“Not tonight. I’m probably going to be late.”
He was gone before I could tell him I was leaving. I swallowed my bitter disappointment. It wasn’t just that I knew he was lying to me, but that I was going to miss him. I realized I still had feelings for Johnny. I thought he’d had them for me, too.
* * * *
So I packed my bags, not knowing how long I’d be gone and I left a note for Johnny. Back at the hotel, our troupe met up in the lobby.
“I thought he was going to fire me!” seemed to be the general consensus. It seemed that everybody got the same abrupt instructions. We all got quiet when Kimo showed up in a minivan.
He glowered in the front seat next to a guy who drove like he’d stolen the van and had the proverbial sixty seconds to get it back to the chop shop. Kimo seemed oblivious to the fact that we were all being tossed around in the two back rows of seats like a box of hot rocks. He didn’t crack a smile all the way to Kahului Airport.
A small private jet was waiting for us and as we stepped out into the balmy night air, he snapped. “What are you all waiting for? A red carpet?”
We climbed on board and he railed at us until we threw our bags into the nearest overhead compartment and fastened our seatbelts. We were soon ascending the night skies and I wondered who would get to see the stars from Johnny’s apartment that night.
Nobody spoke. We were all too scared Kimo would open a door and fling us out into the vast night sky. He kept his I-Pod earphones in his ears, pretending to be asleep, but I knew he was waiting for the slightest reason to bawl somebody out.
“You think it’d be okay if I went and took a leak?” Roland stage-whispered to me.
I shrugged. I didn’t want to suffer the consequences of giving him bad advice.
Roland stayed in his seat, looking miserable. Twenty-two minutes later, I glimpsed the sparse lights of the city of Hilo below us and I felt everybody relax a little. I’d never been so happy to see civilization.
At the airport, we hardly touched ground before we were running to another minivan waiting for us. It was raining, which it often did in Hilo—no surprise since it was the wettest city in the whole United States—and I couldn’t help but pause to sniff my arm. The rain in Hilo was feather-soft and smelled like crushed flowers. It actually had that scent.
Kimo was watching me, but for some reason he didn’t scream at me. I hurried into the van, this one was driven by a woman who kept up a non-stop patter in Pidgin English that Kimo returned in monosyllables. He didn’t get angry with her though, maybe because she had the wheel, but also probably because he was conserving his rage for us.
We left Hilo and hurtled along the Chain of Craters Road at breakneck speed toward Puna, the area known as the outlaw district of the Big Island. A lush, dense town built on frozen lava floes, we had forests, we had lava tubes, we had secret caves, mythology, lost history. And we had fugitives.
Roland had his eyes and mouth shut and clutched his crotch. Poor guy. He was probably fighting the dueling urge to barf all over himself or pee in his pants.
We careened close to the edge of the cliff’s dead-drop into the Pacific, too close, until our driver swung upcountry in a manic way toward the town of Pahoa in Puna.
You saw it all in Puna. I ought to know, I grew up there and some of my early memories were happy ones. In Puna, you saw drifters of all kinds. Some made their fortune illegally, by harvesting the local crop, pakalolo—marijuana—some went into hiding, some kept drifting and some came out by day dressed in weird clothing but were otherwise quite harmless.
Our driver took us to something she called Aloha Place, but was for almost my entire childhood, called The Volcano Inn because of its close proximity to the active Kilauea Volcano.
Kimo took us into the main inn, where the couple who owned it—our driver turned out to be Mrs. Affatata, the wife—presented us with keys to the Guest House at Pali ‘Uli, a stately 1928 plantation style house further down the valley.
As kids, my cousins and I clambered all about the Inn. Now our tired troupe was tramping down the faintly lit trail to the Guest House, which had three bedrooms. It was freezing there. I’d forgotten how cold it got at night, even in summer on the Big Island of Hawaii.
At the door of the Guest House, we looked around at the impressive wooden floors, polished until they gleamed. An eighteen-foot high bookshelf ran from the floor to the ceiling and was crammed with books. A fireplace we had been told was made of lava rocks, warmed the room.
