Mahu Box Set

by Neil S. Plakcy

  “You didn’t want to come out to them?”

  “My brothers make fag jokes and my mother knows the Bible by heart. I will never come out to them.”

  I took a deep breath. “Okay.”

  “Last year I started looking at ads in bar journals. I finagled my way onto an international trade case with a Japanese client and did a Berlitz class in Japanese. I thought about San Francisco, but it’s too much of a cliché. I had a couple of nibbles from firms in LA, but the market there is so cutthroat. Then I saw an ad from Hollings and Arakawa, that they needed an attorney with international background, trial experience and some Japanese, and faxed my resume within half an hour. They had me come out for an interview, they liked me, and voila, I’m here.”

  “I’m glad,” I said, and we smiled at each other.

  He took another sip of beer and said, “How about you? You always lived here?”

  “College on the mainland,” I said. “UC San Diego. Most of a year on the North Shore, trying to be surfing champion of the world. Then back here.”

  “What made you give up trying to be the world champion?”

  I thought about it. I could give him the speech I knew by heart, about realizing I didn’t want it hard enough. But for the first time, I felt like I could be honest, that I could tell Tim anything. “A guy sucked my dick, and I found I liked it, and it scared the hell out of me, and I ran.”

  When I went to pick up my beer glass, my hand was shaking. “It’s all right,” Tim said. “You want to tell me about it?”

  I wanted to. I started with surfing with Harry in high school, and went on, as our salads arrived, to tell him about college in San Diego, and then living on the North Shore. By the time the waiter took the salad plates away, I had told him about Dario and his little shack on the beach.

  “Must have hurt like hell,” Tim said. “Giving up all that stuff. Your dreams.”

  “It did. And I could never tell anyone my real reason.”

  It was easy to talk to him. I had been pretty honest in every facet of my life, except when it came to my sexuality, and I found that when I finally could talk about it, the honesty came easily.

  Over dessert and coffee we laid out our love lives for each other. He’d done a couple of foolish things in Boston, bookstore blow jobs and such, but he’d been lucky, he hadn’t caught anything, and he’d been careful for the last two years or so. One very discreet affair with a guy he’d met at the health club, just before he left Boston. “It wasn’t really what you’d call a relationship,” he said. “I mean, we never dated or anything. It’s just sometimes after we worked out we’d go over to his place and have sex. Safe sex, you know, no exchange of bodily fluids. But we never went to dinner or the movies or held hands walking down the street.”

  I told him about the string of short-term flings I’d had, picking up tourist women at beachfront bars, romancing and bedding them, always hoping the next one would be the one who could change me. “I was as safe as I could be,” I said. “Always condoms, and I get tested every six months.”

  “Are you out to your family?”

  “Not yet. But I think I will be eventually. In a way, that’s what’s scariest to me. I mean, I’m the kind of person, I’m like a dog with a bone. I can’t stop worrying it. That’s the kind of detective I am—I can’t give up on a case until I finish it. I still have open cases from years ago, and every now and then when things get slow I go back to them. There’s one missing girl, a teenager. She disappeared two years ago, right after I became a detective. I still have her picture in my wallet, and I take it around sometimes, to shelters for runaways and out on the street. I know she didn’t get off the island, so she’s got to be here somewhere. I can’t stop looking for her. It’s the same way with this, with coming out. Once I’m started I know I can’t stop until I see it through.”

  “You can stop,” he said. “It’s allowed. You can come to a place you feel comfortable, and then just stop.”

  “Maybe you can,” I said. “Maybe lots of people can. I can’t.” I paused. “Unfortunately, it seems to be the way I’m made. I can’t stop something once I start it.”

  “We’ll see about that later,” Tim said, smiling.

  After a long romantic walk on the beach, I drove us back to Waikiki. “You want me to drop you off?” I asked. “Or you want to come up to my place, I don’t know, maybe have a nightcap or something?”

  “Let’s take it slow, okay? I can walk home from your place.”

