And there was the sun. The sun in Hawaii was so dazzling, so misleading, yet we regarded sunlight as our fortune. We quietly believed, "We are blessed because the sun shines every day. This is a good place for its sunlight. These islands are pure because of the sun. The sun has made us virtuous."
As the TV weathermen on the mainland took personal responsibility for the weather, each of us in Hawaii took credit for the sunshine here, as though we had discovered it and it was ours to dispense. "Stranger, be grateful to me for this sunny day" was our attitude toward visitors. The sun had been bestowed on us and we were sharing it with these alien refugees from dark cloudy places. The sun was our wealth and our goodness. The
Hawaiian heresy, which we thought but never said, was "We are good because of the sun. We are better than our visitors. We are sunnier."
This conceit made us sloppy and careless. Never mind the palmy setting, the people here were as cruel and violent and crafty as people anywhere, but they were slower and so seemed mild. Close up, the islands were disorderly, fragile, and sensationally littered, with brittle cliffs and too many feral cats and beaches that were sucked and splashed by big waves to vanish in the sea. Our secret was that we hated hot weather and stayed out of the sun. The visitors ended up with pink noses, peeling shoulders, freckle clusters, sunstroke, and melanoma, while we kept in the shadows.
"They say the Hawaii state motto is Hele I Loko, Haole 'Ino, Aka Ha'awi Mai Kala — Go Home, You Mainland Scum, but Leave Your Money Behind," Buddy said. "The real motto is even funnier. Ua Mau Ke Ea O Ka Aina I Ka Pono — The Life of the Land Is Perpetuated in Righteousness. The fuck it is!"
The week I was hired, Buddy stopped coming to the hotel. I was glad. Buddy always introduced me by saying, "Hey, he wrote a book!"
I hated that. And I needed to learn the job. He was the wrong person to teach me. He was usually drunk and had the drunk's idiocy, mood swings, and facetiousness; he repeated himself; drink made him deaf.
To please me he tried to be funny, but that could be tedious, especially the formulaic jokes he told in order to define himself, or just to shock. I knew all the punch lines. The man at the bar who says, "I used to think I was a cowboy, but, golly, I guess I'm a lesbian." Buddy saying, in his terrible Mexican accent, "If God hadn't meant us to eat it, then why did he make it look like a taco?" The elephant telling the naked man, "How do you manage to breathe through a little thing like that?" Or Buddy's croaky utterance that amounted almost to a war cry: "Nine inches!" A boss's comedy is always an employee's hardship.
A few days after I started at the hotel, Buddy invited me to his house to introduce me to his new woman, Stella, whom I had not yet met. She was from California, she said.
"She's a tool of my lust," Buddy said, and handed me a platter of brownies. "Stella made them. There's weed baked into them."
I took one and nibbled it while Buddy praised them in a wheezy voice, claiming they'd saved his lungs.
"You ever swim?" I asked.
"Bad current," he said, pronouncing it kernt.
"I'm surprised Buddy didn't make you manager of the hotel," I said to Stella. "You're a great cook and you have the basic qualification. You're a mainland howlie."
"But you also had the other important qualification," Buddy said, poking me in the chest. "Reason being, you understood me."
I smiled at him, to show I didn't understand.
"That dipshit manager I was telling you about?" he said.
I remembered the aggression, the massage table, the blunders, the drunkenness, the practical jokes. Larger than life. Three balled tomcat.
"That was me!"
He needed me to congratulate him for fooling me, and I did. But I had guessed it, and people had whispered at the hotel. What surprised me was that he felt I could do a better job. "A man who doesn't make mistakes ain't doing nothing." But there were more surprises for me, and they taught me to be watchful. I had asked for a new life, but I saw that this meant many lives — wife, child, the world of these islands, and my misapprehensions.
3 Birdsong
Not long after I nailed the janitor, Keola, as incurious, I saw him emptying trash barrels into a dumpster in the alley beside the hotel. Some papers flew out. He stooped and snatched at them with big blunt fingers, but instead of throwing them away, he looked at them. He began to read them, holding the flapping sheets to his face and smiling. That shocked me. He glanced back at me and gave me what the locals called stink-eye.
Later, when I summoned the courage to ask him why he had read the discarded papers, he denied it. If he sometimes seemed to be doing something crazy like reading, he said, it was because he suffered from "nonselective blackouts." He said he didn't even know what I was talking about.
"My short-term memory more worse, boss. Get real common in the islands. Real falustrating."
A week or so later I was in my office and heard, coming from outside the window, the voices of Keola and Kawika, who were weeding the flower bed by the swimming pool.
"Eh, where you was yesterday?"
"Eh, was working."
"I call you up talfone."
"I never hear."
"Eh, you never dere already."
"Assa madda you, brah?"
Fascinated, I cocked my head to listen. It was like hearing birds squawking.
"Figure us go Makaha. Catch some wave."
"I was lawnmowa da frikken grass. Weed Eater was buss."
"How was buss?"
"Da shaff."
"Eh, I get no more nothing to do."
"Was frikken choke grass. I just stay sweating. My pants all broke. Later I wen cuttin da tchrees."
Two birds on a branch, squawking together, squawks I was trying to remember and understand. A few days later, they were squawking again.
"Was one udda bugga. Was rob."
"Who da bugga?"
"One howlie guy."
"Who da steala-rubba?"
"Udda howlie guy."
"Frikken howlies."
"It da djrugs."
"Yah."
"They in depf."
"Yah. Hey, how he go do it?"
"Hide in one tchree."
"Up the tchree?"
"Back fo the tchree. See a waheeny with one bag. He say, 'That mines!' He cuckaroach the bag, and the waheeny she ampin like hell."
"They all on djrugs."
"Take da cash. Buy batu."
"Batu. Ice. Pakalolo."
"Pakalolo one soff djrug. Batu is more worse."
Squawk, squawk. I sat at the window, pretending to work.
And another day:
"Eh, but da bugga."
"What bugga?"
"Da one new bugga."
"Da howlie, yah. He more betta."
"Eh, he look akamai."
"But talk hybolic."
"Yah. But everybody speak him too good."
"The waheeny she frecklish."
"She Housekeeping."
"She not Housekeeping. She Guess Services."