The Atomic Hula - 1959
By Mike Marino

The Atomic Hula covers the years from 1959 to 1968 in a fictionalized account of coming of age in an age when the race for space was rocketing out of Cold War Control and the Beats were going down in a sunset of poetry as the flower power generation was beginning to take root to replace them in the garden. It's the life and times as seen through the minds eye and experiences of author Mike Marino who left home at the age of 15 escaping the industrial boredom of the Midwest for the life of a runaway making his living and way through life anyway he could on the beaches and streets of Honolulu, Los Angeles, San Francisco and on the road in the great American west.
The characters are real...however, their names have been changed to protect the not so innocent...except for the author. He stands guilty as charged.....
The Atomic Hula concludes with an interview with Mike Marino about those purple hazed and double dazed days that appeared in an international magazine, Boomers International.

1959 - Detroit, Michigan
The Blue Collar Red, White & Screwed
Chapter One
When you're an only child, you only have the creations of your own imagination to shoot and kill. Unless, of course, a tree on your front lawn drops dead and keels over. Then the world is your childhood oyster.
1959. Detroit, Michigan.
The Motor City. While the rest of the world is engaged in the nuclear muscle-flexing of ice-Cold War machismo, modern era Greco-Roman action figures, high and crazed on a full metal jacket of political and atomic steroids, the Diego Rivera landscape of Detroit remained steadfast, unmoved, and unflappable. It remained a blue-collar landfill of socialism and sludge.
Alien beings in time warp coveralls from the Planet Heavy Metal entered the auto plants, like so many inanimate and lobotomized rag dolls with their heads torn off. Eye sockets, just holes to let in the light and let out the dark. The mondo monotony of the assembly line . . . parts of product, gleaming, laid out in perfect symmetrical rhythm, like long white lines of cocaine.
The impersonal noise of manufacturing was deafening, deadening and the union dues were simply a pay as you go, pay as you work and pay to work component of the vampiric business of daily life in the plants. The U.A.W. and Teamsters—Maestros of the Masses and Minions—conducted a surreal symphony of industrial-strength dung as the blue collar-ballet and dance of the drones played to a riveted audience of riveters and riveteers.
The Detroit River, which ran the length of the city, was a mélange of "lakers," frighteningly huge freighters that were home to cargo-ladened holds and manned by salty dog sailors, those jaunty Nauti-boys who ply the waters of the Great Lakes, just as blood courses along the long and winding arterial routes of the human body to give and maintain its life. The lakers kept the life of commerce flowing and breathing freely from steel mill to manufacturing plant, bows slicing through the waters with the ease of a welder's torch in the hands of an artisan cutting through metal. Duluth to Cleveland, and back again, back and forth, to and fro, heave and ho! Majestic and mighty and almost silent, except for a dull hum of the engines, as you watched, neck craning, the floating flotilla of freighters passed by from the docks and rat infested riverfront of the Port of Detroit.
Flags flapped in the breezes that came ashore from Canada across the river. Beer and breezes, the natural products of the Great White North; then, the ore and the steel transported upriver and downriver, destined for delivery to the smelting plants and auto factories, to be alchemized and transformed, magically it seemed, from raw material into Gross National Product. Henry Ford's version of a mechanical magician, magically pulling a rabbit out of the hat, or sawing a sequined girl in half, only this wasn't smoke and mirrors. It was pure unadulterated capitalism and industry.
The Emerald City of the Working Class also had a veneer of pollution, haze, dust and rust: a statically charged steely forest, thick with belching smokestacks, red hot extruded steel and sunset orange iron . . . the ménage a troit of De Troit. The high performance, torqued-up stallions of the highway charged off the assembly lines, a herd in heat, wild eyed, looking for asphalt pastures of plenty.
The collars of the card-carrying blue, proud of the red, white and blue product produced and comfortable in their roles as knights of the Union Table, Lancelot’s all. They emptied their black lunch boxes of five-hour-old sandwiches, hard cheese, tomatoes and prosciutto . . . grabbed a quick drink from a silver thermos and waited.
They waited for the blue collar burlesque to begin, the Dance of the Vehicular Veil performed by the wench of the wrench. Finally, she entered the banquet hall, her face a monochromatic gray industrial-age blank. The faceless one of the machine-age whore with caked on, way too thick layers of lipstick and racks and stacks of Rouge Plant rouge.
The Cold War was a crazed bitch in heat, teeth bared, growling and hungry, with an insatiable appetite for insanity . . . mouth foaming, frothing and wet. Caddy tailfins were reaching a post pubescent crescendo in ground-to-fin ratios: heaving hard-ons, leaping skyward with a blue collar bulge and the decade of innocence was about to plummet from its pedestal of Motor City marble and crash-land into a million tiny fragments onto the floor, falling gracelessly from grace into the abyss of space and time to make way for arrival of Holy Hell. The 1960's. The age of anarchy, assassination and Aquarius.
The hardhats of hard hearted Detroit, the unfeeling town without blue collar pity, purity or piety, were only interested in paychecks and parity, not parody, or even supremacy for that matter . . . in space, or anywhere else. The plebian philosophers who later espoused the love it or leave middle finger answer to dissent hadn't risen to the surface yet, like so much bubbling and dangerous volcanic gas. Christ, we won the big one didn't we? WWII, yeah, the Big One, the one that counted. Who cared about one more pin the tail on the donkey commie red star on the Asian map? Little slant-eyed mud hole nobody ever heard of anyway, "Exceptin' for those freakin' fag French, spinning their colonial steel belts in the mud and rice paddies, getting creamed-cheesed like a French pastry on the battlefield . . . waitin' for Uncle Sam to help them out, again, and again, and kick some ass." Ah . . . Lafayette, we are here!
Mickey, the Dago kid, was just 11-years-old and the last thing on his mind was the nightmare of a blood soaked Vietnam that lurked camouflaged in the booby trapped bushes of his future, or in the wah-wah days of purple haze in San Francisco that would entertain, change and alter him in the intervening years of maturation. The cold nights and vacant days of train hoppers and pill poppers, facedown junkies and drunks and the vortex of feather boa boys and double-breasted dykes.
Right now, he had more important matters to attend to. "Gunsmoke" was on TV tonight and yesterday, his second cousin had given him his first hard-on and he had made a mess.
Mickey's Mack Avenue was another small piece of the ethnic jigsaw puzzle of Detroit: dark, secretive Italians; big, hunkering Poles; oom-pah-pah Germans and enough drunken Irish to fill the ethnic cup to overflowing. "Give us your tired, your hungry and your poor. Your beat, your downtrodden, your drunks and your whores. Give us all you got. Why not?"
Mack Avenue ran the racial gauntlet from the inner core to the outer limits. All the way, eastward through the cacophony of the city's ethnicity. Neighborhoods. Corner BBQ's, soot, smoke and pork, beer and betting parlors, rhythm and blues, old Negro buses cranking along the tired old concrete of Gratiot Ave, Mack and Chene. Blue collars, black skin, white skin, brown skin. The Melting Pot of the Kingdom of Detroit, but when Mack Avenue hit the Mediterranean flashpoint of Three Mile Drive, it was Mickey's world, an 11-year-old private preserve of only child make-believe world, as only an only child could fashion.
An Eye-talian neighborhood to be sure. Fresh baked sweetbreads, fat plates of piled-high pasta and meats, blood-red and delicioso. It had enough bad ass badda-bing and badda-boom to ignite megatons of politically incorrect dynamite. A neighborhood full of vowel-ending names . . . Scalisi, Marino, Vitti, Russo, Cusamano and Bommarito. A raucous, vociferous hand waving Roman Catholic city-state of old world/new world peasants . . . kids, families, hustlers and wise guys. The perfect backdrop to grow up in and hold onto for the rest of your life.
It had it all, especially the alleys, those damned alleys that were the perfect venue of play for urban kids to knock around and kick the can, or let loose at stick ball. Sometimes, the alleys were transformed from concrete and broken glass into deep, old-west Hopalong Cassidy canyons of twisted boulder formations—giant red rock, complete with raging, heart-pounding rushing whitewater rivers and steep watchful cliffs. A mystical 1800's Geronimo setting where cowboys, cavalry and Indians fought and killed each other daily: one side in the name of "get the fuck out of my way," American politically sanctioned westward expansion and the other side strictly trying to hold on to dear life and to preserve an ancient heritage.
The same Mack Avenue valley listened intently as the hoof beats and war whoops disappeared into the mist, fog and shroud of imagination, only to be replaced by the sounds of many mechanized divisions creaking and roaring into the forests outside of Bastogne. This time, the horses were replaced by the armored cavalry of General Patton and they would defeat Nazi Germany once again, this time with pop guns and Daisy Air Rifles.
In child war, there is only victory or defeat for one side or the other. No death camps, no Auschwitz, no atrocities. No tyranny, no tyrants. No geo-politics at play, and no real dead to lie there bleeding that have to be mended on the battlefield before being sent home, in pieces, to live out life lifelessly in a wheelchair as a reward for service—with a Purple Heart bedpan medal at the VA Hospital.
At the end of child-battle, the two sides would simply break rank and roles and retreat, armed not with bullets and grenades, but nickels clenched in tiny fists as they raced to the soda fountain for double dips. Vanilla Cokes. Cherry Cokes. Boston Coolers. Vernors and Faygo. It was a sweet toothed unconditional surrender!
As they sat at the counter, big frothy, frosty, Boston Coolers in front of them, Raymond, one of the non-Italian, yet budding Polish philosopher kids Mickey hung out with, scratched his head and thought, "Think dyin' hurts, Mickey? You know, real hurt, I mean?" Mickey had to think hard about that one. He had only seen fake TV death, rich in black and white drama, not ruby red blood. Not real life death. Ever. Yet.
"Dunno. Maybe a little bit. Ain't had no one die yet that I know personally. I know when the Lone Ranger shoots someone on TV, they just fall off a horse, clutch their chest and moan a little. Never see no blood or nuthin', but it probably does hurt a little bit. I just don't know for sure." Somehow, Raymond wasn't totally reassured. "Maybe someday we'll find out. If it hurts and all, I mean. I hope it doesn't hurt too bad, though. That would kill me."
Mickey thought about that last comment his close friend, perennial pessimist and die hard necrophobe had uttered. An only child with divorced parents in the '50's, yeah, he got lonely at times. He hadn't seen his real dad in quite awhile, while his friends went home each night to a semi-fabulous fifties nuclear family. Mom, Dad and all the appropriate siblings.
Mickey's house had the love, the emotion, but not the "dad" to take him by the hand to "father-son this and that’s. Ballgames with giant sodas and too many hotdogs. It was as though his dad were dead, the invisible man, and that left a huge hole and a gut hurt in the living Mickey. He looked once again at his friend Raymond and said, "You know, dyin' does hurt a little, m'be a lot I guess, for the dead guy. Hurts the living even more." Raymond was puzzled, shrugged and started to finish his drink and looked at Mickey. "Dead is dead," is all he said.
Nighttime brought out the flashlights for flashlight tag on warm summer nights as only the Midwest can offer. Fireflies and frogs in the bushes. The humid aroma of bushes and plants. The gnats and mosquitoes and the sounds of boys yelling, "Bang, you're dead!" followed by an age-old one act play where a trusted amigo would feign death and drop to the ground, only to rise again later and be your best friend once more, until another time, when once again, one of you would fall in imaginary battle killed by imaginary bullets from an imaginary gun.
The hot dust sweat drops of play and the illusionary acrid, wincing, battlefield, gray haze gun barrel-blue smoke would clear. Peace treaties signed, sighed and sealed as the sun sank vertically beneath the plumb line of horizon. Fade sky blue to sky black. The impressions, imprints and footprints of the daily play-dramas would be left behind in the alleys to be covered over, obfuscated by layers of fading memory, to live out their lives as archeologically archived fossils embedded in a womb of hardened mud-rock.
Former generals, four stars and all, and western heroes, good guys and bad guys, white hats and black hats, answering to a higher authority, parental, and again, like magic, they were transformed into "just kids" again, stripped of whatever rank of glory they held in the false reality of the realm of play. Voices in a fierce vocal volley resonated like a thudding cannonade from the front porches.
Every kid heard his name called out, the names live ordinance fired in a barrage of artillery fire in a clomp, clomp, clomping marching band Marine-like roll call with a double time cadence. Mickey would hustle along, quickly, his brisk pace carrying him the half block or so along the elegant regal rows of the stately, royal canopy/crown of elms that flanked both sides of the street, up and down Three Mile Drive.
Tall, magnificent gladiators, woody sentinels of obvious Roman birth, silent stewards guarding Mickey's kingdom against invasion . . . Goths, Huns, Normans, Saxons, Cossacks, Redcoats and worse, the kids (Polacks mainly) from Bedford Avenue.
Crowns of leaves and nests, bird dung jewels, summer green, fall brilliant, winter naked, branches extending outward in respectful salute. Hail, Caesar! Hail, yeah! It was a good day on the battlefield of play today, lots of dead to count, but tomorrow would be even better. It was the last day of school until summer: the nuns, married to the Lord and priests, secretive in gowns, dreaming of their favorite choir boy, would go into hibernation until September.
The battle had been won, but now summer was here and it was time to win the whole fucking war
Chapter Two
The Detroit of the Nighttime Gods. The god's masturbated and the sky obliged their self gratification by ejaculating and filling the heavens with the sperm-mess of many millions, billions, trillions of tiny stars. Some seen, some hidden, hiding other solar systems in their cloak. They never tired of their game of solar hide and seek, hidden from view in plain light, not so plain sight. They whispered, conspired like pulp fiction double agents in gum shoe trench coat Prague, sending coded secret messages, streaking across the sky-universe to be deciphered by the deranged, for it was only they, the mentals, rocking back and forth, who could hear the psychotic voices from the other side.
Some voices, real and sweet, and by reason of sanity only, spoke volumes, in wet tongues of reality to the coming end of the school year that lay just over the horizon, tomorrow, at Gary Cooper High Noon. The bad guys who dished out homework by the bucket load, would crumple in a bloody heap, broken and dusty, brought down by a fictional Colt cartridge, while the school bell would ring out its ding-dong, bing-bong Halleluiah song. From then on, it would be an endless summer of Tom Sawyer days and Huck Finn nights.
Mickey, sometimes his friends called him Mikey just to irritate him, lay quietly in is room, his protective womb, as he had every night since moving into his grandparents house in 1949. Mother and child, victims of a devastating divorce. Only one year old at the time, it had been the only home he ever really knew, loved, and wanted to return to time and time again. The march of time, the biological reality of random deaths, and his own wanderings in the psychotic deserts for 40 days and 40 nights would eventually end this false mirage of comfort.
Emotional duct tape was useless in mending the fractured fences and the mirror shattering senses of loss he would feel in the future. An unwilling pilot without navigational equipment, he would watch, hermetically sealed in a psychedelic vacuum-capsule, as he spun around at ever increasing gravity defying speed and G-force, and then catapulted into space into an erratic orbit of his own calculations and design.
There were two rooms across the hall, bedrooms, secret chambers, were the two brothers, to each other, and the two uncles to Mikey listened to music every night. Tom the Older and Bill the Younger. Tom, soon to be married and out of the house, had survived WWII riding in a big bleeding bucket of Patton's metal all the way across Germany and on to, and beyond victory. Bill, would soon, in the early 1960's, trade in his Impala convertible and join the JFK's green machine, the new Elvis Army with "yes sirs" and "no sirs" but, within a year would shed his GI skin to emerge as a civilian and schizophrenic, deadly and deranged as a Davy Crockett with rifle in hand.
Soon he would be sedated on the very worst Fed-meds that the gummint's money could buy and then closeted away, forgotten, hopped up at half-way houses in Detroit's inner city where they hide the crushed, crippled dark angels of society.
Mickey’s eyes began to close, watching the movies that appear on eyelids. His mind danced and laughed at the instant re-plays of the Three Stooges that filled the small TV screen that night, a special treat of boinks, doinks and "soitenly's". Mayhem by madmen as only Dr. Howard, Dr. Fine, and Dr. Howard could produce.
He began to drift off to sleep, like a wet, slippery, quiet and dark Mississippi river log cutting a path in the silent waters, guided in its quest by the moonlight. Tom and Bill, the Older and the Younger, remember the uncles? They were from two different ages, locked in a difference of generational opinion of melody and lyrics. Chuck Berry was beating off to a savage rock n' roll, sweat drenched backbeat from Bills room. Ol' Chuck was frothing, looking for Maybelline at every juke joint in East St. Louis, and trying to get seatbelts and bra straps loose. St. Louie, St. Louie, while from Tom's room, some primo Prima, Louie, Louie, growled for mercy like an animal groveling at Keely Smiths feet...spiked heels jammed firmly into his back. Dat ol' black magic, it got me unner it's spell.
The nuns and the priests were already busying themselves tonight for the last day of school until summer ended... and the cataclysm of catechism would begin afresh. Mikey smiled, and then winced. Tonight, may have been the property of Larry, Moe and Curly, but tomorrow belonged to Jesus, Mary and Joseph!
1959.
The end of the school year. The end of the decade. Eight years of Dwight, days and nights, would now make way for Camelot and the arrival of JFK, the political Lancelot. Korea, attached to the Chinese mainland shaped like a peninsular penis, or Florida, would step aside to allow another world stage to play host to American defeat.
This time deep in the steamy, mosquito repellant, boot and flesh rotting jungles of Vietnam. Korea was at a standstill at the no-mans kill zone. Up North it was Pyongyang Poon-tang while down south the Broadway boys were belting out their rendition of "I'm a Seoul Man". Soon the strange sounding towns would shift from Korea to Vietnam...Hanoi...Da Nang...Saigon...Long Wang...Suc Muc Dik.
1959.
The year that Vietnam had pulled a rabbit from its hat and had produced the first unofficial American casualties. Two dead, one wounded, officially. Officially, these were unofficial deaths, of course, off the record, but, real blood nonetheless, and real silence, and of course, real dead, officially unofficial...of course.
On television, the drag queen of the small screen, Uncle Miltie would do a Berle-esque striptease to shed his black and white frockery and defer to a fabulously accessorized colored peacock and a cast of technicolor thousands. 1959. The end of a decade's Haiku.
Mickey dressed in a hurry and grabbed that lunch bag that no matter how well food is wrapped inside, it still leaves a stain on it the size and shape of Albania. White dress shirt, black pants, black, shined to ridiculous military specifications and that damned clip-on tie. Catholic boys and clip-on ties, Catholic girls and green plaid skirts. The uniform of the day, but not yet complete, unless you had your Hail Mary, Our Father vampire slaying exorcise the demons rosary stashed deep inside your lint lined pockets as an afterthought.
Jesus hanging on the cross for dear afterlife, and dangling precariously from your pocket, swinging back and forth, ready to fall off the cross and tumble down the slapstick mountainside as you race down the stairs. Forgive him Father, he's an idiot!
