by C. McGee
When you’re sober and you wake up in a bar you feel like a piece of shit. When you do it twice in one day, you feel like a huge piece of shit. When you do it twice in one day and have drool all over your face, you feel like a gigantic, bloody, postpartum shit. That’s how I felt when I woke up—like the sort of bowel movement a person remembers.
Exhaustion, irritation, and alcohol, all of the things that had made me think it was a good idea to nap in a bar, were no longer present in my system. Suddenly, I was disconcertingly cognizant of my own actions and thoroughly embarrassed by them.
Attempting to make an inconspicuous exit, I pulled a napkin from the dispenser on the table, wiped off my face, wiped off the table, and then made my way toward the bar. I couldn’t remember whether or not the shameless version of me had opened a tab, and I figured it was better to address the issue immediately rather than come back to it later. Embarrassment is like diarrhea, best to get it all over with at once.
My head was in my hands as I waited for the bartender to make her way over. It was an unconscious manifestation of my mortification; the universal sign for “Oh my god, did I seriously just do that.” My chagrin was noticed.
“Don’t worry girl, we’ve all been there,” said a wiry Hawaiian man, slapping me on the back.
I answered him with a reluctant smile and a shake of my head.
“For real. No reason to be embarrassed.”
“Except for the fact that it’s like three o’clock, and I just woke up at a bar with drool all over my face.”
“Actually, it’s only two thirty and you woke up twice with drool all over your face,” he said through a teasing grin.
“So people saw the first time too?” My shame was mounting.
“Not really, just me and the boys. The bar was pretty empty the first time. Not a lot of people drinking that early. Only the really committed.” He winked.
“Christ, that’s humiliating.”
“A little bit.”
I laughed.
“Honestly,” the man said, segueing away from light-hearted antagonism toward words of sincere comfort. “It seems a lot more embarrassing than it really is.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah, pretty lady.”
“All right then, what’s really embarrassing look like?”
“I don’t know, how about … How about passing out naked in public, and then being woken up by the President of the United States.”
“Yeah, that’s not comforting. I can come up with an outrageous hypothetical as well, but that doesn’t make me feel any better about the real event that actually happened to me just now.”
“That is a real event, and it did happen to me.”
“Yeah, okay,” I said dismissively.
“Swear to god,” he replied, and then immediately started in on a story, as if we were old friends. “One time, back in high school me and a bunch of my friends were in Oahu for a canoe race and …”
“Wait, a canoe race?”
“Yeah. Outrigger canoes.”
“…?” I quizzically responded.
“Outrigger canoes? Come on, I mean I know you’re a haole, but you should know about outrigger canoeing. It’s one of the state sports.”
“…” I replied. I had no idea what the fuck he was talking about so I decided to remain silent in order to refrain from demonstrating further ignorance.
“Well, it’s a big deal here, a Hawaiian tradition. Anyway, my friends and I were away from home and we were in the big city and we had just won a huge race, so we decided to celebrate.”
“So, you got hammered.”
“Exactly. And, as hammered people do, we decided to go out and get sloppy diner food from Zippy’s.”
“Naturally.” I said, assuming Zippy’s was the Hawaiian equivalent of Perkins.
“And after we finished at Zippy’s we drank some more.”
“Like champions should,” I stated matter-of-factly.
“Exactly,” he said with a grin. “So then—and this is secondhand knowledge because I don’t remember any of it—I instructed everyone on the team, and everyone on the street, and everyone in Zippy’s, that I was going to buy them a proper Hawaiian treat.”
“And what’s a proper Hawaiian treat?”
“Evidently, it’s rainbow shave ice with adzuki beans and condensed milk. Or, at least I hope it is because I bought like fifty of those things. It took the shave ice stand over a half an hour to make all of them. By the time they were done, I was passed out in an alley off of King Street with a half-eaten shave ice in my hands.”
“So, I’m assuming that your buddies were grateful for the treat you bought them but not grateful enough to leave your drunk ass alone.”
“You got it. They took off all of my clothes, laid me out on the sidewalk, and left me there for the rest of the night—naked in downtown Honolulu.”
“Rough.”
“Yeah, but on the plus side they were kind enough to cover my crotch up with what was left of my shave ice, so I wasn’t totally exposed. On the down side, condensed milk bears a striking resemblance to semen, and adzuki beans look like horrific genital warts, and the syrup that goes into the shave ice stains pubic hair; so, basically everyone that walked by me thought I was a deviant with a venereal disease and a strange fetish for primary colored pubes.”
“Not necessarily,” I said, offering mock solace. “I mean they might have thought you were some sort of weird clown-stripper that had a bean-related gag go horribly wrong.”
“That’s comforting,” he laughed.
“Oh, oh, or maybe they thought you were an elementary school art teacher that had been roofied by embittered former students. Upset by the bad grade you gave them on their mixed media project, they decided to recreate their Elmer’s glue, dried bean, and watercolor masterpiece right on your junk, and then left you exposed in downtown Honolulu in order to let the discerning arts community decide the real quality of their work.”
