by Sachi Parker
“Well, go see a doctor, for Christ’s sake.”
“I can’t afford a doctor,” I quickly replied.
There was a silence on the other end. I was half-afraid she was going to tell me to sell my necklace.
“I’ll pay for it,” she finally said. “Just make sure you send me a copy of the bill.”
That was as far as we got. At least she was offering to pay for something I didn’t really need.
Now I was in a bit of a fix: I had to get a doctor’s bill to verify that I’d been injured in the first place, or Mom and Dad would know that I was lying (which would only confirm their earlier suspicions about my suspect character).
So I went to one doctor, and another, and another. They couldn’t find anything wrong with my knee (perhaps they should have been checking my head). I knew they wouldn’t, but I felt that now that I had talked my way into this situation, I had to see it all the way through. The more doctors I saw, the more impressive my injury would appear. Eventually I would be miraculously cured, that would put an end to the episode, and we could all move on.
It was the fourth doctor who threw a wrench in the works. He examined my knee carefully, bending and extending it over and over. He took a barrage of X-rays. He made some very ominous-sounding grunts and mutterings.
“Miss Parker,” he finally intoned grimly, “it appears that you have a torn cartilage in your knee.”
“I do?” I tried to mask my surprise. “In my knee?”
He held up the X-ray, pointing to the seam of my knee. “See right here?”
I couldn’t see anything. There wasn’t supposed to be anything. “So, is that bad?” I asked.
“Well, it’s going to require surgery sooner or later. Sooner is better.”
“Surgery?” I looked at him, trying to see if he was hiding a tiny smile, but he was very grave and doctorly. “Are you sure?”
“Oh, I’m sure.”
So I had the operation.
I knew it was completely unnecessary, but I couldn’t say that because I didn’t want the doctor to think I thought he was pulling a scam, which of course I did because he was. But I was pulling a scam, too, so we were even. Besides, maybe there was something wrong with my knee. How did I know?
There’s an underlying irony here that eluded me at the time. One of the most famous of showbiz stories is how my mom got her big break because of a bad leg. Carol Haney, the dancing lead of The Pajama Game on Broadway, broke her ankle, and Mom came out of the chorus to replace her. The popular story goes that Hollywood producer Hal Wallis was sitting in the audience that very night, immediately spotted her star potential, and signed her, a complete unknown, to a movie contract.
Actually, that happened a couple of months later—she had already been playing the role to acclaim and was pretty well known by the time Wallis saw her—but the basic story is the same. One minute a nobody, the next minute a star, and soon she was doing her first film with Alfred Hitchcock. Sometimes it happens that fast.
Maybe, subconsciously, I was hoping for history to repeat itself. My bad leg would remind Mom of how she had profited over someone else’s misfortune, and she would overcompensate for the lingering guilt by showering me with maternal affection, and I would finally become important in her eyes…
Or maybe I was just being an idiot again. Either way, it didn’t work. Even after my operation, all I got was a “Get Well” telegram.
When I went for a post-op checkup, the doctor was considerably pleased with his work. “That’s coming along just fine. But you know, you’ll probably have trouble with that knee down the line.”
“I will? But you just fixed it.”
“Yes, but once you go into that area and start cutting around…things get compromised. Eventually you might need a knee replacement.”
He got that right. Thirty years later, I had surgery for the partial replacement of a knee that was never damaged to begin with.
Chapter 7
Into the Wild
Once I stopped limping, I went to work at the Halekulani. My father maintained a suite there year-round, and he and Miki stayed there whenever they were in Honolulu. Dad was treated at the hotel with all the cachet of a visiting dignitary: he would saunter through the lobby, shaking hands and doling out tips, with the same stylish swagger that my mom commanded on a Vegas stage. This was his kind of show business, and he loved it.
In spite of Dad’s rock star status at the Halekulani, however, I couldn’t even land a waitressing job there. It was very upscale, they hired only the best, and my noodle-shop résumé failed to impress. I was offered a job as a bus girl, and I humbly took it, even though it paid almost nothing. Until I could gather enough cash in tips, I had to live in a seedy part of Honolulu, at the apartment of one of the hotel waitresses. Her name was Shigeko, she was a Nisei (second-generation Japanese American), and she let me stay for free, until I could get back on my feet.
