The island is changing.
I look around today and see five construction cranes all huddled together. More condos. More people. More cars. Possible monorail (which won’t solve the traffic problem…won’t take the CARS off the roads).
Hollywood and Hollywood Hawaii can’t live the lie for very much longer. Soon the world will see Oahu as it really is: A mini-version of Cali. Or, and this is just my wish, a mini-version of Japan. God, I love that place.
For now, outsiders will see Oahu like they see Rednecks. In any case, if one still desires for the good ol’ days…there’s always Maui.
For now.
“Shite Darts”
I WAKE UP. It’s 3 in the evening. I don’t work today at the coffee company. Good. My eye still hurts, but it’s getting better. I check my caller ID. Taki didn’t call. Might as well. I wouldn’t call me either.
There’s a mysterious number on the caller ID. Uh oh. Did I give my number out last night? Hope not. Sheesh. If YES, then I hope it was to someone whose ying yang hasn’t gone topsy turvy.
Whoever this strange caller is, called 25 times. Warren and I take the #1 bus to Honolulu Community College. During lunch I wait for him outside the library.
I’m not sure, but I think the chubby girl from last night walks past, dressed in black. Should I say hi? She did stick her tongue in my ear.
Naw.
Doubt she even remembers me. We make eye contact. Then she looks away, not seeing anything of interest. I suddenly feel pathetic. Did I take my St. John’s Wort this morning for my Social Anxiety Disorder? Think so. To feel better, I remind myself that I have friends.
I wanna go back to that dingy Goth club. Not sure why. Guess it seems like a haunted house: I might find something exciting.
Besides, I might find something interesting on the ground, like a used condom or a dead crab or nasty panties or a troll or maybe even forgotten weed. If I did, I’d smoke it alone in my room: In a controlled environment, haha.
I’d be safe, exploring the club during the day.
There’ll be no one there.
They only use the place every once in a good while (I think every other Friday, or something like that).
Hmm…where’s Warren?
Sure is taking a long time. Maybe he’s making friends with that graphic design teacher, the one we call Mr. Rogers. I hope he didn’t get in the middle of a fight with his goofy school chums: A tall black guy and a Japanese husky guy. I don’t know why they can’t just get along. How hard is it to just chill out? Last time our Japanese pal got so mad at our black photographer friend that he punched a wall…came back the next day with a cast and everything. Pity, the things children do.
I check my watch, which I keep in my bag and never wear because it just hangs off my thin wrist, embarrassed of me. Where is he? Maybe class dragged on a bit.
Better check if he’s okay. Besides, I might walk past an attractive schoolgirl.
So I walk to the design building to greet him, and as I do so, I feel eyes on me. And I start to get the Fever: Are those girls, sitting on that bench, looking at me? They laugh. Are they laughing at ME now? Grr… I don’t know!
Silence, brain, silence.
Brain: Ok, ok, can I at least smoke a cigarette later?
Me: “That’ll do, pig. That’ll do.”
A janitor, riding a golf cart full of trash cans, stops suddenly and all the trash cans go flying out. The girls scream in a laughing way and scurry off, just watching and whispering as the smiling janitor cleans his filth.
I look away and take a step…and walk into a wall. Is someone crying? It’s the chubby girl from the other night (or this morning). She says she remembers me. I ask if she’s okay. She goes into a long story of how her mum scolded her when she got home. When she jumped in the shower, she noticed there were hickies all over her left arm – from the shoulder down to her pinky.
Did I do that, I thought?
Gross me out.
She proceeds with her tale:
Then her mum found an Aspirin bottle full of weed and all Hades broke ass. Her mum turned into a werewolf and kicked at the stove and broke it. The oven door fell off. She picked it up and spanked her daughter with it…slow, heavy hits cutting the air – woosh woosh.
This Japanese mother, who can’t speak English very well, was shrieking, “No mo waking up at the crack of ass! No mo waking up at the crack of ass!”
I feel for the girl.
Beware the Japanese temper.
