Aloha's End (A Fresh Edit) Chapter 28-30

Monday, June 18, 2007

Aloha's End Chapter 28: Giving him "Ha"
Aloha’s End
© 2007, by Michael F. Zangari with all rights reserved. Rewritten on 8/14/07

Investigative reporter and television honey-boy Palani Ku, better known as reporter TrueWest, is walking beach-side down the main train of Wai’kiki.The street is crowded with tourists and locals. It’s constant festival.He boots pavement, taking long confident steps.On one side of the street the ocean is a translucent blue gel, squeezing out onto the beach. It foams a little before it slides back inside itself. On the other side of the street in the distance, the green mountains hump softly into one another with the city skyline of condos and businesses domino in front of it.The mountains are as green as emeralds against the sky blue sky.The Clouds catch like cotton on the bushes and trees and wisp into the creases of the valleys. They are low on the mountains. The valleys themselves broaden into the cityscape. It’s a busy little island, filled with pockets of people and the endless exchanges of the human kind.TrueWest stands out in the moving crowd of tourists like a cactus flower in the desert.He is one tall sun of a gun.His white hat hovers over the crowd like a UFO.His head is tall in his hat.He is over the jet lag of the Houston/Honolulu red-eye, the flight that took him into this postcard from a daydream. The trade winds loft every so often, cooling his sunburned face. His famous rose-gold sunglasses (the ones with the amber lenses) ride his dark russet red nose bareback. They never slip down. They are screwed up tight.He feels pretty good. It shows. Everybody looks pretty good. It is a happy place.He walks past the palm trees and trinket booths with his hands in his pockets. He cuts through the open market. He stops to through a rack of brightly colored silk aloha shirts on hangers. He pushes them to one side of the rack like beads on an abacus.His eyes catch on one.He admires the illuminated sun set clouds and Tiki on the shirt. The pineapples seem to dance on the beach. It is a lurid, but beautiful. The burnt umbers and the Florissant pinks cha cha cha on the silkHe makes a mental note to buy it later. He puts it back.He feels the arms coming around his waist from behind.He looks down to see the brown arms with the gold bracelets come around his waist and slip into the pocket of his sports jacket.It’s Momi, of course. But he wouldn’t be surprised if it were someone else.She presses her breasts into his back and pushes into him, warm and soft. Her perfume and heat come up around him like waves in ocean. He bobs in it.She’s’ on his hip bones with her hands, following the turn of his hips into her arms. He bends to except her. She brings her cheek next to his and exhales softly, bringing the full force of her presence into his. She exhales softly again, her ha, or the breath of her body, her life-force, exquisite, warm and sexy next to his ear.He give her his ha too, filled with the smell of peppermint and coffee, like he was taught to do at family reunions, the breath of life, the essences of his being given to her. It also smells like the cinnamon toothpick he’s been chewing. He has a complicated ha.“Aloha” he says.“Aloha Duke” she says.“Don’t start on me” he says.His shoulders are still sore from the mornings surfing. The burn has not turned on his skin.That was hours ago.Right now he wants to feel Momi's arms slip around him again. It is like getting tubed in heaven.Her ha is sweet with her perfume.“That was some ride” she says, her eyes sparkling.TrueWest grimaces and turns away. “Like riding a Brahma bull out of the shoot” he mutters. “And getting thrown and trampled.”“More better you should boogie board with the kids” she says laughing.TrueWest looks at her as sour as a lime.“I rode bigger ones in Texas” he says. “In Corpus Christie Bay after the hurricanes.”Momi looks at him skeptically. “Oh Yeah?” she asks.“Yeah” he says.She waits for the surf story.He tips his hat.“Ma’am.” He says.He looks at her smiling at him for awhile, surrendering completely to her presence. Damn he thinks.Her teeth and lips and eyes and hair, the fresh burn on her face and blush on her cheeks tumble together like waves. The fresh mountain ginger flower smells sweet in her oiled hair.He feels them old rut hut blues building in his belly place and below.Damn, he thinks again.A little butterfly flutters in his gizzards and moves down his organs like a lizard. Momi pushes him off and out of the hug.“That was offered only in the spirit of Aloha, of course” she says. “Welcome to Hawaii Palani Ku.”“Thank you for that” says True West. “My family left Hawaii in exile.”Momi smiles at him.“The Ku has returned.”Kalani Boys smiles back.“Yes.”“The restaurant is over here” says Momi.The pink neon crackles and fizzles over a fancy Thai restaurant with a big Gold Buddha sitting in front of it on a cell phone. The entrance is covered in flowers. It is busy. People come in and out.Momi turns him another half length. “Over here” she says. “The manapua truck.”The truck is parked close to the brick alley wall.The window on the side of a the small lunch wagon is open, propped open with a two by four. There is a menu painted on a sandwich board in front of it. “The New Wai’kiki Drive Inn” it says. “Shave Ice.”“Good Hawaiian Grinds.”TrueWest walks up to it and looks it over. “Chili and rice” he observes.“One or two scoops?” asks the short Filipino man in the window.TrueWest looks up.“What kind of hot sauce do you have?” he asks.“Chili peppa wata" he says. “Whatta you think?” he says. "Hawaiian chili peppa more hot. Make the creases steam outta your hat, Cowboy.”TrueWest mouth ejaculates saliva on that thought.He's hungry as an alley cat.Momi runs her finger down the menu to the Hawaiian plate.“I’ll buy” she says.TrueWest accepts.“Sure.” He goes for his credit card, but it’s no good at the New Waikiki Drive-inn. The proprietor pushes it away. “You got to be kidding” he says. “No can. Cash only.”TrueWest's face gets as red as his nose.“I haven’t cashed my traveler’s check yet.” He explains.Momi pays it out of her pocket with a tip.She is smiling broadly. It happens every single time.It takes awhile.The truck guy finally delivers a pair of lunch boxes.The bento boxes are tied in red string.TrueWest takes them and looks over to one of the picnic tables in the shade.“How about over there?”Momi vetoes. “Let’s catch sunset” she says.He has. It's in her eyes.

