My mother wanted daughters. She thought raising children would mean dresses with white petticoats and patent leather Mary Janes. Pink stuffed animals. Bows. She wanted to braid her daughter’s hair into thick French twists and wash it with golden baby shampoo, the kind that doesn’t make your eyes tear.
She thought men were wanderers. She did not trust them to be there for the long haul. She wanted daughters who would take care of her when she got old and hard of hearing.
She was never hard of hearing, but she was selective and cheap. She would pretend not to understand when people talked on the phone so that she didn’t have to pay long-distance bills. In this way she avoided most conversations with her unemployed Pennsylvanian relatives, who were always looking for an invitation to the Hawaiian Islands.
She liked letters—even from her friends she saw every day. She could not spell and did not write letters herself.
She had three sons.
After the third she gave up and refused to have anything to do with our upbringing.
The way my mother tells it, she was on her way to the loony bin when she discovered God. He embraced her forcefully and fondly placed her on the right road.
We were left on our own after my father died. My mother said, “I’ll sign checks for your care, but beyond that don’t count on me.”
She liked the church, quoting from the Bible, and raising poodles. Poodles were amazing creatures, she insisted, though before my dad died she had not let a turtle into the house, much less a dog. Poodles, she told us over and over, did not shed. They did not need cleaning up after. She married an animal hairdresser who asked us boys to call him Captain. He was not religious, but said he respected a woman who prayed. The two of them made plans to raise poodle champions. They spent all my father’s money buying poodles that won them a roomful of blue ribbons, silver-plated trophies, and shelves and shelves of ceramic poodles.
I liked beer but drank it too fast and pissed most of it away before I got a buzz. I started on Southern Comfort because that’s what the G.I.s drank during World War II. The Hawaiian liquor stores had dusty shelves of the sweet-tasting liquor that no one bought. I bargained down the price, telling the shopowner I was buying it for my father.
“He’s having a love affair with the bottle,” I told Mr. Wang.
Mr. Wang sold me bottles at half-price until his wife discovered what I was up to. Mrs. Wang, one of my mother’s disciples, knew that my father had died in November.
Mr. Wang cursed me with a horrible life because I lied on my father’s grave.
I took my business elsewhere.
Tourists would always buy for me.
“Look, the native boy wants some alcohol,” the just-married men would tell their wives. I was tan, dirty, and dark and wore the baggy shorts and mud-stained T-shirts of the islanders.
“How about some Jack?” I liked to stick to business. “J.B. Any of the big boys will do.”
The new husbands would go into the store and the wives would stand on the street with me. I liked their pink freckled skin, the way they wrinkled their noses in the bright sunlight.
I gave the women my telephone number, which they always took but never used, though I always thought one of them might call.
I borrowed money from Barney or stole money from my mother to support my habit. My mother caught me with her wallet in my hands at least once a week. She knew I was drinking. I never lied to her about my alcohol intake.
“One daughter,” she said in her prayer voice, looking at the overhead light fixture. Either God lived there, I told my brothers, or she is scared of wasp’s nests.
One afternoon she was particularly whiny, and when she found me with her money in hand, she slapped me across the cheek before turning to the ceiling. “Would it have been so hard to bless me with one girl who would stay with me while my teeth fall out?” she cried.
I went into her bedroom, put on one of her muumuus, and walked around the house in her fruit-salad sandals.
The Captain thought I was funny, but he said that drunks died slow, painful deaths.
He slumped off his chair, clutching his stomach, imitating my father so closely that I wondered if Mom and the Captain hadn’t been hanky-pankying before she was a widow.
My mother came in just as the Captain made it to the floor. “He swallowed a chicken bone,” I said and jumped up from my chair.
She knelt in a great panic and began to give him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.
I was lonely. Wanting to drink, but not wanting to do it alone, I went to the neighborhood bar and ordered a beer.
The nearsighted waitress served me, and I drank three bottles of beer before a customer complained that the place looked like “Romper Room.”
My brothers, bored and smitten with rock fever, made plans to move to the mainland. Traitors, I called them.
“Who will take care of Mom?” I asked.
“The good Captain,” they answered. “And you.”
They let me come to their going-away beer bash on the beach as a consolation prize. They knew they were abandoning a sinking ship.
I was fifteen and there were girls at the party in string bikinis. I found a pack of cards and walked around asking if anyone felt like a quick game of strip poker.
I drank keg beer and told the HBC turning the spit that I wanted to eat the eyes of the pig.
He told me only rats ate the eyes of other animals.
The partygoers cheered me on. I swallowed the eyes whole, washing them down with as much beer as I could. Everyone loved me.
A woman put her tongue into my mouth and claimed that she could feel the pig’s eyes dancing up my throat. I took off my bathing suit to show everyone the hard-on she had given me.
When I tried to swim in the ocean, my brothers tied me to a beach chair that tipped over sometime in the night. A security guard from the Hilton Hotel found me the next morning. I was naked and still tied to the chair. The police were called in.
