Mahu Box Set

by Neil S. Plakcy

  The Gordon Biersch brewpub is at the far end of the marketplace, just a stone planter filled with orange, red and purple bougainvillea and a short piece of tarmac separating you from Honolulu Harbor. I walked through the indoor bar and the restaurant, looking for Harry. As I came back out into the fierce afternoon sun I saw him at the outdoor bar, where he’d just gotten a beer. Fortunately, he’d ditched his habitual pocket protector full of mechanical pencils, but, god bless the guy, he still looked like a geek. He’s thin, Chinese, about five-foot-six, with his black hair cut like somebody put a bowl on his head and snipped. As you'd expect from someone who looked the way he did, he was a genius; as you would not expect, he was also very good with people and able to charm the pants off any wahine he set his sights on.

  He raised his wheat-logo mug to me and headed off to snag us a table, not an easy task in a bar crowded with happy-hour beer drinkers. He was successful, though, as he seems to be in everything he tries, and by the time I had my glass of marzen, a German wheat beer they specialized in, he was sitting at a table at the very edge of the patio. Just beyond us a tanker was coming in through the narrow channel, silhouetted against the setting sun. There were a few clouds massed over the Waianae Mountains, but otherwise it was a glorious, clear, golden afternoon. Then why did I feel so bad?

  “It sounded like you wanted to talk,” Harry said, motioning to our relative obscurity.

  “I do,” I said, sitting down. “How’s it going?”

  “It goes. I’m remembering how to sense the waves. It’s something I’d forgotten, you know? I know all the physics, but I forgot how you just have to sit there and feel the water.”

  I nodded. “You settling in all right at the university?”

  “I’ve got a couple of smart students,” he said. “Better than I expected. But enough crap. What’s wrong?”

  I shifted uneasily in my seat. A young Japanese couple just beyond us on the pavement stood by one of the yellow bollards and kissed, and then a fat tourist in a garish aloha shirt offered to take their picture. I realized again I would never go on a honeymoon, never mug for the camera with a pretty wahine on my arm, never build up memories to share with my children and grandchildren. I had an urge to spill everything to Harry, but I’d done that with Akoni already and look where it got me.

  “Just a case,” I said. “Listen, maybe Monday morning, you can give us a hand? We got a computer with a password we don’t know, and a missing Palm Pilot that maybe was backed up onto the hard drive. You know anything about that?”

  “You have to ask?” Harry put his hand over his heart. “I’m hurt. Of course I know about that. They haven’t made a password yet I can’t break.”

  We made a time to meet at the station Monday, and then I directed the conversation back to surfing, and Harry went along with it. We ordered some food, and by the time we staggered away I was feeling almost good again. I’d been thinking for a while that I was being the good friend to Harry, helping him get adjusted to life in Hawai’i again, going surfing with him while he flailed his way back to proficiency. But it was clear he was doing something for me, too.

  Brotherly Luau

  The next morning was Saturday, and I spent most of it surfing, riding my bicycle, and trying not to think about Tommy Pang or any revelations that his death might bring up about me. I was only partially successful.

  Sunday morning I drove over to my brother Haoa’s house for a big family luau. My oldest brother, Lui, was the general manager of the island’s best TV station (at least in my opinion), and Haoa, my second brother, owned a landscaping business. Haoa lived in a big house, lavishly landscaped, in St. Louis Heights, the same neighborhood where we all grew up, but much higher up on the hill than my parents.

  Lui and Haoa always competed for attention when we were kids, and that rivalry still continued. Each wanted to make more money than the other, have a nicer house, smarter children, prettier wife. Neither ever scored a particular advantage in this game of one-upmanship; every time one did something, the other aped him or tried to top him. Last summer Lui sent his son Jeffrey to Japan for a summer exchange program; this summer Haoa sent his daughter Ashley to England. Lui put a pool in at his house; Haoa a pool and a hot tub. It’s an accelerating spiral I refused to get sucked into.