Quick bowl of oatmush meal, mustache Pete milk and a piece of Jewish rye toast and you're charged for the day. Give granny a kiss, an "I love you", and a "Yes, I have my rosary Granma" as you dash out the door her voice trailing in the distance..."You mind the nuns now, hear me, you mind those nuns."
The times they were a changin'....
Chapter Three
The Atomic Age of the 1950's left the war whore scarred, scared and completely unrecognizable. Bloodied and beaten, humiliated and mutilated. The Pimp of Victory had made sure that her swastika was popped like a virgin’s cherry and left her alone, lost, to bleed and drown in a river of misery and pain. Justifiable homicide in the end, where the ends, justified the means.
Hiroshima and Berlin, the Axis spinning out of control, an evil ant colony asphyxiated with insecticides to correct the chemically imbalanced. Choking to death, before being crushed by a shoe.,,just to make sure. Just to be certain. The Werners of the Reich, von Braun'd, jumped the fence of Facism and defected to the just cause of the Allies, just 'cuz, and the age of the rocket scientist was on. It was the atom splitting, fission/fusion plutonium nuke-freak/geek age of Godzilla and Goddard. The checkered flag had signaled the race for space and the need for speed.
It was an era of space-age eroticism and serialization as Commando Cody and his Rocketeers, became strange lost planet airmen in a stranger's even stranger land. Planets ruled by art deco drag queens doing battle with the milky thighed Empress from the planet Lesbos. Orbiting empires steeped in the subtle other worldly underworld of a transgendered lipstick culture and copious mountains of heaving cleavage.
Planetary life on a daily basis with a swing low sweet chariot chord of cotton field blues that foretold of an imminent collision of moons that would wipe out the advanced civilization of a people with a decided Liberacian flare for all things solar. Chuck Yeager, the first man/child to slice through the skies breaking the barrier of sound and traveling faster than an assassins bullet ripping through the bone and flesh of Kennedy's head. JFK? RFK? DOA! Yeager split it in half with a G-force kick to the groin in the Bell X-1 in 1947. Nix the -nik!
It was those rocket ready Russki's that had launched Sputnik into orbit in 1957-nik...and in 1958 "Big Daddy" Don Garlits put the proverbial pedal to the metal to break the ass of the land speed record and garnering the distinction of being the first man/machine, machine/man combo to go faster than 180 mph in one of Henry Ford's infernal internal combustion contraptions. But nothing...nothing on earth or the in the sky could match the speed, power and "right stuff" that rocketed Mickey out the door that morning, down the steps and into the school...leaving behind a vapor trail of excitement!
The last day. The last day.
The Last Scholastic Supper of the Dominus Vobiscum Academy. Waiting outside, was Tommy, the lone Polish kid on the block, who was also Mickey’s best friend. Along side him was the neighborhoods wild child, a strange but likable kid, Joey, nicknamed Joey the Torch. Joey earned his nickname because of his unrepentant and morbid fascination for packs of matches, the flames they produced and the acrid smell of sulphur.
One day in '57, in a state of moral implosion and a Freudian frenzy set his mothers cat on fire in the dirt alley behind the garage near the patch of pie baking rhubarb everybody in the neighborhood seemed to have in those days. The incendiary incident produced a howling-meowing felonious feline agony that was piercing enough to make the soul bleed, deafening and frightening. The damn thing was in pain.
Real pain. The kids watched wide eyed, tongue bit off silent, as he took careful aim and shot it point blank with a BB gun five times to silence it, and maybe even to end it's misery, and ours. Never was sure if that was the real reason or not.
Newspaper accounts finished the final chapter of Joey's story later in 1970. Shot a cop cold blooded bang, dead, drop in Akron, Ohio. No reason nor rhyme ever given. Joey wounded by another officer, was rushed waa-waa sirens to the hospital, got patched up, glucose life support, pain pills, lot's of 'em, Darvons and morphine, then stood stoic, as a remorseless hospital junkie at trial. He exited life and was executed in 1975. Neither the cat, the cop, not even Joey the Torch could brang that they had nine lives.
There were also the two "older" kids, Davey and Milt, who walked the younger ones to school. Pervert patrol. Patrones. Papal Paratroopers. Guardian angels with human form, invisible wings of godlike flight, unshined and unseen halos. The Wise Old Ones who lived deep in secret swamps, or in caves at the top of mountains, hidden in mist shrouds, yet not much older than their younger earthbound charges, mortals all.
They were not the children of Zeus wearing little Zeus-suits, and who ruled with benevolence over a mythological heaven and earth. Heaven and Earth? Hell, they were bigger than that. They were the flesh and blood of no less a god than Baggypants
Baggypants, was interesting enough, alright, but was truly unique to the Dago heavy eastside of the city. He was blintz Jewish. Holocaust Jewish. He was also a local television personality and funnyman who took centuries of angst, anguish, guilt and persecution, blended them together with the fervor of madness known only to Bavarian alchemists and autistic genius dwarves with science degrees, into a Zyclon-B strength formula of comedy, that when drunk, was intoxicating to both adult and child, and would asphyxiate them with laughter.
He infused the Gentiles small blue collar black and white tv screen with humour as the Emperor of Entertainment with a 13 inch cathode window into his world with a kids TV show at four o'clock every afternoon right after school let out. The kids loved him as they would lavish love on a crazy favorite uncle that they only see at holiday get togethers, and the parents saw him as a patron saint of parody and good clean family fun.
Most important, he was a shiny, if not slightly tarnished mirror to the past.
A Catskills throwback, a vaudevillian Napoleon from a different age, the Golden gilded era of Abbott and Costello, Laurel and Hardy, Harold Lloyd and Charlie Chaplin, proving that even in 1959, taking a direct hit with a pie in the face is still what makes the slapstick world of entertainment go around and around, Goyim acceptable gravity at work...and pie's did fly on that makeshift studio set in numbers, countless on fingers, to rival the numbers of UFO sightings born of paranoid parentage in the late night "ok, what the hell, let's have another beer" skies over New Mex.
At night, when all the kids were tucked in bed, safe from monsters, Baggypants would rip the rubber mask from his face. Under the cover of darkness and nightclub neon, he would unleash a double entendre Pandora's Box of an older, wiser, caustic "don't get me started" adult oriented lounge act at the local low lit smokey old cigarette supperclubs in both Detroit and over, across the river in the dense Maple Leaf wilderness of Windsor, Ontario. The pie in the face routine was folded neatly and put away in a battered old steamer trunk until morning, and replaced, under the cover of darkness, by the T&A humor that defined and glorified fine American tits and even finer Canadian ass!
Davey and Milt, whose mother was Catholic, attended parochial school as a late 1950's social expediency. It was easy for them. You could always hide your religion under one rock, and build a whole new church on top of another. They were proud of their pie tossing poppa, and rightly so. Mickey was proud too, because not only was he their neighbor, but would get spend hours under the slapstick bigtop at the House of Baggypants where he would practice new routines on the kids before they were aired on televsion.
Mickey, the mimic in training, was short for his age, stuttered, with words jamming up in the breach of a verbal machine gun and refused to fire off whole sentences. He was also cursed with a notable lack of athletic prowess that kept him confined to the sidelines, and had a father he hadn't seen since birth. The stigma of being from a broken home never washed off in those days and parent-teacher nights had little meaning, or joy of anticipation for him. He did learn however, under the careful comic tutelage of Baggypants, that laughter, more exact, the ability to induce laughter, was power...and it made you visible and invincible simultaneously, one in the same, sharing the same plane and all three dimensions.
He relished those times with Baggypants, and would dutifully memorize every word, every movement, every element of schtick and timing, and then reproduce all he had learned at lunchtime in the parking lot much to the delight of his pre-pubescent audience. He lit up when he saw their broad smiles, and heard them laugh with the force of a Key West hurricane. Best of all, his stutter, now you see it, now you don't, disappeared when he was "performing". He could feel the approving eye of Baggypants watching, hidden and proud, applauding his pint sized protege. Viva Las Vegas!
As they walked to school in a state of blind animated kid chatter, the sounds of gas chain saws pierced their conversation. Ripping and cutting chewing metal noise. One of the too numerous to count elms that dotted the eastside landscape had to be taken down by city crews. It, as so many others, eastside, westside, and elsewher on the compass, had succumbed to a marching invasion of Dutch Elm disease that was spreading like a malignant cancer racing through a blackened smokers lung throughout the city.
Elm limb after limb was being amputated, leaving the plant patient armless, legless, limbless, and would eventually be reduced to a comatose stump left to lie and die a helpless torso. It would lie on the ground, pleading and begging for painkillers to no avail for days until the chainsaw carnage would end and the trees could be completely cleared, and hauled away.
It was sad to see them fall and die alone. The deaf nurses heard nothing, and would not answer their screams or address thier terminal agony. The stark end of the life cycle and beginning of the death cycle of all woody plants were the same as the cyclical life and death drama of all living things. Flesh and wood. If trees were sybolic of the life symbiosis, as his grandfather had always told him, then their removal represented a lobotomy of the urban landscape.
The chainsaws sawed as they crossed the busy street, dodging traffic to reach the sanctuary of St. Clare de Montefalco school. It stood looming, a baroque Roman basilica, tragically out of place, out of time, and out of tune with it's envriron of urbanity. A large and imposing structure, a Catholic casino, where parishoners parachuted from Sistine skies to the rows of pews below. The poker-priests dealing piety and parochial dogma with the aplomb of a black jack dealer in Reno with a marked deck of cards. "Hit me, hit me" cried the players to smiling, knowing faces. The dealers knew better than anyone, that the decks were stacked and the house always won.
They entered the building, mindless little lemmings heading for the cliffs, high and perilous rocks that shielded from view the crashing beach below. Little plaid people with uniforms and an overdose of Catholic conformity and uniformity. God's assemblyline of good little boys and good little girls. Corked and ready to explode and detonate at a moments notice. Humanities scholarly pipebombs ready to be ignited by priestly admonitions for sins real and imagined. Mortal and Venial. Take your pick.
Bless me Father, I have sinned!
The last bell rang for the first class of the day as they ran inside, little punchdrunk prize fighters ready for one last day of school until summer, and one more round with the champ.
Chapter Four
Mickey's eyes were solar system wide, big-round, dialated black holes, like orbiting hula-hoops around the gyrating girth of Saturnalia's rings. He rocketed through the hallowed hallways, space and time, shattered to shards of smithereen minuteness, to homeroom. Keeping low, to avoid detection, way and well below the radar of the rectory...fast...past the garbed gullwing habits of the floating DeLorean nuns.
Now, listen here, these weren't just any old nun's either, fercrissakes, not off the shelf, assembly lines, lines of assemblage, and certainly not off the rack. These were the custom creations of the Maker, made to order. The Elite. God's Goose-stepping Gestapo Angel Girls of Gethsemane. The tom-tom beating, baton twirling drum majorette cheerleaders for Christ-a-mighty himself, who dared lead the big parade. Salivation with salvation, these were the Lord's Latex and Leather Ladies. The Spanking Order of the Dominatrix, a division of the Dominican Order!
Apples to apples, forbidden fruit to forbidden fruit, by comparison, the priests were quiet, pious, and well, perverted, who would deal with issues of purity and puberty. The frontline of the first jack off, but nuns! Nuns! That was one gang that didn't fuck around. They were the ecclesiastical enforcement division. The Murder, Inc. of Holy Rome. Das Nuns could deal out punishment with the atmosphere sucking force and wrath of a stained glass death ray from space. A Herculean heroine armed with the righteous vengeance of a vigilante on methamphetamine, and could deal out punishment faster than Charles Bronson could say "death wish"!
The rosary was stretched taut, to its sweating limits. A blood letting, flesh slicing barbed wire strand of beads, made up of big blocks, ten beads long of Hail Mary's, punctuated by a strategic line of defense known as Our Fathers. The atomic bomb in the arsenal was the Act of Contrition, which was thrown in contritely across the prairie of a flat, mind numbing and endless ranchland of religion. Put in place by the cowpokes and cowboys of the church, in order, to give order, and to direct the cattle drive of Catholicism into the waiting pens and corrals of the Kingdom of Heaven, come hell or high water!
High noon, time to get the hell out of Dodge. When a nun whipped out her rosary, fast draw style, from the hidden holster of her garments, she transformed herself into the absolute embodiment of a flowing haired, cascading, gold manned Wild Bill Hickok, grafted into the rougher body bark of Calamity Jane, creating a hybrid creature of fiction, half-man, half-woman, all demon, designed to bring order and purpose, to the innocent chaos of children. It was those very visions of religious retributions that projected themselves on Mickey's internal silver screen, as he dove for his seat in Mrs. Mallow's class safe from the demons..for now at least.
He was also very fortunate in his classroom seating assignment, as a matter of fact; you might say he was blessed by the Gods. It put him right behind the Viking pigtails of Lindy Nordstrum and her sweet Nordic smell of salt-air and sea. Healthy skin the color or rich butter. A tomboy who was a cross between Becky Thatcher and Huck Finn, and a year older, wise in her nature and could raise a boys curiosity and pique his interest and destroy his innocence with her own innocent sensuality.
Within a year, they would be "going together" and she would be his Sacajawea. Leading him by his buckskin fringe, clutching his hand tightly, protectively with her own, and leading him into a realm of an unexplored land of exotica, emotion, love, puppy love, and of course, Viking sex. At night, they stared at the stars, listening to the campfire sing sweetly to them under God's canopy, and enjoyed the rush of river as it swept them way in each others arms.
Across from him sat Peter, a quiet type with intelligence, who also helped Mickey with his math. In those years Peter was considered an Einstein, quite brilliant actually and factually. In his own pre-ordained mascara future he would develope and transform into a stunningly beautiful transsexual diva, a glitzy superstar nova and absolute Tsarina of LA nightlife. Cabarets and cabernets.
Glam and glitz without the guilt. Peter, or Pamela, as he preferred, and as he became known, would eventually get shots, get tits, and get married, to a Canadian real estate agent from Vancouver in Thailand, followed up by a cannabis carnival of carnal group bacchanalia in Amsterdam. She was happy with life after the honeymoon, however, later in life he/she would begin to take on water in the bilge, and begin a slow descent, and start to sink below the surface of a rolling, boiling hurricane ocean of sea monsters and sex, slowly dying of aids in the '80s, and full blown dead by the '90s.
Most of the other kids found Peter, strange, effeminate, with alabaster hands and a soft and non-abrasive nature, so of course picked on him unmercifully, crows cackling on road kill. Mickey declined to jump into the dung pile with the others, and in fact swapped books back and forth with him and talked about tales of adventure. Herman Melville, Jack London, Mark Twain, James Fennimore Cooper. Adventure and boys, snakes, snails and puppy dog tails. That’s what little boys are made of, and Peter/Pamela proved that sometimes that’s what big girls start out as!
Sitting behind him, boring holes through his head, looking for gold or silver or something of value to mine from the cranial cavity, was Maureen. She had three massive rogue brothers who never let her out of their sight. Drunken pit bulls in the bar looking for cats to eat as they entered the dark. She was as Irish as they get, and to the enjoyment of Mickey’s rampant hormonal charge of the delight brigade, nature jump-started her physical upper chest formations early on during her own celestial creation.
A Vesuvian eruption of hot lava pushed upward to the surface of flesh, forming heaving Funicellian peaks and deep, grand canyons of pleasant cleavage. In the geography composed of the bodies of women, she alone was the embodiment of the speechless beauty of the Emerald Isle.
On the dark side of the moon, there was Jimmy, and there was Joey. The Bustamante brothers, who took great pleasure in holding spitting contests, generally on other people, and other competitions that usually, involved bodily noises and functions. The future held no hope of a Nobel Prize for either one, let alone a high school diploma.
Instead, they were destined for long prison sentences later in life in a Michigan prison for trying to extort money from a downriver Hungarian bar owner, part gypsy, named Ziggy. When he refused to pay up, and started to reach under the bar for his bat, they beat him near to death with it, leaving him crippled and partially paralyzed for life. Ziggy recovered somewhat and testified against them, happy with their incarceration, although his own world would now be a prison of ongoing 30 days in the hole, heart attacks and strokes inside the solitary confinement of a cellblock of paralysis.
Mrs. Mallow, the object of his first schoolboy crush, was a teacher, but in parochial parlance, a civilian teacher, and not a nun. Some nuns dressed from head to foot in black and white, that made them look more like Jersey cows in a Wisconsin field, ready to be milked, while others wore brown colored garb that resembled an old wino's fingers with layers of nicotine stains like too many coats of paint on a weathered barn. Priests, like Batman, or a protesting Johnny Cash, wore black. Period. A strange interspersal of noxious weeds, predatory insects and poisonous plants all vying for nutrients in the composted garden soil of education.
Every day was the same daily diet of deity, and heaping portions of piety filling the academic plates to a gluttonous, seven course meal of seven deadly sins. Relief from the droning mantra of classroom monotony came when the lunch bell would sound the all clear. They would emerge from the fallout shelters in a nuclear daze of study, study, study, and that’s when Mickey would unpack his alter-ego, kick his stutter in the ass and entertain the parking lot flock with his jokes, one liners and unlimited imitations of the popular TV titans of the day.
He was a miniaturized, short circuit, batteries included, high energy electronic version of Baggypants, all rapid fire Borscht belt blintz and shtick. A budding Hackett in the making. Mort Sahl, Lenny Bruce, and Shelley Berman, intellectualism rolled in the dough with a dash of madcap yeast and slapstick, Pinky Lee style, as he took on the persona of a porkpie punster, the sleazy warm-up act taking command of the comic battlefield with an arsenal of stolen jokes as old as vaudeville itself. A yukster yukking it up with the yokels just before the parade of granny strippers did the bump and grind on invisible phallics. It was comic badda-bing at the Badda-boom-boom Room, Ladies and Gentlemen! It's Show Time!
Another escape from academic Alcatraz occurred on certain Friday's after school. If you weren't kept after class to clean the erasers because of some mortal infraction of Canon Law or the commitment of venial sin parmagiana, then the boys in Mickey’s class, along with some of the older kids would hurry down the concrete steps, below, into the very bowels of the school into the basement.
Fridays were best for these sojourns. Busy end of week days. Still lots of loitering and lingering after the school day ended. and who would notice a bunch of kids sneaking down into the belching boiler room, to take there place in the bleachers, under the dim glare of the cement big top tent of Armando's Ole Cockroach Circus!
Armando, the parishioner of the piñata, was a south of the border (sob!) immigrant from way down dusty Mexico way. He settled into the tiny downtown Bagley Street section of the Motor City in 1954. Originally from the hard scrabble streets of Ahumada, in some unpronounceable Mexican state, he decided early on to escape the dry skeletal desert heat, hot baking sun that turned facial skin into shoe leather tougher than buffalo tongue.
