The Ruins of California (37 page)

Saturday nights we went out. The North Shore was eternal high school—people drinking bottles of beer in their cars while they drove around trying to find where the best party was. We made the rounds every week, to Jerry’s house, to Leftie’s house, to Whitman’s—for a little dope, blender drinks, some dancing, or a few lines of cocaine. Tomas always had some on hand, probably the reason he was always greeted with great enthusiasm and affection wherever he went. Even by the standards of the day, and of the North Shore, Tomas was a cokehead. It wasn’t disgraceful in those days, but mystifyingly glamorous. Cocaine made you funny and smart. Cocaine made you sociable and lively and as close to urbane as imaginable in a place like Hawaii. Everybody had that much
figured out. Grass made you Zen-like and contemplative. Alcohol made you bold (sometimes obnoxiously so). Cocaine made you irresistible—particularly in your own mind, which turns out to be the only place that counts. By the time the summer ended and I turned eighteen, when I wasn’t stoned or drunk or high, I was bragging about how wasted I’d been the day before—while desperately trying to employ as much island slang as possible.
Da kine
meant something was really good, or “the kind.”
Ono
meant something was the best, or number one.
“Ono da kine bes pakalolo”
was the way an idiot haole (white person) would say they’d had some really great grass. Then, if you wanted to say, in simple druggie jargon, that you’d had lots of toot, there was always, “My nose was packed all night, bra.” For my birthday Whitman brought me flowers and my father sent a check for $1,818.18. Tomas gave me an old movie poster and three grams of cocaine. It was gone in a week.

At the onset of October—definitely still summer, no matter what the calendar said—I began to fill out forms for college. I answered all the questions—crowding information about myself in the narrow blanks—signed releases for transcripts and SAT scores, wrote a pathetic essay about what my camera meant to me and how I could make the world a better place with it. (I even mentioned wanting to be a war correspondent.) After Whitman proofread it, I drove to the Haleiwa post office, a dilapidated green cottage with full trash cans and worn-out linoleum, and stood next to the mail slot marked
MAINLAND.
The white paper envelope disappeared into the dark slot. It felt like stuffing a note in a bottle, a long shot and a faraway dream that I wasn’t sure was possible—or even mine.

The sun. The cornmeal sand. The blue waves. Even Tomas, and his sense of humor—his way of looking at life with a kindly, bemused,
slightly out-of-it smile—was like a wonderful dream, and sunny, endlessly sunny and easy. Waves of good things kept coming to me, and pleasure, and I felt so good all the time that I couldn’t make distinctions between my feelings anymore, because they were all much the same, almost as if the tropics had cooked the complications out of me. Any lingering anger and resentments seemed gone forever. Life was good. Life was easy. That’s what I kept telling myself—the little inconveniences about living in Hawaii weren’t going to get to me anymore. I’d gotten used to waiting for twenty minutes for the attendant at the gas station to fill up the truck. I’d gotten used to slow waitresses and bad food in restaurants, to melted ice in my mixed drinks and tepid beer in bars, to the laid-back shopkeepers who barely lifted a finger to help. Everything was
ono
and
da kine
, and everybody was on “Hawaii time,” including me.

It seems crazy now, but I’d never thought about how Tomas had built the house—or where his money came from. Maybe he’d made a lot as a set designer, in the old days. Maybe he’d been a smart investor. How did I know? Money was mysterious and magical to me then—it came and went, had rules of its own that I didn’t know about, that never made sense to me. So I guess it seemed natural for Tomas to have mysterious money. Like Whitman and lots of other guys on the North Shore, he rarely seemed to be working. Sometimes he made calls. Sometimes he drove around. He had “crews” of guys at his disposal, but I assumed they were gardening crews or stonemasons who were building fake waterfalls all over Oahu.

Whitman was the one to spill the beans. “He’s a dealer, you innocent.”

I chose to ignore that for a while. Not months. Not forever. But
just long enough so that when it came back to me, this information seemed more like a recurring dream that might not be real. Everything in paradise felt negotiable anyway. Not quite real, not quite happening. Over the summer, when I heard from Abuelita that Robbie’s father had died, I hadn’t sent a note or even called. So far from home, and so far from what was considered civilization, the old rules didn’t seem to apply.

Or maybe I was just too stoned. I’d go down the hill and smoke dope with Whitman, then run into Leftie, or Jerry, and get a pill of some kind, just for fun. And then I’d come back up the mountain and do a few lines of cocaine with Tomas. Sometimes the lower half of my face was so numb I wasn’t sure if it was still there. Sometimes I was afraid to eat—worried I’d bite off my tongue or start chewing on my cheeks.

