Mahu Fire

by Neil S. Plakcy

  “Come on,” I said.

  Gunter looked better than usual himself. He’s about six-three, lean and gawky, with a buzz-shaved head. The first time I met him, at a gay bar in Waikiki, I thought he looked like a giraffe. But the tuxedo had worked its wonders on him as well. All gawkiness had disappeared, and he seemed suave and debonair. His short hair made him look European, but a little exotic as well.

  “What’s this?” he asked, fingering my tie. “A clip-on bow tie? I can’t be seen with a man wearing a clip-on. Fortunately I have an extra one inside.” He tugged on my hand.

  “Gunter, we’re running late already.”

  “Then we’ll just be a little later.”

  His house was sparse, almost Oriental. No clutter, no books or magazines or sports equipment strewn around, like you find at my place. He led me back into his bedroom, and I started wondering if we had enough time for some quick fun before the party. The answer, of course, was no, but that didn’t stop me thinking. I’d been going through a sexual dry spell, too busy to troll for dates in bars or online, and Gunter had been busy himself with a series of Filipino gardeners at the condo where he worked as a security guard.

  “Take that thing off,” he said, rummaging in one of his bureau drawers. I took off the tie and put it in my pocket. “And take your jacket off, too, and put your collar up.”

  He turned back to me with a long strip of black fabric in his hand. “Here we go.” He stepped up close to me, his face almost at mine, and started fiddling with the tie. “It’s harder to do this on somebody else,” he said. “Let me get behind you.”

  “Get thee behind me, Satan,” I said.

  “Oh, you tease.”

  I felt his body close to me, and sensed a familiar stiffening in my groin, a sensation I resolved to ignore. Then I realized he was feeling the same thing. What a damn shame that we were on a schedule. “We have a dinner to go to, Gunter,” I said. “No time for fun.”

  He finished the tie with a flourish. “There you go,” he said, turning me around so I faced the mirror. “Doesn’t that look better?”

     

  Gunter and I met my high school friend, Terri Gonsalves, as we walked from the parking garage toward the party. She wore a low-cut, short black silk dress with a single strand of pearls. On her right wrist she wore the emerald bracelet that had been her husband’s last gift to her.

  I told her I thought she looked lovely. I knew it was the first time she’d been out to a big party since her husband had died, and I was sure she was feeling melancholy.

  “Since I don’t have a man of my own, you’ll both have to be my escorts.” She hooked her arms around Gunter and me and we strolled down the street. With a pair of strappy black high heels, she was almost as tall as I was.

  The evening was clear and dry, despite the smell of smoke, and beyond the lights of downtown I could make out a few dim stars above. We walked through a neighborhood of one- and two-story offices and stores, a travel agency with vertical columns of Chinese-language ads next door to a place selling medical uniforms. I asked her about Cathy’s application to her great-aunt’s foundation, and she promised she’d look into it.

  The sounds of a jazz piano floated toward us as we approached the offices of the Hawai’i Marriage Project, glowing with light. The two-story stucco building had a big open office on the first floor, where Robert worked. There was a bathroom at the rear and a door that led out to an open lanai. Up on the second floor, there were two offices, one looking to the street and the other to the back. The front room was used for meetings and storage, and Sandra Guarino used the back office.

  When we walked in, Harry and Arleen were standing around Robert’s desk talking with him. Arleen, a tiny pixie of a woman with dark hair and Japanese features, was holding her young son Brandon, who had already fallen asleep. “I’m going to take this big boy upstairs,” she said. “Sandra said I could leave him in her office.”

  “You’re sure he’ll be all right?” Harry asked. He’d dressed up, too, in a double-breasted tux with black satin lapels.

  “I’ll leave the window open. If he wakes up and starts to cry, you can bet we’ll hear it.” She hoisted him against the shoulder of her form-fitting little black dress and walked toward the stairs. Harry smiled goofily as she passed.