Of course, I could have just stayed in my dad’s suite, but he didn’t make the offer. I guess he considered it his private sanctum. Besides, while I often made room-service deliveries to the other guests, the management made it clear to me that Dad’s suite was off-limits to me. Whatever his business was, he didn’t want me sticking my nose in it.
I didn’t care. I was close to him; that’s what mattered. At least we would be together on my nineteenth birthday.
That very morning, I got a call from Dad. “Sach! Happy birthday! Listen, I wanted to do something special with you tonight.”
I recalled all those endless, tedious nights in Tokyo bouncing from nightclub to nightclub. Now I was old enough to enjoy them. “Okay!” I said eagerly.
“But I can’t. I’m in Italy.”
“Italy?”
“Business trip.” I could hear now the long-distance sound in his voice, a little tinny and displaced. “Sorry I can’t be with you on your birthday. I feel terrible.”
“That’s okay…”
We were interrupted now by the operator, a woman who spoke in Italian, and she and Dad traded a few Italian phrases. Long-distance calls in those days were not the smooth exchanges we have today. There was always an operator, the sound was scratchy and crackly, and every now and then there would be a beep-beep-beep—all of which I listened to now as I waited for him to get back to me.
“So when are you coming back, Dad?”
“Oh, next week, maybe,” (scratchy crackling) “or the week after” (beep-beep-beep). “But listen, honey, you just have a great day today, and I’ll make it up to you. Okay?”
“Okay…” Click. Dead air. He was gone.
So I was spending yet another birthday alone.
Still, I wasn’t about to feel sorry for myself. Last time I tried that I wound up in surgery. Instead, I decided to give myself a little birthday treat.
Since Dad was off in Italy, it seemed the perfect opportunity to breach the sanctum. What harm could it do, after all, just to sneak into his room and poke around a bit?
I charmed the key from the hotel clerk and took the elevator up. I felt a momentary qualm as I slipped the key into the lock, but I knew this would be my only chance.
I pushed the door open, and peered in. I expected to be overwhelmed by lavish furnishings, spectacular views, solid-gold bathroom fixtures, that sort of thing.
Instead I was overwhelmed by a thick cloud of marijuana smoke as it billowed toward me. There was pulsing jazz-rock music playing on the stereo, the kind you might hear in a porno flick. As I moved into the drifting haze, I became aware that there were a bunch of people in the room, and very few of them were wearing clothes. Naked bodies were bouncing up and down furiously on the bed, in a merry synchronized humpfest. In the tangle of limbs I couldn’t tell if they were men or women or what—but I knew one of them was Dad. Back from Italy in record time.
I ran from the room in horror. Luckily Dad never noticed me, or if he did, he never let on—and of course I never busted him on it. Somehow, my sneaking into his room and spo
tting him in a pot-smoking orgy seemed a far greater offense than his lying to me about being in Italy on my birthday.
What amazed me most in retrospect was the way he’d faked that phone call, with all its long-distance authenticity. The scratchiness, the tinny voice, the beeping…and I’d heard him talking to an operator. Who played that Italian woman? Was he doing all the voices himself? Who was the real actor in this family?
• • •
DAD owned land on the Big Island of Hawaii, in Napo’opo’o, where it is said that Captain Cook first landed when he discovered the Hawaiian Islands. How Dad was in the position to own such an important piece of real estate, I don’t know. That was just his way.
One time I visited Napo’opo’o with him and we took a drive in his white Jeep Cherokee to Kailua, about a half hour away, and cruised around looking at the scenery. I thought it was just a spur-of-the-moment outing, but then he pulled into a parking lot outside an accountant’s office. He said he had some kind of business he had to discuss, and he told me to wait for him in the car. I didn’t want to wait in the car: it was too damn hot, and there was nothing to look at, and I was bored.
