And yet nobody wanted to buy all the wonderful books we had. What we mainly sold were coffee-table volumes to tourists: high-markup fifty-dollar monsters, stuffed with bright photos of coral reefs and local beauty spots. Then, every two weeks, tall stacks of Rolling Stone and, every month, even taller stacks of Surfer. Those were our profit centers. Our occult, astrology, self-help (though we may have called it self-realization), and Eastern mysticism sections also sold smartly. Some of the authors we had to order in bulk were old-school frauds like Edgar Cayce; others were nouveau gurus like Alan Watts. Then there were the counterculture bestsellers, which we ordered by the case and sold out quickly. One was Be Here Now, by Baba Ram Dass (formerly Dr. Richard Alpert), which came from Crown and, I recall, sold for the occult sum of $3.33. It counseled a heightened consciousness, with many diagrams. Another major seller was Living on the Earth, by Alicia Bay Laurel, which was large-format, hand-illustrated, and offered practical guidance to people trying to live gently and penniless in the countryside, without electricity or flush toilets.
There were many such people on Maui at the time, virtually all of them newly arrived from the mainland. They were living up narrow mountain valleys, off dirt roads or jungle footpaths. Or they were living somewhere on the broad slopes of Haleakala, the enormous old volcano that defined the eastern half of the island, or out on remote beaches along the bone-dry southeast coast. Some were making a serious go of commune life and organic tropical farming. Some surfed. There were also plenty of new arrivals scraping by in towns and villages, like us in Lahaina. Or like Sam at his monastery, which was reportedly on the north slope of Haleakala.
What about local people? Well, none of them came into the Either/Or, that was certain—when I told Harry Kobatake I had a job there, he said he’d never heard of the place, and he’d lived in Lahaina, which was a very small town, for sixty years. Our customers were all tourists, hippies, surfers, and hippie-surfers. Without particularly thinking about it, I began to dislike all four groups. I found myself proselytizing from behind my little bookstore counter, trying to get people interested in reading literature, history, interested in anything besides their souvenirs, their chakras, their pit latrines. I got nowhere, and my college-kid arrogance began to harden into disgruntlement. I felt suddenly old, like some kind of premature anti-hippie. Caryn, who had been there ideologically for years, thought it was funny.
The beautiful people were also starting to make appearances locally, mainly by yacht. Here came Peter Fonda’s ketch, there went Neil Young’s schooner, with “Cowgirl in the Sand” blaring from the deck speakers as it sailed off toward Lanai at sundown. Caryn felt intimidated by the leggy groupies who stalked off these luxe vessels until she had a reassuring experience in a public restroom at the harbor across from Kobatake’s. Someone was giving the loudest, most fetorous performance ever in one of the women’s stalls. Caryn tried to hurry her own ablutions to avoid the embarrassment of encountering the woman, but she wasn’t quick enough, and, of course, the blushing starlet who emerged was straight off some rock god’s boat.
The rock star who cheered me up, socially speaking, was Jimi Hendrix, as he appeared in a curious film called Rainbow Bridge, about a concert he had given the year before on Maui. The film was rough, and the sound bad, as Hendrix and his band played in a scrubby field in a howling trade wind. There was a sketchy, cinema-verité romance between Hendrix and a willowy black woman from New York. She was holding the Maui hippie commune scene at arm’s length, and Hendrix was holding it farther away than that. His slurred, throwaway lines made me laugh. A passive-aggressive commune leader named Baron got so annoying that Hendrix was obliged to pick him off a balcony with a rifle. The movie ended with a no-budget sequence about “space brothers” from Venus landing in the crater at Haleakala. I took the ending as pure spoof. But the more talk I heard, in the bookstore and elsewhere, about “Venusians,” the more I realized that mine was a minority interpretation.
