Boat

by Michael Baughman

  At semester’s end he gave me a lower grade than I deserved.

  Doug was in the same class and seemed more bothered by my problem than I was. He took it upon himself to get even with Dr. Shorter. On the Saturday morning after grades came out, from a public phone near the club on Kalakaua Avenue, he called restaurants, florists, funeral homes, and hardware stores. Doug, pretending to be Dr. Shorter, ordered great quantities of food for a party, and flowers for decorations, all to be delivered as soon as possible to Shorter’s address. He told the funeral homes, six or eight of them, that a maid had died and her body needed to be removed at once. From the hardware stores he ordered building materials and electrical and plumbing supplies to be delivered.

  When the dozens of calls had been made, Doug drove to Shorter’s neighborhood in his old Studebaker to watch from a safe distance. Delivery vans and trucks were lined up down the block. A shiny black hearse had pulled into the driveway, and Shorter, hands clasped behind his back as usual, was in heated conversation with a short man in a black suit that we took to be an undertaker.

  Doug never told anyone but me what he had done, so he never got caught.

  Just as James Jones describes it in From Here to Eternity, the Royal Hawaiian was once Hawaii’s most famous and finest hotel. Movie stars who visited the islands stayed there, and all the guests were wealthy. Young wahines were among these guests, and many of them were lovely. Their proximity made my Outrigger Club friends and me some of the luckiest boys on earth.

  The same day he took revenge on Dr. Shorter, Doug and I met two beautiful cousins on the beach in front of the Royal. Both wahines came from Hollywood families, and we dated them for three weeks.

  Our dates always started off at the hotel. Doug’s parents owned a string of high-end clothing shops in Honolulu, including one in Waikiki, so we dressed well on those occasions, in black slacks, tailored white silk dinner jackets, and burgundy cummerbunds.

  The chaperones, the parents of the cousin I paired off with, call her Joan, usually spent their evenings at the indoor cocktail lounge.

  On the first night we snuck down the beach together Joan wore a low-cut gold-colored dress that matched her shoulder-length hair. Doug and I had bought plumeria leis from a Hawaiian woman at a stand on Kalakaua. When we met the wahines at the hotel elevators we placed the leis around their necks and kissed their cheeks. I also gave Joan a red hibiscus I’d picked on the hotel grounds for her hair.

  We walked them down the long, ornate lobby to the outdoor dance floor and found a table against the low wall that bordered the beach. For a while we sat and talked, and drank tall, frosted glasses of guava juice— Joan signed the chits for the drinks—and then we danced to the slow music.

  At the edge of the crowded floor Joan and I talked while we moved to the music. With my hand on her bare back I felt taut muscles moving under warm skin. She squeezed my other hand and pressed close.

  I felt her against me and smelled the fragrant plumerias and watched the ocean over her shoulder. Torches on the beach wall reflected yellow off the water. I could hear the shorebreak waves, white in the darkness as they rolled up the slope of the beach.

  When a song ended we stepped over the wall near Chick Daniels’s locked and shuttered beach stand. We left our shoes next to the stand and walked toward Diamond Head on the hard sand above the waterline. The tide was low. I rested my hand on her warm shoulder.

  Boat had told me that for old Hawaiians the world of wahines, of sex, was as magical as the underwater world, as the waves, as the great sea itself, as natural as winds and tides and breaking surf.

  Joan and I made it as far as the Outrigger Club, where the canvas-covered canoes were lined up along the beach.

  She sat with her back against a canoe, waiting while I hurried through the dark passageway under the empty dining room and past the sand volleyball courts and into the deserted junior locker room and back with an Outrigger beach towel.

  We spread the towel on the sand between two canoes.

  We could hear waves, orchestra music drifting down from the Royal, and palm fronds clattering in warm wind.

  Boat was right again. It was natural and magic for a long time there on the clean towel on the beach between the canoes. We were healthy and young by the sea.

  Alexander Young

  Another lovely blonde wahine named Joan—she looked a lot like the California Joan I’d known—was a member of my class at Punahou. This Joan’s father was a well-known architect who traveled the world building remarkable things, and her boyfriend was a tackle on our football team, a big Hawaiian boy named Samuel.

