As the general manager, I had no choice but to listen to my owner.
He went on. These camped-out Hawaiians, eating Zippy's specials and saimin and Cheez Doodles, guzzling Big Gulps, said they worshiped the land. The land was sacred! So why did they leave their garbage behind, and all those Huggies and cups. Their beaches were fouled so badly with old refrigerators and rusty cans and human shit they had to be bulldozed and fumigated whenever the cops managed to evict them.
You saw them, Buddy said — "big shaven-headed fatsoes, bigger than me!" — flying the Hawaiian flag upside down from old pickup trucks in protest. They were angry, cranky troublemakers who knew no more than fifteen words of their own language. Even a mainland tourist knew ten after a week's vacation.
"I know about thirty myself," Buddy said.
Hawaiians sang hymns, made a fetish of churchgoing and a pious fuss of the family, unless there was trouble — like maybe spousal abuse — and then they demanded social workers. They used food stamps to buy Puppy Chow and tattoos. They said grace in Hawaiian before demolishing a pile of macaroni, a can of Spam, and a half gallon of Banana Karenina ice cream.
"But that's your favorite meal," I said to Buddy.
"This isn't about me," Buddy said. "Look at Keola. He's half Portugee and he blames Captain Cook for the hookers in Waikiki!"
But it was not unusual for Keola, and Buddy too, to be seen at the side entrance, leering at the hookers taking a shortcut through the alley when they started soliciting each night around ten. "There's a new one," Buddy would say. "Yo, mama!"
Although Buddy did not know the word "sententious," the people he described were the embodiment of it — licensed bores, as all aborigines seemed to be (so he implied), who had a proverb or a biblical passage for every reversal in life. Hearing that also made me smile, for Buddy himself often talked about Stella in heaven, and he believed that the green flash on the horizon at sunset was a coded message conveyed by almighty God to him from her.
"They hang around and pick fights with howlie guys and then try to fuck howlie women," Buddy said, adding that there was hardly a Hawaiian in the islands who didn't have some haole in his family tree.
Hawaiians distrusted each othei and at any one time there were sixty-odd groups saying they wanted the monarchy back and all trying in different ways to get land, because land meant money, and they wanted money to buy a new pickup truck and a TV and a loud radio. Having land meant they could sell it off to haoles, just as their ancestors had done, but these haoles would be casino people who would turn all the so-called holy places into gambling resorts.
Dark, moody, shiftless, ravenous, abusive — they were, most of them, the opposite of the popular stereotype: happy island folk, playing the ukulele, doing the hula, and singing off-key.
They were as puritanical, censorious, and hypocritical as any priest- ridden Third Worlders could be, and in private — because Buddy said he knew their most intimate thoughts — every last one of them was racist.
"Tourists say 'aloha'! Tourists wear leis! Tourists go topless!" Buddy
said.
Local people feared the Hawaiians — the Chinese, the Japanese, the Koreans, anyone with an investment or money, the nonconfrontational Asians who just hid when a Hawaiian blalah raised his voice.
"Hawaiians talk about culture — that's all they talk about," Buddy said, "which is funny, because I mean, what culture?"
The hula, hymn singing, high school football, and Spam.
"You once said that if you lose your language, you lose everything," Buddy said to me.
Had I said that?
"How can you have culture if you have no language?"
"I don't know."
"That's what you asked me once when we were talking story," Buddy said. "Talking story" made him sound so local. "If you don't speak Hawaiian, how can you be Hawaiian?"
"Some of them speak it."
"Maybe three. The rest of them just fiddle-fuck with a few words."
"Lost souls" just about summed them up, Buddy said. They had welcomed the missionaries — and they had swallowed them up. So blame the missionaries if you like — they had transformed the Hawaiians, taken everything away, even their memory. They could not remember a time when they were not Christians. Their history was the Bible, the language was Bible language, and even the ones who claimed they worshiped Pele the fire goddess sounded as sanctimonious and tiresome as Bible-thumping Baptists.
Topless hula was Buddy's obsession. When breasts were bared on the islands there might be hope, but until then Hawaii was just another place with a colorful minority, the least-educated state in the Union.
"What crap I've seen here," Buddy said. "Can you imagine all the Whyan nonsense I've had to listen to? It's worse than all the Paiute Indian crap I had to listen to growing up in Nevada."
Hawaiians were angry, and they were so tongue-tied they couldn't explain why they were angry, so they got angrier, Buddy said, sounding angry himself.
"They come to me for handouts. No one ever says, 'Give me money and I'll wash your car or work in your hotel.' It's just 'Hand it over.'"
The very people who were on welfare, got food stamps, and demanded handouts and government assistance were the ones who claimed they hated the government and wanted to be left alone. The reclaim-our-heritage fanatics wanted to open casinos on ancestral lands.
"They're more American than I am," Buddy said. They loved Twinkies and Christmas and beer and ball games and high school proms. The highlight of the year was the January Super Bowl, which Hawaiians watched at the beach, running an extension cord from the car. Virtually the only Hawaiian heroes were football players and entertainers like Brudda Iz.
Buddy raged on and on, and in describing the Hawaiian people, and especially Brudda Iz, he was of course describing himself.
72 Stand-In
Being deaf in one ear, Peewee walked slightly lopsided, scuffing the sole of one foot, his head cocked to the side, his finger always at his bad ear. "Pacific" he said for "specific," and "pwitty good" and "pwoblem." And you had to shout. Even so, he heard everything Buddy had said about Brudda Iz. As though there were something moral in his hearing, he never missed anything that was unjust. Brudda Iz had the sweetest voice imaginable and could sing in the most plangent falsetto, Peewee said. He was the nearest thing there was to Hawaiian royalty; his size and his presence proved that.
"Don't talk to me about Whyan royalty," Buddy said as Pinky pushed him through the lobby in his wheelchair. "Most Hawaiian royals are gay or blond or howlie-looking or all three. They boast that they're ali'i, as though being a noble meant something."
"Don't it?" Peewee said.
"Only if you're Yerpeen," he said.
Peewee, a pacifist, just smiled and waited for Buddy to be rolled away on the rubber tires of his wheelchair. He reminded me of someone I knew well, but at first I could not make the connection. He was kind, generous, solicitous, most contented when he was pleasing someone. He
seemed very familiar to me in this, and I liked to be with him for this reason.
His long residence in Hawaii and his travels in the Pacific had left him half deaf, blotchy and liver-spotted, blind in one eye, and he was small, not much taller than my eight-year-old Rose. As a chef and a habitual sampler of his own cooking, particularly his creamy coconut cake, he was plumper than he should have been. He had had a heart bypass, and because a vein had been torn out of his leg, he got calf cramps when he walked upstairs. He was about seventy-five and uncomplaining. Because of his sunny disposition, he seemed to me a healthy man. He said his afflictions were part of being old. He had adjusted to them. "Lots of people have it worse than me." He was always bright — up early, accommodating, helpful to me, praising me when I was least deserving of it, as though to buck me up with encouragement.