I told the two officers that Martians had landed and taken me hostage. I explained how I was forced to have sex with an alien life form and that I might be the father of strange, deformed creatures.
They told me to go home. They did not want to see me ever again.
The hit television show Hawaii Five-0 was filmed on our island. With my brothers gone and my mother and the Captain busy with their dogs, I decided my life’s goal was to be a movie star. Fame and fortune might make me a few friends. I convinced Barney to try to be an extra with me. We got up at 4:30 one morning and went down to the set at five. There was already a long line of HBC and Polynesians, the type the show usually used. We stood in line. I had my father’s flask. Barney deserted me long before eight o’clock. He was going for the attendance award our school gave every year at graduation and didn’t want to ruin his record.
James MacArthur, a.k.a. Danno, walked by and asked me if I wanted to make a buck.
“A little more would be more like it,” I told him. Extras on the set were paid fifty bucks for standing around looking Hawaiian.
“This is something special,” he said.
I told him he looked exactly like the guy on the show.
He called a cab and gave the driver directions to a private resort on the other side of the island. I had a message for a woman in the ambassador suite.
“Follow that car,” I told the driver as I made myself comfortable in the backseat. “There’s something in it for you if you step on it.”
The driver told me he’d beat the shit out of me if I didn’t shut up. “I got enough of a headache without a smart-alecky kid in my backseat.”
“The hair of the dog usually works wonders,” I advised.
We stopped at the gas station and parlayed Danno’s money into a six-pack of beer. We drank it fast, burping as we drank more. He cheered up. We bought another six before getting back on the road. We stopped twice so I could piss. The third time he wouldn’t even slow down, but made me pee out the window. I soaked my je
ans. The smell of urine is not that different from the smell of cheap beer.
The woman who answered the door wore a white nightgown that touched the tips of her feathery sandals.
I told her I could smell sin in the air.
She would not let me in until I told her I had a message from Danno.
“Why doesn’t the scumbucker call me himself?”
“The phones on the set are down.”
“You got an answer for everything, little buddy?”
I considered this question, but didn’t know how to answer so that it would work to my advantage.
She went to the dresser and stood in front of the mirror looking beautiful. She pushed her hair on top of her head and pinched her lips as if she planned to kiss someone. She studied herself carefully, turning her head first to the left, then to the right.
I told her she was a real tomato.
“I need to slap the shit out of a man,” she said and let her hair drop. It was blond and fell past her shoulders.
“Vengeance is mine,” she lisped at me, and I realized I wasn’t the only early-morning drinker in the room.
She told me to wait outside while she packed. I hesitated, and she gave me two twenties to do what she said. I made more money that day than I did in two years’ pickpocketing from my mother and the Captain.
The cabdriver had fallen asleep in the parking lot. The sun had moved, and his face was sunburning in wide, clownlike stripes. I shook him awake and asked how fast he could get us to the airport. He was the kind of man who drooled when he slept, and a large dark stain had already formed on his shirt sleeve.
I sat in the back and asked the woman if she’d make out with me. It was a long drive to the airport, and once you saw one palm tree, what was the point of seeing another?
“Would you mind shutting up for a minute or two?” she purred at me. She had overdone it with the lipstick, and her two front teeth were stained bright red.
The cabdriver told her that was about as likely as the skies raining dollar bills.
They dropped me off at the television set.
“Tell Danno I said go to hell,” she said.
“Anything you say.” I saluted her and told her that maybe next time she was in town we could make the earth spin.
I walked past the security guards and marched straight up to Danno. I told him he was worry-free.
“Don’t tell me you got her off the island?”
“You know it,” I said.
He flashed me a grin, all teeth, and I knew he was pleased with my actions. We slapped palms like old buddies.
“What can I do you for?” he asked.
I knew how fickle Danno could be. Each new episode came with a set of new friends for Danno. Each new show brought a case of new concerns.
I told him what I wanted.
“I think they’ve already got somebody for the end shot,” he told me.
“I was a fool to do your dirty work,” I said.
“Give me a minute,” he said and went over to discuss my acting career with the two camera men. He was back in seconds. “It’s all yours,” he said and patted me on the back. “Stand by the tree and practice your line.”
We did the scene in three takes, and everyone on the set burst into applause when I said what I had to say.
“Book ’em, Danno,” I winked straight into the camera. The director yelled “Cut.”
It was a wrap.
I was in heaven. The cast and crew congratulated me.
Another volcano must have erupted off Mauke, for that night, when I got home from my big day filming, my mother announced that she and the Captain were no longer seeing eye to eye on the poodle business. She and I were moving to the mainland. She was going to work beside her sister at Mama Bear’s Country Kitchen in Titusville, Pennsylvania. We were going to live in a brick house with my aunt and five young cousins. Every Sunday we would visit my grandmother in Oil City and eat boiled chicken, canned corn, and iceberg lettuce with French dressing. I would drink milk. I would wear shoes and socks, and just as soon as she found the time, Mom would drive me down to the K-Mart mall and buy me my first pair of winter boots.