A fiesta-siesta land of burros and burrito's, tacos and tequila. A place teeming with sexual intrigue and leetle seester could be screwed by a greenback gringo for a fistful of American dollars! In Mexico, everything was for sale. The restaurant he opened failed miserably, and he was broke by 1957, so he did what all good peasant stock had done for centuries, and headed for the sanctuary and protection of the padres of the Catholic Church.
He made the 45 minute cross-town bus ride everyday to the Eastside to his job, clutching his black metal lunchbox tightly, reading his books on art and death masks. If nothing else it gave him ample time to reflect on his loneliness, and to nurse an open sore, bleeding wound of homesickness that could be classified as gangrene of the psyche. The American wet dream of the wetback wasn't panning out as he had expected, so perhaps that dream was only for Americans after all, he thought.
As the school janitor, he was the equivalent of H. G. Wells' Invisible Man to everyone. Everyone except the kids that is, at least the ones who liked him. They greeted him warmly, sometimes in his native language and that made him smile. He enjoyed being "visible" but, at times he wished he was even more invisible to the ones who made fun of him behind his back, sometimes in his face thinking he couldn't or wouldn't understand their vicious attacks.
He lived for the study of art, and also for those secretive Fridays, in the basement, after school, by the boilers, in the semi-darkened arena. Here, he was a Master of Ceremonies, the Ringmaster of the greatest vermin show on earth, the Ed Sullivan of the dark, dank basement of the home of the Holy Saints. A freakin' impresario. You see, Armando had this strange yet, fascinating hobby. He collected cockroaches, kept them in a box, and trained them at home to perform, as though they were the Bolshoi Ballet of Bugdom.
Ed Sullivan made a whole career out of introducing trained Bolshevik bears, balancing beach balls and pedaling bicycles. He was best friends with an Italian puppet mouse, mouse puppet, and a guy named Senor Wences kept his talking hand in a box until he was ready to have a conversation...with his own five fingered appendage!
The Wallenda's flew high on the stage amidst the flames of the fire eaters and ballet men and ballet women would prance and preen to the Broadway belting show tunes of Sophie Tucker. "There's no business like show business", but when it came to the show biz of bugs, no one could even come close to the high wired act of Armando's trained legion of circus cockroaches.
Incredible sideshow feats of nature. The carnival barker leered that carnie smile, that slightly "lets get the rubes, boys" sneer that is a prerequisite of that kind of job. The boys would sit, excited in their seats as Armando put his charges through their little bug paces. Some hitched to tiny, minute hand made wagons of balsa wood, racing along to the finish line. Others rolling big steely marbles like trained seals and other, smaller bugs, riding on the backs of bigger bugs and resembling bareback riders circling the ring. There was even a death defying high wire act with out a net.
The show would last about a half hour and then Armando would take his bow, gather up his performers and close down the big top to huge applause. Amazingly these extravaganzas remained a secret for years and no one ever got in trouble. Eventually Armando packed up his own bags and moved back to Mexico, Mexico City this time to spend his waning days walking the hallways of the cities many museums, not ever realizing for one second, that he didn't have to study art, he was art in it's purest form.
The last show of the year had been a huge success, and now, it was time to leave for home, the school year had ended until September. Mickey rushed out of the schools double doors under the watchful eye of the statues of the saints and of the Virgin Mary, and wondered if her kid would have enjoyed the basement circus as much as he did.
Chapter Five
Bats! Blood sucking vampires from hell!
Mickey had endured them every freakin' summer for the past three years, when he would spend the entire 76 trombones led the big parade star spangled corn roasting month of July, and part of the hot, humid, Street Car Named Desire steam of the fish fryin' month of August at his grandparents cottage.
Grand Lake in Michigan’s North Country. Fishing and hiking, riding his bicycle, watching freighters go up Lake Huron, and down again...Buffalo maybe, maybe Cleveland. Maybe..maybe through the St. Lawrence Seaway and across the sea to Manila to the dark streets and alleyways of tranny bars and Mama Do-right hiding in a shack. Passing through the Soo Locks like an ore loaded suppository.
Closing his eyes to daydream, and enjoy the intoxicant of pine, sand and juniper. Sensual smells that permeated the wet, swampy mosquito woods that surrounded the red pine cottage. The red was no ordinary American red either. Nor a communist red that appealed only to Slavs. Naw, it was that deep, rich, dark, pumping blood red you see in photographs of log lodges buried ass deep in the blowing white snows of blonde Scandinavia with whole villages of Norwegians, also buried ass deep in the same snows, yelling with accents for more snowshoes. That kind of red.
The navy of early morning fishermen rose bleary eyed early. Ready as hell to launch the fleet of Johnson and Mercury motors to depth charge full speed ahead and damn the friggin' torpedoes urgency in their quest for the Nazi fish just below the surface. Bass battling battleships chasing a silent service U-boat Wolfpack of smallmouth looking to evade capture and sink the Lusitania first. Grand Admiral Grand Pa at the sunrise helm. Water lapping gently, a finger popping liquid Bobby Darin Vegas beat against the splintered sides of that old grey wooden, weathered boat. Grandfather and grandson. The Old Papa Hemmingway Man and the Sea flashing back, like old yellowed pages in a forgotten book. At times silent, enjoying each other, the stillness and quietude of nature, and the abject lack of words. Words not spoken that allow communication between friends who fish and hunt, that only comes with the dawn.
Soon the silence is broken. Sonars ping and bobbers bob, signaling the attack as the line tugs from the depths below...a kamikaze fish on the line, dinner on the table. It was always the time he looked forward to the most. His special time, but first, to get to it...you had to endure the gauntlet of gore and the obligatory Attack of the 50 Foot Bats!
That first Friday, after school let out for the lazy, hazy daze of summer, the air in an academic balloon emancipated, Mickey would head "up north".
Up North. More than a state of mind, it was the promised land of knotty pine, white birch and yellow perch. Deer heads in the buckshot headlights, mounted on the unemployed pine walls of the local food stamp bars and bowling alley dives. They kept gaze from above, glass eyed gods of the art of taxidermy over the pool tables with the incessant cracking collision noise given off by the cue ball as it successfully sought out its next ball/victim and sent it bleeding and slashed into corner pocket hell. A Jack the Ripper eight ball serial killer, if ever there was one.
One of the Ten Commandments of this Promised Land was simplicity itself. "You catch 'em, you clean 'em". You got to unstring them, knock in their little bulging heads with a stick, and clean and scale the helpless critter. The catch of the day. Once filet'd and finned, you'd toss their little left over heads into a little left over pie tin to feed the masked raccoon raiders some left overs when they waddled out at night from under the boathouse.
It was a land of plaid shirts, tackle boxes, shotguns, beer and ammo, along with smoked meats and smoked cheese. Wicker swings on the porch and fireball sunsets. Black bears feeding at the dump, seagulls swooping overhead, all played out on a stage of trash, with an appreciative automotive audience in attendance at a command performance at the Carnegie Hall of Carnivores. Now, dammit, that's mammalian entertainment!
All true blue, red plaid and proud Michiganders referred to "the north" as that magnetic compass point anywhere away from the grime and crime, and the rust and concrete of industrial Detroit. The highways of summer, a California gold rush of vacationers from the blue collar and white collar jails that imprisoned them on a daily 9-5 regimen. An asphaltian armada of Motor City steel and chrome setting sail. Wooden sided station wagons, space age cars, rusticity seeking campers and awesome, sleek phallic Airstreams, heading away from the strewn wounded of the urban time clock battlefields, for some much needed seasonal rest and recuperation and time to reload.
The new Gold Rush. California may have had its share of '49s, but in Michigan, it was the invasion of the Knotty Piners! Secret convoys of modern day prairie schooner pioneers, composed of modern day internal combustion Conestoga's, would toss their white collar ties and blue collar coveralls on a funeral pyre. The sirens wailed as they began the escape from the confines of the city after the work week ended, and would begin the four hour northward trek along the two laned sunrise coast.
As enveloping dark descended, and miles of even darker roads were devoured whole, they would eventually arrive "Up North" around midnight. Eight dirt miles to go and the Packard would slowly berth itself in the small parking spot across from the cottage, a freighter from Dahomey making port in old ganja Jamaica. Just the week before, as in rehearsed history, the cabin was unshuttered by Mr. Carlson, local plumber and volunteer fireman, and his sons who helped out during the summer. They put the dock in the water. The boat hoist put in place. Lastly, they removed the coverings on the two boats that had been as silent as unearthed mummies from underground Cairo in a plastic holy sarcophagus, covered and sheltered at the side of the old boathouse to weather the northern winter storms season after howling season.
On weekends, family would come up to visit. Cousins, aunts and uncles, and when his mom would come up with her fiancé they would sometimes bring up one of Mickey’s commando comrades to spend a week, and return home the following weekend. Alone, most of the time, Mickey had his hearty crew of imaginary and invisible pirates to keep him company. Wind at their backs, and in their mainsail, they would sail the bounding main, and ply the green waters of Grand Lake searching for strange languaged Spaniards of a swarthy nature, and rob their rich ships laden and tilting to one side with too much Filipino gold. Madrid wouldn't be seeing these riches anytime soon, Matey.
The imagined crew would disappear into the hold of the ship when his friends would arrive for a visit. They, Italian adventurers from the Olde Neighborhood, and not the Olde World, would replace the phantom crew of pillaging pirates, and become their flesh and blood plundering, blundering counterparts, Shanghai'd drunks pressed into His Majesty's Service.
Wooden swords held high, bad sea dog accents and enough vanity to think they'd actually find it, they searched for treasure on the beaches, buried deep. They'd explore the grounds of the haunted lighthouse looking for the fabled remnants of the great ghosts of the Great Lakes. Spook each other like Tom and Huck emerged from a time machine, telling tall tales and ghost stories in the graveyard, and spend sunny afternoons building rafts that wouldn't float.
He smiled as he soared on his magic carpet of memories, adrift in a subliminal sea, and caressed by the drone and hum of the engine, a V-8 mantra, horsepower replacing haiku, and rpm displacing Om. Finally, the Packard pulled into its parking spot near the abundant poison ivy. Mickey and his grandparents, careful not to brush against the obnoxious weeds, would get out of the car, grab the bags and flashlight, and make their way to the doors of what passed for Shangri-la.
As they neared the doorway in the black-blue of midnight, Mickey’s eyes got wild, large and as big as flying saucers in the New Age skies over New Mexico. He looked up in horror, noticing that the night sky was not only filled with thousands of planets, solar systems, super nova and stars, but also alive with the nightmare of hundreds of flying blood sucking dread. Bats!
Certain their only purpose in life was to torment him, swoop down and bite his neck, and thus turn him into a mindless zombizi Lugosi "yes Master" creature of the night. Doomed forever to seek helpless victims as he plunged into the B-movie abyss of bad dialogue and eternity. His heart raced and the blood pumped. "Oh God, no, not the blood". Soon he'd be served up on a platter, an all you can eat buffet for every bloodsucker in Transylvania. A feast for the beast to devour.
He would hear the latch of the door unlock and soon they would seek shelter inside. Safe for the moment. Safe from the bats. Safe from a life of as a campy, vampy vampire. He loved the great outdoors. He loved nature..but bats?
Bats suck!
The sun would explode above the horizon the next morning, and the bats would be sleeping, thankfully, resting up for another night of child fear, and the seagulls would take over dominion of the skies. No wonder he dreamt of pirates and high sea Jack London adventures. The lake would be bathed in the early dawn golden hues of the solar gift, and the small waves would sparkle with the dancing reflections of many tiny shards of sunlight. Diamonds and jewels, floating in concert with driftwood above, and minnows below.
Some mornings he'd put on his pirate garb and grab the rowboat and row out to one of the many islands in the lake. One large one, he called Treasure Island, would draw him into it's own peculiar Robert Louis Stevenson fantasy where he would land with his crew and search high and low for the treasure he was sure lie buried in the past and the dirt of history. Men o' war with one legged, eye patched, foul, rum soaked Captains with real swords, and not wooden ones, plied these waters he kept telling himself. Marooning men and burying treasure and selling white, big soft breasted maidens into Arabic slavery.
On occasion he would come across one of these fair maids, hear her cries, pleas, and dash, a handsome Hollywood swashbuckler, to her rescue, ala Errol Flynn. Rescued, they would sail to her castle, evil in pursuit, and once safe would be feted by the King, her father. After a night of feast and festivity he would once again board his vessel and sail away, into the bosom of adventure and the arms of more maidens and lands of strange Argonaut monsters.
When not saving the Crown he would spend hours walking in the woods on old game trails and rotting, half buried logging roads cut through the forest in the early part of the century. Coniferous caverns and deciduous dens of cool woodland comfort and strange animal sounds. Animal prints and scat leading the way into the depths, and all he could think about was the disappearance of tree after tree, the exit of the elms back home in his neighborhood, now light-years away.
His spirit and his bicycle always took him to the narrow spit of beach peninsula up the road where he had made friends with the elderly couple who lived at the Old Lighthouse. Decommissioned for years, and now a museum, it was a nautical beacon of solace for Mickey. The old couple, he a former Great Lakes sailor, and she a teacher, treated him like their own flesh and blood and let him have the run of the place.
He'd ring the giant bell that reverberated across the bay, unleash the cry of the banshee playing with the antiquated foghorn and most of all, got to run up to the beacon tower where he could survey the present, and peer into the past, but he never felt quite alone up there. Along with the past, comes its ghosts, and rumor had it, the Old Light was haunted and alive with spectral death!
Summer of 1959.
Pirates, treasure and ghosts. Corn on the cob and fresh frying fish. Days of innocence that were getting short, shorter. Soon, the summer would end and in the years to come, so would the innocence. The decade of Korea was decaying into the quicksand years of Vietnam and in ten years, man would land on the moon. In another five years, the cottage would be sold, the red, painted over a hunter green by strangers with a mortgage.
The woods cleared for further development, the beach eroded and the lighthouse caretaker would die in his sleep and take his place with the other ghosts of the beacon on the beach. As he returned back to Detroit, the real tragedy awaited him. While he was playing the part of a plying pirate, the large elm in his grandparent’s front yard succumbed to Dutch Elm Disease, and lie crippled on the lawn. Dead.
Chapter Six
The neighborhoods decimated population of Dutch Elms were the botanical equivalent of the unspeakable carnage found in Hitler’s crematoria. Trees, whole families, marked and tagged for the "final solution". Just days before Mickey returned to the city from the north country, city crews began felling the neighborhood trees, carrying on the traditions of old Au Sable River lumberjacks rolling the trunks down skid rows, riding the logs on liquid highways of mud and debris to Saginaw Bay.
His grandparents had watched the trees grow strong, tall and mature since the late '20s when they moved to Three Mile Drive. Small baby step saplings, natural odds against them, fought the wet and dry seasons, adding age rings until full maturation, then degenerating, humpbacked, unable to feed themselves, and progressing slowly to old age and advanced Alzheimer.
The sectioned trunk lay on the ground, looking like nothing more than a bed ridden bed wetting dying tree in a nursing home. One by one, Mickey’s friends came over to his house to start the days play. They sat next to him on the porch, staring at the dead Dutch. Then you could hear the noise as the gears of the machine began their bump and grind.
In the industrial might of the Motor City, imaginations were also fueled by the same magneto force that drove the assembly lines 24 hours a day. Mickey’s internal switch kicked into gear and the tree, as a tree, disappeared. The inner eye transformed it from simple deadwood and it was projected on the movie screen of perceived reality as a drop dead, gorgeous, shiny, metallic rocket ship. A fine ship, indeed, for space age travel for pint sized Astronauts. Silently plowing through the void space of dark, defying gravity like hotrod teenagers defying authority. A simply phallic thrusting rocket with super boosters in search of a black hole.
Mickey quickly high jacked command, ran to the injured tree turned space craft, broke off with a sharp snap a short limb, and in an instant the gnarled protrusion of bark was a first class, third generation top secret Los Alamos Pentagon pleaser of a flesh eating heat seeking laser guided weapon. His grease ball gang of friends, solar system star explorers in their own right, quickly grabbed their own weapons, checked the oxygen in their tanks, yelled a few politically incorrect "Geronimo's" and blasted off like wild meteoric Astro-Apaches themselves into the realm of Buck Rogers and the Alien-nations.
Plunder under the cover of discovery. Killers from Earth, meeting the Killers from Space. Little Buckaroos, chips on shoulder, with so little time, and too many planets to count, conquer and lay waste to, before the tree would be hauled away. Removed from the launch pad, scuttled and dumped in the landfill or other burial grounds where the secret tree spirits dwelt in peace.
Soon, every kid on the block was on Mickey’s front lawn. They heard the commotion and got caught up in the Saturnalia of inter-planetary pleasure seeking. Some were assumed human, some alien. Earthlings. Warrior women from male enslaved Venus. Dark, mysterious Plutonians from the far nomadic corners of the cosmos. Obese beasts from gravity sucking Jupiter, and of course, those damned mother fucking Martians.
Fierce fighting men and women, and those caught somewhere in between that cease fire no-mans (or no-woman’s) land of gender identity imbalance fought alongside each other. War whooping, zapping, floating free for all in space battles. Vandals and Huns, Goths and Visa Goths, even invisible Invisi-goth barbarians joined in the fray on a Galactic scale. E=MC2 atomizing dust to dust weaponry at your finger on the trigger disposal, and the same cries of "You got me" when your opponent fell in a flesh lump to the ground. The same cry you hear when playing soldier, and GI-you shot your play acting storm trooping Nazi buddy, or cowboy-you felled your tomahawking injun buddy in high plains retribution for scalping your mother.
Mars, The Red Planet would be menstruating by the end of the day. It was now colonized, occupied like Japan and Germany, and the little green men were subjugated to the will of the Interplanetary Human Space Council of Good versus Evil. Evil, of course, being anything which we do not understand. The Roswell Act would then be put into place, a pit-bull edict that regulated daily life on the surface of the seething angry red planet. Laws, that in time would turn it into one angry, pissed off planet.
Martial and Marital Laws governing Martians would fall like shooting stars onto the barren landscape of daily life. Segregation would integrate itself into the social fabric. Drinking fountains and lunch counters would be separated now by species. Over here, anal probers, Martians Only. Over there, Earthlings Only. Big white and blue rednecks would start launching a lynching campaign of pain on three foot tall, two toed little green men in the nighttime glow of burning crosses. Cometized chestnuts roasting on an open funeral pyre.
A messiah from Mars...Martian Luther King, Jr. would rise from the planetary plantation pulpits to lead the masses in a series of Freedom Marches on a scale seldom seen in Selma. Then, as quietly as it began, the guilt ridden liberals would in time, take a stand. Racial and differences in species aside, they would fall in love with a little green woman with three arms and one big giant yellow eye.