Rewritten 8/14/2007
Aloha's End
Chapter 29:There's No Such Thing As True West


TrueWest and Momi walk up the sidewalk to a twisted metal link fence. It is shaded by the palm trees and ka’awe bushes. A rabbit hole has been cut into the fence and the ends twisted up to form a passageway to the beach.“Here it is” says Momi. “The rabbit hole.”Its’ wire is bent up just enough to get ass under. Momi drops to all fours and scoots under. TrueWest watches the flowers on the tail end of her mu’u’mu’u rock gently through to the other side. He hands the bento boxes through to her. It’s quite a limbo for a cowboy man, even one used to ducking fences. He gives her his hat and jacket and gets down evaluating the situation like it is serious putt on the golf course.He decides to climb over it, rattling it like the baboon cage at the Honolulu Zoo as he goes over it. He dusts off his pants. Momi looks at him incredulously. “Why don’t you tell everyone we’re here” she says. The lights go on in the hotel windows across the street. TrueWest smiles helplessly. “Ma’am I don’t do anything small.”“Oh yeah?” says Momi, half to herself.That luscious, big lip smile of hers comes on again.She flashes teeth and eyes at him before both drop shyly into her soft grin.Her hair is kinks with the humidity. With her bun down, she does not look like the serious professional woman at the desk of the hotel, always worried about something, as self serious as a portrait of the royalty.She is much looser here, much much looser, and years younger. They sit on the beach as the sun drops into the water.It dissolves like a fizz tablet in the ocean bubbling color on to the clouds and across the water.There’s a double rainbow over the ocean in the silver path of the reflected sun on the water.The moon is coming up on the other side. The stars pop in flashes into the purple aura of it. It darkens quickly to a deep grape. Momi sticks a flash light in the sand and turns it on. It has a red, cone shaped mute over the bulb that glows softly like a votive candle. Momi pops the top on the bento boxes and they eat.The Lau Lau. The sweet potato and poi.The tomatoes and smashed salmon lomi lomiThe Spam musabi.The Kalua pork falls apart when the fork touches it.TrueWest spoons it into his mouth and presses it to the roof of his mouth until it melts. The crunchy sea salt asserts itself, spreading over the top of his tongue and into the taste of the pork as he swallows it.His amber eyes glitter with pleasure.The poi is fresh.He is delighted.It tangs his taste buds like a gong.He sucks at the plastic spoon like it’s a pacifier. He closes his eyes as he sucks.“It’s tangier” he says “then the purple stuff my grandmother used to send at Christmas time.” He says. "It's almost alive." “It is alive" she says. “Day old."It speaks to him when he swallows it in aftertaste.He eats intensely.The sound of the waves takes over, the endless washing of things; the wishing of things.It’s high tide.The water creeps up to them like a hungry dog on its belly.Momi moves TrueWest back quickly as the water comes in. “Don’t ever turn your back to the water” says Momi. “That's what the old Hawaiians say." He thinks on her words. He wonders what the young Hawaiians say about the ocean. “Surf’s Up?”The wind stirs things up. The air is heavy with salt and moisture. TrueWest holds Momi’s hand. “I am a simple country girl from a small island.” Says Momi. TrueWest looks at her hand.On her delicate wrist there is a gold Hawaiian heirloom bracelet. In the middle of engraved vines and flowers is her name, the first, and middle.“Momi Ipolani.”He looks into her eyes.They are dark as velvet, but bright as the stars. She looks at him in awe.TrueWest catches the look like a fast ball. “TrueWest" she says. “Oh no” thinks TrueWest. “I’m not on the network news anymore” he blurts out “I quit.”Momi looks confused. "But you are TrueWest" she says.A couple of days before the trip he had beaten his boss to the punch line in a nasty conversation about a story he was working on.He had quit before he got fired.Enough was enough.“On the news, I had to cover truly terrible stories, disasters. I was instantly recognizable walking through the debris of what was once on ordinary American town. I got my cow dude duds on. The boots, the western canvas shirt with the sleeves rolled up. The amber shades. I did my cool walk through the ruins, reporting on it. If that's TrueWest, then I was it,” he said. “Some reviewer said that I penetrated the news like the ghost of the American West. Bringing back the lone gun and the true heart. Something that never was and never will be again.” Momi strains to understand him.He is TrueWest.He has a great chest on him.And a nice ass on the true west end. Better than TV.