  Of course they were much closer to each other than they were to me, or than I was to them. There were only two years between them, while there were eight years between me and Lui, six between me and Haoa. In childhood, the only thing they joined forces on was picking on me. As an adult, though, I was reconciled to them, and loved them as much as any brother could. I would always be the “kid brother,” the baby of the family, and just as my relations with my father had improved as I’d matured, my friendships with my brothers had grown and deepened as well.

  It was scary to think that I might lose that closeness to them if I told them I was gay. Haoa was the more macho of the two, big, heavyset and blustering, looking more Hawaiian than anyone else in the family. He often made fag jokes, in fact, jokes about almost every ethnic group, even Japanese, and I had often seen our mother wince at those jokes, since she was half Japanese and knew the prejudices her parents went through during the Second World War.

  Lui’s eyes were more oval, and he was the shortest of the three of us, barely topping six feet. He was shrewd, with our father’s business sense, but doubled. He was also fiercely competitive, not just with Haoa and me but with the world at large, always seeking to assert his primacy as first boy.

  I pulled up outside Haoa’s house and parked at the curb. Already I could hear my nieces and nephews in the backyard, and a stereo playing Keola Beamer’s Wooden Boat CD. “Mama going fishing, Papa going fishing, rocking in a wooden boat,” he sang as I walked up the path. “We’re rocking in a wooden boat, several generations old, we’ll be going on forever, rocking in a wooden boat.”

  Everybody wanted hugging and kissing. Haoa wrapped me in a big hug, his breath already a little beery. “Welcome, little brother,” he said. He stepped back from me. “What, no pretty wahine with you? You must be getting old, slowing down.”

  “Must be,” I said. Another big hug from Lui, and little kids stampeding around wanting hugs from Uncle Kimo. We took lots of pictures out in the backyard, under the pink tecoma tree, where its fallen petals had produced a pink carpet laid over the lush green lawn. My favorite was a picture of me reclining on the lawn with all my nieces and nephews crawling over me, from Jeffrey and Ashley, who were twelve, down to the little babies barely out of diapers.

  We played the Makaha Sons on the stereo, along with Hapa, Keali‘i Reichel, and Israel Kamakawiwo‘ole. The day before Haoa and his landscaping crew had dug the imu in one corner of the yard, and the luscious scent of roasting pig floated out into the surrounding hills.

  When I was a kid we had luaus at our house now and then, usually to celebrate something. The best one was for Haoa’s graduation from Punahou. He had been a big football star there, and all his friends came for the luau. My father and brothers and I were up early in the morning, digging the imu. My mother kept saying, “Make it bigger. Lots of mouths to feed today.” We had every kind of food imaginable. Chicken long rice, poi, shark-fin soup, sweet and sour spareribs, Portuguese sausage and beans. And desserts, pineapple like crazy, ten different types of crack seed, malasadas, mango ice cream. I thought we would have leftovers for days but those football players ate everything in sight. At the end of the night, I remember my parents sighing happily, glad that it had gone so well, and equally glad that it was all over.

  Haoa’s luau was not as fancy; after all, this baby was the fourth. Still, the people kept streaming in. Old family friends, distant cousins, neighbors, clients of Haoa’s landscaping business, potential clients he wanted to show off for. My father and his cronies held court on the screened porch, a bunch of old men smoking cigars and telling stories from thirty years ago.

  My father has been building houses in Honolulu since before I was born
, and building friendships, too, across communities. His father, a full Hawaiian, was trained by missionaries, learned to read and write English, and became a teacher at the Kamehameha School. My grandmother was haole, a schoolteacher from Montana who came to the islands to teach, fell in love and never left. My father grew up in Honolulu, and his parents encouraged him to make friends everywhere. As a boy, he had pakē, or Chinese, friends, as well as friendships with the leading scions of the haole community. He began college at UH, but World War II intervened, and he served in Europe in a unit comprised of many island boys.