After sweating up the space blanket, they would soon produce an afterburner afterbirth of a pleasant placenta that would produce little green umbilical children and buy a little suburban green dog and tanks of multi-colored fish. Physical differences would melt away like american cheese, with interspecies copulation and in time, light years maybe from now, the fornicated population wouldn't be white, black, yellow, red or green...but a soft, quiet, gentle turquoise.
Inevitably, it was time to check your weapons in the armory, toss the sticks aside. Dinner was on the table and the sun was still in the sky, but beginning its westward trek below the horizon, to tease and play hide and seek until eastern dawn. After dinner, Mickey went out on the porch to sit alone and ponder his existence. Life wouldn't always be a time of innocent play and wild-eyed wonder. Adulthood would rear its ugly head from the swamp at some point, and it would be time to "act your age".
He knew that by tomorrow the tree/rocket would be gone. Space trash for the space trashed. In a couple of weeks, school would start all over again, and summer would shrink away, but would return again next year, and the year after that. Life has rings too, like trees, and he knew that with the coming of each year, an inch or so of innocence and acceptance of all things around him would be forced deeper into the center of the trees trunk. All rings telling the scrapbook story of its life. Cynicism would cloud and obscure optimism like a fat person with a fatter hat on in front of you at a sideshow freak show. Very little, anymore would be just accepted, but everything would be challenged. Wonder bowing to science and explanation, and if not defined, then it must be destroyed at all costs.
1959 had been a great year for the 11 year old, but like the dead elm, he knew change was in the air. Within two years, his mother would get re-married and Mickey would have to leave his grandparents Catholicism heavy house for a new life across town in the sterility of the protestant suburbs. New school, new friends, new life. His grandparents would both be dead by 1971 and the house on Three Mile Drive would become a crack house and shooting gallery by the '80s.
1963 was just a few years away, and that would begin the real journey in Mickey’s life. He'd quit school, leave home, hit the road and at a tender age would embark on a hallucinatory journey of a decade of debauchery and drugs. A beach bum looking for the perfectomundo beach-bitch in Honolulu. LA sleaze and LSD. Haight Ashbury, sex drugs, rock n' roll, and Angels from Harley Hell, and finally the era of V-8's and Vietnam.
1959.
It was time for the final curtain, final bow, and as he looked up to the darkened sky, he had to smile. A sliver of a moon shared the billing with numerous, unnamed stars. Some yellow like our own sun, some red giants and some white hot. One little dot in space was blinking like a strobe light in the velvet night. It was brighter then the others, the stars. Then it dawned on him. It was his old friend Mars and the imaginary Martian lover he left behind.
He couldn't wait to go back...

THE ATOMIC HULA - 1963
Chapter One
November 1963.
"We're all just passing through life like a bullet ripping through JFK's head!"
DALLAS: JFK SHOT AND KILLED!
The trajectory of the spiraling conspiratorial bullet was propelled by the velocity and the ferocity of the decade, and managed to hit the bulls eye as it ripped through the head of the Irish-American bootlegger's son. Kennedy could probably envision his own death and smell the stench of a dead, rotting Camelot, but the newspaper headlines let the rest of us in on the secret with giant King Kongish black and white font ten urban stories taller than the bricks and mortar that comprised the school book depository building just off now, deadly Dealy Plaza. The nation mourned, Cronkite wept. The fuse of the Sixties had been lit.
Mickey stood draped in a cape of silence on that Honolulu street corner, staring at gaping bloody wounds that were now forming and would soon fester, blister, break open, in the American psyche. All caused by the hot lead headlines framed that November day in the sidewalk paper box. The deadline headline bared its fangs exposing the incisor hunger of the flesh eating newsprint. Then it dawned on him. "Hell, we're all just passing through life like a bullet through Kennedys head." The Prince of Camelot had his steed shot out from under him in that strange snake handling talking-in-tongues southern drawl-twang thang incest infested courtyard of bloody Remember-The-Alamo Texas. It was a memorable day. It was the day the grassy knoll exacted its toll.
November 1963.
Galaxies and light-years away, thousands of steel belted asphalt miles across southwest deserts, all leading to a dead end of sand on a west coasted ocean. It was the land of golden sand, silky and sexy beaches soft as the touch of a breast, alive with the activity of bohemians. It was the ukulele dance of Hawaii's happy hulas and hemp happy haiku hobos, and sands were hot, white hot and scorching under Mickey’s 15 year old feet even at this late time of the year. An inner black light flashed on and off, and on again, crackling the already frayed mental wires causing memory banks to spark to life, traveling back a few months to August of '63. A portrait of a time before he became a teenaged street beast feasting like an addict on meals of concrete morphine. A time before optimism, principles and innocent passions were forced to work the streets and pimped out like cheap five dollar whores hustling flesh and bodies on the streets in order to survive, to eat, to live, to continue dreaming.
The fantasy alleys composed of bricks and children's dreams were no longer safe for invisible, invincible pirates, cheap plastic cowboys and bendable rubber Indians. Now homeless, but not lost on the streets, Mickey viewed them as dark, dank walled-in avenues of crumbling brick, littered with broken bottles, shattered dreams, death pale skin and collapsed veins from too many nightmare junkie spikes of Neptunian narcotics.
He stood hypnotized on the street, mesmerized by the JFK headlines. Nostalgia inside was building already and turning to dreams of Michigan and what had been home for the past 15 years. In just a few more Michigan days, the forests and low hills of the Upper Peninsula would be on fire, ablaze with a visual symphony and beatific wildfire of deep reds of maples and the subtle yellows displayed by the shoreline birches. Magnificent Munising oranges guarding the hungry shoreline of Lake Superior, the Gitchigummee of Hiawatha would soon choke on chlorophyll and devour the green until spring released them from captivity. In the Straits of Mackinac where two giant great lakes meet in whitecap, wind tossed copulation, bone chilling winds would soon be charging in from the Arctic north, a gift from the Yukon, seemingly emanating from the loins of invisible and impossible gods sitting high on impeccable thrones. The howling winds would cut and slice through the region like the frozen blue flame of an out of control blowtorch through the thin human skin as they increased in intensity and mush-raced down full throttle from Henry's Hudson Bay in the far north, a land inhabited by incredible Inuit’s and naughty Nanooks.
The plaid sky paintings of the Great Lakes were hung with great care on the gallery wall to be savored by critics and the proletariat alike, soon vaporized and in a puff of smoke were replaced by the very Vishnu visions of his current reality. How had he ended up in this paradise of palms? Shoeless, homeless, more or less, yet more than less. Happy, dead broke and poor, yet richer than he had ever felt before. Both feelings converging as two rivers colliding at the same time. Nothing was making sense, and everything was out of place on the shelf. Books were upside down and the spines faded, torn and tattered. All the titles were jumbled letters and completely illegible, however, the pages were still intact and readable, but still not making any sense whatsoever.
1960.
Mickey's mother had gone and done the unthinkable. The first unthinkable was divorcing his dad in 1948, the year he was born, in a time when Harriet stood by Ozzie's side now matter what he did. Then, she had the audacity to fall in love again and decided to remarry. In Mickey's eyes, this was the crime of the century. Loeb and Leopold were good Samaritans by comparison. The marriage meant moving Mickey's life from the industrial riverfront Motown eastside comfort of the Italian garlic and pasta plenty of Three Mile Drive of old world Catholicism to the insidious, unknown and uncharted sea monster infested edge of the world lands west of Woodward Avenue.! The fucking suburbs!!

The burbs were bullshit filled little croissants of leviathan Levittown communities of conformity all served up by a topless waitress who in turn was remote controlled by anal probing Ed Woodian aliens from B-movie planets who dared to go where no man had gone before! This was exactly what Kevin McCarthy warned us about. An invasion of procto-pods from Outer Space, intent on filling empty human cavities with cotton balls and rubber gloves.
The suburbs lacked many things. For instance it was devoid of imaginary pirates to pillage and plunder with in imaginary alleys that could become Tortuga. The ranks of Audie Murphy were empty of brave and brazen generals to charge across backyards turned into Nazi battlefields. Worse yet, all the leather faced cowboys had savagely rounded up all the Indian nations and placed them on out of the way shelves, out of our way and onto out of the way red dirt Okie reservations where they now had the redmans right to sell cheap ass pottery and beaded blankets to passing tourists who could give a shit less about conditions in rundown redskin trailers that sat crookedly on rundown redskin lands.
The new school he was to attend, far from the nunified and priestifide old baroque St. Clare de Montefalco was now to be a public school instead. Mickey's teenaged angst years were about to become more pubic in nature as well. Testosterone testy, he got into fights constantly, mostly over girls, or sometimes for no reason at all. Arguments at home flared up too for no reason at all. His synapse was beginning to fray and couldn't be fixed until after the weekend because the minds inner electrician was out of town hunting for whitetail deer until Monday.
Fights. It didn't matter what day or night it was. Horrible hormonal Vikings were setting sail in his imagination on his envisioned North Sea to conquer and assimilate whole cultures and assault sealskin clad virgins, whose virtues were suspect, in faraway Greenland. Defeating first one army, then another, composed of one breasted fighting Amazons, then impregnating them as great and grand pyre fires stoked by the wood of their defeated bows and arrows shot flame and smoke high into the jungle skies.
Westside kids played tennis. Tennis fer crissakes, fucking tennis! They wore penny loafers of brown, worth a penny at most, and yes, they had names like Penney, and Muffy, and Eliabeth! Too many tennis courts, and not enough alleys for play. Blue collars faded to a starchy white as GM and Ford executives along with Dodge and AMC hurried about in a Fritz Lang blitz of anticipation of a Christmas bonus once a year. What's good for GM is good for the country.
Woodsided station wagons and barking border collies roamed the streets, and in the school, hell, it was all so different. The school halls were all highly "see your own reflection" polished to a high gloss Charlie-like sheen. Sweaters with letters and cheerleader skirts hiked up thigh high as the crowd yelled louder ..."Go Team Go, Lift Them Higher" to celebrate the Friday night gangbang taking place on the fields of pigskin honor across Middle America.
Suburbs were also afflicted with a mania known as Madras madness as the mindless minions dressed in cocky khakis created a canyon so grand, it was a social chasm too wide to breach for even the evilest of Kneivels. Mickey had come to crashing stop at a brick wall and to break through it, he came to a decision. Life and the 'burbs sucked. The time had arrived to toss it all in a trash can and leave school behind and go away from all that had been taken away anyway. Mickey had some savings stashed away, money saved from the past four years mowing meandering lawns in summer, shoveling shitloads of snow in the dead of winter. Raking leaves in the spring and other odd carwash jobs had filled in the money mandala. Now, it was time to jump the chasm and escape...and in August of '63 he did just that. No 2 minute warning. Nothing. He just packed his small gym bag, minus the jockstraps, went down to the Ben Franklin where they had a pay phone, called a cab to take him to Detroit Metro Airport. Demons of determination were driving him to go as far west, young man, as a young man, boy really, could go. Going. Going. Gone!
He checked in at the terminal and asked about the student standby fare he had heard about, after all, he used to be a student didn't he? After he completed the negotiation, of which there really was none, he forked over the necessary cash and got his one-way ticket to paradise...a paradise that in time would transform itself into a sexual sideshow complete and replete with hookers, trannies and street kids on the make trying to survive and make a buck anyway you could or were willing to do. A mental institution couldn't have electro-shocked any more severe, than the stark haiku hobo reality of life on the streets.
He was on his way to the boarding gate, when he passed a bank of public phones and noticed others making those last minute "I love you and just wanted you to know in case the plane crashes" phone calls. Mickey was overcome by a desire to dial and call home too, in case he personally crash landed, and not the planes own mass of metal. He just wanted to tell the folks what he was up to and that it would be alright. Hell, he had just turned 15 a month ago, right? A man of the world now by all accounts, but first he had to inseminate the world with himself, so he just kept moving past the phones, walking down the long tunnel halls of the airport to Gate 17B. Soon they called his plane and he boarded the jets pressurized belly for distant Los Angeles, where he would then transfer planes again and hop aboard a Pan Am flight across the wide Pacific. Next stop after that? Honolulu, Baby! Honolulu!!

The Hawaiian Islands transformed Mickey's world of Midwestern black and white into a peacock network of Polynesian color. In his minds eye, the nuns of the church would strip for his pleasure and dance bare chested before pleased pagan statues and the leering eyes of appreciative missionaries. Priests would cast aside their frocks, rosaries and piety, and shed their pale skin like the snakes of Eden, soon emerging as beautiful bronze men with brown eyes and ukuleles. The Catholic classroom walls imploded as the library shelves exploded with so much literature to be studied, homeworked and absorbed. The ordnance had now reduced the tomes of prose to the nuclear rubble of pocket-sized 17 syllable Japanese haikus.
Breeze of sea, heat of sand, trees of palm, played poi-boi games of a phallic nature with Mickey's budding sexuality, causing him to pop his cherry like a sunburned blister and loose his mainland virginity. All without a whimper or a cry for help from the young yelp. Young, naive and haoli, he had come to hear his first not so naive, yet very, very cocoa native "Aloha".
They were stacked like a great cord of hardwood outside a cabin in the forest. Honolulu's finest babies, goddesses really. Nubile all. Big beautiful saucer sized brown eyes, with matching, inviting "soft to the touch" cop a feel breasts; nipples standing tall and proud at full colonial attention for Mickey's personal inspection, The Muses descended from thrones of soft clouds and placed a scented boa of intoxicating Kapiolani flora gently over his head in welcome. A ceremonial "Aloha" at first, followed by a ceremonial "mahalo". At last, at long last, he realized what it was like to get "lei'd" in Hawaiian!
Honolulu. Bitchin' surfs up dude paradiso, eh, Freako? Soon the young modern day Capt. Cook would set out for his first day on the islands beach, kick off his sandals while the soles of his feet, still Midwest tender, would turn a gentle feminine pink, and then into a fiery bottom spanking red outrage. In time, they would harden and toughen, as tough as a Cherokee Indian Nation tanned leather hide, and he would be able to brave the hot beach sand as easily and as religiously as the most devout firewalkers in all of transcendental India.
He was a punk at 15 and ready to live life as a holy haiku hobo of Honolulu; a son of a beach in the land where armor plated coconuts make great protective furry bras for cocoa brown breasts, and the dance fantastico of the hula-girls make the grass skirts sway suggestively and sing silent songs of dripping, Bessie Smith sweaty blues, just as Suzi Quatro would do for tight leather pants in the future crotch erotica glitz and glamour of the 1970s.
August. 1963. Mickey was high on a pubic mushroom cloud of Godzillian proportions and the sexual heat of the Pacific Islands.
November, 1963.
Kennedy was dead and Camelot lost it's erection.
Mickey was also dead...dead broke, and marooned to the homeless madness of life on the beach. Yeah, he was dead alright, dead and fucked!

Chapter Two
"It was the kilts wot kilt 'im!"
Flashback - August 1963
First Day in Hawaii
The European penis had finally entered the volcanic vagina of paradise.
The semen of seaman and missionary machetes sliced and cut wide paths of Caucasian conquest through the paradise of Kamehameha's Kingdom, bearing a colonial gift basket of biblical Christian scripture and European syphllis. Don't ask how, but somehow, God and gonorrhea had teamed up in a macabre Faustian exchange for native land, bodies and souls.
Hawaii's seductive powers have captivated captains and cooks alike, luring heavily laden vessels of adventurers and sailors to her tranquil shores of warriors and maidens. The islands inject the soul with an invisible, living lava bed that carries warm ocean winds and exotic scents of intoxication that forces a gentle, willing "fall to your knees" submission of the spirit. Today, the seagoing scoundrels and run soaked salty dogs of olde, have been replaced by Honolulu high-rise hoteliers and jet-set jesters in search of the perfect Maui martini. The land on the runway and disembark the plane only to embark on a new journey into the ample, fleshy Waikiki waihini bosom of the Big Kahuna's Oahu Mama-cita herself.
Mickey’s middle-class, middle-west, plaid-proud sensibilities were poked Stooges style, in the eye and he numbly stumbled dumbly, clumsily, at first in a darkened room of frayed old wiring from 1910, broken light bulbs and an eerie blindness, caneless, with an equally blind three legged no seeing eye-dog appropriately named Tripod to guide him. Slowly, it dawned on him. This was freakin' Hawaii, man. Freakin' Hawaii. Ha! He made it, damn it after all. His sensory eyesight was returned to him along with the occasional nude muse as a gift from the harem bedrooms of unknown Polynesian kings, and their switch hitter queens, quite queer for the princess and bearing a bitch on a leash for the darling butch.
Happy teeny bop-hot humidity was everywhere in the air that warm August morning, slapping his face fanny spankin' red and ko'd him to the ten count canvas, like that ol' punch drunk broken down boxer his grandpa had talked about named Killer Bixby from the Bronx. The sun and wind rocketed Mickey down the quarter mile of his emotional dirt hotrod racetrack, fueled by hot 1963 teen-angst when he stepped from the Pan Am jet on the ground in Honolulu. Gliding on gilded wings he began to drown delightfully in the sea of rays that showered him in an erotic sunbath and had to admit that from now on he was hooked, lined and sinkered on hookers with hookahs and hip, swingin' hulas.
Mickey stepped outside the airport terminal to hail a hack to make the backseat trek into the land of beach blanket bingo. Soon from hack hell it appeared, a beat-up cab with an equally beat cabbie pulled up curbside and Mickey jumped into the backseat with one easy, fluid and poetic motion. The meter clicked up and he settled in to enjoy the scenery, his own personal thoughts and his own private past pass by.

The taxi was taxi tacky, and stunk that taxi stink that never quite goes away. A toxic mixture of a cheap pimps cologne, a hard working whores perfume and patchouli incense combined to create a blistering mustard gas of primping pansies powerful enough to lob in battle on the Western front creating a death trap trench of taxicab stench!
The door shut tight, not hermetically, but tight enough given its age and condition. Mickey noticed the dashboard with its protective statuary of little plastic St. Christopher, patron saint of all travelers. The kid swore he saw a lecherous grin on the saint’s face as it stood next to a gyrating hula dashboard ornament that wanted to rub against him the most holy. A plastic Mary Magdalene with full swing hula hip-action and a prophylactic profile.
The cab and the cabbie then roared to life. "Where to, Mate?" asked the cabbie. Mickey was startled, here the swarthy Hawaiian in the front seat let loose a spigot full of language that poured forth like a tankard full of the Queens English. Blimey! The cabbie was a Limey! "Not sure, not sure at all" was all he could stutter and stammer out. The cabble fixed his gaze on him through the looking glass of the rearview mirror and let out a laugh, a roar really. "Not to worry, lad. Mos' folks don' know where they's headed anyway, and my young friend, thats cuz, they don' know where they bin in the firs' place!". The last sentence exploded as if it were a landmine taking his leg off with it just above the kneecap.
