by Michael Lion
She sat down slowly in a huge rose-colored wingback chair in the corner. It swallowed her, like a doll someone had tossed among the pillows. “All right. I get your point. I wouldn’t even know where to begin. I don’t...goddamnit, I feel so fucking useless.”
“Useless? You feel useless?” I walked over to the chair and knelt down in front of her. Me, kneeling in front of Tanya Parker. No one would believe it. “See this? And this?” I said, putting my hands on my head and chest. “It’s here because of you, Tanya. And for that I am eternally grateful. I think I’ve already said that once, and I’m not one to get all weepy.” I looked behind me at the bed, with the photo and note on it. “I know you hate what I am, and I know most of what I do repulses you. But it’s exactly those things that are going to get me and you through this. It’s my ability to find out where the shit is and scoop it out with both hands that’s going to get Li her revenge. The revenge that we want so bad. Just live with that. Please. For the next week. Just live with that.”
She leaned forward suddenly and hugged me fiercely, grabbing painful handfuls of flesh along my ribs and tugging at it. She dropped her head down and talked hoarsely into my shoulder. “I hate you. You’re a fucking whore, you know that? And now I have to depend on you. I hate you. I hate you.” I sat there and took what I deserved, let her get it out of her system.
I ran a hand through her now-red hair. I liked it better black. “You don’t know how sorry I am that you got pulled into this, but I can’t apologize for what I am,” I said gently.
She was still telling me how much she hated me, but her voice had become a tiny whisper, lacking any conviction, the words a meaningless chant. I put my arms around her and shared her shoulder. The hug got more intense.
She stopped talking altogether, and I slowly brought her face up to mine. The eyes that met and stared into each other were the eyes of two very different animals who nonetheless understood each other. She started to smile. So did I, but covered it up by saying, “I hate you, too. I’ve got a plane to catch.”
United Flight number 670 was smooth and uneventful. A blond stewardess whose face was mainly cheeks came up and asked half the cabin if I wanted anything. I quietly requested a pillow and no interruptions. Her plastic smile disappeared, and I got both of my desires. Sleep came quickly, and I spent the next six hours dreaming of Ballesteros’ face, hidden behind those huge, mirrored sunglasses.
Chapter 16
I expected hula girls and pineapple. What I got was a female security guard who looked like a woman the way a dump truck looks like a Ferrari. She was displeased with the fact that I had left my luggage ticket in the little seat pouch of a plane now bound for Guam. So I set my bag at her feet, described the contents, produced some of them until she was satisfied, produced identification until she was satisfied, and, leaving her satisfied in a way I have left few women, began the quest for a cab. As I walked off she said, “Mahalo.”
I said, “Yeah.” I found out later it means “thank you.”
The cabbie, who could have been the security guard’s brother, threw my duffel in the trunk like it was a cocktail purse, then spent five minutes getting back in the cab. He was a big boy. I let him take his time.
“Where you like go?” he said, once he’d seated himself properly.
I held up a fifty between my fingers so he could see it in the rearview mirror and said, “Take me to a hotel that’s not crawling with tourists, isn’t booked up, and doesn’t ask a lot of questions.” I tossed the bill over the seat and added, “And take your time getting there.”
It seemed like a simple request. He thought deeply about it for a minute while he tried to hypnotize the fifty. Then he gently turned the key and slid away from the curb.
Hawaii is the only state in the Union that has interstate highways that don’t go to any other state. Imaginatively named H1 and H2, H1 runs along the south shore through downtown Honolulu and into Waikiki, H2 to the middle of the island of Oahu where it peters out in the hills. The cabbie pulled out of the airport terminal onto H1 and headed east toward the industrial section of downtown. He chattered nonstop during the trip, telling me about everything from the wars of Kamehameha to things I never wanted to know about tuna packing. He spoke the broken and friendly pidgin tongue that is famous in the islands. Largely butchered English and Hawaiian, with bastardized phrases from Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Spanish, Portuguese, and about every other language from every group that has exploited the islands in the last two-hundred years, it is a naive, sincere dialect that is spoken from the heart instead of the head. The cabbie told me that it has several different depths, from the easily understood “towny” pidgin spoken in the urban centers, to the pidgin spoken on the outer islands and in the sugarcane fields that is practically a foreign language.
