The Honolulu Marathon is like a box of chocolate-covered macadamia nuts.
You always know what you are going to get.
To be perfectly honest, my pre-race strategy fell by the wayside the moment I saw this huge limousine driver holding up a sign. Sign had MARATHON WELCOMES DEREK CLAYTON written on it.
Right then I decided to tell everybody I’m Derek Clayton.
“Aloha,” I say, in what I imagine was an Aussie accent. Clayton comes from Australia.
“Mista Crayton?” He looks like a U.P.S. delivery van in a double-breasted tuxedo. “Mista Delleck Crayton?” There is this gorgeous petite Polynesian princess with him in a grass skirt with a couple of coconuts, half shells, covering her, um, coconuts. Looks like Rae Dawn Chong on her best day. A banana in her hair.
A thought blew through my brain.
Like out one ear and in the other. You know what I mean.
I bet I’d get some real special treatment if they catered to me like I was a great runner, a retired superstar who, it is said, once got suspended for taking three hundred bucks for a world record performance. Paid his own way, predicted a two-oh-eight and proceeded to run the son of a gun.
“Are you Mista Delleck Crayton?,” he asked me.
“Yes, I am.”
Fruit Salad Woman swished his fronds over to me. She lifted her arms around my head and rung my neck with a odiferous orchid lei. One hot pistil, she smelled good, too. She gave me a kiss on both cheeks.
A trifle young but sweet.
Then she stuck her tongue deep into my mouth and squeezed my buns.
I gazed down. What the hell, I checked her coconuts.