Keep Calm and Carry a Big Drink

by Kim Gruenenfelder

  I did just that. Bright and early Monday morning I said good-bye to my playboy and began my new adventure.

  And for the next two weeks, I toured Europe by myself, yet I was never alone. I met a nice, elderly British couple while I traipsed through Provence, stayed out way too late with some hipsters from Silver Lake (they live ten minutes from my house in Hollywood) while in Lake Como, and hung out with a family of six while touring Rome (it turns out a five-year-old can find better gelato than I can). In Venice, Giovanni took the day off just to spend my birthday with me—and he didn’t even know me! And no great surprise, it turns out nothing is more romantic in life than spending twenty-four hours in Italy with a gay man. We rode the canals with a real-life gondolier who sang Italian romance songs (and made fun of his gay friend, whom he had known since elementary school, for being with a girl). We feasted on vermicelli al nero di seppia, which are fresh superthin noodles smothered in black squid ink, and the best shrimp scampi I’ve ever had, and something called sarde in soar, which is an antipasto of sweet-and-sour sardines with onions, pine nuts, and raisins. Sounds hideous—tastes amazing! Particularly when it is being fed to you by a stunning, giggle-inducingly handsome Italian man. We even went shoe shopping. I indulged in my inner female stereotype and bought knee boots with insanely high heels.

  Life for those two weeks was nothing short of perfect.

  And, yes, I did look for a money tree in every language of every country I went to, and, no, I didn’t find an albero di denaro in Italy, an árbol de dinero in Spain, or an arbre de diners in Barcelona.

  Instead, I found a feeling of empowerment.

  And at thirty-three years old, it was about time I found some of that.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  After those glorious two weeks, I spend twenty-eight excruciating hours taking four hundred kazillion planes from Paris, France, through New York and Houston, up to Vancouver, Canada, and back down to the Kahului Airport in Maui. I had a problem with customs, connecting flights were either late or missing completely, I’d barely closed my eyes in the last forty-two hours, hadn’t had a shower in forty-eight, and was running several hours late. I had already texted Jeff not to pick me up, and to just go to work because I would hail a cab, and by hour twenty-six, as I looked through my window at the vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean that had been below me for eons, all I could think was Back to reality.

  Boy, was I ever wrong.

  Even before the plane lands, I can see why people call this place paradise. As we are preparing to descend, I look out the window, and the view literally takes my breath away. It was even prettier than I could have imagined—and I have read a lot of glossy wedding magazines over the years (and when I say read, I mean that in the same way men say they read Playboy).

  The Pacific Ocean surrounds a towering mountain that I would later find out is called Haleakala. Haleakala is covered in clouds, but below the clouds I can see palm trees that are a shade of green I didn’t know was found in nature—although I think I saw it once on a paint square at Home Depot.

  We land, and as we taxi to our gate, I see palm trees swaying in the breeze all around the airport. The colors look different here, as though the reds, greens, and blues are on steroids. While in the past two weeks I’ve seen breathtaking cities, their beauty has come mostly from humans—the architecture of the buildings, the exquisite paintings in the museums, the gold walls and crystal chandeliers in Versailles, the canals and boats in Venice, the castles in Germany. All gorgeous, but all due to the efforts of civilization. Hawaii has an entirely different kind of beauty—it looks effortless, relaxing. Even the vibe on the plane seems more relaxed than when we left.

  “Aloha, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Maui,” the captain says to us in a reassuring voice over the loudspeaker. “Right now we’re at seventy-six degrees, and we’re looking at some scattered clouds, with a chance of rain later this evening. For those of you who are staying on in Maui, your bags will be at baggage claim one. For others flying on to other destinations…”

  As the captain tells the other passengers which gates to proceed to for their connecting flights to Oahu, Kauai, and the Big Island, I continue to stare outside the window and wonder how anyone can ever summon up the willpower to leave. There are going to be some serious claw marks on the outside of the plane going back to LA from the flight attendants’ having to drag me into the cabin against my will.

  We’re still just on the tarmac, and already I wonder how things can get any prettier.

