The Meat Puppets at Music Millenium, 9.22.09
Hawaii Five-O
Or, The Time I Ate Oahu
At the end of August I spent five days in Oahu visiting family and exploring the island with my friend Marissa. My second cousin Tori lives near Honolulu with her family and Marissa’s mother Florence and brother Jake live on the north shore.
I feel like I saw a lot of the island for how chill the trip was- I mean, it was really just an excuse to go somewhere beautiful and different and eat fresh fruit, shave ice, seafood and Hawaiian specialties every day. And that’s exactly what I did.
Getting there:
Day One:
I ♥ Kennedy’s Bathroom Again
During my visit to San Francisco this summer, my friend Kennedy made an offhanded comment about not having any art on his and Julie’s apartment walls. It gave me an idea. Kennedy is the guy whose bathroom I painted just before he left Portland:
I bought a small canvas as soon as I got home, but it was not until a month later, hours before they arrived in Portland for a friend’s wedding that I actually painted it. The original had only taken a couple of hours, so I knew there was no reason the miniature version to take any longer. I actually used the exact same tubes of paint for both paintings. And the same love.
Pumpkin & Eggplant
6:45 this morning
To Go Just To Go
“Amigo! Ayuda, amigo, ayuda.”
Squinting into the late morning sun, I pass an old Mexican panhandler keeping his balance by leaning against a bus shelter. I’m walking down Mission Street and the air is slowly filling with the smell of frying corn and the soundof a local band tuning their instruments- guitar, accordian, tambora, and maracas. As much as I want to stop and listen to them, I continue on. I’m looking for a place where I can buy a toothbrush and, if I’m lucky, a t-shirt, though not for a souvenir but because I need a change of clothes. I’ve been wearing the shirt I have on for a day and a night. It’s beginning to feel and smell like a sweaty second skin.
A few minutes later I’m in a crowded pharmacy buying a travel toothbrush, which I drop into my pocket next to my wallet, passport, and dead cellphone. The last call that I made on it was to my friend Kennedy to tell him that I was on my way to San Francisco and did he want to get together? Shortly after making plans and hanging up the screen went blank and I was left staring at the red piece of plastic as though it were the frayed end of a constant tether, now severed.
I’m sitting on my porch when they arrive. It’s two in the morning and I’ve been receiving regular updates from Atousa about the progress that she and Naomi have been making from Seattle to Portland, which I’m a little skeptical about given the fact that they are on track to complete the drive in just over two hours. In my experience, and under the best of circumstances, it takes three. But sure enough, just two hours and fifteen minutes after getting a text reading “We’re on our way!” a white Toyota Yaris turns the corner and begins to creep down my street.
I can see that Naomi is driving, and when they finally reach my house she tries to park parallel to the curb and ends up about 20 degrees off. Then she shuts off the car, gets out, stumbles by me, and sprawls out on my lawn like a long distance runner at the end of a marathon. Soon Atousa is climbing out of the car as well. “Oh my god,” she says, and then mutters something I don’t catch. I help the girls gather their things and lead them inside to the futon in my living room. I’m not sure if they’re planning to stay up and talk for a while or what, but that question is answered when I leave the room for a moment and find them both sound asleep by the time I return.
Four hours later I am trying not to disturb my slumbering houseguests while I get ready for work, and later we meet for a few happy hour drinks before they depart for San Francisco in the evening. I joke with them about their condition the night before: Naomi’s collapse on my lawn and Atousa’s near incomprehensibility. I ask if they were drinking during the trip to my house but they deny it, which means they both must have been frightfully drunk when they left Seattle. Tonight they’ll be driving through the night to get home and it would be wise for them to pace themselves, but they don’t, and either do I.
After the first bar we go to another to play pool. Portland is just coming off of a heatwave so I try to direct us to places with air conditioning or basements or both. The sun has set by the time we leave that pool hall, so our next stop is to a bar with an outdoor patio. Defying all logic and reason, one of us orders a Scorpion Bowl, which is 60 ounces of liquor and fruit juice and is intended to be shared between the three of us.
Sips are sipped, snacks are snacked, smokes are smoked. I vaguely recall having a long conversation with a friend of one of the girls on their cell phone. He is a complete stranger to me but we talk as though we’ve known each other for years. Soon after that Ivar arrives. He’s a guy that both Atousa and I know but not well. He once fed us both raw albacore tuna at his house minutes after meeting us.
A second Scorpion Bowl arrives at some point, although no one will admit to ordering it. The four of us stare at the pink globe with a dangerous mixture of fear and desire. Ivar finds a chair and pulls out some expensive French cigarettes that smell several orders of magnitude better than Atousa’s Parliaments. We talk, we laugh, we smoke, we eat, we drink, we laugh, and we drink.
Like a lighthouse on a distant shore, San Francisco waits patiently in our future, further from our minds than words like ”hours” and “miles” are capable of describing.