  I pulled into a space in the lot behind my building and killed the engine. “So tell me,” I said, struggling to keep the tremor out of my voice. “How do you feel about kissing on the first date?”

  In response he simply turned to me, and we kissed. There was a scent of plumeria in the air, a distant whir of traffic in the background. We kissed a couple of times, and he reached inside my shirt and played with my nipples, which hardened at his touch. I kissed his chin and his cheek and blew in his ear, and he shivered. “You like that,” I said.

  He put his hand on my crotch, where I was hard, and said, “You seem to like it, too,” and laughed.

  We kissed again, and I ran my fingers through his hair. It was so short, and wiry. I had to laugh.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “I’ve never kissed anyone with such short hair.” I kissed him again. “Or with a mustache, either.”

  He leaned over and kissed me, deep, tongue to tongue. “So how is it, kissing a man?” he asked.

  I didn’t know what else to say besides, “I like it.”

  We made out for a while longer. One part of me couldn’t believe what I was doing, and another part didn’t want to stop. Finally he pulled back and said, “Let’s save some mystery for a second date, okay?”

  “So there’s going to be a second date?”

  “I’d say we could do that. And actually you promised me a surfing lesson.”

  He had business dinners scheduled for Thursday and Friday, so we agreed to meet at my apartment Saturday around three and go surfing. Though we didn’t say anything about the evening I assumed we’d spend it together.

  He got out of the truck then. “’Til Saturday,” he said. “Aloha.”

  “Aloha.” I sat there for a few minutes, watching him walk through the parking lot and turn onto Lili’uokalani. Then I got out and went upstairs to bed.

  St. Louis Heights

  Thursday morning, Akoni and I had to put aside the investigation into Tommy Pang’s murder because we caught another homicide in Waikiki. This one was fairly straightforward, though; a young Filipina was found in her car in the parking garage at a hotel downtown. She was an assistant in the hotel’s marketing department, and her co-workers told us that she’d recently broken up with an abusive boyfriend.

  Looking at her cell phone, we found she’d received a call from the boyfriend’s number shortly before the garage ticket indicated she’d entered. It took us only an hour to track the boyfriend down and haul him in to the station for an interrogation, where he confessed to shooting her.

  Even so, it took us most of the day to collect evidence, take statements, and handle the paperwork. It was almost the end of our shift before we could get back to Tommy’s murder. The organized crime division had passed on some information about tong rivalries, but after a dozen phone calls, neither of us could find anyone who would say that Tommy Pang had been involved on either side. Lieutenant Yumuri was pleased we’d closed the girl’s murder so quickly, but he was losing patience with our lack of progress on Tommy’s murder, and neither of us wanted it to go unsolved. When our shift ended, I decided to do something I’d been holding off, to stop on my way home and see Uncle Chin. It was possible he could tell me something about Tommy Pang that the computers couldn’t.

  “Good afternoon, Aunt Mei-Mei,” I said, when Uncle Chin’s wife answered the door of their home in St. Louis Heights, not far from my parents.

  She peered at me for a moment, looking up with eyes that fought
against cataracts. “Kimo!” she said. “Come in! Uncle Chin will be so happy to see you.” I followed her inside, down a long hallway toward the back of the house. “He doesn’t get many visitors these days.”

  Uncle Chin was sitting in a bamboo lounge chair on their screened porch, looking down the hillside into the ravine. The porch was jammed with flowering plants—jasmine, hibiscus, and dozens of trailing orchids in hanging baskets. There were also a half-dozen bird cages, covered at the moment, that I knew contained exotic parrots. Next to the chair was a bamboo table with glass top. Uncle Chin’s wire-rimmed glasses sat on top of a hard-bound copy of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.

  “Uncle Chin, look who has come to see you,” Aunt Mei-Mei said. Uncle Chin woke out of his light sleep and seemed instantly alert. He must have been in his late seventies, but his eyes were still keen, and his smile was broad.

  “I will bring tea,” Aunt Mei-Mei said. “You sit.”

