Boat

by Michael Baughman

  “He’s back again!” Boat said.

  The frigate bird, close over the surface, dove with laid-back wings, abruptly leveled off as it reached toward the showering silver baitfish with his long beak, and then powered back into flight, rising quickly, turning back to sea.

  “He came up empty that time,” Boat said. “It’s an ono chasing those little fish around. Or an ulua, or maybe a mahimahi. Let’s pack up. We got to get over the Pali before dark comes. The Jeep got no lights.”

  Number One

  Kau Kau Korner was a drive-in restaurant at the busy intersection of Kalakaua and Kapiolani on the town side of Waikiki. At the back of the parking lot stood a landmark known as the “Crossroads of the Pacific” pole, with signs and arrows on it that gave directions and distances to cities across the world—Tokyo, Berlin, Sydney, New York.

  High school kids parked in the expansive lot and either ate in their cars or went indoors to the counter to order. Every night, hundreds of carloads of boys came to Kau Kau, and many boys and girls on dates, and, less often, carloads of girls.

  Late at night there were fights. Sailors picked fights with me there, and so did boys from other Honolulu high schools. Nearly everybody tended to hate Punahou kids, because the school was private, expensive, and populated mainly by haoles. Nearly everybody except other sailors tended to hate sailors.

  One night I fought a football player nicknamed Horse from Kaimuki High School and broke my right hand on his head. When I was back at Kau Kau Korner the next week with my hand in a plaster cast, a drunken sailor tried to pick a fight with me, and Horse was there and dragged him across the parking lot and thrashed him back behind the restrooms.

  On his first night home from prep school in New Jersey, Doug drove to Kau Kau Korner all alone. For no apparent reason he picked a fight with a gang of boys from Farrington High School, and he knocked three of them cold before the rest overpowered him. Then the Farrington boys dragged him into the men’s room, dumped him onto the floor, and urinated on him.

  That was Kau Kau Korner, Honolulu’s favorite hangout for young people.

  Aloha

  “I love it here,” I said to Boat. “I wish I could stay. But I feel like I should leave—like I have to leave. I don’t know why I’m so confused. Sometimes when I wake up in the morning I’m not even sure who I am.”

  “You young, Mike. I remember small kid time, teenage time. I felt pilau sometimes back then, but I was lucky because I was right here where I belong from the start. You told me about your great-grandpa, about the mountains and streams and the things he did. The things he told you. The things he taught you. That was your place. Then you came here. I was never back where you came from but I know it’s plenty different. That’s the problem. That’s what I think.”

  Once again I was helping Boat strip the canvas off the canoes. The waves were up, so a few early-morning surfers were already out at Canoes and Queens. The sky was clear except for a long line of pale clouds stretching across the horizon.

  “I love it here,” I said. “But I have to go to college. I have to leave in two days.”

  Boat looked at me. “Why two days? The good surf is here. It’s only June.”

  “My parents are moving to California. My old man thinks he can make more money there. So I’m spending the summer in Detroit with my aunt and uncle while he gets started. That’s what my old man wants.”

  “I heard about your friend Doug. What happened at Kau Kau. Heard it on the wireless. Why did that happen?”

  “He started the trouble himself. Doug did. All he told me is he felt like he had to do it.”

  “What is all this ‘had to’ stuff. This ‘have to’ stuff. Who has to fight for no reason? When you have to fight, you have to. When you don’t have to fight, you don’t. Is Doug going to some college?”

  “He’s going to UCLA for football.”

  “Listen, Mike. Go back to your Boston college. Play your football. I think you got to see the world some more. You got to find your own place. That’s how I see it. Who am I? A big Hawaiian on the beach. I always had my place. But I know you now. Someday you’ll find your place. You’ll know it when you find it the same way you’ll know your wahine when you find her. You’ll know. You make sure you call me up sometimes. I’m home in the mornings and nights. Tell me what you doing, tell me where you are. Okay, bruddah?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Thanks for everything, Boat. Mahalo.”

  “After you go away, and then come back here, maybe this can be your place.”

  “I’ll be back someday.”

  “You going to surf now?”

  “Yes. You?”