Aside from boyfriends that bruise their girlfriends (or vice versa), the one thing I will not tolerate is a parent that attacks their child. That’s a nono in my book-o.
When she tells me that her mum ran into the room crying and whipped out ye old samurai sword, I flip – my mouth just hits the grass, like WOMP.
I repeated what she said for dramatic effect.
“She got out the family blade? That’s heinous.”
Her mum attacked her. Chased her daughter with it. They both ran through the house – up and down the place – shrieking hideousities. Upstairs, the daughter jumped into the baby room and locked herself in the bathroom while her infant sister, House, cried on a dead mechanical baby-swing.
The mum kicked the door down. She chopped down the bathroom door in 2 amazing blows and the daughter retreated to the bathtub, barking like a dog to try and scare her away.
As punishment for being “disobedient” and weird, this mother cuts her back. Chubby girl turns around lifting her shirt and shows me and the sight makes me want to cry. She says that she needs my help. I ask her, “What do you need?”
She wants to runaway to her cousin’s apartment, near Waipahu Racquet, but she has to go home first to get some clothes. She’s afraid to go there alone. There’s a good chance that the mum will be home, seeing how she doesn’t work and lives on government checks because she got injured on the job, working as a phone operator at Sprint.
I look at my watch.
We’re on Dillingham right now.
She lives behind Kalakaua Intermediate.
Warren should be out soon.
The housing behind the school is silent. The sun blasts. When she jiggles the key into the lock, panic sets in. What am I doing? Am I drunk?
I should turn around right now!
So we sneak into the place and go up into her bedroom where she throws her stuff into a garbage bag. As we leave and reach the middle of the stairs, we see the mum below us, sword in hand.
She has crazy eyes.
She says something to her daughter in a very snake-like way, in Japanese, softly. She spits on the ground. The daughter answers in English, “I can do what I want, Mommy. I’m an adult. I’m 16.”
The mum’s face turns sad and wrinkles and tilts a little as she makes a scary whining sound.
Then she whispers a word that I do understand: “Baka,” which means idiot. The frightening thing is that she’s looking at me when she says it.
The mum SHRIEKS a samurai’s shriek and runs up the stairs in little, quick steps – sword tailing behind her. We run back up. I trip and fall. Chubs grabs the back of my shirt and picks me up with one hand, throws me into the air and onto the landing. I belly-slide over the wooden floor and SLAM into a wall like a bowling ball screaming through a strike.
I can see into the baby room.
The child is sleeping on the swing, drooling. Only this time the swing is working.
Mother & daughter run toward each other – screaming while not avoiding a single step on the staircase. They mum swings the sword down on this chubby girl. Chubs is quick as a cat. She flies her hands up and slaps her palms around the blade, holding it inches from her brow. The mum pushes down, face nuts. They twirl, both of them holding onto the sword. Someone takes a wrong step and they both take a little tumble down the stairs and roll right out the open door. The sword flies out of their hands and spins through the air and lands into the grass with a SHEENK, swaying back and forth. The sun – as if on cue �
� screams out from behind a cloud. The street is busy. Mother and daughter have a kick fight and a fist parade on the front lawn.
The police arrive. I suppose, as I watch the fight in awe, that someone heard all the screaming and phoned the fuzz.
I yell out, “Jiggers, the fuzz!”
Mum and daughter cry as they fight. The mum punches her daughter on the cheek and it sounds like a loud, wet slap.
Before the Honolulu Police Department can even get out of their fancy black Mustangs, the mum does a baseball dive for the sword. All of a sudden, HPD moves like God pressed fast-forward on his remote control.
The mum waves the sword at them and says something nasty in Japanese. The cops – two Japanese men, a white woman, and a string-bean Filipino male – try to calm the lady down, holding out their hands and saying sweet things to her.
The white officer offers her candy and begs her forth. The skinny Filipino cop tells the Japanese cops to talk to the nuts-O, but they shrug and don’t know how to speak Japanese.
The chubby daughter begs her mum to calm down. I hold her back, away from the bad news bears.