  Soon, I deplane and walk past the gates. Unlike in Paris or Houston or Detroit, the interior of this airport is like nothing I’ve ever been in. Hawaiian music lilts over the speaker system, flowers and plants abound, and instead of a bland, faceless airport bar, there’s a tropical-drink bar sporting thatched leaves, a surfboard hanging from the wall, and a sign promising me THE BEST LAVA FLOW ON MAUI.

  I take an escalator down to baggage claim, located outside, preparing to grab my suitcase and duffel and grab a cab out to Kihei, where Jeff lives and works. But I emerge from the terminal to see Jeff, holding up a white cardboard sign like a chauffeur. Only instead of my last name written in black Sharpie, his sign reads HE’S AN ASSHOLE.

  I giggle and walk into Jeff’s arms. “I told you not to come.”

  He shrugs. “You tell me a lot of silly things that I ignore.” He holds up his sign. “Besides, how else would I have discovered this great new way to meet people? Do you know how many people read this and said, ‘My ride’s here’?”

  I laugh. “I’m so sorry I’m so late.”

  “You should be since you were the one flying the plane and all. Come on, let’s get your luggage.” He looks over at carousel number one. “What are you carrying these days?”

  “What am I carrying?” I laugh. “Man, why can’t we live in 1961? Then I could just marry you and never have to date again.”

  “Honey, if you were married to me in 1961, you’d be waiting in breathless anticipation for the key parties to begin in 1968.” Jeff looks horrified as my beat-up, old black suitcase (circa 1996) flies down the ramp and onto the conveyor belt. “Please tell me that’s not still your bag,” Jeff says, pointing at it and sighing.

  “I’m a poor teacher with crushing student loans. Louis Vuitton’s not exactly in my budget.”

  Jeff shakes his head. “Colostomy bags have more style.” Jeff grabs the handle and tugs the bag off the carousel. “Okay, I have to be at work in an hour. One of my bartenders quit, so I have a little extra work before we open. Let me drop you off at home so you can grab a shower and get some sleep.”

  I sniff my armpits. “Do I smell that bad?”

  “No, but you’ve been on the road forever, and you can’t sleep on planes, so I’m guessing you’d like to wash off the road dust and maybe get in a nap.”

  “I’m fine. Really. Hey, what’s a Lava Flow?”

  “Basically it’s a piña colada with strawberry purée ‘erupting’ out of the middle of the glass.”

  “Do you know how to make Lava Flows at Male ‘Ana?”

  “I know how to make everything flow at Male ‘Ana.”

  Male ‘ana, which is the Hawaiian word for “wedding,” is also the name of Jeff’s bar. Located near his home in Kihei, he opened the bar to cater specifically to newlywed couples who were staying in the ritzy hotels in nearby Wailea on their honeymoons, places like the Four Seasons, the Fairmont, and the Grand Wailea. Within a few months, he got a bunch of five-star reviews on Yelp, then got mentioned in a few bridal magazines, and now honeymooners come from all over the island, everywhere from Ka’anapali to Hana, to spend the evening listening to romantic wedding music, meet other newleyweds and swap wedding stories, and get hammered on specialty drinks with names like Kipona Aloha and Ho’omaika’i’ana.

  “Perfect! Then I’ll be your first customer for the night,” I chirp happily. “But instead of a Lava Flow, can you make me a money-tree cocktail?”

  Jeff narrows his eyes and sm
irks at me.

  I look back at him innocently. “What?”

  “Nice try. There is no such thing as a money-tree cocktail.”

  “Why not?” I ask him without missing a beat.

  Jeff bursts out laughing.

  “What? I’m serious!”

  Jeff puts his arm around me and gives me a big squeeze. “I missed you, geek. Now tell me about Europe. How was Giovanni?”

  “Oh … my … God is that man good-looking?!” I practically yell.

  Jeff faces lights up. “Isn’t he though? So good-looking! His lips…”

  “Gorgeous. I would find myself staring at his lips.”

  “Fortunately, I found myself doing more than staring at his lips.”

  We head out past the exhausted families in their Hawaiian shirts and Crocs as well as the deliriously happy new couples waiting for the shuttles to their rental cars, and over to a parking lot surrounded by bright green palm trees in contrast to the black asphalt of the parking lot and streets. Outside, the air feels warm and … misty almost. Not humid exactly, just misty. Plus, it smells like flowers. This is, seriously, the strangest airport I’ve ever been in. Good strange, but strange.

