Mahu Fire (6 page)

LIVING IN DIFFERENT WORLDS

It appeared that Aunt Mei-Mei had been cooking non-stop since I left, and she had set up TV trays in the master bedroom so she, Uncle Chin and Jimmy could all sit and eat together. I sat with them for a while, eating some of Aunt Mei-Mei’s special Hunan chicken, and then I left them in that room decorated with embroidered prints and black lacquer, sitting at their tables, eating and watching the news on TV. They weren’t talking much but it didn’t seem like a strained silence.

On my way home, I called my parents and told them what I’d done. My father thought, like Aunt Mei-Mei, it was a good idea, that taking care of Jimmy would give Uncle Chin something to live for. My mother was worried, though.

“You know this boy?” she asked. “Does he come from a good family?”

“His father runs a pack-and-ship place in Chinatown.”

“Are you sure you can trust him?” my mother asked. “Uncle Chin and Aunt Mei-Mei are old, and Uncle Chin is sick. What if this boy causes trouble?”

“Enough, Lokelani,” my father said. “If Kimo says this is a good boy who needs help, then we all help him if we can.”

We ended the conversation by saying that we were all looking forward to seeing each other the next evening at the party for the Hawai’i Marriage Project. My mother and her two daughters-in-law had apparently been burning up the phone lines discussing what to wear, and my father complained about having to wear a suit. Business as usual in the Kanapa’aka household.

I spent most of the next day working all my old cases, reviewing my notes, tapping away at the Internet trying to find information, reviewing autopsy reports and generally working hard and getting nothing accomplished.

Just as my shift was ending, Sandra Guarino called me. Cathy Selkirk’s partner, she was the director of the Hawai’i Marriage Project, and she was so upset she could hardly speak. “What’s up?” I asked.

“Bastards,” she said. “Somebody tried to trash our office this afternoon.”

I calmed her down a bit, then looked at the clock. I blew a deep breath out. If I hurried, I could stop at the Marriage Project office on my way home to get dressed for the party. “That would be terrific, Kimo,” Sandra said. “I’m sure Robert would feel a lot better.”

Robert, I thought, as I drove the couple of blocks from headquarters over to the Marriage Project. Harry had fixed us up; Robert was a first or second cousin of Harry’s girlfriend Arleen, and they’d been anticipating double dates, because Robert and Arleen were so close.

Robert had skinny bird legs and two front teeth that he always felt were too prominent. He’d told me that someday he wanted to get braces to rein them in. And someday, too, he might motivate himself to get to the gym and fill out his muscles. But in the meantime, he was accustomed to making do with what he had. “A little eyeliner and a little blush could go along way toward making a boy look better,” he’d said, the one time we went out to dinner together.

He was a nice guy, but I wasn’t his type, and he wasn’t mine. Harry and Arleen were more upset than either of us were; that’s the way it goes with dating.

I pulled up in front of the two-story stucco building that housed the Marriage Project to see a very butch lesbian in cargo shorts and a tie-dyed T-shirt nailing a piece of plywood over what had been a front window.

“If you need something done, ask a lesbian,” Robert said, after we’d exchanged greetings.

We went inside, and I asked, “Want to tell me what happened?”

“I was on the phone with Haley’s Helium Heaven asking why the rainbow arc of multi-colored balloons wasn’t here yet, when there was this noise and the window just exploded.”

He pointed to the square pane in the front window, now securely covered with plywood. “The floor in front of my desk was just strewn with shards of glass. I was so startled I actually just hung up the phone and stared.”

He crossed his arms. He was wearing a bright pink polo shirt and a pair of white clam-diggers that exposed a chunk of ankle. “I mean, I was a pretty girly teenager, bad at sports and in love with Broadway show tunes, your typical fag-in-training, so I got teased a lot, got pushed around in the halls a few times and called a couple of names that I’m glad to admit to now, like cocksucker and butt pirate. But I was never gay-bashed, and I just couldn’t believe it.”