Upstairs, we looked at the rooms. There were three. Kimo assigned these to the three women. Since Ginger was engaged to Eddie, he was allowed to stay and share her room. I swear I saw Ginger’s face fall as Eddie closed the door on the rest of us. Like me, she clearly had fantasies about Kimo.
Sanoe and Kalani shared a room, leaving the third for Jessie.
This left me, Roland, Lon and Kimo, who told us to follow him down to Guest Cottage. We didn’t need to be told twice to be quick about it.
The Guest Cottage was smaller but just as elegant. There were two bedrooms—one up and one down. Kimo told Roland and Lon to share the one downstairs and told me I was to share the upstairs room with him. The top floor had the large bedroom and bathroom he and I were to share. I was already fantasizing about the blow jobs I was going to give him in the shower.
“I hope you don’t snore,” he said as we started climbing the stairs, Roland scuttling past us to get to his own bathroom.
“Not that I know of.” I was too exhausted to take in a thing about our shared digs and falling on my bed fully clothed. I was asleep with the sound of Kimo still talking to me.
* * * *
Kimo woke me at six a.m. He wanted us all in the main Guest House. I hunted out fresh sweatpants and stole a look around the room. It was quite big, with two beds, two bedside tables between the beds, a desk at the foot of my bed and a closet at the foot of Kimo’s. His bed was already made, so I threw the covers over mine and raced up to the Guest House.
“Late again.” This time, Kimo said it with a smile. He led us on a six mile run through the dense forest trail leading from the back of the house. It wasn’t hard for me, but my mind was on getting a good breakfast as soon as we were done. I hadn’t eaten since yesterday morning. No lunch, since Kimo yanked me away from it. No dinner with Johnny. Just thinking about him hurt my heart.
When Kimo loomed in front of me and I saw his ass outlined in his tight bicycle shorts, I couldn’t help licking my lips.
He pushed all of us on and back at the little cottage I shared with him, I noticed in the light of day sported a sign saying, Sushi Cottage. We took turns taking showers.
“When you’re done, we’ll meet back in the Guest House,” Kimo told Roland, Lon and me.
I was unable to get cell phone reception so I couldn’t call Johnny, but I noticed a phone in the small living room. Roland flopped on the sofa beside me, as I reached him at his studio.
“Howzit?” Johnny sounded sleepy. I was overjoyed to hear his voice and he seemed equally happy to hear from me. “I’m sorry about last night,” he said. “But my boss was there and it was hard for me to talk.”
“I understand. Johnny, I miss you.”
“I miss you, too. I had no idea you were going out of town.”
“Neither did I. He sprang it on us.”
“How long do you have to be gone?”
“Not sure. But I’ll stay in touch.”
“You better,” he said as we ended the call.
Something in his voice made me want to call back. I had to tell him I wanted to start again, move back in with him. He could have my heart if he handled it a little more gently this time. Without thinking twice, I hit the redial button.
“Hello,” said a male voice.
My mouth went dry. “Hi, is Johnny there?” I wondered who the hell was answering his phone. There was a brief pause, then I could hear an argument. Johnny came to the phone.
“Hello?”
“Johnny?”
I heard his sharp intake of breath and I could barely keep the venom out of my voice “I didn’t know you had company.”
“Oh…Bobby, Look, I meant to tell you.”
What were all those tears that night in Lahaina? I shook my head and felt like the proverbial damned fool.
“It’s okay, brah…” I said.
“No, it’s not okay.”
“I get it now. I was gonna tell you I want things back again. What an idiot I am.”
“No, you’re not.” Johnny sounded anguished. “I had no idea you were going to come back into my life. I had no idea it would be so good again. I’m…I’m confused.”
“Well, let me un-confuse you.” I hung up on him.
God. Life without Johnny in it. Again.
I stared at the phone for a moment, hardly able to believe what had just happened. I looked up and saw Roland watching me.
“He’s done it again, hasn’t he?”