  Samuel had become my best Hawaiian Punahou friend. By birth he was native royalty, descended from the family of Queen Liliuokalani. We played side by side from seventh grade through our senior years—I was an end—and we liked to joke together, at practice and everywhere else.

  One morning I arrived at school and walked up to Samuel, my friend and teammate, by our lockers at Alexander Hall and slapped him on the back and, as I often did, called him a big Hawaiian son of a bitch.

  He slapped my face, backhanded, hard.

  I asked him what was wrong and he asked me if I wanted to fight.

  There was the usual morning crowd around, dozens of kids, many athletes among them, so I couldn’t say no, couldn’t back down. That just wasn’t done.

  I called him another name and turned and started up the stairs to the gymnasium, knowing Samuel had to follow. The gym was my only chance, because he outweighed me by fifty or sixty pounds and I needed plenty of room to move, to maneuver, to box. I couldn’t let him get ahold of me.

  As a young boy I’d taken boxing lessons from ex-welterweight world champion Fritzie Zivic in Pittsburgh. Zivic once told me that he had begun fighting as a child, because in his neighborhood you had to either fight or stay in the house, and he chose to go out.

  So I headed up to the gym, stripping off my shirt as I climbed the concrete stairs. A crowd had gathered to follow us. Already the dozens had grown to a hundred or more.

  For me, the fight went as well as possible. I walked to the middle of the gym, where I jumped center for basketball games, before I turned to face Samuel. As soon as I turned he charged, and my left jab was in his face. Every time he charged the hard left jab was there in his face. When he grew gun-shy about the jab I landed some rights. I bloodied him up, but I never knocked him down, and he kept charging, and sooner or later I knew he’d get me.

  But before that happened Mr. lams, the athletic director, appeared in the gym and broke it up. He must have heard the noise of the crowd from his office. With Mr. lams standing between us, Samuel spat a mouthful of blood onto my bare chest. I wiped it off with my handkerchief, threw the handkerchief in Samuel’s face, and turned away to look for my shirt. I followed the crowd out of the gym.

  The only important thing about the fight was what I learned a few days afterward, when Samuel and I were friends again.

  Half an hour before I’d arrived at Alexander Hall that morning, Samuel had met with Joan’s father, the famous architect.

  The father had called him at home at breakfast time to arrange the meeting, and had demanded that Samuel appear in front of the Alexander Young Hotel at seven-thirty.

  When Samuel arrived on time the father was already there, on the corner of Hotel and Bishop Streets. I’d seen the father a few times at Punahou functions, a tall thin man with straight black hair combed sideways and a smooth white face that reminded me of lard. His wide-set eyes were as black as his hair, he always looked grim, and he always wore a light-colored silk suit and a narrow black tie.

  When Samuel walked up, the father, without a word, reached into his suit-coat pocket and withdrew a brown envelope, handed it to Samuel, and flatly ordered him to count it.

  Samuel took cash out of the envelope and counted ten thousand dollars in one-hundred-dollar bills. He noticed that passersby on the sidewalk looked on with interest, but no one stopped.

  When
Samuel had counted the money he put the bills back into the envelope and tried to hand it back to the father.

  The father shoved the envelope back and explained that the ten thousand dollars was what he was paying Samuel to stay away from his daughter.

  Samuel had known that the father didn’t want his daughter dating a Hawaiian. He looked at the envelope and back at the father and back at the envelope again, and then he stuffed the ten thousand dollars into his back pocket and turned and walked away down Bishop Street.

  Before ten seconds had passed he had changed his mind.

  When he turned back the father was gone, possibly into the Alexander Young Hotel, which was well known for its breakfasts.

  Samuel had never seen so much as a hundred dollars in cash in his life. A man had just handed him one hundred hundred-dollar bills, a sum he had never even dreamed about. And he took it. And as soon as he thought about what he had done, he hated himself.

  That was why he had slapped my face in front of Alexander Hall.