I checked the license and saw the guy’s name was Tui. It was pretty obvious to him I had never been to his home, and I didn’t try to fake it. He said, “You know, cuz, can nevah get los’ on de island. Know why?”
I caught his eye in the rearview and shrugged. He pointed out the driver’s window and said, “’Cause da mountains always over deah, and da watah always ovah deah.” He punctuated the sentence with a huge belly laugh that drifted into another question. “You look like you going stay fo’ while. Dat right?”
I leaned over the seat and asked for a cigarette. He smiled and threw a pack of Kool Milds into my hands. I would come to find that you almost can’t bum a cigarette in Hawaii without getting a Kool. I got puffing and said, “What makes you say that, Tui?”
He liked that I had picked up his name. “You nevah come heah, but you not dressed like one touris’ eithah. An’ you easy wid money. Can pick ’em easy, you know, da touris’. Come up to da cab an’ all dey wanna know is where can dey spen’ money. Clubs, girls, boys, drugs, clothes, ho! Dey make us laugh. But any money fo’ Tui? Any money fo’ da cabbie, brah? No. Sometimes I get one tinks we don’ take American money. I say, ‘Shua I take ’em, but da exchange rate is pretty steep!’” We were stopped in traffic and his laugh gently rocked the cab on its springs.
“But not me, huh? What is it that says I’m here for awhile?” It bothered me that he could read me so well.
He took in a deep breath that mashed his stomach against the steering wheel. “You relaxed, fo’ one ting. Nevah make sense to me, people come to da kine fo’ vacation, an’ all dey do is worry.” The phrase “da kine” is a universal term that can be substituted for any noun in pidgin, with no confusion whatsoever. Sometimes locals will go into a restaurant and order “some a da kine” and the waitress will bring them exactly what they wanted. It’s almost telepathic. Tui was using it to designate the islands. “Rushin’ heah, rushin’ deah,” he continued, “gotta buy dis, hafta see dat. Ho! Give me one headache listening to dem. Not you, do’. You like listen to me about da island, da people. Shoot, brah, you listen to me talk story ’bout Kamehameha an’ da Pali! You ain’t heah for da touris’ stuff. No, sumting else bring you heah.” He grabbed the crumpled pack of smokes and torched one for himself.
“Like what?”
He gave a shrug that said he wasn’t sure and didn’t care. “Maybe running. You know, maybe you got troubles and you come heah lookin’ fo’ way out. Lotsa buggahs come fo’ dat.”
We were both quiet for a minute, which seemed to make Tui uncomfortable. I pulled up a visitor’s map that some rubbernecker had left on the floor and opened it. I smoothed it out on the seat next to Tui as he took an off-ramp for Punchbowl Street and moved us into Honolulu proper. “Where are we, man? What’s around us?”
Tui glanced down at the map in between heart-attack lane changes. He smashed a fleshy brown finger into the paper and said, “Heah.” Then the finger pointed out the window, over the skyscrapers and out of town to the deep green mountains. They looked mysterious, hidden in shadow and pale mist—a place forbidden. “Can see two valleys, yeah? Kalihi and Nuuanu. Fahda down deah’s two mo’, Manoa an’ Palolo. Can see ’em from
Waikiki. Now, all a dis in heah,” the finger returned and made a little circle over the busiest part of the map, “all industrial an’ military, yeah? Guvament own friggin’ every ting. Outside a dis is houses and surfing, brah.”
I said, “Take me there,” and pointed out his window to the mountains.
Tui looked at me, looked at his meter, looked at the fifty, looked back at me, and made a left on Ward Avenue. He drove north in thinning traffic until the road ended in a “T” at Prospect Drive. Twenty feet from Tui’s front bumper was a reminder of death in a magnitude I had never experienced. A field of white crosses stretched to the horizon in every direction, like some morbid poster for AIDS awareness or cancer research. I just sat with my chin on the front seat and stared, my breath whistling through my teeth. “National Memorial Cemetery a da Pacific, brah,” he said. He took a slow right and a slow breath and added, “My granfaddah’s in deah.” I watched the field of white through the rear window until we were well up Tantalus Drive and into Manoa Valley.
