Mahu Surfer

by Neil S. Plakcy

  Ralph found a dozen ways to ask the same question, but every time I gave him a variation of the same answer. Finally he shifted tactics. “What about that murder case? Will you be testifying?”

  “That’s up to the DA,” I said. “I’ll make myself available whenever the department needs me.”

  “And yet you don’t want to be a cop anymore?”

  “I don’t know what I want, Ralph,” I said, and something about the honesty of that remark made him finally believe me.

  “So what’s next?” he asked. “There are forces on the mainland where you could work, aren’t there?”

  “There are. But I haven’t looked that far ahead. Right now I just want to step out of the limelight and think about what’s right for me.”

  “Going to hit the waves?”

  “You bet. I’ve got a long board and a short board, and they’re both calling my name.”

  “I’ll let you answer that call, then,” he said. The cameraman moved around to get a beauty shot of the waves. Ralph said good-bye, wished me luck, and told me to keep in touch. “You have a lot of fans here in town, Kimo, and I’m sure they’ll all be looking forward to your next move.”

  I felt funny walking back to my apartment after the interview was over. A little depressed, maybe. A part of me liked the spotlight, even though most of me didn’t, and so I was torn between being happy that I could slip into anonymity and knowing that my visibility might be helping others.

  And of course, the fact that I had lied through my teeth during most of the interview didn’t help.

  Northern Exposure

  My cell phone rang late that afternoon, as I was packing my truck with everything I would need on the North Shore. “You trying get me killed?” Lui asked, without preamble. “Because you know that’s what Mom is going to do if I run this story.”

  Our mother still had not let Lui forget that he had broken the news of my sexuality, and my suspension from the force, without calling either me or our parents before the story ran.

  “I’ll take care of Mom and Dad. I’m going there for dinner. Before the story runs, I’ll tell them.”

  “But why, Kimo?” he asked. “If you’re going to leave the force, fine. But why make more of a story of it? I’ll square it with Ralph, we’ll forget you had the interview, and you can go up to the North Shore and surf. Nobody will even notice you’re gone.”

  “That’s the point. I want people to know I’m leaving the force, and I love the way Ralph is making the story more than just about me. I know a lot of people have been following what’s happened to me, and I want them to know how it all has come out. You have to run that story, Lui. You owe me.”

  “You’re crazy, brah, but it’s your own special kind of crazy. It’s a great story and a good interview, so I’ll run it, but you make sure and tell Mom that I didn’t want to.”

  “I will.”

  » » »

  I decided to spend the night at my parents’ house before leaving for the North Shore, and pulled up at the house where I grew up late that afternoon. St. Louis Heights is a nearly vertical suburb of Honolulu that backs up against Wa’ahila Ridge State Park. The houses are older bungalows or split-levels stacked at a forty-five degree angle down the streets.

  “Your father said he had lunch with you yesterday,” my mother said, as I kissed her check. “I wondered when you were going to come and see me.”

  My mother has always stood in sharp contrast to my father. Where he is casual, letting his hair get sloppy before he cuts it, or allowing half a shirt tail to escape his pants, my mother is the picture of perfection. Her black hair is cut and styled and sprayed into submission, her skin smooth and wrinkle-free even in her sixties. As a teenager, she was the Pineapple Festival Queen, glittering in a rhinestone tiara and satin sash, and she has retained that aura of poise and grace. She only comes up to my father’s shoulder, but she exerts a subtle force that easily allows you to forget her height.

  My parents and I sat in their elegant living room, in elaborate armchairs imported from France. It was an odd room to find in a Hawaiian house, one dropped in from the pages of Architectural Digest, circa 1975. As kids, we never set foot in there, for fear we’d break something. My mother folded her hands in her lap and gave me the look that had terrified all of us, my father included, for years.

  “You know I had a decision to make about work,” I began. I realized my mouth was very dry, but it was too late to ask for a glass of water. “And it was a really difficult one to make, but I thought a lot about the way you brought me up, the things you taught me mattered, and I’ve decided that I’m not going back to being a cop. At least not right now.”

  “I don’t like to see you quit a job. We didn’t bring you up that way.”

  “I know.” I squirmed in my chair, trying to find a comfortable position, finally giving up. And there was no way she was letting me stretch my legs out and rest them on the glass and gilt coffee table. “But you didn’t bring me up to lie, either.”

  “What exactly do they want you to lie about?” she asked. “Being gay?”

  “That cat is pretty much out of the bag. It’s something else. I don’t want to go into it.”

  “But…”

  “Let the boy be, Lokelani,” my father said. “If this is what you need to do, then we support you. Being a cop is a bad job for a gay man, anyway. You go surf for a while, then you come back, maybe you’ll work with me. You could go back to school, learn about decorating.”

