Aloha's End: Chapter 25 The Big Orange Balogna

Painting by Bobby Freeman Three Palms Cocoa Beach, used without permission

Aloha’s End © 2007
By Michael F. Zangari
With all rights reserved.

Chapter 25 The Big Orange Balogna

TrueWest falls into current like a snowflake a rushing mountain stream. He comes up for air gasping and is smacked in the lower back by another on-coming wave Then it’s tumble dry in a big industrial dryer in a Laundromat in downtown Atlantis, head over heels pinwheels straight down towards the dead reef at the bottom.

He kicks and flounders in the water pumping frantically in place. The harder he kicks the less he moves. It’s like climbing the walls of a sand pit. The walls give in and collapse as he grabs at them. Instead of climbing, he begins to sink like a lead sinker with feathers. He exhausts himself quickly.

Big man. Big voice. Big chest. Big lungs.

The ballsy radio voice, the one from big lung and diaphragm push is as silent as a producer’s assistant in rapture under tin lights, clutching her clip-board to breasts and beaming. TrueWest is delivering the news in his head, screaming lungless head and date lines, right here and right now. The scream is underplayed by a calm, quiet voice that simply notes the glassy blue green water as it darkens. Up above, not so far away, the surface gels above him.

The fight for surface doesn’t last very long.

He gives up as he looses consciousness.

A warm embryonic feeling pees around him .in the chill of the water.

He feels good.

Drowning is good.

It’s like sleeping. It’s like being carried around in the womb or in the top of his mother’s dress on the tits.

Little Ku.

The anchor, before he was an anchor man, the anchor that held the family together in the foreign exile of the oil fields. The pampas with derricks instead of palm trees. The shade from them stark, not like palm leaves bouncing in trade winds on the big island, his mama’s sighs, like dessert Mariah now, ghostly and high whined in his ears as she walked lunch to his dad on the days he forgot it.

TrueWest smiles. He’s having a flashback as he loses consciousness. How typical and cliché of him. On camera he’s push a little to get out of it, do something new like a west Texas waltz as he drowns, the old ballet in boots
twirling now round and round and round with arms around and around and around his sweeter one, the belle of his ball, ya’ll. His girly friend. She was as tall as he was, Gracie, the one that used to get him in trouble all the time because of how light she was, all that unsunned bone white skin, blonde hair and eyes that sparkled like juiced cinnamon bark .A free willed looker. Nestling his head in the top of her dress What she doing with that Mexican? What’s it look like? (snickers all around.) Why don’t they find someone to dance with? It’s last calling blue bonnet. Last call. Had enough? Huh? You want another beer? Mmmmmm? Beer, another one? Had enough? Mmmmmm. (Just a dot of perfume.) At the top of the valley, then just a little bit of that female sweat smelling up and twisting into that Frenchy smell from Ft. Worth.

Lean back and twirl, girl.

Some wild hack is beating him on the back of the head with a two by four and calling him a Mexican. That is still annoying after all these years. “I’m Hawaiian” He says. “Makes no never mind to me” the hack says, winding back to smack him again with a big orange bologna.

Stop that.

They break surface.

He smacks him again.

Stop that!

“This one’s for Momi. She says for not paying attention to her.”

“Quit fighting it.”

The life guard is actually pretty pissed off.

He hits him again with his floater blimp.

“Ok. Ok.”

“Go limp.”

TrueWest goes limp like a cat on a window sill.

He is towed like a wet rag from the surf.

As he gets to the shallows he stands up to walk but his legs buckle and he blacks out again, embarrassed.