  Robert was the only one who’d opted for a white dinner jacket. He had a green carnation in his lapel—a nod, I was sure, to Oscar Wilde. It was nice to see a gay symbol other than the color pink or the rainbow triangle. I asked him what he was saying about the broken panel in the front window. “I don’t want anybody to know,” he whispered. “I’m just telling people that one of the caterers accidentally knocked into the window.”

  He pulled me aside. “There is a problem, though,” he said, keeping his voice low. “I’ve heard a rumor that we might get some protesters tonight.”

  “Really? How’d you hear that?”

  “I have a friend who works at Homeless Solutions,” he said.

  I knew it; it offered temporary and transitional housing services. It was a place that might have helped Hiroshi Mura, had he been willing to leave the shack in Makiki.

  “He told me that somebody was going around today, recruiting for a demonstration tonight. They were paying twenty bucks just to show up here and be part of a crowd.”

  I shook my head. “What’s up with that? Who cares enough about us to go to so much trouble?”

  “The same people who broke the window? Or the ones who threw the shit on the sidewalk?”

  Just then, Cathy and Sandra came down from the office above, and Robert and I stopped talking. Poor Cathy looked like she could have been Arleen’s homely sister—she was even smaller than Arleen, and her shapeless linen dress looked like an elegant flour sack. She was only half-Japanese, and the contrast between Arleen’s delicate beauty and Cathy’s pallor was dramatic. Sandra wore a navy business suit and sensible pumps, and it looked like both she and Cathy had sworn out a no-makeup pact for the evening.

  The four of us walked out to the lanai together. It was surprisingly large, paved with flat stones, with several big kukui trees shading it. A large frangipani tree with its exotic purple blossoms bloomed directly in the center, above a bar set up on folding tables. The waiters and waitresses all wore plumeria leis and aloha shirts, and they were offering a choice of mai tais or champagne cocktails. I noticed several of the women guests were wearing long, formal muumuus, called holokus, in colorful patterns.

  Sandra came over and steered me and Gunter toward a short, chubby man in an immaculate tuxedo, with a lavender cummerbund and matching bow tie. “I want you to meet one of our biggest benefactors, Charlie Stahl.”

  “I knew I should have gone on a diet before coming to this party,” he said. Everybody laughed, and Sandra introduced us. “So, detective,” he said to me, holding my hand for just a little too long to be comfortable. “You’re even more handsome in person than you are on television.”

  Gunter snaked his hand around my waist and said, “Yes, I always tell him that. Especially when he’s … out of uniform.”

  Charlie Stahl gave him an appraising glance, said, “I’ll bet,” and went on to meet some other guests.

  Gunter and I were momentarily alone. “If I didn’t know you better I’d say you were jealous, Gunter.”

  “You don’t want to get mixed up with that old leather queen.”

  “He’s also the heir to a huge pineapple fortune.” While Dole made sure that every pineapple off their plantation came with a red and yellow sticker on the side, the Stahl pineapples were primarily canned under store names, pressed into juice and used in flavorings. But that didn’t make them any less successful than Dole.

  “Well, who would you rather be with?” Gunter struck a pose, one hand on his hip, the other behind his ear. “The heir to a huge fortune, or moi?”

  I pretended to look around behind him. “Did you see which way he went?”

  My parents arrived a few m
inutes later with Lui and Liliha, followed almost immediately by Haoa and Tatiana. All three women wore modern versions of the holoku, floor-length formal dresses in floral patterns. My father and brothers were handsome in their tuxes, though I could tell Haoa would have rather worn an aloha shirt and flip-flops no matter the occasion. For a few minutes I forgot about the unsolved murders on my desk, about the rumors Robert had heard and the vandalism earlier in the day.

  This is what my life could be, I thought. Surrounded by family and friends, a handsome man on my arm. Maybe all the torment that had accompanied my coming out of the closet was over, and I was ready to move on with my life. It had been six months, after all. I’d dated a couple of guys casually, had some good sex and some bad sex, and gotten more comfortable being recognized.

  Right after I returned to the force, I spent a month undercover on the North Shore, working on a big case, and that chance to get away had been good for me. I met some gay friends, I surfed, I caught a killer. Then I returned to Honolulu and started my new life as an openly gay man.