The mum makes the error of taking a swing at the fuzz, and they all take out their guns and shoot her in the kneecaps. She goes down with an “Aieeeeeeeee!” and they wrestle the old cuffs on her.
Everyone’s yelling something to someone.
Onlookers clap.
Many cars have pulled over, holding up traffic to watch, sitting on their car hoods, sipping sodas and chatting on cell phones. I can feel the Camera flying away, pulling back to reveal the scene as we Fade to Black and the credits roll over classical music…
When the police take the chubby girl and her mum away, I’m already gone – snaked away from the scene during the wild mess.
I make it a point with myself to hightail it back to HCC and meet with Warren. Can't be late. He hates that.
I step into the elevator and go to the 3rd floor. There’s a girl standing with me in this yellow painted elevator.
She’s ugly.
I mentally punch myself in the gut for thinking such evil thoughts.
The elevator opens and I walk down the cold hallway. The walls are lined with “Art” behind glass, of handprints and abstract blots. I pick up a discarded newspaper off the floor – The Honolulu Advertiser – and read the headline.
THE DOLPHIN MASTERS STRIKE AGAIN!
Apparently, there are these Save The Dolphins! enthusiasts, The Dolphin Masters. They believe that tourists AND local people pollute the oceans and aid in the purposeful extermination of all dolphins. They believe that THEY’RE the reincarnation of dolphins, and that humans are simply jealous of their large brains. A criminal psychologist on the morning news once said, “The worst thing we can do is underestimate them. They may be plotting a world-wide takeover, for crying out loud.”
Today – in the wee moon hours of the morning – they jumped a young couple carrying surfboards, hitting them with electric guitars. Witnesses say the same bizarre thing in identifying these horrible people:
“They were wearing these bright blue, full-body dolphin costumes…”
Yeesh.
These people are worst than the Mirovingian Vampires that prowl the streets at night in Waikiki, sucking people’s gore.
I don’t think I’ll come back next semester. I like the class – love the cool teacher – but I feel like I’m wasting my time. I could be working on my writing. That feels much more productive. The problem is that I KNOW what I want to do with my life. No need to take class after class, hoping for a revelation of my future. I know what I want. Which can also be a problem. Because you end up not wanting to do anything else. It’s not that you’re lazy. You just would focus on your craft – what you love – and work hard at it – rather than working a 9-5 job folding clothes and getting spat on by customers from the mainland.
Warren’s class is silent.
It’s dark inside.
It’s a computer room. The monitors all look like portals to some bright, happy dimension. I can her Mr. Rogers yapping, saying something about “layers” and “RGB” and “pasting”. Is he talking about new birth control methods? I realize that he’s talking about the photo-editing program Photoshop. My ears hurt from all the technical talk. I’ve neglected using the Left side of my brain for so long now.
I see Warren sitting near the door, almost spilling out into the hallway. He sits with his head resting on his palm, other hand moving the mouse around in tiny circles. Why does he put himself through this shite? It’s always hard for me to watch: Heartbreaking, even.
That’s it.
I’m not coming back next semester.
Warren and I meet up with his father in the parking lot, and he takes us to our dart competition, at a bar across the street called Se LeVi. Being in a dart league does nothing for my self-esteem. Each time I miss a target, each time I miss a bull’s eye, I can feel the eyes of my captains, Warren & Dave, whipping my spine with thick wet noodles.
And it hurts like a mother.
It’s always the same. You see the same people. Samoans and Hawaiians laughing so loud, glass breaks and wood splinters. Team members call each other assholes if one of them misses an important throw, and bitches if they DO hit something! And that’s just the women.
It’s all in good fun.
As long as you’re drunk.
I once tried flirting with one of our competitors. She was older, and taken by another (one of the best – but not much liked – dart players).
This was at another bar, Emerald City, across from the Neal Blaisdell Center Concert Hall – here you can see Wrestling shows and Opera and concerts. I saw Metallica there once. Good times, especially when people you don’t know hand you hard liquor.