“I started to wonder who I was.” He said. “You don’t watch the news?” says Momi, hiding a smile. “You the Ku.” “I came to Hawaii to forget that.” He says. “Forget it, den” says Momi. She squeezes his hand. She slips the other one under his sports coat into the waist band of his pants, just over the hump of his butt. She cups it gently. “You know where I got that name? TrueWest?” Momi shakes her head no. “You must be part Samoan” says Momi. "Fa'i" TrueWest looks up. He might be. “I got it from the writer and actor Sam Sheppard. He said in a Rolling Stone interview once that there was no such thing as a true west. Or True south for that matter. “True West” is the name of one of his plays. I got it from that.” “There’s no such thing as true west?” asks Momi.She squeezes his true ass. “What’s this?”“But that was the whole point. There is no true west. It’s made up. It’s fiction. Like the news. It’s all a matter of points of view and perspective. My presence may have added something, like food dye. But it was something personal and put on. It doesn't exist in reality” "That name made my email address the mesa and my name the open sky. People ate it up. I answered email. I was humble. I got famous. TrueWest is the product. I’m cowboy riding into town to get the news after a hard drive. I speak slow and sincere enough to be understood. I used simple language, like I was sitting by the campfire waiting for the beans to cook and the bacon fat to melt.All that was missing was the harmonica in the background playing the "Song of the Range.”Momi smiles. “There’s a great hula blues version of that.”TrueWest gives up the ghost writer in the sky.“I was just Kalani Ku” he says. “My momma’s boy.” “Yes” she says. ”That’s the guy.”"What a sham" says TrueWest, disgusted. “People like to dream and get distracted by images. Suddenly I am the lonely cowboy journalist. Never mind I have darker skin. I am out there on the lonely plains of existence, writing things down as they happen. I am responsible to the open sky and my heart alone. I tell true.” Momi is listening. “I am very popular” “I know” says Momi. “It got out of hand” he says. “People started talking about the code of TrueWest. They expected me to talk plain and tell the truth all the time. Nobody does that. They wanted me to be the good guy. And I started to want that too.” “You fucked it up?” says Momi. TrueWest stops cold.He thinks about it. “I wanted to have the same kind of trust that Will and Roy Rogers had. Them Rogers’s boys had a dusty kind of integrity. They were both Indians with a down dirt way of being that people identified with and liked.” He looks up. “A journalist longs for that kind of thing.” Momi forehead wrinkles. She nods to show she is listening. “You’re the star” she says. “I don’t know who I am” he says. His mouth snaps shut. They feel the wind on their faces for awhile. “When you are on camera, doing the news for a living, you are on, no matter what. It doesn’t matter how you are feeling or feeling about the story. The image on the tube has to be consistent, calm and accurate. I mean, I was on the air the day my father died.” He gets tight lipped again.“It’s a Zen kind of thing.” “Everything is a Zen kind of thing” says Momi. TrueWest considers it. “As a journalist, I still have the sensibility of a writer. In fact, I’d rather write. A writer can work in his underwear...” Momi likes this image. She snaps the band on his, gently. She can imagine him at her computer on the desk in her bedroom. Typing and breathing into his big chest, the crack of his o'kol'e just visible above the elastic of his bvds. She snuggles in.“A writer can slam the keys for emphasis. You can get pissed off or cry uncontrollably. That’s the kind of news caster he’d be if he had any choice. You have to be a real personality with lots of problems and opinions. I’d say things I regret. But that’s not the way it is. To be on TV you have to be a good liar. The two dimension archetype with the news.” Momi nods.“Whoa.” She thinks. “I talked with my producer before I left. He said, “Why don’t you go back to Hawaii and rediscover yourself if you hate the cowboy so much.”I told him I’d never been to Hawaii before. It’s no big deal. Most of what I know about Hawaii comes from movies like “Diamond Head” and “Blue Hawaii.” It’s just a place where Christmas packages come from. I’m from Texas. That’s home.” Momi feels irritated.‘Then what are you doing here then?” asks Momi. “Go back to where you came from” “I told myself it’s not going to be one of those smarmy, searching for roots trips” he said. “At least that’s what I told myself. I’m here on vacation. I thought I might look up the Duck to see what that was all about. That’s all. He’s on the watch list for downed American whistleblowers. A true cowboy.” “Duck?” Momi gets sad."That's a story that will never be told. It's completely Hawaiian. It has to be danced." “Duck” thinks TrueWest.Momi does.As the night darkens, the water starts phosphorescing.The glow is like candle light beside the bed.TrueWest and Momi get sleepy and dreamy and hold each other closer.The night is endless sighs.