She kissed me and told me animal hairdressers were an odd lot. “Like pilots,” my mother said. “Roving eyes.”
Convinced my mother had lost her mind, I fled to Barney’s house and camped under his porch, calling on any god who would listen.
“I lift my heart to the sky. I give my heart. I give my heart. I give my heart,” I pleaded.
I was Danno’s right-hand man. I was on my way. I was not just a star, I was the light that shone from it.
The nights were cold. I snuck into their house and drank their cooking wine, which made me throw up. My mother visited me under the porch, and I told her I had an allergy against moving to the mainland.
My mother packed our house in one afternoon. The real estate agency came over with their FOR SALE sign, which I immediately took down and threw into the ocean. The house sold without it, and before I knew it we were on our way.
Titusville, Pennsylvania, was just as my mother described it. I drank rum-and-cokes and walked around my aunt’s house in my cousin’s ski parka, a wool scarf wrapped around my head. I wore my multicolored mittens to all meals.
Everyone ignored me.
No one had seen the Hawaii Five-O episode.
My aunt told my mother that the apple had not fallen too far from the tree. I was one bad nut, she said when she bought the lock for the liquor cabinet.
I sat on the back porch in three feet of snow and smoked packs and packs of cigarettes, careful to save all the ashes in plastic milk containers. When spring came, I borrowed the neighbor’s garden hose and took my supplies to school to show my classmates what it was like to live on the islands of Hawaii. My teacher had been trying to get me to participate in this activity since my arrival in late October.
I dumped the ashes into one end of the garden hose, then stood on the teacher’s desk and asked my classmates to close their eyes.
“Pretend I’m a small island,” I instructed. No one closed their eyes. They sat and stared at me as blankly as they stared at the teacher. “Chant,” I told them. “‘I give my heart to the sky.’ Chant it three times to be saved from danger.”
The room was silent, and the teacher asked me if I wanted a slide projector. Perhaps I had some photographs of the islands I could pass around. Hadn’t my mother and I brought any leis to share with my new friends? I hushed her with a long hiss, then put the end of the hose into my mouth and blew the cigarette ashes onto the classmates who had never bothered to speak to me.
My father’s flask was in my pocket and I sipped from it, making the noises I imagined one heard during a volcanic eruption. The class screamed. Some kids covered their heads, others ran from the class. The teacher demanded I stop. “Get down from there, you,” she shouted. “You. You. You,” as if I didn’t know who she was talking to.
But an eruption doesn’t stop because someone wants it to. I spouted the remaining ashes over the room, finally getting the attention I had been looking for.
I was expelled immediately, no questions asked. They didn’t care to hear my explanations. My mother tried to believe it was God’s will. My aunt said if she had it her way, I’d be shipped back to the savage island I had come from.
With nothing else to do with my days, I went down to Rowling Randy’s Bowling Room and sat on the end stool. It was dark and the television in the corner was tuned to The Andy Griffith Show.
“You ever get Hawaii Five-O?” I asked.
He didn’t answer or seem interested in what I had to say, but I told him anyway. I told him twice. Then I told the guy with the goatee who bought me beers. We switched channels all afternoon looking for my moment of glory and television fame.
“Me and Danno.” I crossed my fingers. “We were like this.”
They nodded, obviously impressed.
“I should have stayed on that island,” I told my
new friends. “I could have been someone. I really could have been someone.
“Yep,” they agreed. “That’s right.”
We all agreed with each other about me.
It was nice and warm in that room. I took off my sweater and unbuttoned my shirt. I showed my new friends my fading tan lines.
I’ve been belly up to that bar ever since.
Figures on the Shore
ASOFT RUMOR MOVED ACROSS MARQUETTE that winter. In the dead of January, most people were hibernating and not listening to town gossip. Still, the news that a mysterious boat had docked in the lower harbor late one night passed slowly from the men at the fish house to the lottery lady at Doc’s, then on to the gas station attendant, who told the snowplow removers, until finally Janeene heard it from her mailman. Yannick Murphy, the only eyewitness, claimed to have counted fifty people sneaking off the boat. Dressed like Eskimos in long fur coats and heavy boots, they walked single file along the breakwater until they got to shore, where Yannick lost track of them in the dark quiet streets. They spoke French, and Yannick was certain they were Canadians. Their conversation sounded clandestine, he reported, as if they were planning something dangerous.
Lake Superior had not frozen that year. The cold weather snapped every few days, allowing the warmer temperatures to melt the thick ice formations that extended from the shallow waters close to shore. Some mornings the deep blue lake sparkled like sapphires, making it impossible to look at anything without squinting. Then suddenly the wind would push in heavy winter clouds, changing the horizon to a solid mass of gray. All memory of sunlight gone.
Janeene and her husband, Phil, were newcomers to the area. Not understanding how the winters affected the people of the Upper Peninsula, Janeene believed everything she heard about the mysterious boat. One night, just as they were going to bed, she saw the sharp, angular movements of a deer outside the front window and knew that someone must be hiding in the cluster of evergreen trees. Something had frightened the deer into motion.
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