“So are you really a dealer?” I asked Tomas one night. I’d decided that I could live without him, I suppose, and that I wasn’t interested in fixing him either.

He didn’t miss a beat. He didn’t seem stunned either. Being in Hawaii for six years had removed that option from his personality. “Who told you that, Little Girl?” he said, chopping another line.

“Whitman.”

Tomas nodded and just kept nodding. Very slowly. He pursed his lips and then smirked. “Well, I guess, then, I’m supposed to tell you that he’s a junkie. Or maybe you’ve figured that out already.”

I
didn’t leave Hawaii right away. And I can’t really say why—denial, listlessness, or indecision. Maybe I didn’t have any energy left for consciousness. Winter came. The air temperature hovered in the mid-seventies, and aside from more rain clouds passing over
my towel on the beach and occasionally drenching me, the days of sunshine and perfection continued. The humidity lessened, or I got used to it. The waves picked up and up and up—grew as tall and thick as buildings—and I barely recognized my old beach spots anymore. The storms took away the sand and a few other things, too. As Jerry had said on my first day in Haleiwa, there were supposedly seven guys for every girl on the North Shore—a nice ratio, if you could find the guys anymore. They were in the water at Pipeline or Sunset or just hanging out at any one of the beaches that ran the length of the North Shore. There were dozens of them, surf spots with informal names and shifting locations due to changing sandbars. One lazy afternoon, after Whitman had come back to his house all tired and worn out, almost nodding off, we ate dried cuttlefish and Maui Chips and drank beers and listed the nicknames of the surf spots in order: Velseyland, Secretspots, Backyards, Sunset, Kammieland, Rockies, Gas Chambers, Pipeline Lefts, Backdoor Pipeline, Off the Walls, Shit-Fucks, Bonzai Rocks, Leons, Log Cabins, Changes, Daystar, Rainbows, Avalanche, Haleiwa, Himalayas, Laniakea, Chums Reef, Marijuana’s, All Rights, Waimea Bay.

That afternoon I remember feeling as though I’d lived in Hawaii my whole life. My skin was so dark, people asked if I was part Hawaiian. That pleased me. I’d nod vaguely. Maybe I was. Did it matter anymore?

By Christmas, like a true native, I’d even gotten bored of the beach. The waves were too big for swimming anyway.

“What are you reading?” Dad asked on the phone.

“Nothing.”

“You haven’t sent me a new batch of pictures in a long time.”

“Haven’t taken any.”

“Are you worried about getting in?”

“Getting in where?”

“College.”

“Oh.” The application was something else I kept forgetting about. It seemed like years ago—another lifetime ago, before the big waves and the surfing tournaments and all the winter parties, which were now nonstop—that I’d sent the thing off. “I don’t really care,” I said. “I mean, I was into it when I sent it, I really was. But now I don’t really see the point. Maybe I don’t see the point of anything.”

“You don’t?”

“Not really. It’s weird. But living here—the perfect weather just goes on and on. It almost creeps into your soul and bleaches it out. I mean, there’s a wreath on the Star Market, and lights on a few palm trees, but it doesn’t feel like Christmas. It doesn’t matter. I hate Christmas anyway.”

“No, you don’t.”

“I don’t?”

“I’m the one who hates Christmas—not you,” he said. “I know what the problem is.”

“Please don’t say I need to come home.”

“No,” he said. “You need to quit smoking pot.”

His voice was very certain, had a kind of firmness that I hadn’t heard since I was very young. When I didn’t say anything right away, he lightened up. “For two weeks. That’s all. Just try it.”

After two weeks, he asked, “Feel any better?”

“What do you mean?”

“Your disappearing joie de vivre—and new hatred of Christmas. Your apathy.”

“Nothing’s changed,” I said. “I’m fine anyway. I just don’t feel anything. Well, maybe I feel a tiny bit better. I bought one of
Madam X’s books, the kind of thing I never read, and I actually liked it for a while.”

“Oh, that’s not a good sign. What else are you doing—besides the pot?”

“Not much,” I said. “Whatever turns up. Sometimes a Quaalude here and there. Cocaine once in a—”

“
Cocaine?
” He raised his voice, almost to a shout. “How stupid. Who gave you permission to do that?”

I didn’t say anything for a long time. I do remember thinking it seemed a little hypocritical for him to be complaining about my drug use.