“Yeah.”
“You okay?”
“I will be.”
He put his arm around my shoulders and we walked up to the Guest House. Kimo was cooking eggs and Portuguese sausage, slicing up fresh papaya. He’d even made coffee.
Roland fussed over me. If only I’d snapped him up before he fell in love with David, his partner of five years. He was so happy and they were even in the process of adopting a baby.
“Didn’t you eat in Maui?” Roland asked as I inhaled six slices of toast.
“No, Kimo wouldn’t let me. I wasn’t even allowed to eat a bite of my lunch yesterday.”
Kimo laughed. He seemed in a much better mood this morning and ordered everybody to relax for an hour. “I have a busy day planned,” he said. “So enjoy your brief, and let me warn you now, rare moment of leisure.”
* * * *
Kimo had us doing various exercises out in the dense forest. Our chants were heard by nobody and, since he cleverly realized we had nothing to distract us at our new digs from television to cell phones, it was work, work, work.
That evening, we all had dinner at Paolo’s Bistro and Kimo sat on one end of the table, surrounded by our three female hula dancers, regaling them with wicked stories of his womanizing youth.
Paolo’s was supposed to be the best restaurant in Pahoa—which wasn’t hard since the rest were pretty dismal—and they prided themselves on homemade pasta dishes they rotated every night. Only Kimo ate fish and salad. The rest of us ate meat and pasta with relish. Our workouts were strenuous; we needed every morsel of food that came our way and fought like street pigeons over the last of the breadcrumbs.
Eddie was convinced that Kimo and Ginger were falling in love.
“You see how he’s looking at her?” he’d keep asking.
“Yeah,” Roland said.
“No,” I said. I really didn’t think so, but since my judgment in the relationship area was so off, I decided it was best to keep my mouth shut.
I kept thinking about Johnny and how once again, he’d scalded me. As I glanced at Kimo, I knew getting close to him would be worse than a scalding. It might be easier and a lot less painful to boil myself in hot oil.
* * * *
Kimo was actually a fun roommate. He would tell me stories of his adventures with the kapuna, or the elders, who trained him in the art of hula. Some of them had a sense of humor and they would send him off on long treks that brought him around full circle, just for their amusement.
“When I was eleven,” he told me, as he lay on his bed and I, on mine, “they sent me in a canoe, on my own to Molokai.”
Molokai. That would be the one-time island leper colony, famous for its inaccessibility.
“I had this canoe and enough provisions for a week. They even gave me a candle with seven notches in it, so I would know when to stop burning it each night. I had to climb this cliff and find my way to the cabin hidden in the valley.”
“You mean Pelekunu?”
“Exactly.” He seemed pleased. “Pelekunu. You know what means, Pelekunu?”
“Burning throat of Pele.”
He nodded. “They call it that because the forest is so thick it almost never sees the sunlight and the smell of rotting vegetation burns the throat. Anyway, so I found the cabin and out comes this nun, with her habit rolled up to her knees and she’s just leaving as I’m arriving. She had some guts, that woman. I asked her if she was afraid of being raped by wild men alone up there in the wilderness. She laughed and told me if there wild men who had the strength and desire to ravish her after climbing up that mountain, they were welcome to her.”
We both chuckled and I saw him lost in his thoughts.
“Weren’t you scared?”
“At first,” he admitted. “That first night was bad. All the crazy sounds I heard. There were, still are, wild pigs and goats up there, and they’d come busting into the cabin looking for food. They ate my whole stash, even the damned candle.”
“What did you do for food?”
“Killed a pig and never, ever got over it. I won’t burden you with the gory details, but I didn’t know then that pigs are my aumakua. I destroyed my own protector. A lesson I never had to learn again.”
I let the words remain between us for a moment.
“Where do you have the tattoo for Kamapua’a?” I asked him.
He smiled. “That’s a very personal question.” He rolled over, facing away from me. “Get some rest, pretty boy. Tomorrow’s gonna be another long one.”