A small pullout came up on our right, and I touched Tui’s meaty shoulder. He pulled over without a word. “Let’s get out and have a look,” I said.
The pullout was walled at its edge and then fell steeply away into the velvety green valley. I hopped up on the wall and peered suspiciously below, out of the valley and into Mamala Bay and Waikiki. Tui pointed out the campus of the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and the wealthy residences of Manoa Heights. I pointed up into the valley where the residential streets petered out and the jungle looked like it hadn’t ever felt a human foot. “What’s up there?” I asked, crushing out my cigarette on the pavement.
“Spirits, mostly,” he answered.
I thought that an interesting answer.
In reality, it reflected a sense of awareness that is part of the personality of the local people. They accept the encroachment of the white man and seem to embrace the perks of civilization, but there is also an innate resentment that surfaces, usually when a local is reminded of the raw beauty of his home. Standing on that wall on Tantalus, the suburban roads crawling through the valley from Honolulu suddenly resembled the tendrils of a tumor, feeling their way through the healthy green and slowly turning it brown, and then turning it dead. It looked like a giant caterpillar had left a leaf unfinished, raggedy-edged and wounded, floating on a pure blue lake.
I reached in the cab window and pulled out the map. I pointed to the Honolulu Harbor area and said, “So this is where I want to go to find out what’s up in this town?”
Tui was still gazing sagely over the valley. He craned his neckless head around and gave me a once-over. “Depend. Wachu wanna know was’ up?”
I leaned against the cab and met Tui’s moist, wise eyes. “Bad people,” I said evenly. “Doing bad things.”
Tui nodded and plopped a finger on the map. Without a word, we piled back in the car.
Honolulu’s about as dry as a long bath, and by the time we drifted onto Kalakaua Avenue my clothes were sticking to me in places I could not politely reach. I leaned forward to unpaste my back from the seat, and there was no mistaking that we had crossed into touristland.
Take out the casinos from Las Vegas and throw in more strip joints and Japanese tourists and you’ve got downtown Waikiki. It’s about as Hawaiian as New York City is French. You pass over the diesel-fuel-and-sewage-polluted Ala Wai Canal on Kalakaua, and the clubs and the crud sprout up like somebody sprinkled loser seeds all over a layer of fresh manure. It gets nice again out by Diamond Head, where the Japanese like to stay, but Tui didn’t go that far. We slid past the two-thousand-a-month apartments that spurted up between palm trees on either side of the street, the buildings changing to no-beach-view hotels and motels with barely a hiccup. He let me see the rip-off vendors selling miniature tiki idols and upraised middle-fingers carved out of “authentic lava rock,” and the Korean prostitutes strutting around in front of five-star hotels, wagging their tongues at men with children and wives in tow, while desperate owners of health-hazard hole-in-the-wall restaurants stood on their stoops, wringing their hands and hoping that last night’s dinner crowd didn’t get botulism or discover some embarrassing fact about where they got their prime cuts of meat.
I peeled another fifty off my pocket roll and threw it over the seat with a smile. “I’m home, Tui. Now take me to my room.”
He nodded, turned left on a side street and got going westbound on Ala Wai Boulevard, back through the trash and onto Kapiolani Street. In five minutes my bag and I were sitting on the doorsteps of the Ala Moana Hotel. Tui gave me the hang-loose hand sign as he drove off. I memorized his cab number.
Hawaii only has two things that are a bargain. A prostitute is one. The other is saimin, what everyone else in the world calls Top Ramen. Except in Hawaii, it’s a meal in itself. By ten o’clock I was sitting in a hotel room I could do things in, eating a bowl full of noodles, vegetables, and fish that was one of the best things I had ever tasted. I had six thousand dollars in cash, no identity, no contacts except for Tui the closet psychic, and no idea where Parenti was. I slurped up the last of the saimin, thought about the paralyzing little local girl who had delivered it to my room but refused to tell me when her shift ended, and called the front desk to have a cab waiting for me in one hour. I showered super hot so that the air would feel cooler, thought about shaving, didn’t, and then stepped out of the hotel and into the haystack, looking for the needle.
Chapter 17
The Kuhio District.