Aloha’s End by Michael F. Zangari
©2007 with all rights reserved.
Chapter 30: When He Shut Up

Momi shuts the door softly behind herself and leans back on it.
She catches her breath.
Her plantation house in the mountains is quiet.
It is nestled in the bottom of the “S” curve on the edge of a crumbling mountain side. It is swamped in yellow ginger and orange flame bougainvillea, a small wooden house that needs a paint job. Its like an old life boat thrown into a sea of flowers. It has aged evenly and has a soft glow about it.

The windows are open. The curtains blow into the house with a wind that is as gentle as a baby's sigh. It is long and soft and permeate the air with the sweet fragrant ginger.

The air is tanged with it.

Momi heels off her flats one by one and rubs her feet.
So good, the cool wooden floor.
She pads through the dark and flops down on the couch bringing her legs up under herself. The cotton of the mu’u’m’u she is wearing is crisp, but softened by the damp night air and the sea mist of the beach.
She’s salty and sweaty.
The burgundy mu'u'm'u clings to her damp skin.
There’s nothing binding underneath.
She is glad to be home from her date.
So that was TrueWest she thinks.
Kalani. Pooboy she thinks. “Another tourist.”
A famous one, at that.
She savors the giggles of triumph that want to come up like bubbles in a bathtub.
Between the surfing and the Wai’ki’ki mooning, his facade went down like sheet ice on an iceberg.
Everything come out.
Like he’d been eating Korean Barbecue with peppa water.
The night beach does that to you.
After the negative ions in the air make you feel good, you feel real.
She tried to make it good for him.
Gave him a little romance. she listened attentively to everything he said. Like he was the only haole in the world. They all feel like they are anyway.
It's like magic dust. Listening. Momi has good Hawaiian ears.
The boy felt the aloha. She knows it.
She gave him a little bit of what the main-landers look for, the legendaryWiki Wacki Woo. The mysterious Polynesia love sickness.
The rut hut blues.
She made the wiki a little sticky and the wacky all together tacky, but the woo she pitched was pure woo, baby, woo.
They come to Hawaii from all over the world for two weeks in paradise.
They know they will only be here for a short while. They fall in love quickly. And live a legendary love affair in six days. That's the wiki wacki woo.
She can’t believe it she is thinking about it.
Pigeon Hawaiian.
The worst, thinks Momi. Wiki Wacki Woo for God's sake.
That phrase comes from old hula blues and slack-key records from the 1920s.
Like the 78s that Benny Aloha listens to on his grind box.
Scratchy, tinty and there in the grooves
Benny waves his hands in the air as graceful as butterflies at the parts he likes. He chair dances the hula, getting up to Sukiaki it a liitle as the phrases catch him. He likes to hand slap the rythms on his knees and stomach like the old Hawaiians and Japenese do and snaps at the rest.
He knows everything by heart and slide nuance.
He caught her grimacing at one of the songs he sang when he was tuning her ukelele for her in an open key. It had the wiki waki woo phrase in it.
She was piss off.
"Hey" he said. He reminded her to be grateful to some of the haole kine.
“The criminals who stole the monarchy tried to destroy the language, dig?
Never forge. You could have you’re tongue cut out for speaking the Hawaiian language after the take over. That's some kind of heavy censorship." He said.
"But it survived.
Like us."
He looked at her for understanding.
He laughed.
"I get piss off too when I think about it" he said. "But this song is about getting laid on the beach. The wahine says "quick and the haole thinks she says "I love you."