  I introduced Gunter to my family, and we all made small talk for a few minutes. Then, expertly, Lui cut my father from the crowd and led him away, with a nod to me and Haoa to follow.

  “Well, isn’t this nice,” my father said. “All my boys together.”

  “So what’s up with you, Dad?” Haoa asked. “You won’t go to the doctor?”

  Lui groaned at Haoa’s lack of tact. “I thought you were going to let me handle this.”

  “Handle what?” Dad asked.

  “Mom says you don’t feel well and you won’t see Dr. Yu.”

  “I feel fine.”

  “No you don’t,” I said. “We can all see it. Your stomach hurts, you’re tired.”

  “Why are you being stubborn?” Haoa asked.

  “Why are you doing this?” Dad asked. “It takes three of you big boys to gang up on one old man like me?”

  “We love you, Dad,” Lui said. His eyes flashed at the both of us. “We want you to be well, to live a long time to spoil your grandchildren. You remember you and Mom used to drag us to the doctor every time one of us sniffled? Well, it’s the same thing. We just want you to take care of yourself.”

  “I’m fine.” He squared his shoulders and stepped away from Lui. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to see if your mother would like a drink.”

  PREACHING TO THE CHOIR

  A man I recognized as Vic Ramos stepped up to the microphone at the front of the room and cleared his throat. “Hi, my name is Vic, and I’m HIV positive.”

  The audience was silent. “I guess we don’t have many veterans of twelve-step programs here,” he continued. “You’re supposed to all say, ‘Hi, Vic.’”

  There were scattered calls of “Hi, Vic” from around the room. Gunter’s voice was among them.

  “Well, that’s a little better,” Vic said. He unbuttoned the jacket of his tuxedo. “You see, I know about twelve-step programs, because I’m also an alcoholic. I’ve used intravenous drugs. Oh, and I’m also a homosexual, and I’m in love with a guy in the audience named Jerry and I want to marry him.”

  He smiled at us. “Guess that gives me a lot to talk about, doesn’t it?” The audience laughed a little. “But I’m not going to get into most of that. Let me just tell you that when I was a teenager, growing up in a little town about an hour outside Manila, I started to realize that I was sexually attracted to other guys.”

  He started to walk around. “Can you hear me without the microphone? Good. I’m a salesman, you know, and salesmen love to walk around while they make their pitches. Now, I don’t know about where all of you grew up, and what it was like there, but I can tell you in a small town in the Philippines in the 1960s, we didn’t have gay porn. We didn’t have magazines like The Advocate or TV shows like Will and Grace to tell us that it was all right to feel the way we did.” He stopped under the multicolored arc of balloons. “No rainbow coalition, gay pride, pink triangles or tea dances.”

  He put one hand in front of his stomach and the other up in the air and did a little Latin dance step. In his tuxedo and black patent leather loafers, he could have been a contestant on any of those TV dance shows. Somebody in the audience called out, “Olé!”

  Vic gave us a quick bow. “There was one guy in our town I was pretty sure was gay. He cut all the ladies’ hair and gossiped with them, and he wore these gauzy shirts and bell-bottom pants. Once a month he went in to Manila and got a permanent in his hair. One day, he saw me hanging around his little shop when he was about to close. I guess I was about fifteen then. He must have recognized the look in my eyes, because he invited me inside.”

  I noticed a guy in a tux slip in the front door, sweating heavily, and head for the bathroom. I hoped that he hadn’t gotten sick from the appetizers; I’d eaten a bunch of them myself, and I’d seen most of my family eating, too.

  Back at the front of the room, Vic smiled again. “You probably all know what happened next.” There was some laughter in the audience. “What you don’t know is that my father found out almost immediately. He kicked me out of the house, and the hairdresser said he couldn’t take me in, because he’d get thrown out of town, lose his house and his business. He gave me the name of a guy in Manila and he lent me money for the bus fare.