The cabbie drove deftly with one hand on the steering wheels suicide knob while t'other hand reached for and fully orchestrated the downing of a handful of pills with the flair and precision of a flamboyant Bernstein, baton grasped firmly in his delicate ivory hand. Gawd dammit, these weren't just any old pills either. They were a colorful cornucopia Wizard of Oz over the rainbow assortment that would make Dorothy/Judy salivate and pant like a dog in heat.
There were ruby-red pills; yellow brick road pills; little blue smurfy Munchkin pills to munch and crunch; and some were twin engine two-toned Toto inhalers. There were numerous types of pills to choose from in the Mason jar/holy chalice gaping open mouthed on the seat next to him. It proved only that the cabbie was an enlightened pill popper and would not party-cipate in a policy of pharmaceutical apartied!
The yellow amphetamine submarine ripped away from curbside and began a cool cab cruise along the beachside highway of Kalakaua Avenue. "Names Doc, Doc Yucatan, kid. I may looks a little Hay-why-yan, but me pop was a kilt happy Scotsmun and me mum was a grass skirt'd native girl, when they met in '25. Pop was a missionary, holy pious man he was, trying to save the savages from the snake charmers!" Ha! "These native girls, lad, they'll bring you to your knees every time, with a wink in their coy eyes and of course, happy lip smackin' delicious hips! Anyway, they ends up in a most un-missionary like missionary position, and as a result they had me."
Doc was as colorful as a boxful of Crayolas. His rapid fire speaking in tongues intoxicated the young runaway enough to lure him staggering, stammering, drunken, deeper and deeper into the Cabbie Cave of giant ferns and even taller tales. A storytelling spelunkers Alice in Wonderland, and somehow, Mickey, somewhere, had broken through the looking glass guided by a happy hookah haiku hobo as his guide to all things new and outlandish in whacked out Wonderland.
Doc flipped the page and continued his story. "Strange it was, growin' up in that household. Me mum, she wore the grass skirts on occasion, ceremonial though most times in those days. Hell, they used to be bareassed nekid before the dammed priests and pastors got here. Anyways, Pop was partial to kilts, bein' a Scotsmun and all as he was. On more than one occasion Mum and me caught Pop dressed up in one'ov her grass skirts, just a sashayin' real nice like, all by himself in the bedroom. Strange thing though, is that it was alright with me mum. Sometimes she had pop dress up in one of her skirts and do a hula for her and damned if she didn't like to wear his damn kilts herself. We didn't have pants in the house, so Mum used to joke around that she was the one who wore the kilts in the family!" The Tartan Clad Princess of Wahoo Oahu.
"Mum and Pop was both whacko, schizoid. Inner workin's split in two like kindlin'. Well, one day, I sneak out of the mission school early and head home. Damn cops all over the place. An ambulance, people everywhere, neighbors running around, and Mum cryin' her brown eyes out somthin' fierce." The pause was long enough to get itself boinked and pregnant. "What happened then?" Mickey blurted out, louder than he expected. Doc reflected. "Well, see, pop was dead on the spot. Heart attack brought 'im down like an old bull elephant. The worst part? Here's the worst part. When he was lyin' there dyin' the 'mergency people was there to try to save 'im and they found him on the floor dressed in kilts and a deep purple bra! Seems he Was dancin' 'round the room in a grass skirt when he keeled over, stroked. Mum found 'im and knew he couldn't be seen like that so she stripped 'im bare, took of the kilts that she was wearing and switched 'em onto Pop so's he'd look proper when the authorities came. 'Cept she forgot to take off the damn bra!" He paused again. "Yep, could say, it was the grass skirt and bra, and not the kilts wot kilt 'im." Ha!
Mickey had to stifle a laugh out loud. The thought of a grass skirted Scotsman playing with his own bagpipes was too much. He smiled and kept it, the laugh that is, inside of him, and instead leaned back nestling into the vinyl to watch the buildings flash by and to enjoy the visual arcade of the bikini clad peepshow visible through the walkways between the hotels. It was a carnival of a beachful of catamarans and joyous heaving mountains of fleshy female cleavage. The portal to paradise was spreading its legs and opening wide, offering its soft wet treasure to him on a silver platter....and man, was he thirsty!
The sugar plum dreams were soon smashed and dashed like a piece of old melon. Doc's voice. "Seen any zombie movies, kid? Damn flesh eatin' bastids' anyway. Bringin' hell with 'em right from the grave. Hoowee! Hell, they even look like hell, eh?" Again the laugh that came from deep inside the bowels of the very earth itself erupting Vesuvian in the front seat.
Vampires! Zombies! Giant spiders! Monsters! Movie matinee monsters! Popcorn and people-eater monsters, all manner of monsters shot by his imagination. "Naw, not yet. Just been travelin', well wantin' to travel. Actually, this is my first trip. Not too sure of where I really want to go, or where I'll end up. It's all been pretty good so far though, considerin' I ain't been anywhere yet at all anyhow."
Doc looked in the rearview right at and his gaze bore right through Mickey. Doc's face took on an eerie look as it lit up brighter than high beams on a Plymouth Fury. "Zombies do put a fear in folks, don't they? Hells bells, they don't even know where they're goin' either. Just rise up from the grave, all hungry like and just want to have look-see for human food is all. A feast of flesh and it scare's the shit out of folks. Damndest thing those zombies, damndest thing ever you seen". Mickey absorbed the zestful zombie stories of living deads and undead dreads. "Lemme get this straight" he thought quietly to himself. "I run away from home, travel damn near 5,000 miles and end up in the backseat of Cab Nine From Outer Space with a voodoo/vampire/zombie worshipping cult high priest from the planet Glen/Glendora that had somehow ejaculated itself from an Ed Wood movie and ended up as a stain on the tiki-tacky wiki-waki Waikiki sheets and a taxi on the Honolulu streets!" How fuckin' cool is that?
Day dreams overpowered Mickey as he closed his eyes to see. He could hear, feel, haunted Haitian drums beating out a heated beat in the coal black dark of the night in the muddy middle of a dense Negro island forest. Great bonfires of ganja tossing illusory gifts of wafting smoke and colorful visions, in pagan offering to the stars held fast above them high in the sky. Pins. Painful millions of tiny pins piercing his own effigy. The voodoo doll of Mickey squirming to escape, but as in all dream sequences, he knows that is all but impossible.
Soon, he was transformed into one of the dreaded undead, denizen of the dark, doomed to walk the earth for all eternity, or longer. Longer than eternity? Shit! Dragging one foot in a hopeless cross between stop action and slo-mo. He would learn the tricks of the dream art of actually overtaking victims who could elude him at warp speed if they so choose, but, for whatever reason, chose not too.
The drums got louder, the smoke got thicker and he could hear the blackened voice of doom, hellfire and damnation growl from within. "They're coming for you Barbra, you fucking tramp! They're coming for you!" Goddamn it! Somehow, he ended up in a script, a scene right out of a goddamn B-movie! Barbara and the Zombie. The Voodoo hooker and the zombie pimp. Trampy Camp meets Campy Tramp!
The lurch of the cab snapped its fingers and it was time to leave the world of daydreams far behind. The sails were hoisted high to catch the winds for Mickey’s return trip from Voodoo Island and blondes named Barbra, Question. "Doc, why's it you seem to know so much 'bout things? You know, people and all, movies and stuff like that?" Doc bared a huge laughing mouth full of pearlies. "Don' know boy, don' really know all that much, Kid. It's all about perception, you unnerstand? It's what you make other folks think they see or hear about you and what you have to say. Fer 'xample, "do you want to pass away the night, or do you want to pass away tonight?" Two diff'rent questions, two different answers, dependin' on the person’s frame of mind. Perception. Take this rearview mirror here. See, it says, "Objects In Mirror May Be Closer Than They Actually Appear". Doncha see? It's all smoke and mirrors with a leetle bit o' bullshit is all it is Kid. Smoke and Mirrors!" Mickey added "..and bullshit. Don't you forget the bullshit Doc." Doc took up the chorus, "Bullshit it is, Kid. Big-assed steamin' bowls of bullshit it is!" Mickey’s own personal taxi perception of things at that particular space, in that particular time, was that everything was right with the world. In fact, it couldn't get any better!
Docs cab slowed down, easing curbside. A behemoth yellow cruise ship berthing itself neatly next to a two story building stacked delightfully deli sandwich high with boxy little studio apartments, one on top o'tother. They seemed, at first glance anyway, to mimic a lost pueblo village of long ago Anasazi redmen. Dormant burial grounds laced with spirits, adobe ghosts, coyotes and peyote. Perception, he thought. Perception..and bullshit of course, don't mean shit, without the bullshit!
Exiting the cab, Mickey grabbed his bag and stuck his head through the taxi's window, a penitent parishioner fessin' up to a litany of immoral sins, some venial, some mortal to a penance pushing priest in a confessional. "How much I owe you, Doc?" Doc, amused and bemused at the query at the same time. "Damned if I don't rightly know, young friend. See, I was spendin' all that time jes' yakin' away, an' well, damned if I din't forget to set the meter. I'll tell ya what. Gimme a couple a bucks, and the rest owed to me in plain old fashioned karma, and we call it kosher, done. Allright with you Kid?" Mickey beamed and handed Doc a five. "Thanks Doc, thanks for everything." Doc gave his hand a friendly island shake, and handed Mickey a smudged "bidniz" card as he liked to call it, being as he was a Honolulu bidnez-man. "Here, keep this on ya. It's got my number and all, and if you need anything, jes' holler loud, like them old island drums you gonna hear at night comin' from Duke Kahanamoku's bar." Those haunted Haitian walkin' talkin' voodoo ganja Negro drums. Maybe those were the drums he heard earlier in his daydreams. The dreams of drums, the drums of dreams.
Doc pulled away and as the taxi shrunk to the size of a small yellow dot in the growing distance Mickey stood alone, more confident now, on the spirit world street in front of the "pueblo village". It was now his new world. He, Mickey, as Eric the Red, Viking explorer in search of Canadian coastlines to conquer. He smiled, grabbed his satchel and dashed up the steps to the door marked "Manager" and knocked.
These were no ordinary apartments either. Naw, these were clean and lean, and operated like a well oiled Pearl Harbor Machine. No bull, Halsey! A battleship, under the flag of a slightly built, attractive, mature Asian woman who went by the name of Mrs. Kuramoto, because, that was indeed her name, so why not, by all means shouldn't she go by it.
This Hannah of Hiroshima, would, like Doc Yucatan in months to come, play a pivotal role straight out of Hollywood central casting, leaving a long, lasting impression on this most impressionable of kids. Hell, the kid still believed in invisible pirates, pixie dust and Lost Boys.
The door opened and beheld an Asian goddess, an angel of mercy. Madame Butterfly Kuramoto appeared before Mickey as a beautifully, delicate carved bonsai vision framed in a soft aura. Mickey stopped dead in his tracks. His heart pounding fast, ready to rip from his chest. Puppy love and a teenage crush, just add water. The same force that made schoolboys fall like slaves to their knees, panting, in heat before certain teachers, rushed over him like a tsunami over breakers on the beach. She was porcelain and barbed wire. She was a lustful lover, teacher and mother at the same time. She was wo-man, he was womb-man. It was obviously Oedipus and his wonder dog Rex.
She sized up the young boy in a single slice of the knife and determined the best, the only course of action that she would take. Runaway kid, for sure, she surmised. She contemplated, commiserated and then communicated.
She would allow him to have a room but, (monster "but" coming here) but, on the condition that he pick up the phone and trans-Pacific pacify his parents with a call simply to let them know how far he had traveled and where he was. There was no quarter to be given, no room to squirm. He did the only thing he could do. He accepted the victory won by her divine kamikaze wind, laid down his arms and unconditionally surrendered to her terms.
The call was placed and parents and child connected by hardwire. Tears traveled down their faces, across the Continental Divide, the high plains, the mainland, all the way to the shores of the ocean then set sail bounding over the main and out again through the phone.
Mickey’s stutter returned with a personal vengeance this time detonated by rife and strife and tears. Soon, the mother and child reunion was one of unity, and semi-understanding so Mickey said his "good-byes" and handed the phone to Kamikaze Kuramoto as he exited the room to let the wimmen tawk!
Hushed tones. Muffled laughter. Conspiratorial infernal maternal instincts were manifesting themselves before him. Two to one. Fuck! "It's ok, Mickey. I gave them my address, and of course they have the phone number now so we can all keep in touch. Now, you're to look at this as though you were on a vacation because they will be sending you a plane ticket and you have to be home before December and then back to school when it starts up again in January." He thought it over, and realizing he had no choice, nor did he intend to stick to the deal anyway.
So, nothing to loose, he agreed to all the terms. Hell, he'd even send them a postcard or two from "The Wish You Were Here" islands of palm fronds, sweet tasting brown skinned ass and skirts of grass. Mickey turned over the first months rent, which left him with $250 and some spare change to spare.
Mrs. Kuramoto gave him the studio apartment right next, wall to wall, to the office, her apartment. That way she could keep a watchful eye on him just as she had promised his parents she would do; and his gaping mouth open love struck look hadn't gone unnoticed to her either. The kid was young, but attractive; innocent to a degree, but, lets face it; he's gonna have to grow up someday anyway somehow. Besides, he was toting around a fully laden cargoe hold of hormones, typhoon powered, that would be raging across the froth of the South China Sea, cresting and peaking with undulating motions, then, ultimately make landfall. So, why not just BE the landfall he'd end up on anyway?
She also knew that first real puppy love could whip itself into a potent and highly powerful sex elixir. Dr. Jekyll meet Mr. Hardon Hyde. Offer him a teasing taste to tempt and wet his appetite and she could then direct, control and harness that puppy love; using it as a puppy leash to keep Mickey close to her bedside.
She did, after all, promise his parents to keep an eye on him to protect him from predators, and God knows they were/are numerous and wily. She got lonely at times too. Her husband, of 21 years, business tripped to Tokyo on occasion, leaving her alone in paradise, and she could now use that now promising precious promiscuous time to train her new young pet on a leash a few rollover and beg tricks in bed of her own. It was true, she thought, you can't teach an old dog new tricks. Now a young puppy, fresh meat, that is another story. She was his first, and without regret, the most unforgettable. Mickey would dive in headfirst, as deep into her rich garden soil as he could plant his roots, many, many musky times. The moist petals of her Lotus Blossom would open wide, hungry and inviting, not to mention deliciously and devastatingly demanding, to devour and swallow whole, the cherry from his own blooming tree of blossoms.
One night as he was lying naked on her bed she came in the room wearing only a double-breasted pinstripe suit top and a grey fedora hat. Marlene and the Cabaret Crowd swinging on a trapeze in the fog. the look on his face made her smile and laugh. "Doc told me once I looked like a double breasted dyke." Mickey’s eyes flying saucered once again. "But you see, I can't be all that" she said. "One quarter of my sexuality is saved for you."
Mickey had heard of dykes, from Doc, and wondered what they were exactly or not exactly. She was sexy though with one breast escaping the double breasted cage of pinstripes. "What is a dike exactly, ma'am"? She had trained him well to call her Ma'am and he did as she told him. "Well, there is DIKE, spelled with an "i" and that is where little Dutch boys put their fingers in, then there is DYKE, with a "y", and that is where little Dutch girls put THEIR finger in."
She stripped but kept on the fedora and sat on the bed and caressed him and held her head to her breast as he tried in vain to get her milk, long since dried up, but it quenched his thirst anyway. He was an only child, but now, not a lonely child. He now belonged to her, and her to him but she wanted him to explore the beach and the others on the beach, but always come back to her when she called, and we would do just that.
Street level apartments in Honolulu just happen to sport spectacular voyeuristic views of the King Kong thong throngs that perform daily and nightly across the street. Haughty hoteliers and convivial concierges arm wrestle one another in the Beach Blanket Bingo Battle Royale for very real estate. The frontlines, no more, no less then mere thin-skinned walkway sidewalks allowing access to the ocean and its sandcastle palace of pleasures.
The wenches and the wretches alike, oozing a sexy, subtle brown Coppertone hot-skin smell, little flecks of sand hidden, embedded, in the fog of its sweet sweat. Coconuts, high up in the trees, hiding until they can be fashioned into fine exotic breast wear; balmy skies, palmy trees; frondy foliage, stacked, racked surfboards; outriggers and catamarans adding to the cacophony of sound and sensory assault of sight as all was being made ready for The Minnesota Tourist Creatures from The Beach Lagoon! Yelling out to the mountain tops of their lungs, ALOHA! YOU'BETCHA!
Hyena laughs coming from the haoli hordes; locals, ever watchful and wary of these post-missionary invaders from Mars; heart pounding waves, skies of the bluest of hues, and in the tropical backdrop cloth of a background the sensuous vibrating g-spot strings of an idyllic islandic ukulele.
Mickey was ready, for what, he didn't have a clue, but damn, he could feel the readiness take hold. The bitch of the beach beckoned to him, all come hitherish more like a tenderloin whore with too much makeup and too many miles on 'er. It was it took. He was off and running in all directions. He put on some old raggedy cutoffs and ran out of the apartment, straight for the beach, breathing and heaving heavily. Once again, the whore had won.
Mickey walked "gingerly", (jes' always wanted to use that word, feel free to insert your own if that pleases you!) barefoot in the footsteps of Gallileo and other men and women of pure crystalline science and unholy blasphemy. He beheld enlightenment in the form of a tiki torch and discovered that the earth was indeed round, egg shaped and elipsing about the universe wobbling all the way. He also found that man would sail under the ocean, fly around the world in 80 days and one day, one lunar tune day, man would walk on the surface of the moon.
Mickey stood still, silent, jaw gaping as he absorbed the scene as much as his little sponge of experience would allow. Gaping and gazing. A numb struck jumbuck at best. The promise of promiscuity made itself visible in the short time it takes to crack a whip. Son of a beach, he had been jolly rogered and jolly and joyfully marooned on an amazing atoll of fantastic, bombastic bikini's.
Fuck science. Fuck fusion and fuck fission. Bomb holding bikini's held massive warheads that if unleashed could be, would be, no doubt about it, devastating. They would release massive megatons of countdown cleavage ten times more powerful than the Nagasaki nuke. Atomique breasts armed with detonator nipples, shared the beach with silos of failsafe missiles of mile high thighs!
Mickey could only stand there, immovable, immobile when he noticed the bulge in his pants rising like the full moon. He was racing head-on for a collision with a hard on that was expanding like its mushroom cloud over Alamogordo!
The time had finally come. Mickey had unlocked the key to sexual universe and was more than ready to split his own sexual atom and detonate!