  I sat. We talked first about my parents, my father’s heart troubles, my mother’s garden club successes. I heard about his plants and his parrots, and we discussed my brothers, especially Haoa and Tatiana’s new baby. Keikis always seemed to make Uncle Chin a little sad; I guess he remembered his own son, whose difficult birth had somehow prevented Aunt Mei-Mei from being able to have any more children.

  His name was Robert, I knew, and he was a few years older than my brother Lui, so always a remote presence to me. He died when he was twenty-one, a drug overdose of some kind, and according to my father Uncle Chin had never been the same since.

  But Uncle Chin had enjoyed the luau, and was glad to see us all at a happy occasion. “And what about you? No wife yet?”

  I shook my head. “Not yet.”

  He wagged a finger at me. “You not young forever,” he said. “Must make choices for life. Soon!”

  “Yes, Uncle. I know.” Aunt Mei-Mei brought cups of sweet-smelling Chinese tea and then disappeared again.

  Finally Uncle Chin said, “Your work. It goes well?”

  “Interesting cases,” I said. “Always interesting.” I paused. “A man killed behind the bar he owned in Waikiki. Maybe you know him. A man named Tommy Pang.”

  For a moment, the light seemed to go out of Uncle Chin’s eyes. Then he seemed to have returned, and considered, massaging the paralyzed nerve in his face with the fingers of his left hand. “I know him, but not well,” he said, finally. “Not important man.”

  “No, it doesn’t seem so. Yet someone found him important enough to kill.”

  “Ah, importance relative, no,” he said. He thought for a while. “I no can help you, Kimo. I not know who could have found this man important in way you suggest.” For the first time since I had known him, Uncle Chin looked old. He was older than my father, though I remembered him best when I was a child and he was tall and imposing and yet somehow not frightening at all. Now he had become an old man, retired among his flowers and his birds.

  We finished our tea and Aunt Mei-Mei came back in. “You will go to see your parents now,” she said. “You are so close to them.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “I’m tired. It’s been a long day.” I looked at my watch. It was nearly seven o’clock. Not enough daylight left by the time I got back to Waikiki for surfing, or even swimming. A quick dinner, and then maybe a book. A quiet evening.

  “Oh, no, your mother will be so disappointed. She has already put out a place for you at the dinner table.”

  Of course, I thought. While Uncle Chin and I talked on the porch, Aunt Mei-Mei had been on the phone to my mother, announcing my presence in St. Louis Heights. There was no way out now.

  The streets in St. Louis Heights are steep and narrow, and all the houses are very close to each other. We were lucky that my father had decided early he wanted to live in the neighborhood, and had built a simple fifties-style ranch on a lot that backed onto Waahila Ridge State Recreation Area. As a consequence, our backyard is several thousand steeply pitched acres of pine and ravine, and on an island where real estate prices are high, such a huge empty space is now nearly priceless. Though both my brothers have beautiful homes, I know they covet my parents’ property.

  My parents had the main level of the house, street level. The master bedroom suite, the kitchen, living room, and dining room were all there. My brothers and I shared the basement, three bedrooms, one bathroom, and a big playroom that spilled out to a patio my father had built into the hillside. It was a wonderful place to grow up—when my brothers picked on me, as big brothers always do, I could sneak out into the underbrush, climb the hill, and set my sights on the ocean. The other wonderful thing about our house’s situation was that if you climbed to the roof, as I did sometimes, you could see all the way from Diamond Head to downtown Honolulu, and the vast ocean between them. Sometimes my father would disappear for a few hours at a time, usually after a fight with my mother or after the three of us boys were making too much trouble. I knew he went up to the roof, but I never told.

  I wondered if my parents would ask, like Aunt Mei-Mei, when I was going to settle down, add to their brood of grandchildren. They were baffled by my frenzied dating, the endless parade of one-night stands and tourist wahines that their friends saw me with all around Waikiki. My new situation would probably confuse them even more. That is, if I ever told them. I sat in Uncle Chin’s driveway for a while, thinking, before I turned the key in the ignition.

