Last Notes from Home (9 page)

“Swear!” he cried, raising his right hand to the heavens. Racial and ethnic slurs were rampant, epidemic, flips for Filipinos; nips or Buddha-heads for Japanese, chinks or pakes for Chinese, yobos for Koreans, borinques for Puerto Ricans, popolos for “niggers,” and even the pure Hawaiians suffered the derogation kanakas. As to the poor Portuguese or Portugees, as they were called, they had been reduced to being absolutely interchangeable with the Polacks of our mainland jokes. The only group who had avoided any ethnic slur was the bleeding Samoans.

“Why is that, Jimmy?”

“Oh, Frederick, me lurve, your ignorance of the islands borders on the unforgivable. Nobody dares cast an ethnic slur on Samoans. All Samoans”—Jimmy raised his right hand to the heavens once more—”stand six feet seven, weigh 275 pounds, and have a thirty-two-inch waist. If they can make an X on a piece of paper, they are transported to your mainland universities to play that absurd mutation of the Irish game you choose to call football. If they are unable to make their little X, they muck about Honolulu and work for loan sharks and collection agencies, breaking the arms and legs of the poor souls who can’t pay. I must say, though, in all fairness to them, lurve, and unless their employers are really angry and want the kneecaps broken, these lads can give you some marvelously clean breaks.” Jimmy now instructed me as a fellow
haole
how I ought to approach a Samoan should such an unthinkable confrontation arise. Shoving his chubby hands up into the sleeves of his gabardine jacket, suggesting the way the Japanese put their hands into the billowing sleeves of their kimonos, he began bobbing his head up and down in the Orientals’ gesture of politesse and, as though he were I addressing that imagined monstrous Samoan, kept repeating over and over, “You my brud-duh, you my brud-duh, you my
bruh
!”
Unhappily, the Samoans did some rather nastier things than breaking legs and for that they should have to pay dearly. I had no idea what Jimmy meant by that but also didn’t doubt that he would tell me.

8

Jimmy now had his elbows propped on the tray, was cradling his jaw in his clenched fists, staring directly at me, and as I returned his stare, he rolled his eyes wildly and secretively to the left, indicating I should come closer. Even with my face almost up to his, he rolled his eyes yet again, suggesting I come even closer, and my face ended up almost lip to lip with his. “Of course, Frederick,” Jimmy whispered, “when our little group leaves these paradisiacal islands, there’s going to be about six less Samoans!”

“There’s going to be what?” I cried.

Jimmy raised his index finger to his lips and shushed me so violently that his spittle sprayed all over my face. “I mean,” he said, “we are going to get some shotguns, blow their goddamn thick skulls off, stuff them into the trunks of Toyotas, and leave the cars in the long-term parking lot of Honolulu’s International Airport. It’s not only a reprisal, it’s an out-and-out warning to their employers, the bleeding eejit pakes and yobos.”

“But why in the world would you want to do that, Jimmy?”

“Because the bleeding eejit pakes and yobos want a dollar a ticket, that is, a fourth of our total Hawaiian take, for insurance purposes only, that is, insurance that our distributors and sellers will be able to move freely in Honolulu. They themselves won’t do a blasted thing, distribute, sell, anything else. They just demand a fourth of the take to ensure our people will be able to move about the islands unmolested. I mean, godawmighty, Frederick, your own Mafia, knowing the monies go to the poor, the sick, the downtrodden of our beloved but impoverished Ireland, don’t interfere with our operations.”

“Who fixes that for you? Cookie?”

“Now, Frederick,” Jimmy said, smiling despite himself and patting me lovingly on the thigh, “don’t be a naughty boy, lurve. In fact, your Mafia volunteered to come over here and intercede in our behalf, but we refused and told them we were quite capable of handling our own affairs, thank you, ma’am. Besides, one does not accept favors from the Mafia. Their bill always comes due, if you know what I mean? You see what happened, we told these bleeding eejits in Hawaii to ram it up their bleeding arses and they, in turn, put some double-aught buck into a sawed-off shotgun, blew away the head of our distributor—the cutest little Buddha-head you ever saw—threw the poor bugger’s body into the trunk of his Toyota, and left him in the airport’s parking lot. The poor chap’s decomposing body lay there so long that by the time they discovered him he had stunk up the whole airport.”

“But listen, Jimmy, I don’t understand this at all. I thought you said this was a pleasure outing for the more deserving workers of your Hospital Trusts.”

“Well, it is and it isn’t. There can hardly be any harm in mixing a little business with pleasure. Aboard this flight are three superb gunmen, one from Dublin and two we picked up in New York City, members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood.”

