People speak slowly in the Pacific, the way the elderly taking exercise along the beach in Waikiki run slower than most New Yorkers walk. The local alphabet, with its twelve letters, five of them vowels, tends to be filled with “u”s and “l”s, so you end up ululating languorously and lulling undulatingly. The gravestones I see in a local cemetery are the tersest I’ve ever seen, a name, not much more. It’s a language made for sashaying, and yet the names in the papers are “Froggy” and “Boogie” and “Oping,” and the nearest Chinese restaurant is called “Froggies.” The ads are for Make-up Artistry, Nail Technicians and Wellness Technologies.
*****
“It’s two in the morning,” a dude reminisces on his cell, walking quickly between crowds lined up on the street outside Chili’s and TGIF, “and we’re sitting in a circle, throwing napkins at each other.”
“Like I wake up,” the girl working behind the counter at Starbucks announces, “and I’m still sleeping.”
“I know what you mean.”
*****
The t-shirts say, “I’d like to help you but I just CAN’T FIX STUPID,” and represent a mock-paper called the Waikiki Beach Digest, with the headline, “SHARK ATTACKS SIX TOURISTS. TOURISTS ARE FINE.” The “mostly Greek” restaurant in the mall advertises “not so fast food.” In the phone-book I see listings for Paradise Vows, Paradise Canyon Systems, Inc. Paradise Hair Extensions and Paradise Implants Inc. Paradise Sky Cap Service, Paradise Lending and Paradise Loans and Jewelry.
In the elevator at my modest hotel I am told I can enjoy a Cleopatra Wrap or a Cranium and Pelvis Correction. “My inner child feels so complete and fulfilled in this radiant chakra light,” the legend volunteers.
*****
“So we live in this little village,” the wife of a celebrated Japanese painter tells me, offering me directions to their house. ”You can’t miss us. Our street is only one block long, and we’re the second on the right.”
I ask for an address, and she gives me a five-digit number, not what I expect from a one-block street (the first two digits, I later learn, refer to the whole district, and the final three are somewhat arbitrary).
“You know when you’ve gone too far,” she says, “if you hit the Assembly of God, this little white church. We’re just past the 7-Eleven.”
“Great.”
“Well, actually”–a pause–”I should warn you: there are two 7-Elevens in our village. We’re just past the first. Midway between the first 7-Eleven and McDonald’s.”
I’d told a friend I was coming to Honolulu, and she’d said, “I remember, when I travelled around the world, in 1960, as soon as I arrived in Hawaii, I smelled French fries.”
“But it had become a state only a year before.”
“Yes. But they got quickly to the fries.”
*****
“You see, it’s really a multi-multi-melting pot,” the American Westerner is saying to his friend at the Cockroach, perhaps referring to the fact that Hawaii is the spiritual home of spam musubi, and cross-racial dating agencies are everywhere. “Now, I’ll bet that waitress was abused by her father.”
His friend laughs, a little uneasily.
“No, I’m serious. I bet she went through a lot as a girl, and now she’s working in this high-cost area. Even though she doesn’t know the meaning of `a la carte.’ I mean, there’s a story there. A young girl working alone says to me, she’s coming from a home that’s disintegrated. And how do they disintegrate ? It’s usually because the men are abusive.”
*****
On the beach, a teenager accosts her bikinied friends, strutting along the sand.
“What are you doing ?”
“Nothing.”
“In this gorgeous world,” Paul Theroux, an 18-year resident of Hawaii, writes in Hotel Honolulu, “birds uttered long, meaningful phrases, and people spoke in flat monosyllables.”