  “Do all of the Hawaiian airports look like this?” I ask as we get to Jeff’s bright red Mercedes convertible.

  “No. They all look different,” he tells me as he throws my suitcase into the trunk. “When you land at the Big Island, the airport is built on top of old, black volcanic flows, so it looks like you’ve landed on the moon. In Honolulu, it looks like San Diego with flowers. Kauai is so green, you’d swear dinosaurs will come up and nuzzle you at baggage claim.”

  As we climb into our seats, I see a pink bakery box on my passenger seat. “What’s this?”

  Jeff smiles. “Cupcakes. Open it.”

  I sit down and put the box on my lap. I open the box to see two cupcakes: one slathered with white frosting, the other with beige, each with a small, white ribbon poking out. “What did you do?”

  “Pull one.”

  “Which one? Didn’t you rig them?”

  “Because that’s gone so swimmingly when Nic does it?” Jeff asks.

  I debate which cupcake to pick. Left? Right? Left? Right? “Are they both the same flavors?”

  “No. One’s lilikoi with a vanilla frosting, the other’s chocolate with a salted caramel frosting.”

  “Lilikoi?”

  “Passion fruit. Local flavor. You’ll hate it.”

  I smile—he totally rigged this. I take the chocolate one, as he knew I would, and pull out my charm. I don’t recognize it. I put it in my mouth, lick off the cake, and look again. It’s a silver charm of a Hawaiian shirt. “I’ve never seen this charm before. What does it represent?”

  “It means your future is in Hawaii. Wait … What a coincidence!” He puts up his hands and makes a show of presenting the area. “And here you are!”

  I smile. “You’re awesome.” I take a bite of my cupcake. “But what if I had chosen the other one?”

  “You can pull it and find out if you want to.”

  “No, I don’t want to take your cupcake.”

  “I didn’t say you could have my cupcake,” Jeff says immediately, “but you can have the charm.”

  Curious, I pull the ribbon out of the top of Jeff’s cupcake to see a silver charm covered in cake, which I lick off. “Ick.”

  “I told you, you wouldn’t like it.”

  I look at the charm, which is a Hawaiian flower. “It’s beautiful. But what if I had picked this one?”

  “Then congratulations! That charm means your future is in Hawaii! Now give me my cupcake.”

  Jeff winks at me as he puts down the top on his car. Within a few minutes, we have pulled out of the airport and are driving from Kahului Airport down to Kihei, on the southwest side of the island, about half an hour away.

  You know that awful drive you have to take from the airport into the city—no matter where the airport is or which city you’ve traveled to? There’s no such thing in Maui. There are no million-lane freeways or highways anywhere on the island, and the drive out of the town of Kahului is stunning.

  Soon we are on the Mokulele Highway South, which is all of two lanes, and we are speeding past sugarcane fields on both sides of us, their green stalks swaying in the breeze. Above one sugarcane field is a rainbow that spans a full half circle, from one side of the field to the other. I have never seen a rainbow that complete. If someone had put a picture of this on their Facebook page, I would have assumed it was photoshopped.

  And then we get to ocean. Stunningly blue ocean.

  I spend most of our journey pretty much repeating different combinations of the same three phrases: “Wow”; “Oh my God”; and “That’s beautiful.”

  When Jeff makes a left onto South Kihei Road, we begin driving through the town of Kihei. On my right side is nothing but ocean. “Do you live close to the beach?” I ask.

  “Several blocks up. But I’m on a hill, so there’s a nice view of the water from most of the rooms in the house. My bar is about a half mile away from the house, on the bottom of the hill. It’s right across the street from the beach, so the views on our lanai are pretty spectacular. Since your plane was so late, I need to drop you off at home, then race over to go open. I can come pick you up in a few hours if you want to see the bar.”

  “No, no. I want to come with you to Male ‘Ana now,” I say excitedly, beaming as I grab his shoulder lightly.

  “You want to go with me to work? Why? Aren’t you exhausted?”