We weren’t entirely at odds with our little makeshift community, Caryn and I. There was another movie, a hard-core surf film, that I dragged her to. Hard-core surf films are essentially meaningless to anyone who doesn’t surf. An old ramshackle movie house in Lahaina, the Queen Theater, played them occasionally, always to sold-out, stoned-out crowds. I remember a few sequences (though not the title) from this particular film. One sequence was of giant Banzai Pipeline, and the filmmakers, lacking a soundtrack, played the Chambers Brothers’ slow-building anthem “The Time Has Come Today” full blast. Everyone in the movie house seemed to be on their feet screaming with disbelief at the screen. It was electrifying, for people like us, to watch guys pulling into such apocalyptic waves. But I remember being surprised to see Caryn also on her feet, her eyes popping.
Then there was a sequence of Nat Young and David Nuuhiwa surfing one of our local spots, Breakwall, to a much gentler score. Nuuhiwa had been, a few years before, the world’s best nose-rider, and Young had been the first great shortboarder, and it was moving to the point of tears to see them surfing together, both on shortboards now, both still absolute maestros—the last dauphin of the old order and the strapping, revolutionary Aussie, playing a kind of sun-drenched duet in waves we all knew well. I doubted that Caryn got all the implications of the Nuuhiwa-Young set, but she definitely got the bit that followed. The filmmakers had, on poor advice, tried to include some comic land segments—always a bad idea in a hard-core surf film. One involved a villain running around wearing a face-distorting mask made from a nylon stocking. The crowd groaned and somebody bellowed, “Fuck you, Hop Wo!” Hop Wo was a Lahaina shopkeeper with a reputation for surliness and tightfistedness. The bad guy in the nylon did bear a resemblance. Caryn laughed along with the surf mob, and “Fuck you, Hop Wo” became a complex, sweet refrain between us.
• • •
I SENT BRYAN DI SALVATORE $125 when I had it. I didn’t hear back from him directly, but an elegant woman named Max often came by the bookstore and sometimes had news of him. He was in Idaho, then England, then Morocco. I couldn’t figure Max. She was boyish, in a fashion model sort of way, with a low voice and an amused, direct gaze. She seemed out of Lahaina’s league—like she should be in Monte Carlo or somewhere. She and Bryan had clearly been an item, but she seemed quite cheerful about his absence. I wondered what she thought when she saw his old car. Caryn had painted a huge flower on the trunk, at my instigation. It was a well-painted flower, but still. It was no longer a car you could call Rhino Chaser. I say I was becoming anti-hippie, but I retained certain tendencies.
I heard very little from my parents. Their objections to my leaving school still rang in my head. My father had insisted that 90 percent of all college dropouts never returned to get a degree—“Statistics show!” They were probably also worried, understandably, about my draft status. What they didn’t know was that I had never registered. My sense of civic obligation, never strong, was nonexistent when it came to the military. Maybe, if the feds came looking for me, I’d end up in the Caribbean with the Either/Or’s owners. In the meantime, I never thought about it. My folks had also insisted that Caryn and I sleep in separate rooms while we stayed with them in Honolulu. That had been the crowning insult.
Our neighbors at Kobatake’s were a rowdy, dope-smoking crew, prone to skateboarding in the hall, loud music, and louder sex. They seemed to be constantly playing Sly and the Family Stone; I would never enjoy the band’s albums again. I embarrassed Caryn by frequently flying out of our room, book in hand, to glare at noisy debauchees. Actually, I didn’t know then that she was embarrassed. She only told me years later. She even showed me her journal, and there I am, “our fervent scholar” sticking my “crazed head out in the hall” and causing her “endless chagrin.” I didn’t mind being disliked, but she did—yet another inconvenient point I didn’t trouble to notice.
Everybody at Kobatake’s got food stamps. Indeed, everybody who had ever lived there seemed to have gotten them. “At the
usual time of the month, the pink came,” was how Caryn’s ever-mordant journal put it. She meant the dozens of pink government checks that arrived for residents both current and departed. This mass reliance on food stamps carried, among our loose group of peers on Maui, no particular assumptions, I thought, about the welfare state. Food stamps were viewed as just another hustle—strangely legal and easy but decidedly minor. I later lived among young able-bodied dole bludgers in England and Australia (some of the latter were surfers) who saw their government checks as essential sustenance and a type of right.