Chapter Three

Daybreak broke as the sun began its vertical ascent above the endless, homeless horizon. Solar jaws opened wide to devour what remained of the fading night, choking on stars, planets and incestuously feasting on its own crater infested, meteor battered sister Luna. It's a heroin heroine that numbs reality and human fear, holding demons at an opiate distance, at least until the night of dead living returns. It's then that reality and associated fears rematerialize and the demons laugh again.
Mickey now had pockets that were mean street empty. Money for rent had run as dry as the Colorado River in a drought, and he was now spare changed and on the bum; a haiku hobo without a net to catch him should he fall flying high from his tramp trapeze. Life for the young teen was about to become a promiscuous promised land of carnal carnage, heaving hot with a sordid assortment of Turkish delights in back alleys filled with secret doors that opened up to opulent dens of opium and smokey Julie Newmar inspired T-girl Bangkok bars. Honolulu, too, was a Mad Hatters tea party and Mickey wanted to pay the price of admission, if only to see the Bearded Lady and her three legged dog, her two headed Siamese son and her fiery fire eating daughter. He bought his ticket from the barker and entered the tent of mildew and cigars..and headed straight for the land of the holy men and hookers on Hotel Street.
He hoofed along on Kalakau Street, beat and happy at the same time and enjoying his no cost, no charge, spare change "freedom" as it were, when a screeching of tires nudged him back to reality. It was the old beat cab with the old beat cabbie, Doc Yucatan. "Thought tha' was you boy, get in." Mickey lit up when he heard Doc's voice and saw that wonderful and weird yellow machine that passed for mass trans in the Hay-wian Islands. "Hey, Doc...goin' to Hotel Street. Can you take me there? Don't have any money left though so if that’s a problem I'll understand." Doc's eyes got as big as the planet Jupiter. Hotel Street. "Boy, what you want tha' old part of town, anyway? Jes' pimps and drugs and sailors and hustlers is all. Why you want that?" He didn't have to think too long about it. The future held mysteries..mysteries he couldn't wait to unlock. He smiled though and thought to himself, "All that doesn't sound so bad. I'm a pirate now and pirates take pleasure in life, don't they?" The only thing he forgot was the fact that all those imaginary pirates aboard his ship of imagination that eventually were marooned on imaginary islands didn't really exist. He however was real, and really marooned, in paradise granted, but marooned he was in his own new reality. A paradox paradise.
The old cab grumbled along the ave as Doc steered the course to the booze and sex landfill known as "Hotel Street", a series of streets really with cheap bars, bar girls, massage parlors and whores in alleys. "Now, see boy, is that what you want? Don' think so, no. Mrs. K tol' me 'bout you running low on funds and had to leave and she felt real bad, but, business is business eh, kid?" Mickey nodded. How could he disagree with this agreeable character? "Won't be bad Doc. The place has plenty of beaches to sack out on at night and should be able to eat something everyday, don't know what, but something. I'm young, I'll get by"
The kid never had a growling, painful stomache a day in his life and Doc knew it. "Won' be that easy, but stay away from this here hotel area. Too many sailors jes' want'n to drink, fight and fuck. Dangerous she is." The cab wove back to the beach area by the Reef Hotel, right across the street from Mickey’s small studio apartment that once protected him in its 90 degree walled womb and Doc let him out. "Ok, kid, back where you started from, now don' go near no hotel street and keep away from the Beach of the Prince down the road. Got girly boys and tough girly boys want'n stuff. Stuff you don't want to know about, ok? No Prince Beach, hear?" Mickey nodded again as he jumped from the cab. "Got ya Doc and thanks for the tour. See you on the beach!" The cab roared off and left behind a kid with a cloud of exhaust and beach full of sand, now, his only possessions and they were fleeting.
He walked down the skinny walkway that divided the two large hotels as they do in Honolulu and emerged on the beach he was so familiar with. The scenery never changed, only the people populating it did. Weeklong vacationers seeking worship of the sun, tropical breezes, and maybe a little Polynesian romance. In addition to his affair with his landlady, he had managed to "date" the island visitors daughters, for a week or so at least. Life was good. How could it ever not be?
Today, the sun was out, cooler now in fall, but warm, Pacific caress warm to the skin, and the beach was ablaze with a carnival of bikini's and enough flesh showing that danced in his head and make him spin like a whirling merry-go-round. He noticed a group of young kids, his age and younger running back and forth to an older Hawaiian kid holding royal court under a shade tree in front of the Reef Hotel. These kids would run in pairs to this Emperor of the Islands, hand him something, he'd write something down in a little notebook, they would nod affirmatively, and take off down the beach at high speed once again and return again and again like obedient yo-yo's on a short string. Curious, but interesting. What was he writing down? Names? Proverbs? Haikus? Who knew.
Soon the hungry sun of morning was spent and decided to rest below the horizon, wrapping the Hawaiian beach in a blanket of first, twilight, then dark, but in a gesture of kindness, hit the celestial piñata with a stick and out spilled an array of stars that landed in the sky and along with one half of a moon, the Cracker Jack prize at the bottom of the box, to cast gentle ghost light bouncing off rippling Pacific waves. Reality began to sink in as the sun was sinking west and Mickey came to a conclusion. He had absolutely no plan for the night. Sleep. Shelter. Food. Nada. The beach was cleansing itself of it's bevy of beauties who went into their hotels to swap clothing from the day for clothing for the night to enjoy the nightclubs, restaurants and savage distant drumbeat naughty night scene of hot, hot, hot Honolulu.
Looking past the Reef he noticed Fort Derussy, the old army fort built in 1915 to protect the U.S. from foreign invaders from God knows what planet, yet probably more to have an excuse to house a visible military garrison to keep the local population in a continuous state of mind of colonial captivity and subservient tranquility. A missionary paradise of purity and plantations. As he looked he noticed a guard tower rising above the ground, a Trojan Horse waiting for invasion, and figured he could easily breach it, climb the steps to the lofty tower itself and sleep the sleep of old drunks on the wooden floor, unbothered, not yet bewitched, yet bewildered. He managed to follow this game plan and settled onto the floor of the phallic overlook. Once again he was a pirate, only a captain this time at the wheel overlooking the ocean, his command of men below swabbing decks and swearing and smelling as he suspected they all did. Soon he lay down and the gentle breezes lullabye'd him to sleep, drugged on the aphrodisiac of paradise and palm trees...when the bough breaks...until he was awakened by a blinding nuclear light flash that blinded him and gruff voices yelling, The guards...it was a guard tower after all and there stood two of them as he leaped to his feet.
"What are you doing here? Get up, now" barked the taller of the two GI's. "Man, you can't sleep here, that's goddamn trespassin' so you got to go." said the shorter one. Then they both started laughing and shaking their heads as they escorted Mickey down from the tower and off the property and sent him marching on his way to wayward Waterloo.
3 AM and the sun wouldn't be creeping above the horizon anytime soon. He to hold out and had to find some place to sleep. Custers Last Stand, suicide stand, outnumbered by hordes of hostiles he went down without a plan either. Mickey hiked down the beach past the vacant outdoor dining patios of the hotels as he headed westward towards Diamond Head. He came upon a hotel construction site and right there in front of him stood a small portable concrete mixer, small, but enough for him so he decided it would do as a nest for the night until better outdoor accommodations could be found. It wasn't exactly the Waldorf and it wasn't exactly comfortable either. He crawled in to share space with metal cold to the touch, hardened cement crust and blades in the bottom and immediately crawled out and walked to Kalakau Street and headed further down towards Prince Beach. He knew the warning Doc had given him about gender transitions of some of the denizens but the only thing worse than a good looking woman who was actually a man, was a beat cop, and one was heading his way on a collision course with Mickey on the sidewalk from the opposite direction.
"What are you doing out here son,? he said in his police voice. Mickey knew he had to think quick, this prick probably thinks he's an underground revolutionary for the Freedom of the Hawaiian Islands Committee or something wanting to restore the kingdom, throne and install the Pineapple Princess as rightful ruler of the realm. "Well, I'm here with my parents and we've been here for two weeks but have to leave for Minnesota, home, tomorrow and I'm really gonna miss it here. They're sleeping right now and I couldn't and the hotel restaurant is closed so I just wanted to go for one last walk along the beach and maybe find a hamburger or something to eat. Gonna miss this place, real bad. Maybe, I'll come back someday but have to just enjoy what’s left of my vacation,"..The cop smiled. Mickey thought, the fucking sonofabitch bought it! He couldn't believe it. "Well, now go down about five blocks and on the right is a place called Joe's of Waikiki and they're open 24 hours and have some of the best grub on the island. Just be careful out here now, and when you're done eating just go on back to the hotel before your parents wake up and find you gone."
Mickey hurried the few blocks, hunger hunkering down emitting a low growl and rumble spurring his quest for the immediate Holy Grail, a burger with fries and a coke. Money enough, barely, but that slab o' meat worth more to him than an ounce of gold right now, not that he could afford an ounce of gold. He ducked inside Joe's and grabbed an empty seat by the window on the street with flashing neon casting an eerie on-off-on again "Open" glow to beckon any passerby, of which there were none. The only other person there was an old man across the room staring at a cup of coffee in a lonely booth, reading his own fortune and future, of which there were neither. He ordered the burger and fries and sat in anticipation of the aerial bombardment of nutrition his stomach would soon experience and his stomach would satiate his hunger and expand his stomach like a birth control sponge absorbing little beasties of homicidal sperm racing like an army to the ovaries, the forward guard of the Impregnation Nation hell bent on visions of plunder and pillage of the Vaginal Village.
Suddenly, Joe's door opened and in quietly stepped a staggeringly gorgeous blond of obvious Hawaiian persuasion. Blondish hair, brownish skin tone, long of leg and large of breast who smiled at Mickey and motioned with a smile and nod and a flair and a flourish of hair if she could join him. Thinking he had hit the Mother Lode of Polynesian Princesses nodded yes, yes, of course, please, sit, sit, dance, do whatever you want but don't go back out that door. She sat across from him and extended her hand. "I'm Kimmy," she said in very humble manner, still smiling at him. "I'm, Mickey," he managed to stutter and stammer back and shook her hand. It was a larger hand than most women have he thought but soft and smooth. They're just bigger here in the islands he thought and attributed it as something born of healthy island living and loving. "You're kind of young to be out this time of the night, and near Prince Beach aren't you? You're not one of those kids who hang out on the beach down at the other end near the hotels are you?" He shook his head vigorously so there was no question in her mind that No, he was not one of them, and as he didn't even know who they even were did not want to be associated with them in any manner as this Goddess may disappear and go back to Coconut Olympus with the other divinities who watch over mankind. "No, Ma'am don't even know them." She smiled and leaned towards him, "You're not a runaway now are you?" Again the vigorous shaking of the head but her commanding presence called for honesty. "No, not exactly, I did leave home and my parents now know about it and where I am but had an apartment," he said proudly, "and then I ran out of money and this is my first night on the streets," he said more humbly, cancelling out the proudly to negative zero.
"Well it's not safe out here so tell you what, I do have a boyfriend but he's at the north end of the island until this afternoon. You come with me and get some sleep at my apartment, it's just around the corner and will fix you a great and wonderful breakfast when you wake up. Also get you cleaned up, take a shower and get your day started right later today so you can get your bearings, but, don't come down to this area late at night, ok?" He nodded again as his burger came and he remembered Doc's warnings about Prince Beach and Hotel Street and although something about Kimmy didn't seem quite Midwest normal, he felt safe with her around so agreed. Finished his meal and Kimmy picked up the tab and led him out of Joe's and around the corner and into her small tiki filled apartment.
Tiki gods and goddesses adorned Kim's apartment unabashedly plentiful. There was Pele and her consorts, bronzed warriors and warriorettes, standing silently as the incense burner on the table lifted sandalwood offerings to hidden thrones in hidden month to month temples, utilities included, above the clouds and just a little left of visual reality. Mickey had never seen so much statuary in miniature before. A tiny, minuscule movie set straight out of a Jap Godzilla movie where nuclear plants wait to get wasted in order to feed the uranium hunger of the beast. Kim handed Mickey a bathrobe, a long man's kimono really, with lotus blossoms and intricate temples on it, peaceful art like zen, and then she went to brew tea while Mickey showered the kind of long lingering shower a gruff, filthy, leather faced Kansas cowboy craves after ridin' and ropin' and wranglin' and swearin' on the lone prairie with nothing but a harmonica, a can of Skoal and bellowing cattle to keep him company. The shower felt good, he stepped out, dried and put on the Confucian cloak. The incense scent was like a trail of Hansel and Gretel breadcrumbs leading him from the bathroom to the living room, now clean, and ready for mystical Tao, tea. & tiki's!
In later years, Mickey would hang up his Catholic frock of high mass and low mass to no mas, and explore Eastern philosophies to find one that would fit snugly, like a new pair of crotch hugging Levi's. He walked through the crowed marketplace where various religions were laid out on display, slabs of fresh theological meats in a farmers market of deities. Old crippled women in bhurkas, old brown-faced men with wisdom carved into their faces and the kid from the Midwest, squeezing philosophical tomatoes for freshness and the firmness of believability. Only zen he felt, gave him more spiritual big bang for the buck.
In a split atom second it seemed, a yin-yang was about to be revealed in one hell of a shell shocked existential moment powered by its own Newtonian momentum. Kim fixed both of them a cup of tea, in tiny Japanese teacups and sat down on the chair across from him. She spoke. "I don't know if you noticed or not, but I did notice that you keep looking strangely at me. Like something is out of sorts, off kilter, not quite right, right?" Mickey held his breath, throat and tongue got desert drought dry and of course, he lied. "Uh, no, not really." Kim laughed, "I know better so let me just put my cards on the table. I am a woman, but, also, I used to be a man. Played football at the University of Washington and moved here, back home, to work. The problem is I never felt comfortable as a man, and well, one thing led to another, and made some changes," she laughed, "Big changes!" Mickey did notice a sizable rack on her, him, it. Big indeed. "My voice is still in the lower range but will change eventually," laughed again, "And I still enjoy football and can get rowdy with the best of them and still out drink and out fuck anyone in the locker room." Now the adrenalin of fear began to flow quietly, a runaway kayak on the Colorado River doing number five rapids. Out fuck, he thought. Where the hell is this going? Great, I'm about to be devoured by a sexual carnivore. In a nuclear flash, he was projected onto the sci-fi screen, he was now in Patricia Neal's shoes facing Gort the Robot alone in "The Day the Earth Stood Still." The military helpless to stop him, Michael Rennie out cold. No, only three words could stop the madness of outer spaced out obliteration of the planet...Klatuu, Barada, Nicto!
Sensing sensory overload on the kid, Kim interjected the punctuated look of dread on his young face. "Now I'm not some damn Nelly queer you see hangin' out at Prince Beach and quite frankly that's why you're here. I saw you walk into the restaurant and you looked scared and lost, like I was when I was confused about who I am, or rather was. I saw that same fear and loneliness and you were too close to the edge by that damn beach, no telling what could happen there. So, that's why I wanted to meet you and see if you were a stray and didn't stray into the wrong area, or hands. I have a boyfriend who treats me well and that's that, and I hope it answers any unanswered questions you have. Has it?" Relief sighed and the color once drained returned to his face, the drought ended and the waves of fear subsided to placid calm. It was yin-yang, the duality of life, the taijitu filled with summer and winter, and other neo-Confucian confusion, only this one was Dr. Gender Jekyll and Mrs. Hyde. "I appreciate you telling me that, and yeah, I got scared for a little bit." He sipped his tea, looked at her/him and let out a sincere, "Thanks. No, I really mean that. Wow, Doc told me about that beach and thought it was just Doc ramblin'." At least it was all explained and out in the open and he could let down his guard. Damn, he thought. Mrs. Kuramoto and Doc watching out for him and now a bent gender trans angel of mercy. He felt more protected out on his own at 15 then he ever did back in what he referred to now as "that other world."
They both laughed and talked in high speed animation until the sun began it's rise to prominence over the domain of the day, and she told him he better get a little bit of sleep, and then some breakfast when he wakes up to give him a full tank of fuel to face the day, his first real day as a son of a beach! He fell asleep, feeling strangely safe and guarded by a guardian angel with opaque wings, one the yin, the other the yang. Mickey began to drift off to sleep and hoped, honestly, that he hadn't offended her, him, what the hell was it? He knew however that he had acted as a perfect gentleman, as he was taught, because she was a lady after all. As he drifted off to sleep he was cradled in the imaginary arms of Patricia Neal, who sang him a strange lullaby to rock him to sleep...she repeated the same words over and over again as he drifted off. Klattu, Barada, Nicto!
Chapter Four
Treasure Island had now become a sandy Skid Row beach

1963. Cruise ships and hula hips. The nation mourned its dead president, while Mickey was being born in a placenta backbeat of beach bums, booze and boobs.The beach was bitchin' to paraphrase the day. Its cup began to overflow with tourists trying to fill a beach bra two sizes too small to handle the load. Catamarans awakened from overturned slumber were being readied to cast off to paddle out into the sun drenched Pacific. Surfboards getting a wax job for aerodynamic precision on the curls and rolls to cut a Fellini swath through a waiting tube, the seas legs spread wide for a hang ten lusty entry.
Mickey's eyes took in a beach feast of visual stimuli including cabana after cabana erected with colorful cloth making it look like a Bedouin village that even Lawrence of Arabia would feel at home in, sans camels. It was a movie set staged, lit, camera's ready to roll..action! The players stood their marks, the same kids on the beach Mickey had seen everyday since he arrived in beach bum paradise, only now their forms took on new meaning as he was now one of them. He left the trans-angel apartment just after dawn and breakfast and made his way back to familiar territory by the hotel across from his old studio apartment in Waikiki, not knowing what his next course of action or in-action would be. That was when he met Porkpie Sam who set in motion the promiscuous roller coaster journey he was about to embark on for the next year and half in an amusement park of sex, bums, drunks and thieves, all in collision orbits in a solar system of heavenly bodies, fueled by a sexual revolution rapidly revolving and spinning out of control. Mickey thought to himself.."It's true, there is no gravity. The Earth sucks!"
The under aged boys of the beach (Mickey now one of the little Oliver Twisters) seemed to float by on reed rafts in a stop motion morphine dream, while back home in Michigan it was Friday night lights and the gridiron grind of pigskin, marching bands doing a Sousa march to the sea towards victory and of course, more importantly, the state championship. The go-team-go cheerleaders getting go-team-go banged under the bleachers. Let's face it, everybody scored, on and off the field. Touch down!. Mickey crossed the 20 yards of sand to meet the curious man with the porkpie attitude. "Sam," he said, island born and bred. A Polynesian James Cagney, cocky, short, with a gold tooth gleaming while grinning. "Hey", said Mickey cleverly, "Hey, back at ya," porkpie volleyed across the conversational net. "Been noticin' you comin' to the beach ever day for a month or so and was wondrin' when you'd introduce yourself. Names Sam, good to meet ya." Mickey nodded and felt one of those shitty nervous grins emerge that wears like a mask at a ball that you have to remove at midnight. "I noticed you too, and those other kids over there running down the beach. Though you might be a school class or something so didn't want to butt in." Sam gave out one hell of a hearty, almost piratical laugh. "Now, dammit, that is a good one. Yeah, school, that's what it is and those are my students. Always got room for one more for the honor roll you know. If you're interested that is." Mickey was now kill the cat curious.