Less than halfway through Waikiki’s downtown area, Kuhio Street branches off from the main drag of Kalakaua Avenue and slinks away from the lights and sounds of the International Marketplace and the hotels fronting Waikiki Beach. Slithering along the fringe of downtown tourist traffic for twenty-or-so blocks, it finally dead-ends against the smell of trapped and irritated animals at the Honolulu Zoo. If it didn’t have a line painted down its middle, it would just be a big alley. It looked like the kind of place that would have what you were looking for, no matter what it was.
I picked a random corner that seemed to be on the edge of things and tapped the cabbie, who managed to only get one tire up on the curb when he stopped. I opened my door and almost had a foot on the sidewalk when a sailor and his twenty-an-hour date tried to sit in my lap. They both stumbled backward trying to get off me, and the whore sat down hard on the curb, spread her legs, and started giggling. The Navy boy looked at her blankly, looked at me like I had hurt his feelings, looked at me some more, and decided he wanted to fight. Before he could do anything about it, I reached down and handed him his date, piling them both into the cab. I threw the driver a fin through the passenger window. He took it and looked at me like he had seen the exact same scene ten minutes earlier. I was going to ask him something when the hooker opened her mouth to talk, and the cab suddenly smelled like Mai Tai’s and cigarettes. I left the driver to sort it out.
I crossed the street to a little dive pizza place that said “Take-Out and Delivery Only” on its door and only saw the health inspector when he wanted a quick bite. I went in and wolfed a piece, watching traffic pour in and out of the glitz.
I could see three nightclubs—The Wave, Masquerade, and The Pink Cadillac—guarding the entrance to downtown Waikiki like neon henchmen. The Wave and the Cadillac looked alternative, Masquerade hip-hop. All three were obviously money pits, with lines of beautiful people wrapped around them, waiting to crowd in. Opposite The Wave and Masquerade, and sharing the parking lot of the Cadillac, was a little mini-mall with a couple of after-hours restaurants, a 7-11, and a liquor store that looked like it fell out of Cannery Row. I stepped out of the pizza place and went looking for a drink. The mouth of Kuhio Street yawned before me.
By midnight I had come up completely dry. I had met six surfers, countless beautiful women wearing more makeup than clothing, a dozen losers of various types and sizes, and a bull-dyke bartender who wanted me to party with her and some friends on the beach after her shift ended. I’d had seve
n beers in four bars; learned that “mahu” is the Hawaiian word for homosexual (and a club on Kuhio called Hula’s is the best place to find them); and dropped almost a C-note pasting five-spots into the palms of street vendors for information I could have tripped on a sidewalk crack and gotten by accident. I couldn’t figure out what my problem was, though it should have been pretty obvious.
I was lost.
I was also hungry, and the bartender at the last joint I was in recommended a little Italian place called Guccinni’s as the only restaurant on Kuhio with trustworthy food. It was right across the way at the end of a little crack in the street called Alligator Alley. I had taken ten steps down it when a voice behind me said, “You been made, cuz.”
It was neither sinister nor innocent. It was simple and matter-of-fact. I turned around slowly and met the back of Lou’s head.
He was crouched over an easel at the mouth of the alley with an airbrush in his hand. Built out from the wall behind the easel was a low planter with some bushy ferns that seemed to lean forward in appreciation of his company. He had used them to prop up some of his better work to attract customers. There weren’t any. It didn’t look like there very often were. Nonetheless, talk like that made me nervous. I put my hands in my pockets to make him wonder and walked up behind him.
The airbrush paused almost imperceptibly, and then continued. I said, “Did you say something?”
“I said you been made, man. Noticed, recognized, labeled.” He didn’t turn his head to talk.
There was a spot on the planter wall next to his easel that wasn’t occupied by paintings or fern fronds. I planted myself there and waited for him to say something else.
His seat was a blue plastic milk crate filched from one of the restaurant kitchens that had their doors on the alley; I could see stacks of them back in the gloom. Within arm’s reach on the bricks was a large box of wooden kitchen matches with a pack of Carltons on it. The edges of the cigarette pack were perfectly matched with the box. Above them a small sign hung over the corner of one of the surrounding paintings. It read, “Portraits In 15 Minutes 25 Dollars.” The lettering was ornate calligraphy done in about six different colors that must have taken longer to finish than an average portrait. I finally said, “I know what it means. Who are you?”