“You’re drinking, too?”

“Where are you going with this? You make it sound like
Lost Weekend
or something. It’s not that bad. And I’m not depressed or anything. I just…The world seems flat. That’s all. I’m flatlining and floating all the time. Nothing sticks. You know what I mean? I’m not hooked on anything—it’s almost the opposite. I couldn’t get hooked on anything if I tried.”

“Another two weeks,” he said. “You’ve got to go another two weeks. Stop everything—whatever you’re taking or drinking or smoking. You’ll feel better soon. You’re just in a slog.”

It might have been a week later—I was driving to meet Tomas at Kammieland for some bodysurfing, and on the way I saw a dark horse in a meadow. There was a young girl on the horse, and there was something about her, and the horse, and how they moved together, that made me start to cry. The next day, when I was shopping in the Star Market, I saw a newsmagazine with Jerry Brown on the cover and felt homesick, so terribly homesick. He’d been the governor of California for so long I’d forgotten about him too. That
evening, as a test, I picked up Madam X’s book again and tore through it in one sitting.

The next morning, when it was still too early to call my father, I went down to the rocks in front of Whitman’s and took pictures of the local kids fishing for eels with their drop lines. They stood so proudly with their buckets and smiled so hugely for my camera. When Whitman wandered out, I took a sleepy picture of him in the morning light. Whitman—golden, so golden and brown and smiling at me.

In the next week, I had so many momentary epiphanies that it would be difficult to chronicle them. They came sporadically, in a rush, almost as if all the thoughts that I hadn’t had all summer and fall were now desperately trying to find their way out. I was alive with thoughts, and reconsiderations, and feelings, and almost manic energy. Mostly I was just alive. I bought coffee and a newspaper at the café in Kua Aina, and while I was drinking the coffee, I came across an article with a New Delhi dateline, and suddenly I remembered, almost from the depths of my being, that there was a real place called New Delhi and it was still there, along with the rest of the world, teeming with stories and people, teeming with life, beckoning to me and calling me. I wanted so much to be there, in the world again, and not pacified in a tropical haze of adolescent dreams and decadence and stupidity. What was I doing with my life? I lifted my head from the paper and slowly looked around the Kua Aina café and felt, for the first time in a long time—perhaps ever—that I knew who I was. But how had I wound up in Hawaii?

In January, when the news came from University of California that I’d been admitted, I was capable of wild excitement. I couldn’t wait to buy books and notebooks, to start classes, to feel cool weather again. I stretched out in bed and dreamed about needing
to wear a sweater. I thought about Wolfback—its wonderful fog and gloomy microclimate. The gray sky, the chill, the dark clouds, the windswept beach. But how could I leave Tomas?

“You’ve got to be honest with him,” Dad advised in the serious tone he always adopted when he was giving me love advice. “None of the head games you played on David. If you’re going to enjoy the freedom and pleasures of adulthood, then you’ve got to act like an adult yourself. Even if it’s just an act, or a rehearsal. Be an adult. Level with him. Simply tell the man how you really feel. Tell him it’s hard to leave—but you have to—and cry if you feel like crying. He’s a decent guy. He’ll understand how you feel.”

A few days later, a copy of James Abbott McNeill Whistler’s
The Gentle Art of Making Enemies
arrived in the mail with a funny note. Dad called more frequently than before, asking if I needed anything. He seemed as energized and excited by my return as I was. “I’ve made the most perfect apricot scones,” he said one night. “Too bad you’re not here. My best batch ever.”

And Whitman? Tomas could be wrong, I told myself. Was it my business anyway? But Whitman did seem thin, and distracted. He fell asleep in the middle of dinner and was out of money sometimes. When the swells came, sometimes he didn’t bother going into the water. Why didn’t I just ask him? In books and movies, people always ask direct questions and get direct answers. In life it always seemed too hard. I was afraid of losing him. Even though, in some way, I suppose that I already had.

I
t was a long flight back to civilization. At the last second, I wasn’t sure if I was ready. The airport felt too busy and hectic. The plane felt strange and futuristic and way too clean. I ordered a gin
and tonic from the hostess, and then another, and moved to the back of the plane, to the smoking section, and pulled out a fresh pack of Camel cigarettes—and I smoked them. I felt sorry for myself, I suppose. I wondered what the waves were doing at Waimea. I wondered if the local kids were fishing on the rocks in front of Whitman’s house. I wondered who’d look after the garden at Tomas’s house now and whether I’d really come back over the summer like I said I would.