  “You know what a fifteen-year-old boy does in Manila, when he doesn’t have a family or any money, not even a high school diploma? He goes to work in a pleasure house. That’s where my hairdresser friend sent me; it’s where he went once a month, before he got his hair done. It was the height of the Vietnam war and Manila was full of GIs, on their way to the war, or on their way home, or taking some R&R. There were plenty of them who were happy to have sex with a cute little Filipino boy with a nice ass.”

  The sweaty guy seemed vaguely familiar; perhaps I’d met him in a bar somewhere. I watched the restroom, waiting for him to come back out, trying to get a fix on where I’d seen him before. I generally have a good memory for faces, which comes in handy as a homicide detective. That made it particularly frustrating when I met someone I just couldn’t place.

  Vic looked rueful. “My ass was pretty nice then,” he said, nodding.

  Gunter gave him a wolf whistle, and he smiled.

  “You can see me after the party,” he said, and everybody laughed. “Me and Jerry, that is. I don’t want you to forget about Jerry. He’s the most important person in my life, but I’m gonna get to him in a couple of minutes.”

  He looked out at the crowd. “Now, where was I? Oh, yeah, I was a sixteen-year-old prostitute, and I was pretty miserable. I missed my mama and my family and my friends, and a lot of the guys were pretty rough with me. They called me ugly names, and sometimes they had to hurt me in order to make themselves feel good. A couple of the other boys and I used to get hold of this terrible cheap beer and drink. The madam who ran the brothel started smelling our breath, though, so we couldn’t drink as much, and we started using heroin.”

  He held his arms out to us. “I haven’t shot up in years, so my tracks have faded, but you can still see them. Eventually, this one older gentleman, a Frenchman living in Manila, took a liking to me, and he bought me away from the pleasure house. I lived with him for four years as his houseboy, until he died. Then I made my way, doing this and that, and eventually I landed here in Hawai’i.”

  I looked toward the bathroom again. The sweaty guy still hadn’t come out, and I worried that if he was throwing up, there could be a big mess.

  “Things are a lot better for me now than they were when I was sixteen, even though the HIV is making a mess of my body,” Vic continued, running a hand over his forehead. “I’ve got a good job, district sales manager for the Pacific Rim for a big farm equipment manufacturer. I’m in love with a great guy, and we own our own little house. You all should come over and see us sometime.”

  He pointed at Gunter. “Especially you,” he said, and Gunter blushed. “The point of all this, though, is how easily that
can get taken away from me. From us, from me and Jerry.” He started walking again. “I’m the primary breadwinner in our household. Jerry builds some of the most beautiful hand-carved furniture you’ll ever see, but he’s still developing his business. You know how expensive it is to get health insurance as a small businessman? I’ll bet some of you know.”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the bathroom door open, and the sweaty guy slipped out. I couldn’t get a good look at his face, though, and that irritated me. I’d probably wake up in the middle of the night and remember that I’d met him at a bar.

  Vic continued, “My company doesn’t offer domestic partner benefits, and they probably never will. So I can’t put Jerry on my health insurance. I can’t pass on my pension to him, or my social security when I die. If I get sick, the hospital may not even let Jerry in to see me, or let him make decisions for me. I’ve got this goddamned Bible-thumping bitch of a sister who lives here in Honolulu now, and if she gets wind of me being sick she’s going to take that opportunity to come on in and take over my life, no matter what kind of papers Jerry and I fill out.”

  I twisted around in my seat to look for the sweaty guy again. I just couldn’t let go of it—I knew I recognized him from somewhere. But I couldn’t find him in the crowd.

  Vic was standing at the podium. “You see, without a marriage license the government presumes your blood family knows what’s best for you,” he said. “Until gay men can legally marry each other, until lesbians can legally marry each other, teenaged kids are still going to keep thinking there’s something wrong with them when they find they’re attracted to their same sex. Until the government treats us like every other citizens, with the right to serve in the military, to receive the legal benefits of marriage, to be protected from discrimination in our homes and on our jobs, we are not going to be able to enjoy the benefits of full citizenship in the United States.”