Paradise Park (10 page)

T
HE
government-land jungle out on Molokai was the most ruthless place I’d ever been. Philodendrons choked the trees. Vines strangled the philodendrons. Every plant put out its leaves and tendrils like grappling hooks; its stems like stilts to catch the light. Every day those trees and ferns and roots were jostling and pushing each other to get by. And since in rain forests there isn’t any limit to how far living things will go, they just grew and grew till they were giant size. The philodendron leaves would be three, four feet across, and the ferns would grow the size of banana plants, just unfurling more and more fronds, sending up more flags. The lichens and the fungi would grow till the tree trunks were soft and leprous. And there were these vines called
kauna’oa
—orange parasites that had actual suction cups to suck the life’s blood out of any tree or plant they could latch on to.
Lilikoi
vines were so thick they grew into whole arbors. The place was festering with fruit, so you couldn’t eat it fast enough. The guavas shone like yellow eggs, and they were so sweet, so good, but you had to watch what you bit into, because these special fruit maggots used to nest in them, and you couldn’t tell from the outside, unless you turned the fruit all over in your hands. The bugs could enter through a hole small as a pinprick and
leave the fruit’s skin pure and smooth, while on the inside, ten thousand swarming black maggots would be feasting and pillaging on the pink guava flesh. The insects were obscene. At night the moths thumped like bats. The roaches were the biggest fliers I’d seen. Their antennae were longer than my index finger. But they were lean, not broad like rubbish-fed city roaches, and they bit in the night. They were always hungry. There were rats, too, running and climbing in every crevice of the place, and it was nothing to them to shimmy up a tree and eat out an entire nest of fledgling birds. Then there were pigs running rampant, with tiny little eyes, and they ate everything in front of them. They’d eat the rats, and the birds and the fruit off the trees and the trees themselves, and if they got hungry enough, they’d eat their own piglets too.

But as human life went it could be quiet there. It could be beautiful. It was very physical earthy work, farming. Kekui’s sister Lani and her boyfriend, Joseph, and I were just working that rich humus and growing
pakalolo
, which was marijuana. This was, of course, before the helicopter patrols. It was the golden age. Every day we got up and we tended our green plants and cleared away space for them and weeded them and personally picked off the slugs and parasites, because the whole operation was organic. We nurtured every crop by hand in a network of little patches among the trees. We were raising a secret garden.

Lani and Joseph had an incredible place they’d fixed up where the jungle and the runoff water ran down to the sea. It was a weathered old hut with a corrugated iron roof. The glass in the window was broken when they moved in, but they stapled up fresh screening on the window frame so it was like new. Kekui and I lived farther in, meaning a little bit closer to the crops. We also had a gem, an abandoned field station—needless to say, rent free. It was only slightly termite eaten and surrounded by trees, or actually one banyan tree that was the size of a herd of elephants with its roots hanging down like tails and trunks and legs on all sides. There was a door that closed, and hooks inside to hang your stuff, and a great table Kekui scavenged. It was a giant spool that the telephone company had used once upon a time to reel out cable. When you set it on end, it turned into a round table. Around harvest time our distributor would come out and he’d bring us stuff—money, kerosene, batteries. But it was amazing how the so-called necessities of life turned out to be so forgettable. Like newspapers, or plumbing, or
cars. None of that mattered. And that’s what I loved. We had mountain apples, which were these small fruits just blushing red, and you bit them and they were completely delicate with the slightest crunch, just sweet enough. We had waterfalls with clear sweet water running down the forest slopes into a little stream, and we had fish in there, gray tilapia we used to fry up on our smoky little hibachi and eat right in their curling skins. And of course we had the fruits of our labors, the best homegrown
pakalolo
there was, so in the evenings or the afternoons, or anytime at all, you could roll your own, and sit back and blow some rings.