One day when we were both off work, Caryn and I went out in dribbly surf at a spot called Olowalu. It was a shapeless little reef southeast of Lahaina, off a flat part of the coast where the road ran next to the shore. Caryn had no interest in learning to surf, which I thought sensible. People who tried to start at an advanced age, meaning over fourteen, had, in my experience, almost no chance of becoming proficient, and usually suffered pain and sorrow before they quit. It was possible to have fun, though, under supervision, in the right conditions, and today I had talked her into trying the slow, tiny waves on my board. I swam alongside, propelling her out, getting her into position, pushing her into waves. And she was in fact enjoying herself, getting long rides on her belly, yipping and hooting. I was just trying not to get cut on the rocks—the water was shallow and did not look or smell particularly clean. There was no one else around, only cars whizzing by on the road to Kihei. Then, as Caryn finished a ride, slipping down the wave’s back as it passed into the inshore lagoon, I saw four or five dorsal fins beyond her: sharks cruising parallel to the shore.
They looked like blacktips—not the most aggressive local species but still an extremely unwelcome sight. They didn’t look big, though it was actually impossible to tell from where I was. They were right next to shore; I was thirty yards out. Caryn, who was just a few yards from the beach, obviously didn’t see them. She was splashing, trying to turn the board back out toward sea. I put my head down and swam in her direction as hard, without thrashing, as I could. Caryn was saying something, but the blood roaring in my ears drowned her out. When I reached her, I saw that the sharks had turned around. They were still cruising close to shore, now coming back toward us. I stood up, in waist-deep water, trying to see their bodies, but the water was muddy. I kept my face averted as they passed us. I didn’t want Caryn to see my expression, whatever it might be. She was surprised, I imagine, when I turned her toward shore and started a fast march for the beach, ignoring the rocks I had been so careful about not touching on the way out. Still, I don’t recall her saying a word. I angled the board so that I blocked her view of the sharks, and so that we would reach the beach well behind them, assuming they didn’t turn again too soon. They didn’t turn, at least not while we were crossing the lagoon or scrambling onto the sand. I didn’t look back after that.
Caryn and I were in weird territory. I was deeply involved with my old mistress, surfing. I was waiting with passionate expectation for Honolua Bay to start breaking in the fall—tuning up, tuning up, surfing every day. Caryn, who had never seen me in this state, didn’t seem jealous. In fact, she began making discreet inquiries about the technical aspects of my ideal Honolua board. This was a line of questioning so unlikely that she was forced to confess her plan: she wanted to get me a new board for my birthday. With our food-stamp-qualified incomes, this was no small gift. So I was waiting for Honolua, and she accepted that. But what exactly, again, was she doing on Maui? She had quit her waitress job and was now scooping ice cream at an awful new resort outside Lahaina called Kaanapali. We had made some effort to find her father, driving over to Kahului and Paia, asking around at a monastery and an outpatient clinic, but we hadn’t followed up on the slim leads we got. I had started to wonder if she really wanted to ambush him. It could be painful, to say the least. Lahaina had its charms. They were subtler than those of the west Maui coast and countryside—old Chinese temples, some amusing eccentrics, coral-block prison ruins baking in the sun—and yet Caryn was alive to them. She even made a few friends among the other surf migrants—what she called “the bands of blond suncreatures.” But the weirdness between us began with our failure—my failure, really—to make any serious distinction between her desires and mine.
We had been merged, fused, our hearts’ boundaries dissolved, at least in my mind, since we got together in high school. Physically, we were an unlikely pair. I was more than a foot taller. Caryn’s mother, Inge, liked to call us Mutt and Jeff. But we felt like one body. I experienced our separations deep in my chest. When we were still in high school, and Inge’s nights had seemed to be one long middle-aged orgy, Caryn and I were the resident young Puritans—quaintly monogamous, devoted entirely to one another. Their apartment was an unusual household even then—a place where the kids were free to have sex yet pitied for their unadventurousness. It took me a while to get used to that freedom, after an adolescent love career of dodging (or failing to dodge) watchful, sometimes irate dads. My parents never did get used to it, throwing fits, after I took up with Caryn, when I failed, as I often did, to come home at night. Their ire surprised me. For years I had felt like what Caryn called, with mock solemnity, “a free agent of God.” Now, at seventeen, I suddenly had a curfew? My own sullen diagnosis: parental sexual panic.