I smiled reassuringly, and as I did, I wrinkled my nose with the recognition of a bad smell. At first I worried that maybe the aroma of dead chicken was still lingering around my truck, attaching itself to me, but there was a different note to this stink.

“You smell it,” Robert said, noticing my reaction. “The rock that came through the window was just part one. The guys yelled, ‘Take that, faggots!’ And then I smelled shit. I looked through the window at the pavement outside the building. A half-dozen paper bags were split open, and there was brown, mucky goo spilling out of them.”

He handed me a piece of brown paper bag, with writing on it. “There was a note, too.”

I read, ‘Faggots deserve to die,’ scrawled with a pencil in crude block letters.

I took notes on everything Robert said, and promised to file a report. All the time he was talking, I kept looking at my watch, worrying that I wouldn’t have enough time to get home, get showered and changed, and pick up my date.

Harry had encouraged me to invite someone to the Marriage Project party, and I’d deferred until a week before, when I’d been having drinks with my friend Gunter at the Rod and Reel Club, a gay bar in Waikïkï not far from my apartment. I’d mentioned the party to Gunter, complained about having to get into the tuxedo I owned but tried never to wear.

“I’ve got a tux,” Gunter said. “But you can bet I jump at any chance to wear it. I think men look more handsome in tuxedos than in any other clothes.” Then he smiled at me. “Even better than in no clothes at all.”

Gunter was a “friend with benefits.” We had sex every now and then, when no one else was available, but mostly we were friends. “Come with me, then,” I said. “Be my date.”

“Serious?”

“Serious as a hot dick on a cold night,” I said, repeating back to him one of his favorite expressions.

Since then we’d talked a couple times about the party. Gunter was about as far from marriage-minded as a guy can get, but the party meant free food and booze and a chance to look his best, and there was nothing wrong with that. I was pleased I’d been able to make him so happy.

By the time I got home, he’d already left a message on my answering machine, saying he was ready, so I jumped through the shower and started pulling on my tuxedo. When we went to my cousin Mark’s wedding, which was black tie, my parents had bought it for me, over my complaints. “I’m never going to wear this thing again,” I’d said, while my mother supervised the fitting.

“Every man should have a tuxedo,” she said. “Just in case.”

I sometimes think she and I live in different worlds. In hers, people go to black tie dinners and dance until dawn, drinking champagne cocktails and flirting like they’re in some old movie. In my world, people commit murder, they force teenage kids into prostitution, and they shoot chickens, which start to stink in the hot sun. The two worlds don’t go together that well.

I clipped the black satin bow tie on just as I was ready to leave, then stopped to look at myself in the mirror.

I considered myself lucky to get the best genes from my varied ancestors. Black hair and skin that tans easily from the Hawaiians, a slight epicanthic fold over the eyes from my Japanese grandfather, just enough to make me look exotic and dashing. Solid lines in my face, good cheekbones and a strong chin from my haole grandmother. I’m normally not vain about my looks, figuring it’s all genetics, but that night I had to admit I looked handsome.

Gunter shared a small house with a roommate, just outside Waikiki proper, behind Diamond Head Elementary. I pulled up in his driveway and walked up the front sidewalk. The orange and yellow hibiscus blossoms on the bushes by his mailbox were already closing up, and the evening sky was shading from pastel blue to lavender above the mountains. The pervasive smell of smoke still lingered, and I hoped we’d get that rain sometime soon. In the distance I heard someone pounding an ipu gourd and chanting rhythmically in Hawaiian.

Gunter came out the door. “You look gorgeous!” he said, stopping to admire me. “Who knew you dressed up so well?” He put one finger on my chin and turned my head from side to side. “Darling, you need somebody to take you in hand and bring out your potential!”

“Come on,” I said.

Gunter looked better than usual himself. He’s about six-three, lean and gawky, with a buzz-shaved head. The first time I met him, at a gay bar in Waikiki, I thought he looked like a giraffe. But the tuxedo had worked its wonders on him as well. All gawkiness had disappeared, and he seemed suave and debonair. His short hair made him look European, but a little exotic as well.