On the one hand it was a very simple life, and not a lot of thinking or wrestling with questions in your mind, but putting your mind to rest, and letting the days just carry you. On the other hand, farming was a huge effort, cutting off other plants that every day tried to move in and strangle your crops. You had to be vigilant about the rats eating your supplies. And it wasn’t like at any point you could let up, because there was no winter to hunker down and hibernate, mend the nets and oil the traps. But there were patches of pure pleasure, just sitting around, or swimming in the stream when it was swollen up after some rain, or just enjoying the absence of society, ditching all those clothes and rules that went on out there. I was at a time of my life when I was not into clothes very much, and when I was alone, or just working with Kekui, I ended up being naked, just feeling that warm air with my skin, just opening up all my pores. My hair had grown long again, and I liked to feel it hanging down against my bare back, because it was so soft and heavy. I liked to swish it all around me.

Kekui’s sister Lani always wore at least a bathing suit, and most often a Hawaiian-style
pareo
wrapped around her and tied at the waist. She had thick hair she wore loose and purposely roughed up when she brushed it, because she liked it to look thick and Hawaiian, being so proud of her heritage. A lot of the reason she and Joseph had come out to Molokai in the first place was to live a purer Hawaiian life, in nature, without having to deal with haole civilization. She and Joseph were both half Hawaiian, and since their culture was in danger, they wanted to raise their kids to know who they were. When I first met them they had two little ones, and then the next year they had a third, and they had natural births every time. Lani birthed all her kids at home—actually outside. Those kids had the longest, most poetic names I’d ever
heard, but, of course, they went by nicknames. The youngest baby was called Kananipuamaeole, which meant beautiful flower of something or other. But she went by Kanani.

Since Lani and Joseph were trying to raise their kids pure, I was worried at first about what they’d think of me, but actually they didn’t mind my living with Kekui so much, since we weren’t having children or anything, and I used to baby-sit for them, and Kekui and I both tended the crops, so they liked having us help out. The area was pretty sparse as far as people went, and this was on an island that was rural to begin with—a place where if you were running for public office a good campaign tactic would be to paint your name on the side of a cow.

The strings of my guitar rusted out so badly I couldn’t play anymore, and there wasn’t anyplace to get new strings. I missed playing, but for music we could always sing. On Sundays we sang hymns, which Kekui taught me, like “We Gather Together,” and other nights we’d sit back with Joseph and Lani, who had a lovely alto. Just hymns or rounds or newish local music, like “Brown Eyes” or sometimes Peter, Paul and Mary, like “Puff the Magic Dragon” or old songs such as “Good Night Irene,” in harmony like the Weavers. Joseph didn’t sing, but he beat time, clapping. Our music was our voices, and our hands and feet, and at night the rain concertizing on our metal roof. Kekui and I would lie awake listening, and the rain would be drumming and thrumming, and nothing was better—unless the rain blew so hard it came in those cracks between the sheet metal and the walls and we got wet. Sleeping in wet sleeping bags tended to ruin the experience.

We had no clocks, just a radio that was broken half the time. I still had Grandpa Irving’s watch, but I didn’t bother winding it. You could look around you and tell the time of day, and you didn’t have to be so precise, making hours and fractions of hours. You could take your mornings and your afternoons and nights all in one piece. Apart from Lani’s Bible, the only book we had was my Norton anthology, which got wet and swelled up so it wouldn’t close, and its thin white pages turned puffy. I skipped around among all the authors, but the one I loved was John Keats. His writings were so vivid to me, the “Nightingale” and the “Urn.” What blew my mind was John Keats had created all this poetry when he was my age, and then he died, and his whole voice was lost to the world like Buddy Holly, and Richie Valens and the Big Bopper. He was just an unbelievable
talent. I used to walk around with his lines humming in my head, like “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness.” I used to say to Kekui, “Where did he get the gift?” We’d be sitting in our rusty old lawn chairs, which we dragged outside in the afternoons, and I’d have my book open on my lap and I would say, “Oh, my God!”

“What?” Kekui would ask.

“Oh, my God, listen!

“Doesn’t that make you hungry?”

The Eve of St. Agnes.
I used to read it all the time. The page got ripped. I used to walk around chanting it: “St. Agnes’ Eve—Ah, bitter chill it was!” That poem had everything I didn’t have out there on Molokai, not that I missed it in real life, but I got a charge from the idea of those things: bitter chills, and gargoyles, and all this repressed sensuality. Repression was something I was definitely lacking. And the words just made my mouth water. I mean, lucent syrops! Kekui didn’t really see it, though. Poetry wasn’t his thing. If he were hungry he’d rather do something about it.