"You can still have your tongue cut out for speaking the language” Momi said.
Benny Aloha smoothed his hair back like he does, and smiled his smile, throwing light-rays from the corners of both his eyes.
“The haole used a lot of Hawaiian language in the songs. It's short pop poetry. That’s why some of the words survived. The conversational ones. You know, the most intimate ones. The common ones. The Hawaiians writing the songs did the same thing. There was a barter of sorts going on. The everyday poetry of life. You'll will find words in the hula blues that are not in the dictionary anymore. In fact, some of the words have not even been recovered or recorded yet. You know the Hawaiian’s brought them out like gifts to share with the visitors like the fish and the poi. Share the local akamai.”
He looked at Momi again for some kind of understanding.
She knew the kine.
"They are cutting words out of the dictionary again, to make room for the new Hawaiian language that is developing. Words like ipod. It is a tremendous loss to lose the old words." He sighs. "Another tremendous loss."
Wiki Wacky Woo is not one of those phrases Momi will miss much.
The wiki means quickie. It’s about sex all right. The wacki woo is another thing. It sounds goofy.
The haole like to talk about sex. More than doing it she thinks.
How strange to be a tourists, eh? In a strange and sensuous culture.
They get permission to be naughty when they come here.
To bare their bodys and do rude cartoon hula by the pool.
She thinks of Palani’s big amber eyes on her.
So sincere.
Hot as honey in the tea.
His eyes on her big lips. Her eyes. Her tits.
Exotic, yah?
The boy wants a little taste of something Hawaiian.
Better get him a pinapple basket and macadamia nuts.
She did not expect it.
She went to college in Oregon.
She remembers how uptight the boys were about sex.
The heat and humidity here speak it all the time.
It is second nature. Like all body intimacy.
It's in the way the trade winds blow and the islands volcanic magnatism expresses itself.
The island supports sensuality as much as the mainland suppresses it. She thinks.
She is used to being sexualized by the Japanese and the White tourists.
She sighs at herself. Playing the roles behind the desk at the hotel.
She thinks about the evening. she tries not to be so anylitical about it.
But it is her passion.
Details.
She reviews things.
She counts the thirteen sexes as they emerged over the course of the evening, like Chinese gem stone beads one after another. As Palani and her morphed roles in a tradition Pacific Island manner all evening long. All hula play and eyes.
When he shut up, that is.
She thought about her mai nei. The invitation to join her dance. The offering of it.
She flushes with the heat of herself.
She reminds herself that Kalani is blood Hawaiian.
But as white as mahi meat, she thinks.
Momi watches the curtains blow in for awhile before checking for messages on her message machine. The blinking red light gets her attention.
There are a couple of messages from her home in Wai'ana'e.
One from her mahoo brother wanting to karaoke over the weekend in drag.
Then there is one from Palani.
His voice is confident again, back down there in the broadcast range like he is doing liners for the evening news.
His voice is as deep as the fissures in the volcanic mountains, almost echoing, like in the volcano tubes of his chest.
She gets a little more heat from that. A therma nuclear reaction.
“That was really good” he said. “Really good. Thank you Momi. I'm going to sleep like a brick tonight.”
She smiles.
Yes. It was good.
For the most part.
“That’s a wrap. I’m going to bed after I shower the sand off my butt. It’s True West. And that’s News For True.”
He did that for her.
She gonna save that one.