“Oh yes, that’s even more reassuring, the first victim of burgeoning avant-garde artists/perverts.”
“Better a victim than a deviant.”
He laughed. “Yes, words to live by.”
“Indeed.” I smiled. “All right, so what actually happened?”
“Well, nothing quite as exciting as the scenarios you just posited. I just lay there, passed out and naked, until the morning when this lanky black kid in a Baskin-Robbins uniform tapped me on the shoulder and asked if I was all right. I mumbled some sort of drunken explanation after which he ran inside and got me an apron. After I covered myself, he let me into the ice cream shop where I used the phone to call my asshole friends who came and picked me up.
The wait time between the call and my friend’s arrival was relatively uneventful. Basically, this kid and I just shot the shit. I told him about the previous night and he told me a little about himself. I forgot most of the stuff we talked about the minute that I stepped out the door, but there was one thing that I never forgot.”
“And what’s that?”
“The kid’s name: Barry.”
“Barry, huh?” I said through a slightly skeptical grin.
“Yup. Barry—the guy that saved my naked ass. The next time I saw him was like thirty years later on the television. I remember spitting out whatever I was drinking at the time and going ‘holy shit, that’s Barry on TV’ and then going ‘no fucking way’ when I figured out that it was a presidential campaign ad.”
“All right,” I said. “That’s a pretty good story.”
“And embarrassing,” he added, continuing his effort to cheer me up.
“So, you’re a big Obama fan now?”
“Of course not. I actively campaigned against him. You know how humiliating it is to be reminded of the most uncomfortable moment of your life every time you see the president? It’s a nightmare. I didn’t even look up what policies he supported. I just left my house as soon as that ad ended and volunteered for the first opposing candidate I c
ould find.”
I smiled, this time without reservation.
“That’s what embarrassing looks like,” he said, slapping my shoulder.
“That does provide some perspective,” I admitted.
“Good, then my job here is done.”
A happy expression on his face, the man picked his drink up off the bar, turned, and headed back to his table.
As he left I said, “Thanks for the story …” Ending the sentence with an awkward pause, suddenly aware of the fact that the man had not relayed his name.
“Koamalu,” the upper-middle-age Hawaiian said, as he turned back to me. “Koa for short.”
“Ingrid,” I replied, putting out a hand.
“Nice to meet you, Ingrid,” he said, returning my gesture.
Our introduction complete, we both went about our business.
The following morning the boys and I kayaked the Kalihiwai. It’s an easy paddle that I finished in about forty-five minutes. Charlie and Ethan took about an hour. I like kayaking with them. Their mediocrity makes me feel like an Olympian. After that, we went down to Hanalei Bay devoting the rest of the day to bocce, reading, and skimboarding. We could have spent the entire afternoon just existing. Hanalei Bay is one of those kinds of places—the kind that requires nothing else, merely being alive and being there is enough.
Per usual, around midday, a brief spell of rain drove all three of us underneath a large beach umbrella. I used the opportunity to tell the guys about the events of the previous afternoon. They enjoyed the part where I woke up with drool all over my face. They really enjoyed the part where an unknown Hawaiian man told me about passing out in the nude and then being woken up by the future President of the United States.
“B-Rock!” Ethan exclaimed. “Seriously, he was saved by teenage B-Rock? Hilarious!”
“Yeah, that’s a pretty good story, right?” I agreed.
“That’s an awesome fucking story. How did Obama not mention that little anecdote while he was out on the stump? That would have been enough to convince me to vote for him. I would have gladly overlooked the fact that he bumped me up a tax bracket.”
“Ahh, yes.” Charlie interjected wryly. “Democracy in action. Nothing predicts presidential performance like the telling of a good story about a drunk naked guy.”
“Right, you are my friend,” Ethan said through a grin that both acknowledged and dismissed Charlie’s incisive sarcasm.
“So who was this guy?” Charlie asked, shifting the tone of the conversation slightly.
“I don’t know. His name was Koa. He’s just some forty- or fifty-year-old Hawaiian guy. Why?”
Charlie’s curiosity seemed incongruous with his normal behavior. He is typically good for an interesting aside or an acerbic remark but rarely does he ask questions.
“Just curious,” he said. Then, in a more characteristic fashion, “It seems fairly reasonable to question the motives of a fifty-year-old man with a history of public indecency that strikes up a random conversation with a thin, pretty, blonde girl.”
“Fair enough,” I replied, adding in an assenting head bob. “But, honestly, he didn’t seem like a creeper. Just a nice guy that was there with a couple of his friends who saw a person that was mortified and wanted to console them.”
“Yeah,” Ethan said in the exaggerated tone that clever people adopt when they are about to make an incredibly un-clever joke. “Make you feel better with his penis.”
“You’re the worst,” I said shaking my head in amusement. “For real, I think he was just being nice. The aloha spirit or whatever the fuck they call it.”
“Yeah,” Ethan said, continuing on in his I-know-what-I’m-about-to-say-is-moronic voice. “Aloha to his penis.”
“That doesn’t even make sense, you idiot.”
Ethan silently appealed to Charlie through a plaintiff facial expression.