In a lot of ways our life was what I would define as paradisiacal. There wasn’t even a single serpent, because there are no snakes on Molokai or on any of the Hawaiian Islands. There was just one thing. One bad thing. That was Joseph’s gun. I was against having a weapon from the beginning, but there wasn’t any choice. Every once in a while, even though we were remote, people would come through and try to steal from us. We actually had a lot of money growing there in those green plants.

I hated that shotgun. There was a special box for it under the floorboards in the field station, and I always stepped over that spot on the
floor, like I was superstitious. It just seemed like an evil thing to me, harboring a firearm. I mean, there were some things that were illegal, like growing
pakalolo
, and homesteading on government lands, and being illegal wasn’t bad, and a lot of times it was good, since laws were all about artificial rules being imposed on people’s freedoms, and imperialist feds appropriating the Hawaiian way of life and locking people into lot lines. But then there were some things that were actually just
wrong
, like weapons. I just felt people should live and let live, so having a gun in the house alarmed me, especially since our lifestyle was otherwise so edenic, and in general we had such a good time. Whenever Kekui or Joseph had to go out and chase someone off the land, usually just a lost hiker, and they had to intimidate these people and act like they were trespassing onto our property, I got upset. I didn’t want there to be any property at all or any ownership getting in the way. I didn’t even want the money for our crops, I wished we could be subsistence farmers and wouldn’t need a distributor at all—but wishing didn’t change anything. We lived a pastoral life with capitalist interruptions.

We were in our second year out there when the intruders got to be more of a problem. One morning when Kekui and I got up we went out to one of the patches and found all our plants stripped down, and the leaves stolen. They were so badly trampled I thought at first some animals had got into them, but Kekui said no, it was people. We were just shocked. It was like the plants had been raped. Some had been brutalized so badly that their main stems were broken. Kekui and Joseph started taking turns watching at night. Kekui would go out on patrol with the heavy-duty emergency flashlight and the gun and I would lie awake inside. I couldn’t sleep, I was so nervous. I felt like we were all turning into members of the police state we were supposedly here to get away from! “Z, Y, X, W, V, U, T,” I recited in my bed. That was a trick my brother had taught me when I was little. Sing the ABCs backwards if you’re trying to get to sleep. “S, R, Q, P, O, N, M, L.”

I said to Kekui in the morning, “Can’t you stop all this guarding?”

And he said, “Those folks’ll come back now they know where to get their stuff from.”

And I said, “I feel like we’re turning into the whole system we were running away from.”

But he said, “Eh, I wasn’t running away.”

That hurt. Looking back, I can see Kekui was simply pointing out that ultimately, despite being his girlfriend, when you came down to it I was a white interloper trying to impose my pacifist ideology on him and his sister, when they, who were truly embattled, and truly endangered by my own dominant culture, did not have the luxury of giving up guns. And I guess he was suggesting that I should get real rather than continually try to turn our lives into a formal utopia that would have to be not only for things—like living the mellow life—but also against things, e.g., violence. But at the time it just hurt.

Life was better when Kekui and I didn’t reflect too much on the differences between us. Life was better when we just focused on the matters at hand, singing, sleeping, smoking, making love. Our tolerance for pleasure was really quite high. Our pleasure threshold was way up there.

One day we were outside sitting in our chairs with a couple of joints. The sun was setting so the green forest was rosy and warm, and in my lap I had my book, so puffed out its pages were exploding all over my legs, and I was reading to myself this very sad yet lovely poem about getting high—“The Lotus-Eaters.” I was just feeling the words, just getting a little bit numb and feeling the syllables riding up inside of me, and repeating them to myself like they were a mantra: “Rolling a slumbrous sheet of foam below. Rolling a slumbrous sheet of foam below.” And every time I said it I saw different things, like big white sheets blowing in the wind, and giant rolling pins beating the white sheets, and beaches foaming and panting to meet you.