  “Nope. Got my fifth wind. I mean, look at this place!” I say, catching the wave of an adrenaline rush from my new adventure. “Plus, your idea of work is my idea of fun. Oh, and you’ve promised me a Lava Flow and a money-tree cocktail!”

  “There’s no such thing.”

  “You could just invent one,” I point out, having given this a lot of thought.

  Because he totally could. Jeff’s bar “specializes” in signature honeymoon drinks, each of which supposedly brings good luck to one of seven areas of married life: love, romance, riches, health, luck, happiness, and fertility. I put air quotes around “specialize” because the drinks actually have nothing to do with Hawaiian fortune-telling, divination, or luck of any kind. They are just different concoctions Jeff made up over the years when he bartended to pay his way through college. He took his most popular love potions from that time, dubbed them lama pa’ipa’i (which is the Hawaiian word for “cocktail”), put them on his bar menu, then poured them into inexpensive souvenir glasses for newlywed couples to take back to the mainland.

  Jeff calls the drinks “a bar version of fortune cookies.” I call them marketing genius. Couples bring home the glasses, which not only become sentimental keepsakes from their trip, but conversation pieces with friends, family, and future honeymooners. The couples happily gush about the place and send their honeymooning friends, who come to drink and take more glasses home, and the cycle continues on in perpetuity.

  “Come on,” I badger Jeff. “You invent new drinks all the time. This could be your mai tai. What about something with Midori?”

  Jeff furrows his brows at me. “You hate Midori.”

  “It’s taking perfectly good liquor and mucking it up with melon. Can you blame me?” I watch as Jeff makes a left turn into a parking lot surrounding a huge thatched hut. “Wow. Is this it?”

  “This is it,” he says, slowly passing the bar and parking his car in the back.

  “It looks like a tiki lounge,” I say, surprised. Which is true—it’s basically a giant building made to look like a Pacific-island hut, composed of bamboo, straw, reeds, and dried palm-tree leaves, and dripping with lush tropical greenery and flowers. Replace the parking lot with the Pacific Ocean, and you’d have an overwater bungalow in Bora Bora.

  “What did you think it was going to look like? A space station?”

  “No, no. It’s just, if I were to imagine what the perfect bar in Hawaii would look like, I wo
uld pretty much picture this.”

  “Well, good. If you think that looks tropical, wait until you see the inside.”

  The two of us head inside, and I feel as if I have died and gone to heaven the moment we walk through the door. The walls are covered in rattan matting and bamboo. The tables and bartop are glass, but under each glass is a thatch table skirt. The stools and chairs are all wicker and painted bright colors. Tiki masks, statues, and totems dot the bar throughout. I pick up a mask that looks sort of like a scary God smiling at me and exclaim, “This is amazing.”

  “Do you like it?” Jeff asks me proudly. “Every wood piece you see here is hand-carved by a local artist. And check out this sign.” He walks behind the bar to show me a large sign that says ALOHA! HERE, YOU’RE OHANA! “This was made of Hawaiian driftwood.”

  “Ohana means ‘family,’ right?”

  “I see you’ve watched Lilo and Stitch. Yes. Three words you need to know here”: Ohana, aloha, which means both ‘hello’ and ‘good-bye’ and can also mean ‘I love you,’ and mahalo, which means ‘thank you.’”

  “Mahalo. I can’t thank you enough for inviting me.”

  Jeff smiles. “No mahalo to you. I love having my ohana around.” He then takes my hand and leads me outside. “You have to check out the lanai.”

  The outside area, which most Hawaiians call the lanai, is a dark blue wooden deck surrounded by palm trees, other kinds of pointy, green trees, and a myriad of colorful flowers. Bordering the deck in a perfect line every ten feet or so is one of my favorite things in the world …

  “You have tiki torches!” I squeal in delight as I run up to one. “Can we light them?” I put up my hands in prayer. “Please, please, please.”

  Jeff seems almost charmed by my reaction. “Most of the restaurants and bars in Hawaii have torches. It’s part of daily life here. And we can, but not until dusk. We actually make a bit of a ceremony of it here.”

  “Like a religious ceremony?”

  “More like a ‘Give everyone in the bar a shot of something tropical, compliments of the house, pick something fun on the jukebox, and get the party started’ kind of ceremony.”