“Nope,” asserted Charlie, rejecting the appeal.
“Fair enough,” Ethan replied, amiably accepting the fact that his attempt at juvenile humor had fallen short.
As the rain stopped, we returned to our leisurely pursuits. A couple of hours later we left the beach and headed back into town. The guys went to the bar. I went home to get some sleep.
Chapter 8
A Plan Is Hatched
I was awoken by a wretchedness of chickens. There must have been twenty of those fuckers, pecking at the ground, pecking at each other, pecking at my patience. The elementary school kids are running a goddamn soup kitchen for those birds. I thought, while looking disdainfully out my window. Word must be spreading throughout the chicken community.
Rather than impotently watching as the children encouraged my nemeses, I went to the garage and found some of my wild animal traps. After setting up the traps at various spots around my property, and in the nearby woods, I headed off to guide a zip-line tour.
I returned from work six hours later with a hundred dollars in tips and even more antipathy for Sage. That cunt spent twenty minutes guilting me because I ate some pineapple. It was as if my consumption of six chunks of the fruit made me directly responsible for the poor treatment of the workers that pick them and the negative environmental effects that stem from their harvesting.
Listen, bitch, I thought as she groaned on about pesticides. Basically everyone that’s alive right now has eaten something that has negatively impacted someone, somewhere, so cut the judgmental bullshit.
After throwing my zip-line harness into the closet and my empty pineapple container into the recycle bin, I walked over to the fridge for a snack. There wasn’t much, just a few hard ciders and a couple of yogurts.
I should buy some veal, I thought. And bring Sage the leftovers.
Having made a mental note to purchase baby cow meat, I grabbed one of the yogurts from the fridge, a spoon from the drawer, and headed out to check my traps. Unlike my fridge, they did not disappoint.
The traps contained a total of nine chickens, which is amazing considering the fact that there are only eight total traps and the doors of those traps snap shut the moment that an animal enters. A couple of the chickens must have been so compelled by the food inside that they felt the need to charge the small opening at the exact same time. Gluttonous bastards.
After carrying all of the cages over to the stump, I headed inside and got my axe—”The Hen-der” as she is known in my head. Her blade was a little dull so I grabbed a bastard file from the drawer and got to work sharpening. At some point, while I was filing the blade, I looked up and caught sight of another elementary school kid spreading his leftover lunch on the ground. Three or four chickens were at his feet.
Six o’ clock at night, I thought, and children are still across the street from my house aiding the enemy.
It was then that it dawned on me—as long as the kids keep on feeding the chickens, the chickens will keep on coming. As such, beheading the birds is an effort in futility. In order to actually alter the chickens’ behavior, I must alter the children’s behavior.
From this realization an idea was born. I got to work on it immediately. By the end of the night I had created a makeshift pen in my backyard and placed the recently caught chickens inside of it. Having moved the nine captives into their new home, I set the traps back up, headed inside, and went to bed. I slept soundly, comforted by my new plan.
Just like the previous morning, I was awoken by a secretion of chickens. Actually, this time there were two secretions, the one pinned up in my backyard and the one at the feet of the children across the street. I was annoyed by both, but not as annoyed as normal. My negative feelings were tempered by the fact that I had decided upon a promising course of action.
A cup of coffee in hand, I walked around my property checking the traps. A couple more chickens had been captured over the course of the night. I threw these new detainees in with the rest of the prison population, tossed some of my kitchen scraps into the makeshift coop, reset the traps, and then headed to Ethan’s.
O
n the drive over, I contemplated telling the guys about my plan but decided against it. They would be useless. I grew up in rural North Dakota so chicken slaughter doesn’t faze me. By contrast, Ethan grew up on the East Coast in an upper-class, suburban neighborhood; chicken slaughter is likely as foreign to him as public school. Based off the number of boat shoes Charlie owns, the same can be said of him. Having decided to keep it a solo mission, I parked the car and walked inside.
Upon entering, I found Charlie standing at the island in the middle of the kitchen. He was drinking coffee and talking to Lana. Ethan was nowhere to be found.
“Probably pooping,” I said to myself. It was a safe bet. Ethan moves his bowels like four times a day.
“Is that Ingrid?” Ethan yelled from upstairs. Assuming he was correct he continued on, “I’ll be down in a second, babe, just pooping.”
Nailed it, I thought. “Don’t rush,” I said.
After helping myself to a cup of coffee from Ethan’s ridiculous, customizable temperature, single-serve machine, I joined Charlie and Lana at the granite-topped island.
“Seriously,” Lana said. “I think you and Ethan should get in on this. You too, Freyja.”
Lana was talking to me. She has called me Freyja since the first day we met. When I asked her why, she said because I reminded her of a Norse goddess and Freyja was the only Norse goddess she could remember. I was amazed that she knew any. As a Kauai native of Japanese descent, she should have absolutely no knowledge of Scandinavian mythology. I’m from the Upper Midwest, and I barely have any knowledge of Scandinavian mythology. The fact that she does is a testament to her wide-ranging intellect and superior education.