“Is the Irish Republican Brotherhood the same as the Irish Republican Army or IRA?”

“Oh, no, the IRB is strictly an American organization. As it happens, these two chaps we picked up in New York City were formerly with the IRA but things became extremely uncomfortable for them in Belfast and Deny and they were forced to emigrate to the United States.”

Against the possibility of any reason, judgment, or sanity, I found myself so caught up in O’Twoomey’s lunacy that I started craning my neck up and down the cabin’s aisle trying to isolate these “superb gunmen.” Jimmy laughed heartily and told me not to bother as I wouldn’t spot them in a million years. “Let me say only that their leader is old enough to have stolen the Peking Man!”

“To have stolen
what
?”

“The Peking Man!”

My ignorance of archaeology verged on the sublime but I did know what the Peking Man was. In a limestone cave near Peking, during approximately the decade between the late twenties and the late thirties, anthropologists had uncovered human skulls, limb bones, jaws, and teeth, which were said to predate Neanderthal Man by at least five hundred thousand, perhaps six hundred thousand, years. However, with World War II looming, a decision was made to move the bones to the United States for safekeeping during the war. The relics were thereupon packed into two redwood chests and moved by train from Peking to the port of Chinwangtao, where the chests were loaded aboard the S.S.
President Harrison
for shipment to the States. From December 7, 1941, the very day the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, the redwood chests were never again seen. Moreover, I knew that after these nigh onto four decades, there was still outstanding a substantial reward—perhaps as much as fifty thousand dollars—for their return, no questions asked; but Jimmy scoffed at this and said the reward was a hundred fifty thousand but with some hard bargaining one could easily reap at least two hundred fifty thousand dollars.

“But, Jimmy, why in the world would you want to steal the Peking Man?”

“Frederick, lurve, sometimes your ignorance appalls me. Pius XII couldn’t very well sit still for that kind of blasphemy, a bunch of crackpot scientists uncovering a bunch of bleeding monkey bones predating Christ by perhaps more than one or two million years and having the audacity to claim they were men.”

“If you don’t mind my asking, where are these relics now? Underneath the Vatican in the room adjoining the Pope’s pornography collection?”

“Oh, Frederick, you really are choosing to be a naughty boy, aren’t you? As a matter of fact, the remains are right in my Dublin flat. They are magnificently polished and cleaned and I use the skulls to serve my Guinness in. You come visit me one day in Dublin and I’ll serve you some splendid dark in one of the skulls. Word of honor!”

All the time Jimmy had been talking I once again had been looking loonily up and down the aisle and now told Jimmy that the only man who appeared old enough to have pulled off the Peking Man caper seemed to be Father Maguire. Jimmy threw his head back and roared with laughter, told me I might just be right, lowered his seat, told me he must, absolutely
must,
sleep, and asked me to awaken him in Honolulu. “You really are a truly lurverly chap, Frederick,” he said. He then went into the deepest most nerve-wracking snore I’d ever heard. James Seamus Finbarr O’Twoomey snored all the way to paradise.

Ms. Glenn’s haunting eyes were a constant recrimination telling me she thought something was wrong with me, something not at all right. It wasn’t as simple as having refused her breakfast of scrambled eggs and sausage, of having forsaken the movie
Jeremiah Johnson
with Robert Redford, or even at that moment of having refused the economy section’s dinner choices of chicken luau or manicotti. It was something a good deal more distressing to Ms. Glenn and perhaps something not notably indigenous to her generation. I was not jolly. I am unable to pinpoint the precise moment Ms. Glenn abstracted the lack of felicity within me but I do know that from the time she did so she set herself the improbable task of instilling in me what her employer doubtless would have called “the aloha spirit.”

Our bargain had been simple enough, though my part of it was utterly tacit. In exchange for refilling my vodka tonic on the rocks whenever it was discovered empty, my obsequiously laconic smile had seemed to suggest I would refrain from breaking wind, wouldn’t pick my nose and wipe the viscous waste on those damp cocktail napkins Ms. Glenn had to retrieve, and wouldn’t vomit in the laps of any passengers in the completely jammed steerage section. Mentally or physically, Ms. Glenn’s part of the bargain required no great effort. I was nursing no more than one drink every forty minutes or so, perhaps as few as one an hour. To my agitation, however, Ms. Glenn seemed to materialize every quarter hour, would myopically scrutinize my plastic cup, satisfy herself that it still contained vodka, and then would wordlessly retreat into the darkness of the forward bulkhead area. Alas, when my cup was found to be empty, Ms. Glenn at some unhappy point decided, or apparently decided, that what I needed was a little prodding into the grand adventure called Hawaii. In two hours the captain would be announcing our impending descent into Honolulu and such was the enormous altitude at which we flew that descent would take yet another hour after his announcement.