  The result was that my father knew almost everybody in Honolulu, in both licit and illicit sectors. One of his best friends was Uncle Chin, a tall, stately man who always had an air of ineffable sadness, even when bouncing his dozens of honorary grandchildren around him. In part that stemmed from a paralyzed nerve in his face that caused the left side of his lip to droop a bit, giving him a faintly perplexed look. Uncle Chin was not really active in his tong anymore, at least not according to police records. But police records weren’t always up to date.

  I tried to stay out of trouble during the luau, preferring to play uncle with my nieces and nephews and second cousins. At one point, though, I went up to the bar to get another beer and ran into Peggy Kaneahe.

  We always sat next to each other in school, Kanapa‘aka and Kaneahe. When we were sixteen I took her to the junior prom at Punahou, and she was the first girl I ever kissed. We dated for almost three years, through high school graduation and our first year away at college. She was the first girl I had sex with, in her pink bedroom, one Saturday afternoon when her parents were at a christening on the North Shore. I broke up with her right after coming home from my first year in San Diego.

  I had never known anyone who was gay until I went to college. Then, on my first day at UC, right after my parents left, I met a guy down the hall who was tall and thin and very effeminate. A lot of the jocks on the floor used to tease Ted, write fake love notes on the message board on his door, steal his towel from the shower room, that kind of thing. I remember once he walked down the hallway, stark naked, his hair dripping wet, making eye contact with every guy who lined up to watch. I got a hard-on when he looked at me.

  One night in the spring I got drunk and was sitting on my bed with the door to my room open when Ted walked by. I don’t remember what I said to him, why he came into my room, but I know that after a while he got up, very deliberately, and locked the door. Then he stood in front of me, without speaking, and unbuttoned his shirt. He unbuckled his belt, unzipped his pants, and dropped them to the floor, then shucked off his shirt and tossed it next to his pants.

  I remember being stunned that he didn’t wear any underwear. Then he came over to me.

  By the time I got home that summer I was totally confused. But I knew that dating Peggy hadn’t cured me of my interest in men, so somehow that meant I had to stop seeing her. I didn’t have a reason to give her, and I don’t think she ever understood.

  “Hello, Kimo,” she said. We kissed briefly, like friends.

  “You look great,” I said. She wore a pink polo shirt and a navy skirt, and her hair, which was usually pulled up on her head, now hung free to her shoulders.

  “I’m sorry I’ve been so busy,” she said. “And I can’t even stay long today, because that jogger hit and run is coming up before Judge Lap tomorrow and I’ve still got pages of discovery to go over.”

  “Your parents look good,” I said. I nodded toward them, a nicely-dressed couple who had always been friendly toward me.

  “You’re lucky you have brothers,” she said. “My parents are still waiting for me to give them grandchildren.” She made a face. “Peggy, when you gonna find nice boy, have keikis for us to play with?”

  “I still get that. Parents have no shame when it comes to grandchildren.”

  We talked for a while longer, walking around the party together. I wondered how I was going to tell Peggy that I was gay, that I’d been fooling her as much as I’d been fooling myself. I hoped that we had so much history that it didn’t matter that there weren’t any sparks between us anymore, that we were really just friends. At least, I told myself it didn’t matter.

  Talk Geek to Me

  Monday morning I was up at first light and on the waves at Kuhio Beach. By the time I made it to the station I was feeling almost myself again. Akoni arrived a few minutes after I did, and I said, as he arrived, “Hey, brah, how was your weekend?”

  He pulled a chair up next to me and said in a low voice, “Look, Kimo, I don’t want to know about your personal life. I don’t want to know what kind of magazines you got stashed under your mattress, who blows in your ear and who you grab your ankles for. All right?”

  All my good spirit evaporated. While the weekend had helped me put aside some of the problems of the week before, it obviously hadn’t worked that way for Akoni. “You want another partner? You want me to put in for a transfer? I will.”

  “I don’t know who you are any more.”

  “Well, here’s a news flash, buddy,” I said, as I turned to my computer. “I’m not sure I do either.”

  We were scheduled to meet Harry back at the Rod and Reel Club at eleven. At about ten of, I asked Akoni if he wanted to come with me. “You handle it,” he said. “I don’t know any of that computer stuff anyway.”