“What’s this?” he asked, fingering my tie. “A clip-on bow tie? I can’t be seen with a man wearing a clip-on. Fortunately I have an extra one inside.” He tugged on my hand.

“Gunter, we’re running late already.”

“Then we’ll just be a little later.”

His house was sparse, almost Oriental. No clutter, no books or magazines or sports equipment strewn around, like you find at my place. He led me back into his bedroom, and I started wondering if we had enough time for some quick fun before the party. The answer, of course, was no, but that didn’t stop me thinking. I’d been going through a sexual dry spell, too busy to troll for dates in bars or online, and Gunter had been busy himself with a series of Filipino gardeners at the condo where he worked as a security guard.

“Take that thing off,” he said, rummaging in one of his bureau drawers. I took off the tie and put it in my pocket. “And take your jacket off, too, and put your collar up.”

He turned back to me with a long strip of black fabric in his hand. “Here we go.” He stepped up close to me, his face almost at mine, and started fiddling with the tie. “It’s harder to do this on somebody else,” he said. “Let me get behind you.”

“Get thee behind me, Satan,” I said.

“Oh, you tease.”

I felt his body close to me, and sensed a familiar stiffening in my groin, a sensation I resolved to ignore. Then I realized he was feeling the same thing. What a damn shame that we were on a schedule. “We have a dinner to go to, Gunter,” I said. “No time for fun.”

He finished the tie with a flourish. “There you go,” he said, turning me around so I faced the mirror. “Doesn’t that look better?”

   

Gunter and I met my high school friend, Terri Gonsalves, as we walked from the parking garage toward the party. She wore a low-cut, short black silk dress with a single strand of pearls. On her right wrist she wore the emerald bracelet that had been her husband’s last gift to her.

I told her I thought she looked lovely. I knew it was the first time she’d been out to a big party since her husband had died, and I was sure she was feeling melancholy.

“Since I don’t have a man of my own, you’ll both have to be my escorts.” She hooked her arms around Gunter and me and we strolled down the street. With a pair of strappy black high heels, she was almost as tall as I was.

The evening was clear and dry, despite the smell of smoke, and beyond the lights of downtown I could make out a few dim stars above. We walked through a neighborhood of one- and two-story offices and stores, a travel agency with vertical columns of Chinese-language ads next door to a place selling medical uniforms. I asked her about Cathy’s application to her great-aunt’s foundation, and she promised she’d look into it.

The sounds of a jazz piano floated toward us as we approached the offices of the Hawai’i Marriage Project, glowing with light. The two-story stucco building had a big open office on the first floor, where Robert worked. There was a bathroom at the rear and a door that led out to an open lanai. Up on the second floor, there were two offices, one looking to the street and the other to the back. The front room was used for meetings and storage, and Sandra Guarino used the back office.

When we walked in, Harry and Arleen were standing around Robert’s desk talking with him. Arleen, a tiny pixie of a woman with dark hair and Japanese features, was holding her young son Brandon, who had already fallen asleep. “I’m going to take this big boy upstairs,” she said. “Sandra said I could leave him in her office.”

“You’re sure he’ll be all right?” Harry asked. He’d dressed up, too, in a double-breasted tux with black satin lapels.

“I’ll leave the window open. If he wakes up and starts to cry, you can bet we’ll hear it.” She hoisted him against the shoulder of her form-fitting little black dress and walked toward the stairs. Harry smiled goofily as she passed.

Robert was the only one who’d opted for a white dinner jacket. He had a green carnation in his lapel—a nod, I was sure, to Oscar Wilde. It was nice to see a gay symbol other than the color pink or the rainbow triangle. I asked him what he was saying about the broken panel in the front window. “I don’t want anybody to know,” he whispered. “I’m just telling people that one of the caterers accidentally knocked into the window.”

He pulled me aside. “There is a problem, though,” he said, keeping his voice low. “I’ve heard a rumor that we might get some protesters tonight.”