Dad was annoyed, and he got very short with me: “Stay there!” he snapped.
So I sat in the car while he went inside. While waiting, I noticed a manila envelope on the front seat. The flap was open. I shouldn’t look in there, I thought. But it was hot, and I was in a bad mood, and I wanted to be entertained by something. So I peeked in the envelope.
Inside were a bunch of loose, glittering gemstones. Diamonds, to be precise. There must have been a hundred of them. I’m no diamond expert, so I didn’t know if they were cut, or finished, or raw. Yet they were diamonds. I knew that.
Why would Dad have an envelope of diamonds in his front seat? Whom did they belong to? Where were they going? Was this part of Dad’s business? What business?
I didn’t know, and I wasn’t going to ask. What I did know was that just one of those diamonds would have come in handy for me right around then.
• • •
AS soon as I could afford it, I moved out of Shigeko’s apartment and got a place of my own. She was a lovely woman, and I was tired of mooching off her. On the other hand, I couldn’t quite swing the deposit on my new place, so Shigeko helped me out by paying the first and last month’s rent, no small sacrifice on a waitress’s salary. God bless Shigeko—she was one of those uncanonized saints, like the prostitute in Trieste and the Yugoslavian couple, people who came into my life at just the right time and gave me an enormous lift and a sense of hope when I really needed it.
And I needed it now. I was living in perhaps the most dangerous part of Honolulu. I had no money and no friends. I remember this time as being perhaps the lowest point of my life.
I could barely afford to eat. At the Halekulani we would get one meal a day, lunch, and I made sure never to miss it. Aside from that, I would often stroll through the mall, where the food merchants gave away free samples. I’d go from stand to stand gathering up samples; that would be my dinner.
At the coffee shops, there would be no charge for refills, so I would drink five or six cups of coffee in a row. In my anorexic mind-set, I thought this was good for me. The laxative powers of coffee helped me to purge myself of the toxins, the pain, the loneliness. Every trip to the bathroom was an opportunity to feel clean and emptied out, the darkness gone. In my situation you had to take the positives wherever you could find them.
Still, there was no escaping the depressing reality of Apartment 315. Little more than a tenement apartment, it was a tiny space infested with roaches. I cleaned and cleaned, but there was no getting rid of them. I couldn’t afford bug spray; and anyway, being Buddhist in philosophy, I didn’t want to kill a living thing. So I gave them all names instead, and we did our best to coexist.
My apartment overlooked a tiny shack right below, where a family of native Hawaiians lived. Every single night, they would have a barbecue in their backyard, and every night, I would watch them from my window and live through them vicariously, peeking through the leaves of the palm tree that framed my view. They had a big family—big in every sense; there wasn’t a thin one in the bunch. The aunts, uncles, and cousins would come over every night, swelling the ranks and bringing food for the pot luck dinner. It was always a huge feast: poi, lomi lomi salmon ceviche, banana leaves stuffed with pork…They’d party into the night, drinking and getting rowdy, and dancing around the bonfire. They were as poor as all get-out, but they seemed immensely happy.
I wanted so badly to join them. I was hoping someone would notice me and call me down from my balcony, just like in the movies. I would eat and dance and become part of the family, and marry the handsome chubby son, and we would hula off into the sunset.
It didn’t happen. I stayed apart and alone.
I remember one night sitting on the floor of my apartment watching the roaches scurry along the wallboard, feeling utterly empty. I stared at my phone, waiting for it to ring—which was a futile exercise, because the service had been cut off for nonpayment. Didn’t matter. Nobody ever called anyway. Next door, the party was raging into the late night, everyone in the family laughing and getting rowdy, and reminding me that I had no family of my own.
I knew suddenly, with fierce clarity, that I should kill myself. My life was a failure, nobody cared about me, I was completely alone and forgotten. So why go on? Who would miss me? Who was I kidding?
I wasn’t sure how to go about it. I didn’t have any sleeping pills, so I couldn’t try Mom’s method from The Apartment. There were knives in the kitchen, of course. I could probably hang myself with the belt from my robe. Oh, if I only had some bug spray…
There were lots of possibilities. As it happens, I was too depressed to do anything about it. So I just sat there, all through the night, thinking about being dead.