Then Caryn and I got in a car accident. We were on a camping trip up the coast when a speeding drunk rear-ended my van. The van was totaled. We were both unhurt. But we got a small insurance settlement, and we took that money, bought dirt-cheap charter-flight tickets, and split for Europe, skipping our high school graduations. This abrupt exit settled my parents’ hash, I thought. Its potential cruelty never crossed my mind. Had my parents been looking forward to the graduation of their firstborn? If so, they didn’t mention it. Inge, for her part, seemed to wake up and freak out just as we left, making me promise to take care of her little girl.
I didn’t really do that, though. We had started to quarrel, Caryn and I, and we didn’t fight well. On the road, moreover, I turned into a tyrant, setting a merciless pace as we bummed around Western Europe, living on crackers and fresh air, sleeping under the stars. There was always someplace new, someplace better, we had to be. I dragged her on grueling pilgrimages to rock festivals (Bath) and surf towns (Biarritz) and the old haunts (and graves) of my favorite writers. Caryn, less callow, did not see the reason for all the hurry. She pressed dried flowers in her journal, went to museums, and, already fluent in French and German, undertook to learn each language we encountered. She finally dug in her heels on the western Greek island of Corfu after I announced that I had a burning desire to see more “Turkish influence.” I could go hunt for Ottoman minarets on my own, she said. And so I up and left her on the remote, mountain-backed beach where we were camping au naturel. Neither of us, I suppose, believed I would really do it, but I had become adept at, if nothing else, moving quickly through strange territory at low cost, and within a week I was in Turkey itself, newly intent on traveling overland to India. Motion, new companions, new lands were my drugs in those days—I found they did wonders for the adolescent nerves. Turkish influence fascinated me for about half an hour. Then only Tamil influence would do.
Istanbul, 1970
This folly came to a grubby halt on an empty beach on the south coast of the Black Sea. Mediocre surf, brown and misty and blown out, was rolling in from the general direction of Odessa. I was stumbling along through brushy dunes. What, exactly, was I doing? I had left my true love alone in the boondocks of Greece, abandoned her on the roadside. She was seventeen, for Christ’s sake. We both were. My lust for new scenes, new adventures, vanished in a bitter puff as I sat there in the Turkish scrub, not bothering to make camp. Dogs barked and darkness fell and I suddenly saw myself not as the dauntless leading lad of my own shining road movie but as a hapless fuckup: deadbeat boyfriend, overgrown runaway, scared kid in need of a shower.
The next morning I started back to
ward Europe. Europe turned out to be harder to reenter than it had been to leave. There was a cholera scare, and the borders with Greece and Bulgaria were reportedly closed. I bounced around Istanbul, walking along the Bosporus, sleeping on hotel roofs (cheaper than a room). I tried to go to Romania, but Ceausescu’s sentinels reckoned I was a decadent parasite and refused me a visa. Then the police raided a flophouse where I was staying. They arrested three Brits, who were convicted the next day of hashish possession and sentenced to several years each. I moved to another roof. I wrote brave, boastful postcards: Hey, no photograph could do justice to the beauty of the Blue Mosque.
But I was frantic about Caryn. Although she had said that she would find her way to Germany, where we had friends, I kept imagining the worst. I bought her a cheap purse in the Grand Bazaar. I befriended other stranded foreigners. Finally, I broke down and phoned home. It took all day, hanging around the vast old post office, to get through. Then the connection was awful. My mother’s voice sounded terribly frail, as though she had aged fifty years. I kept asking what was wrong. I told her I was in Istanbul, but I still hadn’t asked for news of Caryn—nor mentioned that I hadn’t seen her in weeks—when the line went dead. Now the post office was closing. I wrote many cards and letters, but that was the only call home I made that summer.
Barbarian Days Page 13