  “You go out now, I come out later. Pretty soon we got some canoe tourists coming over from the Moana. Nice waves for canoes. Easy break today. Smooth.”

  “I’ll be out there all day, I guess. Doug might come down in a while.”

  “I be out there sometime later.”

  “I guess I’ll paddle out to Populars,” I said. “Nobody’s there yet.”

  “I be out to Populars later then.”

  Boat finished folding the last canvas cover and turned to carry it back to the shed.

  I had Populars all to myself. The perfect waves grew steadily larger through the day. Doug never showed up. Boat paddled out to join me in mid-afternoon. He could only stay for an hour, because more tourists were signed up for canoe rides.

  I was tired and hungry, but I didn’t want the day to end.

  I sat on my board to watch the sun set, and then I finally paddled in, showered and dressed, and walked all the way home for dinner.

  My parents were fighting when I got there. My father was drunk.

  PART TWO

  Hawaii Calls

  “Dead boys is the worst, bruddah. Those old men make the wars happen and the boys who got to fight do the dying. Everybody knows that. Even the boys know it and they still go kill other boys and get killed. What about you? You’re in the army. What if a war comes? A war comes every few years. What if one comes now?”

  Dimeys

  My Aunt Betty and Uncle Roy lived in a working-class Detroit neighborhood where a disheartening amount of the social discourse I overheard concerned “niggers,” specifically the fear that they might be trying to buy homes in the area. My only happy times that summer were at Briggs Stadium watching the Tigers play. Their star was Al Kaline. I sat in the cheap seats near center field with mostly blacks around me, and over the course of the summer a few became casual friends.

  I left Detroit for Boston the day I turned eighteen.

  Boston University was a huge school in a gray city. The weather grew cold in October, the middle of football season. I played well enough despite the cold, and our freshman team went undefeated for the first time in school history. Some of my teammates became friends and invited me home for weekends. There was a Hungarian boy from Pittsburgh, an Italian from Providence, and an Irishman from Ipswich, all of their parents immigrants from the old countries.

  The Pittsburgh trips included nighttime excursions across the state line to whorehouses in Steubenville, Ohio, where a “straight” or a “French” went for three dollars, while a “half-and-half” raised the price to five.

  I took one of the prostitutes out on a date for New Year’s Eve. We talked for a long time, and made out but didn’t have sex. A redhead, about my age, she called herself Torchy, and I liked her more than any other girl I met that year.

  My business classes—accounting, business mathematics, marketing—were a collective bore. My single elective class, Roots of American Culture, taught by a visiting professor from England, was marvelous. Some of the roots he covered, like the genocide of Indians, had been ignored at Punahou.

  I visited Harvard and MIT, just to look around. At least once a week I went to a burlesque show on Scollay Square, where the famous stripper Tempest Storm displayed a remarkable ability to make her left breast twirl one way while her right breast spun in the opposite direction. Downtown in th
e Boston Common, on weekends, I watched and listened to a former Catholic priest named Father Feeney rant and rave against Jews, who gave him back at least as good as they got.

  For the entire school year I was confused and miserable, and homesick without even having a home.

  Not long after I got to Boston I discovered a small Italian restaurant near Kenmore Square. Even though hardly anybody ate there, the food seemed good, so I kept going back. The other occasional customers were well-dressed men who drank red wine, smoked cigars, and talked and laughed a lot, eight or ten of them to a table. One night when one of the men leaned back, laughing, I saw the shoulder holster under his suit coat.

  When I told some of my teammates, one of them claimed that the restaurant was a known hangout for mobsters. I kept going back, and eventually the mobsters made friends with me. Sometimes they invited me to sit with them. When I told them I came from Hawaii they nicknamed me “Pineapple.”

  I also spent time at Mick’s, a small, dingy bar in a narrow alley off Scollay Square. I wandered in one rainy night after a burlesque show and ordered a ten-cent draft beer. The place was warm, smoky, and crowded. Most of the patrons appeared to be what we call “homeless” today, and what were called “bums” fifty years ago. These were elderly men in soiled clothing, they all drank draft beer—I never saw anything else served at Mick’s—and they seemed to know each other. Given their circumstances, they appeared remarkably happy, maybe because they were high on beer.