It was then I noticed a tattoo on his body I’d never seen before. A tattoo in the shape of what looked like the sun, on the sole of his right foot.
I had no idea exactly what it meant, but its location told me this was more kaona. More secret, hidden power.
* * * *
It was two nights later, very, very late when I finally saw him naked. After we’d talked again, he’d gone to take a shower and he came back, thinking I was asleep. He had his towel wrapped around his waist and thinking he was alone with the moonlight, I watched him drop the only thing keeping him from my feasting eyes.
Kimo was as breathtaking as I thought he’d be. My eyes drank in every exquisite inch of him, only I couldn’t let him see I was looking. Pretending I was asleep, I looked through my lashes and could see his gargantuan cock flopping to the side of his leg as he lay down.
I had never, ever seen anything more massive, either in a porno movie or in my own life. My mouth dropped open. Then I saw his hand move to his cock and he lifted his head to glance in my direction. He shifted slightly so his actions were obscured and it was more than I could stand.
I was over by his side in an instant. “God, Kimo,” I said. “Please let me help you with that.”
He sprang up from the bed. “What, are you crazy? I’m not gay!”
“Letting me help you will not make you gay. But I can guarantee you the blow job of a lifetime.”
He gaped at me. “I can’t believe you’re saying this to me. I could kick your ass, you know.”
“What a waste that would be.” Where was this stillness, this quiet calm coming from? “Three minutes,” I said aloud. “Just give me three minutes and if it isn’t the best head you ever got in your life, I’ll go back to my bed and we’ll never mention it again.”
“Jesus. Can’t a guy jack off in peace?”
“Jack off and waste all that juice?” I dropped to my knees. “Kimo, please. I’m a born and ardent cocksucker. Just let me do my thing.”
“Get back to your bed,” he barked, covering himself with his sheet.
I did as I was told and lay there, listening to his steady breathing.
“Goodnight,” he said firmly and turned away from me. Within a few more minutes, I heard his steady breathing. Did I dare a surprise attack?
Something told me time was my friend, not my enemy.
I could wait.
Chapter Four
The next day, Kimo was reserved with me, though not as rough with me as he could ha
ve been. No, his special brand of vitriol he reserved for the girls, who were all upset by the end of the day. Kalani and Jessie, who have danced with him for years, said they’d never seen him so angry. Only Eddie and I seemed pleased with the way things had gone.
That evening, nobody wanted to eat with Kimo except me, but I didn’t admit this. I sat back and let them argue over the meager offerings that made up Pahoa’s restaurant choices and we went to Luguin’s, which bore a sign saying, The Best Mexican Restaurant in Town!
Guess, what, it was the only Mexican restaurant in town. The food wasn’t bad, but the mango margaritas were killer. I stopped at one because I was afraid of getting back to my room and making a drunken ass of myself with Kimo.
Ginger however, got well and truly snuckered and was feeling Eddie up in the back of Mrs. Affatata’s minivan.
Back at the Guest House, she dragged Eddie to bed. All in all, I’d say Eddie had the best day of his life.
At Sushi Cottage, the bedroom door was closed, but not locked. I tiptoed in, the scent of Pua-keni-keni, a small yellow flower that grows only on the Big Island was filling the room. The scent is like no other flower. For a small bloom, it packs a sensory wallop that is part aphrodisiac, part mental mind field. The first time you smell it, you say, What is that? You spend the rest of your life being haunted by it.
Kimo had found some flowers and put them in bowls of water on our conjoined bedside tables, Hawaiian style. He was on his bed, facing away from me. Something told me he was awake, but I undressed quietly, slipped on a pair of shorts, got into my bed and lay there, staring holes in the back of his head.
About fifteen minutes later, he said, “You awake?”
“And ready for business.” I had no idea where this confidence was coming from, but I was over to his side in seconds. As he moved his embarrassed hands away, I whipped off his tank top, tugged down the sheet and removed his Calvins. He shifted his body toward me so that I could look at that beautiful monster in the moonlight.
Phantom Lover Page 3