Mickey didn't know where to start, so in typical Midwestern fashion, began in the present. "I ran out of money and lost my apartment so I need to find a place to sleep and stuff like that." Sam's eyes got big as coconuts, "Well, you've come the right place me boy. Tell you what, you can stay with a few us and I can teach you the ropes, the ropes of survival in this so called paradise. Game?" Game. Set. Match. Mickey took the bait. Hell, he had no choice. 'Sounds good but where d'ya'll live?" Sam simply pointed upwards, to the god's on thrones, Zeus and Company, high in the sky, and also to the roof of the Reef Hotel. Mickey tried explaining he had no money to kick in to share expenses and just wouldn't feel right doing it. Shit, the porkpie has a penthouse! Sam, had heard it before and started that laugh of wisdom and been there done that before. Porkpie laughed until he choked this time. "No, no. Not there man. Here! This tree, this tree right here, ain't got no room service but each room has a view." Now it was time for Mickey's eyes to get saucer big. "The tree? How the hell you live in a tree?" Once again, Porkpie divined wisdom from atop the mount of the homeless and the helpless. "See those beach mats over there, the ones the haoli's use to lay on the beach, so she don't burn their skin from the heat? Well we each have our own, stashed during the day down in the garage here and at night, we grab 'em, climb up and make a sort of nest, a hammock in the limbs and sleep with the stars," he said as he stared at invisible starry heavens not due for another 12 hours. Mickey saw the mats stacked on the beach and Porkpie nodded to him to go get one, which he did and returned prize in hand. Then Porkpie motioned to follow him through the small openings on the beach to the inside of the parking garage of the hotel and led him to a stash of mats hidden on top of the steel beams at the far end. "We keep 'em here so's nobody steals them." That's irony don't you think he thought, but what choice did he have. Had to protect his stolen property from being taken back by the rightful owners, and what better place to stash them then in the parking structure owned by the rightful owners. Mickey placed his there and went back out through the same opening, spelunkers in paradise, a concrete cave with no bats. Just cars and mats. No bats.
"Now if you noticed down there they got mini showers so's the tourists who go back into the hotel at that entrance after rolling around the sand and surf can rinse off before hitting the elevators and going up to their rooms, and not leave a trail of sandy footprints all over the place. Well, that's where we wash up in morning. Gotta keep clean you know." Mickey was beginning to feel better already, safer, not so homeless, only half-assed-homeless. "What about food," he said, feeling he was pushing his luck now. Christ, the guy was offering him a home, such as it was. "Well, you can roll drunken sailors and soldiers for me down on Hotel Street or you can borrow a few trinkets and odds and ends from these tourists here. Tribute to the tribe, I call's it. Look. See that couple over there, getting ready to go in the water, now watch what they do." The couple got up after lathering in sun block, then, carefully and carelessly the guy removes his cheap-ass Timex, and places it along with his wallet and room key inside a shoe, careful to tuck it deep inside so it was buried treasure, out of sight. Then the lady places her dainty watch with cheap jeweled face and silver bracelet inside of her shoe, and then, as though the she were hiding the Maltese Falcon inside of Fort Knox puts her purse under the goddam beach mat leaving a telltale bulge the size of the Philippines. Secure in their seeming cleverness at thwarting evil, they then dashed hand in hand happily and falsely secure into the waiting Pacific whose waves gently caressed the shore as though it were a virgin’s breast on a first date.
"Now, these mainlanders come over here to get all tropical and such, hit the beach and think a shoe is a goddamn safety deposit box inside old Fort Knox which it ain't. Look, see those kids over there running around? Watch." Sam had the air of an Eisenhower commanding D-Day forces ready to breach the bunkered beaches at Normandy. Each kid glanced around like mechanized radar towers, scanning the beach and its unwary tourists getting ready to baptize themselves in the holy Honolulu waters, amen, brother. First one, then the other would stand up after taking off their shoes and setting them down in military formation on the sand. Then a magneto would whisk the watches and superfluous jewelry from body as they were removed and placed, tucked deep inside of the canvas cavern near the toe. Unseen like submarines. Once they felt they were secure from theft they made their mad from here to eternity dash to the sea, oblivious lemmings while the prying radar eyes of vagrant buggers made the dash for the cash and to liberate the piñata of jewelry and money in one swift, adroit movement, with the precision of Jack the Ripper ripping away in the East End. Watches, assorted jewelry, cash, coin, traveler’s checks, credit cards, and room keys themselves that would open the gated treasure rooms now vacated while the residents vacationed obviously oblivious.
Little demons would then fade into the crowd as though they were the unheard horror voices in a schizoid’s mental amusement park of paranoia and delusion. Just one more particle of sand on a beach full of sand, ditching empty wallets in nearby dumpsters, and then hold audience with Sam who would take the fenceable lootables, mark down who had stolen what so he could split the payoff with them. Mickey's question had now been answered. So, that's what Sam was always writing down. Not haikus, poems, dirty ditties or Irish limericks. In time, he learned, Sam was extremely organized and exceptionally honest, for his line of work anyway, proving to Mickey there was sort of a thing as honor among Honolulu thieves. Never mind these same kids would knife a sailor in a back alley for a few bucks of shore leave cash meant for whores and bartenders. Mickey would spend the next year earning his gold watch, although the watch would invariably belong to someone else who put in the old thirty and out kiss my ass retirement scenario. He did wander to the hotel district one night to see what goes on in the world of neon drunks and brown skinned muses who lie on their backs while soldiers and sailors would lie through their teeth to themselves and think they had fallen in love. Love by the way only lasted 20 minutes and cost fifteen bucks. One night, hidden in the shadows of the street, he watched a few of the kids he knew, and liked, wait in a doorway by the corner alley to pounce on their prey. Hunting lions at night bringing down water buffalo's with a crash and splash of blood. A stumbling drunk in dress whites from the USS some shit or other would weave a zigzaggy path towards the darkened doorway, then woosh...would be whisked into the waiting alley, the lions den, punches flying, feet kicking the wounded beast prone on the ground, muffled groans, too drunk to yell aloud and soon the victim would pass out and be as limp as a rubber after it's been tossed in the trash. Stripped of watches, cash, even some of the insignia buttons and military ribbons as they were worth money too, Popeye had been punched out as he was punch drunk anyway. He's down for the count and there would be no rematch in the ring. He had witnessed a Kubrickian scene straight out of Clockwork Orange, me droogies. (The alpha male of this marauding pack, Chaika, would later be the administer of a severe beating that landed Mickey in the hospital for two weeks when he ended up in juvenile hall. But I'm getting ahead of the story.....)
"There is another way to cash in too. How old are you anyway?" queried the quizzical Sam. Proudly, Mickey blurted out, "Fifteen." Sam put his arm around his shoulder and began walking him down the beach to get a better view of the Reef and its rooms. "See all those rooms? Well lot's of them have tourist ladies who travel together. Usually single, some married on a girls out vacation, no husbands around, back home they are, the husbands I mean. Sometimes they want a little action and I try to supply that to them with the help of my friend who works in the hotel on the night desk. Now, looking at you, young and all, these old broads would probably pay like they do for some of the other guys over there. You'd make money, I'd make money and my friend in there would get his money, finders fee we call it. Been laid yet, kid?" Mickey was awash in stimuli now, trying to absorb everything and said "Yeah," he said, thinking fondly of Debbie back home. and about the lady on the loose job offer, "Gotta think about it," and think about it he did. "Couple of broads like that a night and you can eat like a king my young friend. Sex, and you get paid for it in paradise no less." Sam continued along the same lines trying to reel in his fish. "Now, they do like them young but don't want to get mixed up too much with jailbait so you say your 15, right? Well, now, you're 17 going on 18 and because you're white we'll say your mixed race, besides you brown up pretty good in the sun here, so look kinda Hawaiian. Yeah, your mama a native girl, daddy a sailor or sumpthin'. They like the local boys but a mixed breed boy could do very well here.!"
Mickey thought it over and the thought of getting banged and paid was too inviting. Food money if nothing else, 'cept he already had a girlfriend who worked at a restaurant that would boost food for him on a daily basis and he was dating the daughters of tourists who would spring for a beach bums meal and that sort of thing. Most days his hours would be spent committing bank robbery on unsuspecting tourist shoes for the treasure within Davey Jones' Dr. Scholls locker. Meeting girls, posing for surfboard photos for the tourists for a buck and at nights on occasion going inside the hotel room of some widow or spouse intoxicated by the sun, the surf and the chance to cheat on their husband back home without guilt or a relationship. Mickey now understood what was meant by getting lei'd in Honolulu, as he was being officially sacrificed and tossed headlong for the next year into a sexual volcano to appease the Goddess Pele.
Chapter Five
1964. The young president had been dead now for just over a year and it would only be four more years until another bullet used a Kennedy for target practice. The new cowboy president was over his head in political mud and the quicksand that would be Vietnam was already beginning to suck him down as it would the rest of the country in just a few years. It was the year of the British Invasion when a little mopped topped group from Liverpool hit the charts in America with their first number one hit, "I Want to Hold Your Hand," and the box office was boffo with The Pink Panther and Goldfinger with enough Peter Sellers and glorious Pussy Galore to go around. In the southern fried Deep South the bodies of three young civil rights workers, Schwerner, Goodman and Chaney were found in an earthen dam in Mississippi. Racial unrest was brewing in the land of the free and American pilots were getting shot down, killed or captured in rice paddies as the technological military might of the United States was getting a licking, but kept on ticking, until it finally ended, 50,000 plus bodies later.
Mickey managed to survive the first year living on the beach without any serious assassination attempts on his life. The difference between a beach bum and a popular politician. They are red, white and screwed. In that space in time he had morphed from a homeless haoli into a haiku hobo. A tree and a parking garage had more square footage than a suburban condo as the sky was limitless with infinite ceiling and 90 degree walls were smashed by the Sherman tanks of illusion, leaving endless horizon to horizon living space. It was the kid's mondo condo. No mortgage. No rent. No limits, no rules, no shit to put up with. A mandala waiting for inclusion of personal illusions.
Back in Detroit, the factories were going at it at a fast and furious pace, cranking out automobiles for a hungry planet, global, universal, the Motor City, King of Cars. Muscle flexing machines screamed with a vengeance in 1964 as the birth of the Muscle Era was heralded by the unleashing of the GTO. John DeLorean packed a mighty motor under the hood of a Tempest and the wild child era of screeching tires was off and running, up and down Mainstreet USA, everywhere. That would all come crashing down in the 1970's when fuel was short and regulations handcuffed the muscle car era. He often wondered what his friends, ghosts now from his past, were doing. Sockhops and rockin' around the catholic school clock, cruisin' Woodward Avenue on a Saturday night now that they were old enough to drive fast and drunk and the backseat was a mobile brothel. Homework, schoolwork, allowance, movies, radio, television and drive-in sci-fl at the Ford-Wyoming drive-in. Then he'd shrug it off and start the day with a beer by 8AM.
Mickey’s great adventure of promiscuity on the jailbait drag strip of survival peeled out from the starting line and went full throttle and overheated the engine, coolant evaporating, needle rising, gauge about to redline and burst with plastic shards exploding into prismatic fragments. Idyllic days on sandy shores, so many shoes with so many watches and so many wallets and so little time. Bracelets, trinkets, anklets, ends and odds, a Christmas piñata of pawnable candy spilling out on the beach to be scavenged and sold to seedy brokers dealing in pawn, with sweaty shirts and stinking of too many cigarettes. Travelers checked in and travelers checks checked out...fast, cash, notated in Sam's little haiku book to tally for distribution among the needy. He was the high priest of the homeless and dispensed payoffs as priests dish out penance of so many Hail Mary's and Our Fathers as though religion was methadone being handed out at a free clinic to fix the junkie's need for a quick fix quickly.
Sleeping in a tree a half plus one story in the air agreed with Mickey. The tropical breezes gave a lilting Don Ho voice to rustling leaves, a robust concerto of flora, while the pounding surf added bass to compliment the drums at Duke Kahanamoku's bar and tiki lounge in The International Marketplace, every night, like clockwork, at midnight, native cadence, tribal beat of hollowed logs and big xylophone sticks keeping the tempo with jazzed up fervor. The reed mats nested naturally in the limbs, a deranged sculptor sculpting from clay molding the nest to perfect proportion of its occupant. Rodin couldn't have created a more fitting artistic work of play. The hotel loomed above the treetop, a concrete King Kong waiting for Fay Raye to be scooped from the upper canopy of this leafy bedlam and taken to a secret place on Skull Island. Mickey kept imagining a gigantic gorilla hand giving him the finger instead. The balconies would fill at night with the sound of a million parties, people getting juiced so they could flirt and laugh, and on occasion would look down at the strange sight of three beach bums laying in the top of a tree staring up back at them. It was Gilligan’s Island with a chorus line of Gingers and Maryanns doing high can-can kicks to entice and seduce as muses will do.
Sometimes someone would toss a half a bottle of cheap gin or a couple of beers down to the beach. The libations to Prometheus being returned to the mortals below. One of the limber druids would then climb down from the top of the tree, grab the beach booty and scuttle back up, beach blanket bingo booze in hand. They'd wave a cursory thank you from the tree, and the patio partiers would wave back, cavalierly, drunkenly, but satisfied now that they had some form of social intercourse with the local beach culture. They were the satiated anthropologists studying a lost tribe of booze swilling cannibals they alone had discovered, got the chief drunk, and put the entire village under a microscope to write articles for thesis' and National Geographic. Nothing like rare photos of jungle boobs exposed in print in the name of natural science. "Yes, those are nice tits aren't they. Look how erect the nipples are. Damn fine race of people don't you think, so in tune with nature, in harmony, so free, so carefree, so damned naked. And look at the ass on that one, damn!" Yes, science, my ass.
Getting piss drunk on a regular basis for a 15 year old bum of the Hawaiian beach is child's play, literally. Plenty of everybodies want to get you Johnny Walkered for one mercenary reason or another. Foraging for food, however, was a Honolulu horse of a different color. You had to have your wits honed as sharp as a sword blade composed of fine Toledo steel. The Toledo in Spain, not the one in Ohio. Ohio has buckeyes and do not make swords, or if they do, they're not very good. Mountain men smeared in bear grease, and their buckskinned squaws had wild berries and beaver fever, but beached in the Pineapple Republic with no pelts and no wild game to skin, cook or trade, food acquisition was possible with well coordinated restaurant recon forays. Hotels line up along the sandy beaches of Waikiki, thick brick and imposing heights, almost grotesque Sovietesque as the Berlin Wall, only more hospitable and with room service, something you don't see in the finest Siberian labor camps.
Most had patio's that catered to the romantic notion of diners dining in the tropics where winers and diners could sit, enjoy the hor' d' ouvers, and on occasion leave the table and it's bread sticks and appetizers to dance to the music, leaving platefuls of bon appetite' behind, alone, delicious wallflowers waiting for a hungry William Holden to walk over in white tux and ask them to dance. The ballroom floor would fill with bossa novians and how low can you go limbo Olympians, while Mickey would leap up onto the patio and grab what grub he could make off with, unseen, an invisible Huck Finn as he dashed down the sandy strand to his raft on the Mississippi where he and Jim the negro slave would feast before poling their raft down the Big Muddy to Cairo and freedom.
Doc's car horn signaled a Viking invasion from cabbie Valhalla. "Doc, didn't expect you until next week sometime, any news?" Doc had kept in touch with Mickey since he ended up on Pitcairn Island as he referred to it from time to time to time. Sometimes it was Treasure Island fresh from the mind of Stevenson and others, well, it could be a sometimes violent, sometimes comical sexual island of Dr. Moreau run by the Marx Brothers, Groucho, Chico, Zeppo, Harpo and the secretive Karl the Red Marx Brother. who wore outlandish Goering sized Brando kaftans. In the year he had been carving out a living as a beach bhiku, Mrs. Kuramoto had gone back to Japan, to Sapporo, with her husband having sold the small apartment complex where Mickey had stayed. Doc had now been keeping the kid's gym bag and clothes at his house. Whenever Mickey earned a few bucks he would make a deposit in the Yucatan bank of Doc, who would dole it out to him in small increments as he needed it, small, miniscule money amounts to make sure Mickey didn't spend it all. Doc made one hell of a socialist.
He also kept in monthly contact with Mickey's family back in Michigan, to keep them up to date on whether their kid was dead or alive. It's not that the kid didn't care about them, but on the rare occasions when he did his mother would start getting emotional, fire a volley of tears that would eat away at his foundation like termites, weakening his resolve, so to resolve the problem, he simply asked Doc to go into the parental trenches on his behalf. They had offered numerous times to foot the bill to fly him back to the mainland, but he had always refused. He was Peter Pan now, or maybe Leo Gorcey, and he enjoyed his new roll as one of the Dead End Kids with the other Lost Boys.
"Hey, Doc. Got some more cash to stow away in that treasure chest of mine" as he jumped in the front seat of the cab, reserved seating for the seatless homeless. Doc gave out with a laugh from deep within the center of his centered earth. Goddamn, Doc was as cool as a body in a morgue. Nothing got by him, and nothing upset him. Must be the drugs, or at least the marijuana that he kept in his pocket. The kid remembered the first time he and Doc smoked themselves into Olympus, driving around in the beat up chariot cab heading towards Diamond Head, the ocean undulating, the sky dancing in veiled seduction and Diamond Head ahead sexually erect. It had been 6 months now since he added dope to a regime of booze, not the junkie in the alley shit, but good smokable shit, Asian, not Mexican, heady not heavy. Dealing dope and getting high was a high crime and not a misdemeanor in those days either. Cheech and Chong hadn't flown into popular culture on their organic magic carpet of rolling papers and the roach clip hadn't yet replaced the class ring as a symbol of undying lust to the big buxom blonde in study hall. "No, really, I think I'm in love with you because you understand physics and Greek literature. Has nothing to do with your boobs, honest. Now, you wanna screw in my car or yours?"
Mickey was not only smoking it but found it made a great uninhibitor to loosen the loins of the uninitiated. The tourists came to experience the islands and its Kodak moments of flowered shirts, swaying palms and hips, but instead of just coconut boys and hula dancing girls they discovered more than they hoped for in the forbidden pleasures savored by those who frequent opium dens for their illicit dangers and rainbow visions. The 50th state was now a dirty back alley in Tangiers with intrigue and shadows in bas relief of cannabis Claude Rains chasing a silhouette image of Peter Lorre across the black and white silver screen in a Fritz Lang movie of dark danger complete with oh so foreign subtitles.