  Never the Same

  I pulled my truck up in the driveway, right behind my father’s. He could afford a Mercedes if he wanted. Instead he bought new trucks every few years, and handed down the old ones to his sons. The four Kanapa‘aka boys, driving around Honolulu in Ford pickups in various states of disrepair. Oh, and then there’s my mother, who drove a maroon Lexus with gold trim, and her two daughters-in-law, who were much the same.

  My brothers and I were alike in many ways, and then of course very different too. From our father, we inherited a love of the outdoors, the land and the sea, of working with our hands, stubbornness, and a tendency to laugh easily. From our mother, who was born poor on a plantation on Kaua‘i, the daughter of a Japanese workman and a young Hawaiian girl, we seemed to have inherited a certain kind of strength that my father was missing. He had always been successful, but my mother was the one who pushed. It was because of her that we all went to Punahou, and on to college.

  Until 1962 it was actually illegal to give a kid a Hawaiian first name. My father had always gone by Al, though his actual first name was Alexander, and my mother’s first name was actually Reiko, though she had always been known by her middle name, Lokelani, which meant Heavenly Rose in Hawaiian. Our names were Louis John, called Lui; Howard Frederick, called Haoa; and James Kimo. In my case, Kimo was simply the Hawaiian pronunciation of James, which was the name of my Montana great-grandfather. I always wanted to know why I didn’t have two English names, why my first and middle names were essentially the same. It was one of those things the youngest always picks on, to wonder why he is different from his brothers.

  I was different. I used to hide from Lui and Haoa, taking books and scrambling away into the woods, where I’d find a quiet safe place and lose myself in the pages of another world. Because they were so much older than I was, I was spoiled sometimes, often treated like the baby, and then from the time I was nine and Haoa left for college, I was the only child.

  Of course I was different in other ways too. My big brothers would come home from college, or from their lives as young studs on Waikiki, and talk about their girls, and I would wonder if I’d ever feel the way they did. It wasn’t until I was sixteen that I realized I probably never would.

  I was browsing in a used bookstore off Fort Street on a rainy afternoon when I found a stack of all-male porno magazines. I had never known such magazines existed. My heart sped up and my arms and legs began to feel like jelly as I flipped through the pages. I particularly remember a naked guy walking out of the ocean, on a beach somewhere in California. I got so ha
rd it hurt. There were stories as well as pictures, and ads for talk lines and dirty books. I had to buy at least one of those magazines.

  I picked the one that had the tamest cover and casually walked up to the register, carrying a paperback I wanted as well. I was glad I didn’t have to speak, because my throat was dry and hoarse. The proprietor, an old man, merely looked at the prices and rang them up on his register. I handed him the money, and he put the book and magazine in a brown paper bag and handed them to me.

  It was one of those moments after which your life is never the same. I finally understood what I had been feeling in gym class, and not feeling on dates with smart girls from Punahou who wore wire-rimmed glasses and serious expressions. And imagine, it only took me sixteen years to get from that bookstore to the food court at Ala Moana Mall where I bared my soul to Akoni.

  I let myself in the front door with my key. “Hey, Mom, you here?” I called as I closed the door behind me.

  Surprisingly, it was my father who appeared first. Usually, like Uncle Chin, he holds court from his recliner in the living room. “Hello, Keechee,” he said. It’s always been his nickname for me, and when Lui or Haoa had tried to tease me with it he’d come down hard on them. He had a nickname for each of us, a special name that was between the two of us alone. Lulu was Lui, of course, and Howgow was Haoa. “Your mother will be pleased to see you.”

  “And you? Is this torture for you, seeing me?”

  “You have always been the wicked son,” he said, smiling. My mother came out of the kitchen then and leaned up to kiss my cheek. The Kanapa‘aka boys were also lucky to inherit their father’s height; my father never quite reached six feet, stopping at five-eleven and three quarters (and he was always so precise in his measurements that he could never give himself the extra quarter of an inch) but the three of us all hovered between six foot and six two. Me, I was six foot and a half inch, and the difference between me and my father was that I told people I was six one.