  That thought horrified me. I missed that gay decorating gene; my apartment looks like the “before” picture from some reality TV show. It was killing me to have my parents think I was a quitter, that I couldn’t do my job any more just because I’d come out of the closet.

  My mother clearly wasn’t happy. Short, petite, and pretty in a china doll way, she has ruled her big, tall husband and three sons with a raised eyebrow, a tone of voice, a deep sigh. It’s rare that she comes out and takes a stand so definitely, but there was nothing I could do at that point. Once I’d made my decision, chosen my wave, so to speak, all I could do was ride it until it crashed to shore, doing my best to manage the fear and exhilaration, and avoid getting crushed on the coral that always lurked just below the water’s surface.

  “There’s more,” I said.

  My mother looked wary. I could only imagine what was going through her head, after all that had happened. “What?”

  “There’s going to be a story, on KVOL, on the evening news.”

  “No, Kimo. No more stories!” She reached for the phone. “I’m calling your brother right now.”

  “You can’t, Mom.” The words rushed out, in my haste to keep her from spoiling those carefully-laid plans. “It’s not about me, so much. It’s about the decisions gay people have to make when they come out, about who to tell, and how to tell, and what you have to do once the secret’s out.”

  I leaned forward. “The reporter interviewed other people, too. I mean, I’m the hook, the reason for the story. But they’re making it into another series, like the one on gay cops around the country. This is about gay and lesbian people in Honolulu, and how they live their lives every day.”

  My mother looked at my father. Some kind of unspoken message passed between them, and finally my father said, “The news is on soon. We don’t want to miss it.”

  We moved out to my father’s den to watch the news—there was no way my mother was letting a television set into her recreation of Versailles. My parents were both tight-lipped during the interview.

  After the interview with me, Ralph gave the audience a preview of what was to come in this new series: gay men who had lost their jobs after coming out, lesbian moms who had lost custody battles, gay ministers who had been forced to leave their churches. There were other, more positive stories coming too, about people who had found faith, given up addictions, chosen new careers and established new families. It was going to be a good series, I thought, one that might change minds a
nd move hearts. And it was going to do all that because I had told a lie.

  The segment ended with a shot of Ralph framed against the surfers at Kuhio Beach Park. “This is Ralph Kim, in Waikiki with former Honolulu PD detective Kimo Kanapa’aka, who has just announced his decision not to return to the force after his very public coming out story. Stay tuned to KVOL, “Erupting News All The Time,” for more stories about ordinary men and women and their experiences coming out of the closet.”

  When the news was over, my mother stood up, said, “Dinner now,” and we went into the equally formal dining room and ate, talking carefully about my brothers and their wives and children. I could tell the story had moved them, though we didn’t talk about it. That didn’t change the fact that I had lied, and I would have to live with the consequences of that lie, particularly when it came to light, but it did make me feel better.

  We watched TV together after dinner, and then I went up to my room, just the way I had as a teenager. It was frozen as it was when I was seventeen, leaving Hawai’i for college on the mainland. The walls were lined with surf posters, the shelves crowded with every trophy I ever won in a surf competition. I sat on my twin bed and tried to remember that boy, or the young man he became, who returned to the islands with the idea that he could be a champion surfer. I remembered the day my parents picked me up at the airport, how I told them I was moving to the North Shore to surf even before we had left the parking garage.

  In many ways I’m lucky to be the youngest. By then, my oldest brother, Lui, was married, a father, and moving up in the hierarchy at KVOL. Haoa, two years younger, had just gotten married and started his own landscaping business. Their success bought me freedom, and my parents agreed to let me take a year to surf. My father hired me on as a laborer and carpenter until the fall, letting me bank every penny I earned to fund my North Shore adventure, and I surfed every morning before work, rising in the pre-dawn darkness, and every evening. I left them in September, as the North Shore waves began to improve, and didn’t return until winter had passed and I had given up that dream.

  I tried to read but I couldn’t concentrate. I checked my gear again, waxed my short board, reorganized the books on my shelf, which I hadn’t read since high school and wasn’t likely to ever again. At eleven, I turned the lights out.

  I couldn’t sleep well, hyped up by the nervous energy of what the next day was to bring, but I did doze a little. I was grateful when light began seeping in my window and I heard the slap of the morning paper in the driveway. I pulled on a pair of board shorts, slippas and an old t-shirt that read, “Hug a Pineapple.” Before I opened the door, I looked outside for reporters lurking in the underbrush. Fortunately there were none.

  There was a breeze blowing up from Diamond Head, and I could smell just the faintest hint of salt water. Down the street, I heard the soft whoosh of someone’s sprinklers, a dog barking, a siren passing far below. A yellow and orange sun was just coming into view over Wilhelmina Rise, to the east, and there were thin wisps of cirrus clouds high in the atmosphere. I picked up the paper and went back inside.

