Hawaiian Electric

ʻImipono Kenyatta

On the way to his house, I’m curled up in the backseat of the C, the one with a mangled voice box that smells like gonorrhea. The rule is that my Hawaiʻi ends at Ko Olina. If someone notices I’m missing, it would be better to say I faked my way into some college party and got busted. The west side is the asscrack of the island. Too poor, too dirty, too local for us. But I come anyway. Because he wanted me to come. I can smell the HECO power plant as we pass Electric Beach. He said the stench doesn’t make it all the way past the mountain, it’s just replaced with a million different other stenches. He doesn’t know how old some of them are, or how much longer they have to live.

When I jump down onto the sand at the top of the ave, I pinch my hood over my head. I wish I could say I was just scared of being recognized, but down here, not being recognized is life-or-death. My heart starts to throw itself against my ribcage as I fast-limp pass the seedy corner store and the stink-tuna whores. They all spit through their teeth and box each other in behind a utility pole.

“Eh, hāole girl, twenny dalas you can do whateva you like to me!”

King Crack grinds his flaccid dick on the side of the white wooden door. 

“I no get horneh you touch me, I no get horneh you suck me!”

Queen Batu eyes me, raw piece ʻahi, up and down, picking out my pieces in her spidery haze of ice.

The spit and STD slime oozing from their lips turn the sand beneath them a stiff and sickly brown. He told me that some of these people stand on the corner all day, edging close to dying, just trying to feel alive. Sometimes they get on the C and take it all the way down to ʻAʻala Park. Get in, get out, get head. Maybe another half-hour until they can get back on the other way. They could land right back in Nānākuli in about four hours. Some stay in town to eat, but the worse ones don’t even take time to shit, shower, or shave. They’re just stuck in the same loop. Bum for your change, shoot your smack, pass out, piss yourself, and start again at the bitching whine of dawn.

He told me that there’s a rhythm to avoiding them: shake your head twice, spit and kick once, and run like you stole it. He says you know you’re safe when you’re standing in the lights coming from the houses. Why should I call for help if they all wanna kill people who look like me? He tells me it’s not like that anymore, I don’t trust anybody who could ever be like that in the first place. My head is spinning straight for a circle. It’s a straight shot up the ave to his house.

The whole neighborhood buzzes audible, nauseating blue and yellow, thick incandescent light swirling like little ropes to the sky. Further up the road, someone’s either cooking or has cooked down some stew loaded with Spam. I remember him telling stories of stretching half a block of Spam and a can of cream of mushroom between seven kids for weeks on end. He would come to class with bruisey rings around his eyes, his sleep again stolen by the sound of sisters taking turns throwing up vegetables. 

Someone else is plucking at a dirty old ʻukulele. I can hear the sound of their fat, untrimmed fingernails soaking the strings in molten mosquito punk and Heineken sludge. They’re playing something close to Sleepwalk, calling on Johnny and Santo to serenade any spirits left over that couldn’t make it out of the ghetto in life or in death. The sound is soaked in piss and stranded in time, taunting all of us who are awake; paradise doesn’t live here anymore, and we’re the plastic flowers forever beaming on her grave.

When I reach his house it’s pitch black, crying. ʻUkulele Man is still plinking away in the distance, and the air is still heavy and humid with the buzz of utility poles and swine-flu-dyspepsia. He’s leaning against his guitar in the bed of his dad’s rusted-out pickup truck wrapped up in black leather and kicking broken Scotts around his red-dirt stained feet. 

He says he can’t believe I actually came, that he would have met me at the top and walked me down if I had let him know. He doesn’t flinch at the pregnant-mama mosquitoes that jam themselves into his ear canals. He’s playing something from some obscure folk band he used to like while I climb into the bed. No longer able to dance to the artificial rhythm of the streets, all grown up and out of a childhood where it was safe to sing. 

When I’m riding him and I kiss his mouth shut, I can taste the fear in his lips. I don’t know if he fears for me, knowing that I have to face the living funhouse mirrors when I get back on the C to the gated subdivisions. He tells me he fears becoming another instrument in the grand symphony of the forgotten. Right next to ʻUkulele Man and King Crack, the popolo kānaka boy with the hāole voice that made it into Kam School and never made it out. Singing his heart out on his bust-up guitar, woozy, dehydrated, spewing worthless poems to no one who will listen.

I sing the Hawaiian electric.

When we rock the bed of the truck back and forth as we come, he doesn’t let me into the house. He tells me that it’s too ugly in the house, that it still needs cleaning. He stares off into the abyssal backyard, a fire in his blackened, tired eyes. He tells me that most of the ugly goes when the neighborhood kids come out with the sun to play. 

He’s almost crying as he looks into my eyes, for the nameless kids that pass him from beyond the fence, for the kid he once knew all too well, riding his Mongoose bike into oblivion just beyond the corner of Haleakalā and Third Road. We both see him driving his pedals to the floor, looking back at the house chasing no one up the valley. 

I decide to stay with him until sunrise. He says he’ll take me way up the mountain behind the house to get away from all the noise. He won’t say if he’s trying to chase that boy up the valley, send him back home or take him in as his own. I stay and forgive him either way. 

When I curl up in his arms, he cries before anybody in the house can see. Another voice buzzing along, the heartbeat of the valley.

I sing the Hawaiian electric.