• • •
THEN everything changed, in the blink of an eye. Two eyes, actually, both gorgeous—and they didn’t belong to a Hawaiian or a Nisei; they belonged to an Australian.
His name was Luke Garrett, and the minute he sat down in the hotel restaurant, I knew I wanted him. He was Hollywood handsome, with blond hair, broad shoulders, and a great tan. All I could think was, Oh my god, who is that?
As it turns out, I already knew who he was. We had met years before, in Australia, when I was about twelve or thirteen. My dad was business partners with Luke’s dad, who had a cotton plantation in Weewaa, which proudly calls itself the Cotton Capital of Australia. The plantation house reminded me of Tara in Gone With the Wind, with its Corinthian columns and winding staircase, crocodile-filled bayous, and black Aboriginal laborers doing all the menial work. The surrounding countryside was barren and dusty, with unpaved dirt roads and far-off mountains. Whenever I see old Westerns on TV, I think of Weewaa.
Young Luke was a teenager then, sixteen or seventeen. I probably had a little crush on him, but it was nothing earthshaking.
This time was different. Now I was seeing him from a fresh, sexually informed perspective, and the earth was shaking plenty.
At first I was a little embarrassed; I didn’t want Luke to know I had turned out to be a bus-girl. At the same time, it gave me a perfect excuse to engage him.
I wanted to look my best when I did, so I put on some extra makeup, hiked up my skirt, and flashed my most charming smile as I approached him and bent over him: “Coffee, sir?”
He nodded, and I promptly spilled hot coffee on his pants. Oh, totally on purpose. It was very artfully done—all around the crotch, without burning anything important. I sputtered apologies as I dried him off, conscientiously patting down the area in question…Then I looked up at his face. “Why, aren’t you Luke Garrett?”
He flashed his own charming smile back—and just like that, we were off to the races. I don’t know if you could call it a whirlwind romance, but it moved mighty fast. A few dates, and then Luke had to return to Australia. Then he came back to get me—and asked me t
o marry him.
I never said yes faster in my life. I couldn’t believe my fairy-tale luck. I was Cinderella, rescued from the drudgery of busing tables by a genuine Prince Charming, who would sweep me away to his enchanted kingdom across the sea.
Dad was delighted with the match. He remembered Luke from years before, and he was very pleased that our families would be united. Even Miki seemed to approve, which surprised the hell out of me. She never ever wished me well, but now she was beaming like a proud mom. I guess that was Luke’s roguish Aussie charm at work. He could win anybody over. They even started inviting us to hang out with them. I got to see Dad’s suite again, without the naked bodies.
As much as we enjoyed the perks of a comfortable lifestyle, we couldn’t tarry in Hawaii. We had a new life waiting for us, Down Under.
• • •
I’D been to Australia before, not only as a child, but more recently: piggybacking off my New Zealand ski instructor experience, I’d traveled on to the Snowy Mountains region in New South Wales. It was only for about a month or so, but it was memorable.
At the Thredbo ski resort, I was looking to teach, but there were no jobs open, so I wound up working as a maid at a local hotel. There was a whole team of maids, and we rotated jobs. My job was to do the beds, which was a step up from cleaning the toilets. On one particular day, while I was making up a bed, I noticed a curious substance on the sheets. It was creamy, like a gel, and as I bent to smell it, it had an odor sort of like fresh-mown grass.
I had no idea what it was, so I called in the other maids. “Have you ever seen anything like this before?”
They all exchanged knowing glances, and smiled. “Uh…yeah.”
“What is it?” I asked innocently.
They laughed, and explained to me an essential component of the reproductive experience. I was amazed. I knew about sex, of course—I’d engaged in the act myself—but I didn’t know that this creamy, grass-smelling stuff came out of men. Brad had never mentioned it in his hasty tutorial, and I wouldn’t have noticed it anyway, what with all the blood.