She was sitting at the bar, singing karaoke, and I would’ve made my move…but I was too drunk. Instead, I would speed-walk occasionally into the restroom and puke something awful into the toilet. Later, as Warren’s dad drove down the freeway at 12 in the morning, I threw up in the back-bed of his red pickup truck. But I didn’t want my hideous filth all over his truck, so I puked in my hands, and then tossed the mess overboard and onto passing cars. There was a puddle on the back-bed, so I smeared it here and there because I thought that would help it dry up quicker.
This is how I play darts.
These are my league nights.
Really, I come here to drink and take shots of whatever whenever, because I wanna be a part of the Laugh Pack. Just not too many 151 shots, please, oh please.
I am relieved each night it’s over. These things usually go on for 2-3 months, with us playing once a week on Thursdays (note: Nowadays, the other guys play 3-4 times a week). I love darts but I loathe playing in leagues! I don’t like being told when to do things. I wanna play when I feel like it. I can’t take the stress of competition. I can’t play, I say, okay? No way!
But there are good nights, though. This one happened AFTER a darts night:
To cheer me up, a pal (who shall remain nameless, and who hates me now because I’m an idiot) and I hop into his truck and drive to DHV. It looks like your ordinary video store, but step inside, my friend, and walk to the right, for here there be much porn, indeed.
The first thing that hits me is how bright the place is. It’s a rat maze of porn. A labyrinth. I expect to cut a corner and see David Bowie playing with a tiny, crystal ball.
I have never been here before, and I am shocked by the quantity – yet impressed by the quality of the products. Equally surprising, is the amount of Adult Cinema knowledge my friend has. He’s like the freakin’ scholar of porn. He knows exactly what he wants, and exactly where to go. I, on the other hand, find myself a tad uncomfortable. I see a young couple “reading” the back of a DVD box. They look at me – I quickly turn away and look at some crazy box covers. The couple walks past me, laughing. Are they laughing at me?! WHY? It’s because I look 14, I know it! Well, I’m not! I’m 25! Bastids.
I don’t want to b
e with people here.
Alone time, please.
I wish I had donkey eyes. The placement of a donkey's eyes enables it to see all four of its feet at once. If I had that super power, I could see anyone laughing at me behind my back. And I’d whip around and point and go AHA! Laughing at me, are you??
To relax, I find much entertainment while browsing the titties – I mean titles – on DVD covers: Blacks on Blonds, Browns on Yellows, MILFs, Zoo MILFs, Midgets on Acid, Vagina Wars, Toilet Babies, Japanese Screamers, Paranoid Creamers, Fart Eaters, Golden Showers, I Eat Doodoo, Old Couples (eww…), The Anorexic Playground, One in The Pink – One in The Stink, Touch my Tofu, Mothers & Daughters, My Ass is Haunted, Vomit Tryouts, Animal Fantasies….
One title that sticks to my mind in particular is Mother Makes my Entrance Wider with Devices.
I walk into the animal fantasies section and back up like a warehouse truck, “Beep beep beep”. I pick up a VHS. The cover is black. I hold it in my hands. Don’t turn it over. Don’t do it, son, you’ll regret it! I close my eyes and flip the box over. I’ll open my eyes very – oh so very! – slowly. If I see a hint of anything disgusting that’ll turn my eyes black, I’ll put it away.
So I open my eyes so very slowly and…
…see nothing but yellow.
So the front of the VHS is black while the back is yellow. Very mysterious. But also very good news for me. I don’t want to see any kind of animal sex. Ha! Although, it was exciting expecting to see it. That, I’ll never understand. Why do I want to see something I DON’T want to see?
Meh!
To be human.
I explore the area further. I see panties that you can eat, as well as condoms; dildos ranging from the size of a pinky to the size of an arm; candy shaped as you-know-whats; and underground magazines from The Honolulu Mongoose to Fat Girls Urinating Local Style. I bypass the homosexual area by putting my hand to the side of my face, and come to a long line.
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