  Harry and I met up in the alley behind the bar. Arleen was on the phone with her mother, as usual. I introduced Harry as “my computer expert” and she waved us into Tommy’s office.

  Harry sat right down at his computer and turned it on. “Let’s see what he’s got here.” He’d asked me to prepare some basic information about Tommy for him—his birthday, his wife’s name, birthday, and anniversary; Derek’s name and birthday. He did some typing and after a couple of unhappy sounds, the computer started whirring to life.

  “Easy as pie,” he said, as the Windows warm-up screen appeared. “That’s not to say some of the files aren’t encrypted, too. We’ll have to see.”

  Most computerese was gibberish to me. The computers we used at the station were very simple, and pretty user-friendly. You moved a cursor around, clicked on items on lists, typed in what you wanted to search for, that kind of thing.

  Around noon Arleen came in. “It’s almost lunchtime,” she said. “My boy’s on a half-day today, so I’ve got to go pick him up.”

  “I wish I had a kid,” Harry said, shocking the hell out of me. “How old is he?”

  “He’s five,” she said. “You want to see a picture?”

  Harry nodded. She opened her wallet and pulled out one of those studio pictures, the kid posed on a carpet with a teddy bear. “Cute,” Harry said. “What’s his name?”

  “Brandon.” She had a couple more pictures, which she showed us. I looked at them politely, Harry with more interest. “He’s why I have this job, you know. I’m not some kind of criminal or anything. I just need to work, and this way I get to see my son as much as I can.”

  “Cool,” Harry said.

  “I actually have an associate’s degree in computer science,” she said shyly, making eye contact with Harry. Once again I was amazed at his ability to attract women. It was almost like I wasn’t there, this thing that was going on between them. “But I make more here than I could as a junior programmer somewhere, and the hours are better.”

  Arleen gave us a menu for a local deli before she left, and we ordered take-out. Harry sat back down at the keyboard and I wandered around the office, looking for anything we might have overlooked. But I guess there just wasn’t much there to find, and I’d been over every inch by the time the delivery boy came. I paid him, tipped him, and took the sandwiches in to Tommy’s office.

  “Find anything interesting?”

  “Nothing much. But I still have to crack into his Palm backup software.”

  Just then we heard the door open. Arleen had that same cute little boy with her who I’d seen before, with coal-black hair in a short crew
cut, wearing blue and white striped overalls with a pattern of trains across the bib. He looked hapa haole, or half white, his eyes a little too round to be fully Japanese.

  She smiled shyly, and introduced Brandon to Harry. I felt like drumming my fingers on Tommy’s desk, hurrying them along, but I caught myself. It was like this transformation was going on inside me—I’d never been an “us versus them” kind of guy, maybe because my family’s such a melting pot I never felt like there was a group I didn’t have at least one relative in.

  But being gay was different. Every time I heard the word fag, I felt my body go tense. I was starting to look at straight couples together and get mad, that they had something I didn’t. I was about to start calling people with kids breeders. And all within less than a week. Kind of took my breath away.

  It took Harry a little longer to break into the Palm Pilot software than it had to get past the computer’s password, but eventually he was able to synch up the Palm to a copy of Microsoft Outlook on Tommy’s computer, and export the calendar and address book. “This won’t be completely up to date,” Harry said, as the PC whirred and clanked. “I mean, if you’re expecting to see he had a meeting Tuesday night, it might not be there. This is only current up to the last time he hot-synched to the computer.”

  “I love it when you talk geek to me. What does that mean in English?”

  “It means that he carried the Palm around with him and made entries directly into it,” Harry said. “Adding people to his address book, putting in appointments, making notes. But in order to get that stuff into this file,” he pointed at the icon on the screen, “he had to perform this function they call a hot synch. You drop the Palm into the cradle, press a couple of buttons, and everything copies.”

  We discovered that the last time Tommy had done a hot synch had been a week before. “So nothing on his calendar for last Tuesday,” I said.