  Both Alexander Hall at Punahou and the Alexander Young Hotel were named after a Scottish haole who came to Hawaii in 1865 and, like so many other haoles of his day, made a fortune in sugar.

  Mighty Doug Young

  Doug’s old Studebaker broke down just when we were surfing the big winter waves at Makaha Beach on the North Shore. Besides Hawaiians, very few surfers went to the North Shore in those days, or even knew about it. There was no paved road to Makaha, which might have had something to do with the car problem.

  We loved and feared those North Shore waves. An older friend from the Outrigger Club and a former Punahou athlete, Billy Cross, had lost his brother Dicky at Makaha not long before I moved to Hawaii. Dicky had been out with two friends when huge surf came up without warning and closed out the bay. The friends paddled to sea and waited it out, but Dicky tried to ride one of the monsters to shore. His body was never found, nor was any fragment of his board.

  Doug and I wanted Makaha for the powerful waves, for the challenge they presented, and, maybe most of all, because no Dr. Shorters were anywhere near the place and never would be.

  But the old Studebaker wouldn’t run, and Doug’s parents refused to pay for the necessary repairs, which would come to about a hundred dollars. Doug came up with a wild plan: he would run one mile down Kalakaua Avenue, the heart of Waikiki, at eight o’clock on a Saturday night, naked except for an ape mask.

  With some reluctance I acted as his business manager. I discreetly spread the word around school, promising that the run would take place on a “busy street,” and collected a dollar apiece from interested customers. On the appointed Saturday morning I designated Lower Field at Punahou as the place for everyone to gather at seven o’clock. There I would check my list of those who had paid, collect money from those who hadn’t, and lead everybody to the starting point.

  The preliminaries went smoothly. Doug and I knew that word of what soon became known as “the bare-ass run” would spread quickly, but because only he and I knew the location, we thought we could keep it safe enough. No matter what happened or who saw it, if he wasn’t caught, nobody could ever prove who it had been. The ape mask would cover his head, with the only alterations the enlargement of the nose and mouth holes for easier breathing.

  At seven-thirty on the appointed Saturday evening, riding with a mutual friend, I led a long procession of cars from Lower Field toward Waikiki. There were ample parking spaces a few short blocks away along the Ala Wai Canal, near where I had attended Noons’s funeral celebration. From the canal we walked the dark, quiet residential streets toward Kalakaua Avenue.

  Timing was crucial, because a crowd of more than one hundred high school boys, along with a few girls, couldn’t go unnoticed. I reached the spot where the run would begin two or three minutes before eight. There was a dark, narrow alley not far from the Waikiki Theater that opened onto Kalakaua in the middle of its brightest, busiest stretch. Precisely at eight—we had synchronized our watches— Doug would sprint out of the alley, turn right, and begin his mile-long run. A few hundred yards from where he would turn off Kalakaua, on a relatively dark and quiet stretch of beach, we had hidden him some clothes.

  As always, Kalakaua was mobbed that Saturday night. There were the tourists, mostly middle-aged and elderly, as well as many local young couples wandering in and out of bars, restaurants, and nightclubs. When the crowd I was leading hit the street we attracted some curious looks, but no one seemed to take special note of us.

  I checked my watch at thirty seconds before eight, then watched the second hand sweep toward twelve, and at precisely eight, to the second, Doug turned out of the alley.

  It was a wild sight, even though I was prepared for it. Doug looked like an uncensored advertisement for a gorilla movie of the day titled Mighty Joe Young. Sprinting down the sidewalk, muscular arms and legs pumping hard, naked except for the mask and his wristwatch, he was definitely moving. Thinking back, I realize how lucky we were that nobody died of a heart attack or dashed out onto the street in front of the heavy traffic.

  Most pedestrians were clearly consumed with one simple thought—getting out of Doug’s way as quickly as they could. Some looked terrified, some amazed. One wide-eyed old man tried climbing up a palm tree.

  The police took up the chase almost at once. Later we decided that somehow they had gotten the word and had managed to follow our crowd to Kalakaua. Within seconds after Doug had turned out of the alley, they were after him with flashing lights and a wailing siren. At that point Doug really turned it on.