  Opening it, I saw that I had reclaimed the headlines I’d been so glad to relinquish only a few days before.

  “Gay Cop Resigns,” they read. Someone, identified only as an “unnamed police source,” said that while gay men and lesbians had been successfully integrated into police forces around the country, there was no formal policy at the HPD prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, and that some officers might not feel comfortable serving with someone who was openly gay. Sampson himself was quoted as saying, “Mr. Kanapa’aka has gone through a very difficult time in his life, and the Honolulu Police Department wishes him only the best in whatever the world brings his way.”

  My father was up at first light, too, and while my mother slept in we read the paper and he made scrambled eggs and Spam for both of us. We Hawaiians take pride in the fact that we eat more Spam per person than any other group in the United States, something like five and a half cans per person per year. Hormel has even made a special limited edition hula girl can for us, available only in the islands.

  “At least you get to surf for a while,” my father said, as we sat down to eat.

  “I will,” I said. “Big waves coming soon.” It was October, and the best surf of the year was on its way to the North Shore, monster waves that attracted the best surfers from around the world.

  “You have to be careful,” my father said, between forkfuls of egg. “People will know who you are, and some of them won’t like you. You won’t have your badge or your gun to protect you.”

  “They never really protected me while I had them. The badge is just a way of convincing people to give you the information they know they should. And a gun doesn’t protect you; it’s a means of last resort. The only protection you really have is your own common sense.” I reached over and touched his shoulder. “Besides, if I get in any trouble, I still have that pistol you gave me.”

  When I left for the North Shore the first time, after returning home from California with a BA in English and no job prospects in sight, my father had given me a .9 millimeter Glock, one he’d had for years. It was more male bonding than out of any sense that I was in danger. I had grown up around guns; they were as much a part of our family life as luaus and slack key guitar music. Another father might have given his son a book, an heirloom watch or an embroidered ball cap. Mine gave me a gun.

  He’d kept it lovingly polished and oiled, and I had tried to take as good care of it as he had. At that moment, it was locked in the glove compartment of my truck—which of course he had handed down to me, too. I believe you don’t draw a weapon unless you are ready to fire it, and you shouldn’t be ready to fire it until you have exhausted every other opportunity. I’d never fired either the Glock or my service revolver at anything more than a paper target, though I had killed a man with his own gun only a week before. The memory of that incident still haunted my dreams, but I had done it to save my brother Haoa’s life, and I did not regret it.

  “Good,” he said, smiling across at me. “You know I worry about you.” He took a forkful of eggs and Spam, and smiled at the taste. “Just don’t tell your mother.”

  “Don’t tell me what?” my mother asked, coming in to the kitchen in her white terrycloth robe, a gift from a spa vacation my father had treated her to the year before.

  My father’s eyes widened. “I wasn’t supposed to tell you he had Spam for breakfast,” I said. “You know how you worry about his cholesterol.”

  I was surprised at how quickly the lie came to my mouth. I try and believe I am an honest person, but years of harboring secret desires, lying to myself as much as others, had made the habit easier. So much for my new honesty; like the position I thought I was getting at District 1, it had evaporated quickly.

  “You shouldn’t eat like that, Al,” she said, taking the half-eaten plate from him and scraping the Spam into the garbage. “You know what the doctor said.”

  “He said, don’t eat anything that tastes good,” my father grumbled to me.

  Let’s Go Surfing Now

  I left them a little later, taking the Kamehameha Highway up through the center of the island, past pineapple plantations and tourists in rented cars. It was a sunny day, clear skies and gentle breezes ruffling the papery blossoms of wild red and purple bougainvillea along the highway, and I rolled down my windows, turned the volume up on an early Hapa CD, and tried to relax.

  It had been a rough couple of weeks, emotionally and physically, and I knew it would take me a long time to process everything that had happened. But now I had to focus on the case, and solve it quickly so I could get back to Honolulu and get on with my life.

  My cell phone rang about halfway up the Kam. It was my second brother, Haoa, the one who had the hardest time with my coming out. “Eh, brah, howzit?”

  “Heading for the big waves,” I said. “How you doing?”

  Both my brothers had help
ed me put away the case that had been the cause of my coming out, and Haoa had nearly been shot. That experience seemed to have shaken my big, solid brother, and I was sorry I was leaving Honolulu when he might need me.

  “Keeping busy. We’re redoing all the planting for an office building out in Kahala.” Haoa’s landscaping company had continued to grow, and he sometimes worked with our father on projects. I was a little jealous of that.

  I asked about his wife, Tatiana, and their kids, and heard all their news. Then there was an awkward silence. I thought for a moment the connection had been broken and checked the phone’s display to make sure the call hadn’t dropped. Finally, he said, “How you sleep, brah? Going through everything you do?”