  Mick’s was about the size and shape of a railroad car, with a long bar running its length. Half a dozen rickety wooden tables with chairs were lined up in front of the bar. I found a place near the middle of the bar that first night, and ended up in a conversation with the man to my left, who introduced himself as Ramsey, and who soon asked me to buy him a draft beer, a “dimey.”

  So I bought him one, and then another, and we talked—about the weather, about Boston, about Frank Sinatra, about Ted Williams and the Red Sox.

  I stayed at Mick’s for a couple of hours, long enough to meet some of Ramsey’s friends. I didn’t mind that they saw me as an easy mark for free beer.

  That same night I met the middle-aged bartender and owner, a large, dark-haired man in a clean white apron named Tony. Ramsey explained that he and his friends liked Tony very much, because he allowed them to sleep out back in the storage room on the coldest winter nights.

  Ramsey was short and stoop-shouldered, with a bald patch on the top of his head and long white hair at the sides. He wore baggy pants and a plaid sport coat several sizes too large over two or three ragged sweaters. He told me his story that first night, as he worked his way through the dimeys.

  Ten years back he had been a successful engineer with a large office in downtown Boston, and he had lived with his wife and son in a fine house near Beacon Hill. On a Saturday morning, two blocks from their house, the son, a teenager, had gone through a stop sign on a bike, on his way to visit a friend, and been run over and killed by a truck. Ramsey’s wife had suffered a breakdown, and Ramsey took to drink. He had always enjoyed a cocktail hour, a Manhattan or two, after work and before dinner. Soon he was drinking a bottle of bourbon a day. Ten years later, here he was at Mick’s.

  I had no reason not to believe Ramsey. Many of his friends had similar stories—they had been successful men, even happy men, until unforeseen and dreadful events shattered their lives—and I believed them too.

  I drank dimeys at Mick’s at least one night a week, always on weekends. Ramsey was always there, and we always talked. He had traveled to Europe—something I very much wanted to do—and he told me about Paris and Rome. When he talked about his vacations his eyes brightened and he smiled, and he suddenly looked at least ten years younger.

  One cold winter night, a Saturday, Tony was sick and a sullen fat man in a dirty apron tended bar instead. Ramsey explained that sometimes Tony stayed home with migraine headaches, and he complained that the substitute wouldn’t let customers sleep overnight in the storage room. Outside the temperature was near zero, and when I asked Ramsey where they’d sleep instead, he shrugged his shoulders.

  Ramsey talked more about Europe that night, mostly about a trip to Naples and Rome.

  When I left near midnight I forgot a book I’d bought that afternoon.

  I remembered the book when I woke up Sunday morning. I dressed and caught the subway downtown.

  When I turned down the alley from Scollay Square I saw the police van. There were three uniformed cops outside Mick’s, one standing between the van and the street behind me, the other two loading corpses into the back of the van. They heaved three bodies as I stood there, with no more apparent feeling than if they’d been tossing mailbags or sacks of grain. I recognized the last body as Ramsey, his eyes and mouth opened wide as if in shocked surprise and, in the early-morning light, his face the same shade of blue as the uniforms the cops wore.

  I asked the beefy, red-faced cop between the van and me what had happened. Hands deep in his pockets, sounding half-bored and half-angry, he said that some bums had slept in the alley on a night that was way too cold, and then he asked me what I was doing there anyway, and before I could answer he told me to leave, and I did.

  That was the day I called Boat from the mainland for the first time. I didn’t call to complain about my life, or life in general, and I didn’t call to learn anything. I needed to talk to Boat. I needed to talk about Hawaii—about sandy beaches and breaking waves, reef fish and soaring birds, warm weather in January.

  Because of the five-hour time difference I called at three o’clock Eastern time, to be certain Boat would be out of bed on a Sunday morning.

  In his rumbling voice, he answered after two rings:

  “Boat here, who you?”

  “Mike,” I said.

  After a pause: “Boston Mike?”

  “Can you hear me okay? It’s a long way. A long distance.”

  “Hear you fine, bruddah!”

  “How’s it, Boat?”

  “Good, bruddah! Good to hear your voice! How’s it with you in that Boston?”