  I followed along behind him, running as fast as I could go.

  Doug was a track star fueled by surplus adrenaline, so I couldn’t begin to keep up, but I stayed close enough to see the whole run. He sprinted down the middle of the wide sidewalk, scattering amazed and terrified pedestrians all along the way.

  The police car—two uniformed officers were in it— dodged in and out of traffic and swerved around a couple of city buses, but they couldn’t keep up either. They never came close.

  Doug ran the entire mile and finally made his left turn off Kalakaua a good hundred yards ahead of me.

  I stopped at a liquor store to buy a six-pack of Falstaff beer, and by the time I reached the beach Doug was dressed, sitting on the sand, still breathing hard but leaning comfortably back against the trunk of a tall palm. We weren’t far from the Edgewater, where, on a December morning, I’d seen Waikiki for the first time.

  We drank the beer and talked. When I told Doug I was going spearing with Boat in the morning, he asked me why I spent time with that big, mean son of a bitch. He told me he’d heard somewhere that Boat was sick. I changed the subject to wahines.

  After the last Falstaff had been drained we counted up the take, which came to more than the hundred dollars needed to get us back to the North Shore.

  Deep Water

  Boat owned a motorboat—the only powerboat at Waikiki—that he often kept moored in the shallow water in front of the club. He talked to me while we loaded it up with our equipment.

  “I be taking you out to my best place today, Mike. Too deep for you, but you got to start to learn the good places sometime. Hey, bruddah. I heard all about your friend last night out there on Kalakaua.”

  “Doug?”

  “I already heard all about it on the coconut wireless. Everything comes over the wireless. Tell me—how come he wanted to do that?”

  “Money,” I said. “His car broke down.”

  “Maybe it was a funny trick,” Boat said, “but I think it was dumb. Your friend’s heading straight for trouble, Mike. Make sure you don’t go there too.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “What I mean is, he’s always fighting against something. Inside himself he’s fighting, and the fighting comes out. He wants trouble, bruddah. He looks for it. Plenty trouble comes without looking. Nobody got to look for it. You remember that. Your friend, that Doug, he needs more peace in his life. You think about that. Yo
u think about your own life.”

  “Okay. I will.”

  I saw Chick setting up down at the Royal. The other way, at the Moana, under the banyan tree, tourists were sitting at tables eating breakfast.

  As we lifted anchor, Blue waved at Boat from the canoe shed.

  Then we were heading straight to sea at high speed with warm wind in my face, the prow lifting over small swells and slapping down in troughs and rising again as the beach receded in the distance. Puffy cumulus clouds drifted above us, and going to sea with Boat made me feel as free as the clouds.

  Once we were well beyond Canoes, Boat steered us east, toward Diamond Head, and we picked up more speed over softly rolling swells.

  “Okay,” Boat said. “Now I take you out to my good deep place.”

  “How deep?”

  “Deep. Eighty, ninety feet.” He had to almost yell to be heard over the motor. “No matter,” he said. “You watch me, remember the place. I want to spear one big uhu. For my dinner tonight. Uhu got to be fresh. After I kill the uhu I take us back inside where you can spear. How deep can you go?”

  “Forty feet, maybe.”

  “After the uhu I take you back inside where it’s forty feet. Good there too. Good for the kumu and aweoweo.”

  By the time Boat had slowed and then cut the motor, we were farther offshore than I’d ever been before at Waikiki. The Royal Hawaiian showed as a hazy pink dot in the far distance. The Outrigger Club was invisible.

  When Boat dropped anchor I looked down over the side and watched it sinking quickly with the coiled hemp rope playing out behind it, and soon the anchor vanished. I couldn’t see the bottom.

  By the time the anchor disappeared Boat had pulled on his mask and fins. He sat in front of the motor taking long, deep, slow breaths. I watched his massive chest expand when he inhaled. Smiling from behind the mask, he picked up his spear and sling. “See you soon, bruddah,” he said, and, gracefully for such a huge man, he dropped back-first into the water.