It was Bogart in neutral Casablanca double dealing in diluted drinks, delusional drunks, doctored documents and clandestine cloaks and daggers. Now, "don't bogart that joint me friend, pass it over to me...." Marijuana was kept under the felony covers throughout the Fifties and early Sixties, except in poverty places, places of non-plenty, such as Negro Harlem and the Old Mex southwest. Beat up hipsters, Errol Flynn, Lenny Bruce, jazzed up Charlie Parker musicians and North Beach beats were toking, joking and jazzin' softly while William Burroughs was handling the rough trade and jamming needles into his arm in vein. In addition to some of the suburban tourists who had ventured to tip-toe to their version of the dark side with Benzedrine, martini's and Rusty Warren records on the hi-fi back home, Mickey also found a ready made to order tailor made marijuana market in the vast number of hungry hordes of army green GI Joe's and shitloads of shiploads of sailors who were already buying it from cock banging Bangkok to Hotel Street in Honolulu. Money was good if you didn't smoke up all your profits which was usually the case. The whores bought it too, at least those that weren't strung out on heroin with dead eye sockets to stare out at nothing with and tracks running up and down their arms and legs so you could connect the dots and end up with a painting of dogs playing poker around a table. The good whores though, the angels of the bed sheets, were dancing hulas dressed in marijuana skirts and grassy bowl bras.
Mickey exhaled and a Cheshire cat appeared to form in the cloud of smoke, and then was gone, just smoke playing tricks. "How's the beach been boy?" Doc had that look and tone that made him appear to be inside out of himself. Putting on skeptical spectacles and performing his role in a parental tone. "Good, Doc, real good, why're you asking like that, not like you, know?" Doc took another hit too and smiled. "just curious, thought you'd be heading back home by now, had enough and all. Get back to a nice home, you're family is real nice and they always say they'll send a ticket for you, get you back, get back in school, rah, rah, rah and all that. So, you ready yet? I kin 'range it and have you back where you belong in no time." Mickey knew this conversation by heart although this was the first time he heard it, he imagined it, he played it out in his mind, he talked it out with himself so was ready to go, verbal volley to verbal volley. "Doc, I like this life. You know what a sense of freedom this is? I've never felt like this before and it's like, well, I can't step backwards, to my parents, teachers, and really don't think my "friends" would get it, know what I mean. Sam and Tommy and the others are my family now, my friends. That tree is home, Tommy is a desk clerk, yes, but I also get my mail at the desk through him, so he's also the mail guy, postman or whatever he's called. Sam is a great teacher, like an uncle who used to be a tank driver in WWII or flew jets to break the sound barrier, he got me through a barrier and I can't go back again. Everything back there already seems so small, and hazy."
True. His parents and grandmother especially would write to him and it would be addressed to the hotel, Tommy would hold it at the desk until Mickey came in to ask if he had anything. The hotel was a mall of survival for Mickey. He'd take the elevators up to various floors where the cleaning maids were changing sheets and making up the rooms. While they were inside busy and overloaded Santa Claus carts left unattended in the hallways Mickey would grab some of the wrapped soaps and small wash rags and stash them in the rafters in the parking lot so he always had a ready supply. Most people would hop into an enclosure to shower or bathe, small rooms forming mildew that had to be scrubbed, tubs shaped like feeding troughs and a room no bigger than a large closet. Mickey on the other hand, would just wade out into the ocean early in the morning into the world’s largest bathtub, suds up, scrub up and let the sunrise dry him off. He would sleep in the tree, or if the weather weirded out, he always had the parking structure or under an overturned catamaran. He also had spent the night at his girlfriend Kali's house when her parents were visiting relatives on the other islands and when involved with an adult female tourist would usually spend the night enjoying a full dinner, room service and a large breakfast before he left in the morning, along with a contribution for a sexual sermon. He wasn't stealing as much from the beach either, like the younger kids were still doing. He was making plenty of money now from the tourists who handed it over and his marijuana merry-go-round. Tommy did run the hotel operation for the older women who visited the island, matching them up with the boy of their choice, but Mickey found that he could get "dates" on his own so wasn't part of that anymore. He ate well and he lived well and wouldn't trade it for anything, and Doc knew that.

"Know kid, they got Chaiku the other day and he's in juvenile now. Stealing for Sam, he was, and that could happen to any of you," Mickey’s eyes widened, "Goddamn it Doc, I ain't Chaiku or any one of his shit friends, I'm smarted than that asshole, he's got fuckin' seaweed for brains along with piles of shit." Mickey had trouble before with Chaiku. He was older, been with Sam's crew for a long time and resented Mickey mainly because he was white and seemed to replace him as Sams favorite pupil. Chaiku also had a penchant for violence and anyone who didn't believe you should hurt someone and take their money was a pussy. Mickey didn't believe in that creedo, and that led to a fight one night on the beach between him and Chaiku who taunted him in front of his crew. Mickey told him to fuck off and that ignited Chaiku's already short fuse and the battle began. Both boys were matched in size and height and Chaiku didn't know Mickey liked to fight and had plenty of experience back on the mainland in school, so it was evenly matched in determination and mutual hatred by the bucketfuls. Mickey took the first punch as it came out of nowhere and blood started pouring out of nose and he was dazed a bit at first but managed to land the next in Chaiku's stomach and as he double over, knee'd him in the jaw so he went reeling and fell on his back on the beach. Mickey then jumped on him and was greeted by an uplifted Chaiku foot and he went flying. It went on like this for several minutes until someone in the hotel started yelling at them and they broke it up, a dead draw and everybody ran from the scene in different directions.
They didn't speak to one another after that, but their paths would cross again in the future and swords drawn once again in battle. Doc knew it was a loosing battle so backed off and dropped Mickey off at the library for one of his literary forays in the world of words and punctuation, but mostly ideas and adventure. He had been spending a lot of time at the library reading everything he could get his hands on. Not having an address, he found his beach combing talents handy in boosting a book at a time out of the library to finish reading at his leisure. When finished he would then get it back into the library and onto the shelves, wrong shelf though so when found, those wiley librarians would surmise it had been misplaced and not misappropriated. He would then replenish the returned Hemmingway for an outbound Heyerdahl.
He had been a voracious reader from a young age devouring words like a hungry cannibal devours fresh meat. Mark Twain mostly, river rogues and dubious adventurers on a riverboat rampage. Tom Sawyer. Injun Joe. Aunt Polly. Puddin' Head Wilson. Huck Finn. The big old man Muddy, a river older than measured time, with the dirty little river town, Hannibal stranded drunken face down on its banks. Mickey would hide in the literary bull rushes that lined the pages of Twain's tales, lying quietly in the reeds with the ribit'ing bullfrogs and chirping crickets and slithering dark snakes on evening patrol looking for tasty mice and voles. He became immersed in the quicksand of words and could feel the cold Midwestern mist on his face and the soaking dampness of bottomland riverbank earth seeping through his clothes, chilling his body to morgue temperature. Fog and mist radiated from the pages of books, causing mirages of the imagination and lifting him high above the reality of Newton’s ground of gravity, freeing him to soar with Twainian bravado and excitement.
In the fog he could clearly hear the unclear, muffled voices aboard the boats docked, loaded with cargo and passengers ready to disembark to embark down past New Orleans. In the dark, the fog was punctured by voices now audible without the need of mental subtitles. The boatman would release the riverboat from its dockside umbilical cord to begin its journey of fornication as it struggled to enter the swift, changing vaginal currents of America's mightiest river. The whistle would blow, lonesome, and the groaning, moaning engines would jump to life with a nautical sexual erection and roar with mechanized machismo, while throbbing smokestacks would ejaculate large clouds of black smoke in heated frenzy, as the paddle wheel engines pumped harder, harder, moving the Memphis Queen forward in accordance with the natural undulating flow of the river. finally reaching peak top speed in one final orgasmic upheaval.
Old Muddy was a madam and the riverboats and showboats, her gilded girls, entertaining a colorful cadre of tycoons, travelers, pimps, cutthroats and gamblers with pocket watches, loaded dice and marked cards. Fathoms would deepen as the ragtime music kept time with the big wheels in perfect paddle wheel harmony. As the big boat disappeared, obscured by the southbound fog, Mickey/Huck poled his raft behind her taking every advantage of her wake, following the soft glow of lanterns hung on her stern as decorative ornaments on a Connecticut Christmas tree. The words in the book were more than paragraphs, they were beacons illuminating the passageways to discovery, where he would meet other characters on other pages of other books written by Jack London, James Fennimore Cooper, and stories of the expeditionary visionaries Lewis and Clark. They would climb out of the confines of printers ink and glued book bindings, climb aboard his raft and regale him with tales of Northwest Passages, Alaskan gold rushes and Mohicans.
Later his appetite would be appeased by books by Hemmingway, romantic wars, civil in Spanish nature, fought by Republican patriots and foreign mercenaries. Tolkein, painted brush strokes of strange new worlds, Hobbit inhabited, and Aldous the Huxley would unlock and open the doors to new perceptions. Steinbecks dust bowl dissertations of Tom Joad and the Mother Road, Route 66. H.G. Wells and Jules Verne. where he could escape warring worlds by hopping trains of time to an age in the future of Eloi and Morlocks, and get his kicks on a Jules Verne rocket ship racing to the surface of the moon.
The silver screen had as much influence over him as literate adventure-lit. Why, just a year before he began his own travels and travails he saw Lawrence of Arabia in all it's wide screen David Lean techno-splendor. There he was, Lawrence, O'Toole'd and Omar, Sharifing across the silver screen's ocean of sand. T. E. Lawrence, a British stranger in a strange Bedouin land, a Great War rebel with an Arab cause that was not his property to begin with, but car jacked it by breaking and entering and made it his own. Long, cascading robes, flowing in the wind, a waterfall of soft fabric billowing in desert sun taking the shape of an angels wings, to whisk him along, atop and astride the exotic desert mammal the camel that transformed into a charging Roman chariot rushing headlong against a line of Turkish artillery. So impressed was Mickey by the film that he went to the bookstore and bought a copy of T. E. Lawrence's "Seven Pillars of Wisdom" and read it two times in the year. Another film that influenced him greatly was "Mutiny on the Bounty" with its mutineers throwing off the shackles of convention and class, sailing away to escape the blight of Bligh and to seek a better life. A copulating paradise populated by a Tahitian temptress or two, who stroked the psyche and stoked the fires of tropical lust.
Mickey had to laugh as now in Hawaiian reality, he was Fletcher Christian, in a tropical paradise. When he left home in Detroit, he did not runaway he merely mutinied against suburban convention to follow a bare chested inner muse whose name was unknown and whose face was unclear her bare flesh needed no introduction. He was in Hawaii..paradise found, and had lived like a king for over a year, but that was about to change. His metaphorical coconut hut was about to burn, baby, burn, and the skies of reality would darken into night. He didn't know it that day as he left the library but that night, the sun would begin to set on him and the fireball would burst into fire and flame, consuming him whole as it began it's descent below his paradise lost horizons....Pele had abandoned him, and Prometheus was pissed!
1963 - Chapter Six
Atomic Hula - 1965. Chapter One
Mini skirts were beginning to feed the thigh high hungry population with exposed flesh and fantasy while Bob Dylan revisited Highway 61. The "my generation" couldn't get no satisfaction except on the music charts and Mickey noticed that more GI's were flooding the island like maggots on a carcass. Most of these troops would not be staying long on their Honolulu stopover enjoying grass skirts and swaying hips. In short time they would pack aboard a transport and become part of the humidity soaked, drenched in country that would be stationed on the ground that year in Vietnam. Some would later trade the cocky khaki for a black body bag as they would begin the body count countdown of the 50,000 plus dead that war would spit up in our faces by wars end. Hardly a fashion statement to compare with a mini-skirt and thigh high white go-go boots.
Somehow, miraculously, Mickey had made it to 16 and had spent two birthdays and Christmas times two on the island. Vietnam was not on his mind that day, but as he left the library his thoughts were consumed by the prospects of the evening luau he was taking Tina Soretto out to. Tina was a nympho from Monterey, aren't they all? In Monterey I mean? She was a bonafide sterling silver Daddy Warbucks girl whose father owned a string of auto parts emporiums up and down and up again on the California Coast. Tina was 19 when he met her visiting the island for a week with her parents and when he met her on the beach it was as though Ike had landed at Normandy and Mickey was now in retreat from advancing forces to powerful and determined to stop. Most girls he had met had been a blur, Tina was a classic sculpture that you couldn't ignore and wanted to possess. She had a boyfriend (or two or three) back on the mainland and Mickey knew he was a vacation diversion for her. They would meet again within the year when they were both in California, re-igniting the flames, only this time fanned by Santa Ana Winds hot from Baja. He knew he was just a passing fancy for the moment to her, as every car has a spare tire. In this case, he was it.
He did not know however that tonight events would occur that would have his life spiral out of control, sending him into a fiery tailspin, a jet shot down over a meaningless rice paddy in meaningless old French Indo-China.
He waited for her at six and she made her grand entrance down the walkway heading towards the beach and the bum wearing a blue floral print bikini with shirt tied at the waist making a pirate princess fashion statement. The combination was Monet meets Gaugin for an aperitif at a sidewalk cafe in Marseilles near the docks. Dark freighter waters and voyeurism smacking against the pilings. "Let's luau, Mickey" she said as she approached his airspace. The words fluttered from her mouth, flower petals leaving a beautiful trail of scents and promise. He followed them where they would lead as she took his hand and the walked down the beach to an already crowded scene of tourists and locals alike, pig in the ground, and a big beach bonfire casting golden glows on the sand as the sun began to set. These luaus where informal, but relatively structured to give a palm frond feeling to the visitors and nothing Waikiki like more than a reason for a beach party.
While they joined the crowd someone was passing around a bottle of wine, beer flowed from all directions, a meteor shower of Japanese brews, not to mention the marijuana Mickey had brought with him. In the past year he gave up drinking and instead, preferred to puff, inhale and exhale. He needed the exercise anyway, and decided he didn't like waking up with a Honolulu hangover hovering over him all day long. Marijuana was just what the doctor ordered, so when he began to drink that night, his now intolerant system rebelled and was getting drunker by the minute as Tina played Eve to his compliant Adam in the garden feeding him the wine of grapes, beer and also joined him in smoking joint after joint after joint, jointly.
The uke's strummed, the drums drummed, the pig was served, pasty poi, oy! The moon was full and Mickey and Tina strolled off to find seclusion in this unimaginable fairy tale land of enchantment, They made love at a deserted spot, not many of those around, and it was a sexual Kodak moment to be preserved in his photo album memory forever, and then it was time for Tina to leave the ball and return to her room and family before the clock struck twelve midnight and her carriage turned into a pumpkin. Mickey walked her to her hotel lobby, kissed her goodnight and made his way down the beach to his "tree home", staggering, stumbling like one of those drunken sailors downtown. Everything was spinning, gyrating, twisting, all at the same time and when he reached home base, he found he had lost his sober super powers...and couldn't make it up the tree to the safety of its canopy, so decided to sleep under the overturned catamaran instead. That would have been a good idea, except, he didn't make it and passed out just three feet from it. He lay there obviously oblivious until he felt someone poking at him, yelling at him and then yanking him hard by his arms to get him on his feet.
Hoping it was Tina coming back for more he smiled, at least until his vision cleared, and clearly saw two policemen, the beach patrol staring at him as though they had found Al Capone hiding out in their jurisdiction. "Got any i.d on you?" barked the German Shepard of the two. "C'mon, any identification will do. How old are you? You're drunk." Mickey was amazed at the astuteness of this obvious mental giant among men. He did produce nothing. He had no i.d., no driver’s license, no nothing so decided to come clean and fess up. "I'm 16 and yes, a little drunk, officer. No, my parents aren't on the island, and yes, I live on the beach, but don't usually sleep face down on it," refusing to give up the tree and his compadres. That was all they needed and picked him up and he was classified as an underage runaway and vagrant and taken to jail before processing and handed over to juvenile authorities. He quickly called Doc and filled him in on the recent turn of events.
The next day in that wayward home for wayward windward boys, Doc came by to visit and informed Mickey that he had contacted his parents and they were going to call the juvenile authorities, which was not an oxymoron as authorities are usually juvenile with decoder rings and badges and big belt buckles standing guard in fast food parking lots, jails, malls. They all started as hall monitors, the parochial and public school version of the Hitler Youth. Somewhere along the line the grow up to become attorney's general and FBI. "Damn, Doc, should have listened to you. So, what happens now?" Doc gave him that Yucatan grin, "Ya gonna stay awhile. Not long, a month me'be, depends on when your folks can get the money and ticket here to get you back home. Then you can leave here, but you have to leave the islands too." Doc laughed again, "Ya know, you was like a runaway Cap'n Cook discovering these here place, get hooked on 'er and when you have to leave, it leaves a hole in ya. That's why I never left here. No mainland for me, no sir. Nuthin' there that ain't here, and me'be less. Anyways, they gonna call today and you can talk to them and get every thing squared away. Jes so you knows, Sam got picked up for having stolen property, but he faces long time. Been busted before, and Chaiku is in here too so try to avoid him if you can. Could be trouble."
Both laughed and the JO waited aside at the boarding gate until Mickey got on, turning once more to look at Doc, a face he would never see again, but had taught him so much. "Aloha, Doc!" and waved. Doc aloha'd back and saluted. Mickey then took his seat, fastened his seatbelt and waited to lift off. It was crashing down on him now like a wave at Makaha crashing to shore in winter. It was time to bid aloha to Pele and her Atomic Hulas as the panoramic Pan Am panorama of deep sea blue ocean below swallowed Oahu whole. The island shrank as they reached altitude plus, reducing its image to a tiny dot, the size of a period on the page of a book. As it receded, it engulfed Doc, Kimmie, Sam, Kali and his own childhood, fading now and evaporating fast from his present into his past.
He drifted into deep dream sleep as the plane droned east towards California's west coast. Mickey dreamed of Michigan, its evergreens, birches, lakes and snow, but when he awoke the snow had melted and he could now see the haze on the horizon diffusing the bright LA lights, as the plane began it's descent and land in the City of Angels with broken wings, broken dreams, broken wine bottles. California, the stuff of myth and legend since the time of the conquistadores. The golden land of sandals, surf and sand, Hawaii's institutionalized half-sister.
Yes, he thought, it would be nice to get back to Michigan...but not right yet. the plane taxied onto the tarmac into Steinbeck’s promised land of milk, honey, and beaches. Mickey smiled. What the hell....Michigan will have to wait. California, here I come!

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Tag der Veröffentlichung: 18.11.2009

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