Paradise Park (14 page)

Baron and T-Bone were a little wild at times, but also generous and open-minded. When I said I was on a quest for God, they said okay. When I wanted to adopt a cat, they told me no problem. So I brought home a kitten an Ecuadorian grad student named Miguel had found at the university. Just a little black fluff ball with white feet, and he was so soft and sweet. But after a few months he grew into a black slinky outdoor teenage cat, and he went out at night and fought all the neighbor cats, and it turned out he wasn’t cuddly at all, yet he was my new companion. I named him Marlon, after Brando. All the neighbors hated him. You could hear him screaming at night.

Our neighborhood had bungalow homes with teensy tufty mondo grass lawns in front and borders of hedges manicured every day by these older Japanese couples, mostly second generation off the sugar plantations. However, our place was not exactly manicured. It had once been
used for cockfighting and then boarded up by the cops, and then converted into a rental. The bugs were plentiful, but, given my experiences, to me it was no big deal. The house swayed a little in the breeze, since it was mostly termite eaten. Baron and T-Bone went to school some days and sold restricted substances on others. Yet when I moved in with them I barely ever took a hit. There I was, searching for God, and caring for Marlon, and it wasn’t as if I had a lot of time for smoking dope.

I got my new job through Geoffrey Wong’s fiancée, Julie Liu, whose aunt and uncle owned Paradise Jeweler in Ala Moana Shopping Center. And one of the main reasons I took the job was that Mr. and Mrs. Liu were very religious! They were, in fact, evangelical. At the store the Lius would stop everything they were doing just to talk to me about the Lord. They were always open to discussion. They got me my own copy of the New Standard Annotated Bible to study and mark up, and they invited me to pray with them whenever I wanted to, and also to go to their church. Telling it now, it sounds a little bit wrong, like mixing church and state—me praying with my new employers. Yet at the time I couldn’t get over it. Just when I was looking for divinity, this highly spiritual couple was looking for a salesperson! It was like all along they’d been waiting for me.

I had been to church a couple of times before with Kekui, but the Lius had a different house of worship. They went to a place in Manoa called the Greater Love Salvation Church, which was a Pentecostal millenarian revivalist congregation. The gist of the church was there was no greater love for mankind than that of Jesus our savior, and he chose to die for us in order to save us. But since there was still sin in the world he was coming back. He could be coming any day, so we had to get ready, because when he arrived there would be an Armageddon and a rapture, and those who were saved would rise up on eagle’s wings, and those who were not would go straight down the chute to hell. I admitted up front I was skeptical about these concepts of the faith, but the Lius were fine with that. The idea was that someday I’d get so bowled over, I’d get the big picture all at once. It would be like a circuit of the philosophy of Jesus and my vision of God. The two would click, and zap. I’d get the charge, and then, like one of those gilded roaches, there would be no looking back.

The Lius’ Pastor McClaren loved to preach and read from his scripture that he’d selected for the day and extemporize and tell anecdotes about what he’d seen and heard during the week. He had a big cross, maybe five
feet high, hanging up above him, and a smaller one on his lectern, and a cross on his robe, and he had about two hundred people filling the pews of the funny old cement-block building. Little kids passed around polished monkeypod wood bowls to take collection, and Mr. and Mrs. Liu used to sit with me and look up front with their gentle faces, and Geoffrey and Julie used to sit together holding hands. As for me, I sat on the edge of my pew. I was on tenterhooks. I was just trying so hard—not so much to understand, but to believe. I was very ignorant, so a lot of times I didn’t get down beneath the beauty and the poetry of what the pastor said. I only perceived the surface, and the shape of the words, rather than all the connotations he was assuming everyone knew. The rapture, for example, didn’t have a lot of technical meaning for me, but just sounded very sexy. Sort of like Christ and the Church finally getting back together after they’d been apart so long. I was reading in my annotated Bible the Lius had given me, and I’d found this Song of Solomon, which the annotations said was all about Christ and His Church being lovers. And the Church was this beautiful virginal girl who had taken up with all these men who weren’t good for her, but just the same, she ran everywhere searching for Christ who had been her first love, and better for her than anyone she’d been with since. And that really touched me, having this whole ballad with these two beings, the Church and Christ, who longed for each other constantly and searched for each other, and just so wanted that rapture of being together again. “Oh that I could kiss your lips; your lips are sweeter than wine” or “Oh that his left hand were under my head, and his right hand embracing me!”

Music was the high point of the service. There wasn’t any choir or organ, but everybody sang the hymns. All that harmony was soothing after a sermon where you had to seriously get your head around Ezekiel’s wheels with wings and wheels with eyes and everything spinning, so that picturing the scene just about blew your mind.

I had so much trouble with the concepts that the Lius wanted me to take formal instruction from Pastor McClaren and also to join their Bible study group. So I did. I appreciated it that they were trying so hard to mentor me, even though I didn’t have the understanding to start moving toward conversion. I hadn’t heard Jesus speak to me yet, but the Lius weren’t worried, since they relied on faith. I wasn’t worried either. Not yet, anyway. My vision was still fresh in my mind. And in terms of religions I was just starting to look at my options!

Revival

Q
UITE
often in Greater Love I would feel it—this greater love shining down upon me from the Bible study class and the altar and the cross overhead. This gentle warmth would fill me—the whole idea of gentleness and mercy; and I could feel just a brush of this incredibly tender holy spirit that wasn’t far away or out there at all, but dwelt in me, in my own personal tabernacle—my heart. And I would leave Saturday-night Bible study with my Bible in my arms and I’d step out into the Hawaiian winter night, which was so mellow and warm, and I’d walk along, and my whole being would be relaxed and happy, and I’d take the bus home to Kaimuki humming hymns. But then when I got to my house there would be cars packed together all along both sides of the street, and the house would be rocking and shaking. There’d be another party going on, and the whole place streaming with Baron and T-Bone’s friends, and their friends’ friends, and their acquaintances. And, it wasn’t as if I didn’t enjoy a party, but right after Bible study it was not the atmosphere I was looking for.