Like that good old boy from Plains, Georgia, who had the whole country by the balls before the country even realized he had its fly unzipped, Ms. Glenn began her campaign to lure me into gladness gingerly and tactfully enough, even in what I suppose she imagined was a kind of quaint, charming subtlety. Whereas she’d previously been taking my empty cup unbidden, filling it, and returning it to my tray with nary a word, she now began to hover over me until I was forced to look up into a doll-like smile of great artifice and in gratingly lyrical tones she’d ask the obviously rhetorical did I “care for another” or how would “a nice lovely fresh one” do me? Invariably my answer was a vigorous but mute nod of affirmation. Despite the fact that Ms. Glenn spoke quietly and that I didn’t speak at all, I began to suspect, as only an alcoholic in thrall to his own and inevitable paranoia can suspect, that these exchanges had become matters of sympathy or alarm to those passengers in our immediate vicinity and it was all I could do to refrain from saying, “Goddamnit, yes, I’ll have another drink. And to allay your obvious qualms, you ought to know there have been times in my life I needed a pint of this stuff to rinse my mouth mornings. You know, the way you use Cepacol?” In my fantasy I even appended, “Incidentally, as a practical matter and for a survey I’m conducting for Erica Jong, do you use Cepacol before or after giving head?”

In the course of putting down a drink Ms. Glenn wanted to know if it was my first trip to Hawaii. I said that it was. She said I must be thrilled. I said I wasn’t in the least thrilled. When I looked up into her large, gray, haunting, and vacuous eyes, I detected in them a perplexity of which I hadn’t credited her capable and hence was compelled to offer a smile by way of apology. Ms. Glenn wanted to know if I was staying on Waikiki. If I was I must absolutely stay away from the hotel bars and the floor shows featuring “the Steve and Eydie-Tony Bennett-Don Ho bunch.” That was all part of Waikiki’s “flagrant, unarmed robbery.” Again I smiled in deference to Ms. Glenn’s perception. She had no trouble detecting I hadn’t any shekels. Ms. Glenn recommended a lot of sun for me. When I needed my vodka tonics she told me to walk to the corner of Kalakaua, Waikiki’s main drag and “a depraved pigsty after sunset,” and Lewers Street and at the Holiday Hotel—not to be confused with the Holiday Inn, “another trap”—I’d find a most comfortable little bar with a naval decor where I could get a drink at mainland prices. The place was called Shipwreck Kelly’s. Evenings the place also featured an authentic Hawaiian group. Again I thanked her but told her her information was gratuitous as I was staying with friends in a Honolulu suburb pronounced, I believe, Hawaii Kai.

“Hawaii Kai!” cried the lovely Ms. Glenn. “That’s where I live! Where in Hawaii Kai?”

It was some street with a kanaka name I could neither pronounce nor spell.

“Hey,” Ms. Glenn said, “I thought you’d never been to Hawaii. Where do you get that kanaka stuff?”

I pointed at my seatmate, Mr. James Seamus Finbarr O’Twoomey, the totally insane and drunken Dublin Irishman who had long since passed out.

“That figures,” Ms. Glenn said. “I’ll tell you this, though, as a stranger and a white man—a
haole,
did the informed Mr. O’Twoomey give you that expression?—you’d better be careful how you throw that word kanaka around on Oahu.”

I promised I’d be a good and obedient boy.

“My fiance and I share a houseboat at the marina in Hawaii Kai. The Coco Marina. It’s right behind the main shopping plaza there. Your friends will know where it is.”

Was this an invitation to a
ménage
a trois
? Perhaps Ms. Glenn’s fiance was one of those pure Hawaiian flower children. She had certainly been indignant enough at my use of kanaka. Abruptly I grew giddy and ethereal with mirth, thinking I might laugh in the bewildered Ms. Glenn’s face. I had conjured up this vision of Ms. Glenn, her kanaka fiance, and myself, all naked except for leis and exuberantly smearing one another with coconut oil, about ready to abandon ourselves to the houseboat’s water bed and thereupon defile the smug suburban ambiance of good old Hawaii Kai. I was mortified and turned my back on Ms. Glenn and took comfort in Jimmy O’Twoomey’s drunken snoring, thinking that at least I’d heard the end of him until we reached Honolulu.