  “Not so good. First off, tell me how warm it is there.”

  “You okay? What’s wrong in Boston?”

  “Nothing exactly wrong. But goddamn, it’s cold. I’m freezing my ass off. Today’s below zero.”

  “Tell me what the hell is below zero?”

  “What is it there? The temperature, I mean.”

  “Temperature here is around eighty-four. ‘Hawaii Calls’ was on yesterday from the banyan down the Moana. That Webley Edwards announcer guy, he always says the temperature and yesterday was eighty-five. Water temperature seventy-eight. He always says that too.”

  “I remember. The two things I miss listening to are ‘Hawaii Calls’ and Akuhead in the morning.”

  “Akuhead’s the best! Number one!”

  “But Christ, Boat, it’s ninety degrees colder here than it is there.”

  “Tell me what the hell you still doing there then. You going to stay?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. Probably not.”

  “When you coming back then? What the hell you want to stay in that kukai place for? What the hell anybody want to stay in a place like that place for? They pupule? Hey, tell me something, bruddah.”

  “Tell you what?”

  “This call on the phone from way in Boston going cost you plenty I bet.”

  “Don’t worry. It’s cheaper on Sunday. They give me spending money, the school does. I can afford it. I definitely want to talk a while.”

  “Who gives the money?”

  “The school. The university. Tell me some things now. You been surfing? Spearing? Canoeing?”

  “Big North Shore waves this week. Makaha’s up good. Spearing is good right here at Waikiki. I take the tourists out in the canoes like always. I speared one big blue uhu the same place I took you. Not as big as that time, but big. Last week me and Blue ate lobsters in Laie.”

  “I wish I was there.”


  “Then how come you not? What the hell you do when it’s freezing outside?”

  “Go to movies.”

  “Pretty soon I’ll be in a movie,” Boat said.

  “Really? What movie?”

  “The Old Man and the Sea movie. They asked me to be in it. They pay me money.”

  “Do you ever go to movies?”

  “Not since small kid time. When I was small kid I liked the cowboys. I’m no small kid now. Why go to movies? Sometimes I take the movie stars out in the canoes. Sometimes I take the movie stars surfing. Mostly the man movie stars are five feet tall with arms like brooms. One time I took a movie star out who was a cowboy in the movies. He had an opu like a hapai wahine. Why would I go see pissants and fat cowboy men in the movies? I’m in the movie because they pay me money.”

  “Are they making it now?”

  “Pretty soon they be making it. The story is an old man who catches a big fish. A giant a’u. Then after he catches the giant a’u the manos kau kau the giant a’u.”

  “I read the book.”

  “Never mind the movies and books. How was the football?”

  “They didn’t pass enough. But when they threw a pass my way I caught it. We went undefeated.”

  “Same like Punahou!”

  “An old man I knew froze to death last night.”

  “What?”

  I suppose that was really why I’d called. I had to tell somebody who might care what had happened. So I told Boat about Scollay Square and Mick’s and all I knew about Ramsey and his friends. I told Boat that some decent unlucky men had died and some cops had tossed their frozen bodies into the back of a van. It poured out of me.

  “Ramsey,” Boat began. “I never knew a man named Ramsey. No Hawaiians named Ramsey. But I knew plenty men with some bad luck. You think we get what we deserve in this life? Hell no. Did Hawaiians get what they deserved? Did Mohawks? We get what we get and nobody knows what the hell it’ll be till we get it. After we get it, whatever it is, we do the best we can. I know you remember Kanaka. He was a damn good man. He was my age. Younger even. A little bit younger. Four months ago he got a cancer in his head, inside his brain. I went out Queens Hospital and sat there a long time right beside him. You say this Ramsey was a good man. I believe it. Good men get kukai sometimes and bad ones get the luck. Sounds to me like you made this Ramsey happy. A little bit happy the best way you could. Good for you, bruddah. What the hell we alive for? To be happy! You try make me happy, I try make you happy. Those cops, they did their job. Why’d they want to be cops? I got no idea about that. Why they want to arrest people? Why they want to haul around dead bodies? Does that make them happy? I got no idea. I’m sorry about that old man Ramsey.”