Having envisioned God and moved, and started a new job and all, I have to admit, all of that got old pretty quick. Now I felt this longing to move again! Up and go to Molokai, or Walden, or Inisfree! Or west, to
the western islands. To go somewhere with no boomers and woofers vibrating the floor at night, and no gold earrings to sell. To go off alone—or even better to go off alone with someone. Except who would that be? It was kind of self-defeating to keep thinking of Brian.

A lot of times I just stood around at work and sighed. “I wish I could go somewhere just to be with my thoughts,” I told Mrs. Liu at the store.

“Somewhere you can pray,” she said.

“Yes!” I burst out. I flung myself down on the counter. “Where I can pray in peace.”

“Not on glass,” she chided. I was always leaning against those glass jewelry cases, and Mrs. Liu was always wiping off the smudges. The Lius were very neat. Mr. Liu wore aloha shirts, and Mrs. Liu wore cotton muumuus, but they were always pressed.

“You need a retreat,” Mrs. Liu said.

“I
wish
.”

“Our Father,” she murmured, “please make Sharon a retreat.”

“Amen,” I said.

Then the very next day, boom! With that kind of beginner’s luck that people sometimes have when they first start praying for things—I got this great opportunity! It happened like this. I strolled by the Women’s Studies Program to see Corinne, and there I ran into the psych prof Margo who used to tip me off on gigs at the medical school where you could be examined or studied for extra cash, and she started telling me about her Mind-Body-Spirit Exploration Seminar, which she and her husband, Harrison, held at Christmastime as an annual couples’ retreat. See, Margo and Harrison were scholars who didn’t feel totally fulfilled in the ivory tower. Every year they organized this great big workshop for couples about self-realization in relationships. They had actually written a book,
Our Partners, Ourselves
, and this was their chance to open up their research to the community. They had about one hundred couples coming out between Christmas and New Year’s, for a teaching and learning vacation, a vacation exploration where couples could relax at the Hilton Hawaiian Village and swim and watch the hula shows and eat, drink, and be merry and have the time of their lives, but also have an opportunity to learn about each other and grow together, and basically just remember what they saw in each other in the first place and catch up on where they were now at. But the program had grown so
successful that Margo could use some help. So she told me I could man the registration desk and be a troubleshooter. For this they would
pay
me, while I was participating and learning as much as I wanted about how to realize myself and enhance my relationships, et cetera! So of course, I saw immediately that this was not exactly what Mrs. Liu had been praying for, but it wasn’t too far off either! I signed on.

R
OLLING
up to the hotel in tour buses, the one hundred couples looked a lot older than I’d expected, and tireder, which was understandable, since they’d been on long flights. They got out where Margo and Harrison and I stood to greet them; and they looked like moles blinking in the sunlight, surprised out of their winter slumbers. We had to guide these folks along and help them through the shops that fringed the bottom of the hotel and into the hotel proper, all beige stucco and adorned by a mosaic rainbow.

The main thing about this hotel was it had its own lagoon carved from the beach and enclosed with cement pylons topped with lava rocks to look more natural. There were guaranteed no waves inside that lagoon. Still, it was pretty in a greenish way. And when I saw my room, man, I wasn’t disappointed. It was a far cry from the hotel I’d stayed in when I first got to Hawaii. There was a dresser with a television, and a bathroom with towels. There were two queen-size beds, just for me! There was even a balcony looking out on the ocean. I’d come up in the world! At least temporarily.

Then there was the food. We had these buffet dinners that were part of the package deal, and there were salads, and beets, and steamed asparagus, and potatoes au gratin, and cauliflower, and did I say soup? and fish in cream sauce, and spicy chicken wings, and broiled tomatoes topped with bread crumbs, and then right at the end of the line, there was roast beef carved by a chef, and you could get this humongous slab, only there wasn’t any space left on your plate to put it, so the chef would have to lay it right on top. I was in heaven. At breakfast the next morning we had omelets and bacon and hash browns in silver dishes covered with silver domes on top, and glazed pastries, and toast cut in triangles that came prebuttered. I ate as much as my skinny bod could hold. I could have stayed all day at breakfast, but we had to start the morning session.

Everyone trooped into the Prince Kuhio Ballroom, which was set up
with these lovely yet quite uncomfortable gilt chairs. Margo and Harrison presided at a table with a white skirt.

“Aloha,” Margo said.

“Aloha,” said everybody.

“You can do better than that,” she said.
“Aloha!
”

“
Aloha!”
said everybody.

“Now one more time. ALOOOOOHA!”

“ALOOOOOHA!”

“Welcome to Hawaii,” Margo said. “And welcome to the first day of the rest of your lives together.”

Everyone applauded.

Then Harrison gave the introduction on the Body, Mind, Spirit triangle, which led to the day’s first Our Partners Ourselves exercise.

“Body. Mind. Spirit,” Harrison said. He was tall and originally southern, although he’d lived in Hawaii for years. He just had a little bit of a southern accent left, so his voice had sort of a soft center. He was actually a little younger than Margo, I think, and he had a lot of brown hair, and a moustache and deeply sympathetic brown eyes. Even in his aloha shirt you could picture him as some kind of Civil War cavalryman. He was really a very handsome man. The women in the group totally responded to him. “When we love,” Harrison said, “what do we love? Do we love the whole person? For what they truly are? Or are we attracted to one facet? Are we attracted to one side of the triangle? And if it is one side, then which side is it? Can we truly identify which is the single part we’ve come to see?”