Neil Plakcy - Mahu Vice

“We’ve already done that,” I said. “And see where it got us.”

Once I dropped Ray at UH to meet Julie, I couldn’t stop yawning. But because my father had sold the center only a few months before, I knew his records would be relevant and I wanted to pick up whatever he had. Since his heart surgery, he had closed the office he’d kept in Salt Lake, moving all his paperwork into Haoa’s old bedroom.

“Are you sleeping enough?” my mother asked, as soon as she opened the door. “You look very tired.”

“Just temporary,” I said, leaning down to kiss her cheek. “Shift change.”

“You should go to your room and take a nap. I’ll make up the bed for you.”

“Thanks, but I want to get back home.” I sniffed the air. “What’s cooking?”

“Chicken long rice. I’ll make you a plate.”

My father was sitting at the kitchen table, a pile of papers around him, half-glasses perched on his nose. An old Alfred Apaka CD was playing softly in the background, and he wore a T-shirt proclaiming him the world’s best grandfather. “Aloha, Tutu Al,” I said, kissing the top of his head and calling him by the nickname his grandchildren had given him.

I sat across from him and he started handing me papers. “Lease agreements for the center,” he said. “Liliha kept the records for me, on computer. She’s going to e-mail you the spreadsheet up to the time the center was sold.”

I hadn’t known that Liliha was involved in my dad’s business, but it made sense. She had been a secretary and bookkeeper at KVOL when Lui met her, quitting her job when their first child was born.

My father shook his head. “When this center first opened, I knew every tenant personally. They gave me the rent, in cash, and I gave them a paper receipt. Now, everything is on computer. Some tenants were on automatic pay-the bank sucked the money out of their account, dropped it into mine the first of the month.”

“Made it easier for you,” I said.

He shook his head. “Nothing easy about business these days. That’s why I wanted to sell everything. I won’t be around forever, you know. I want things to be easy for your mother.”

“Enough, old man,” my mother said. “You know the saying, only the good die young. You will live forever.”

I laughed. My parents had bickered like that for as long as I remembered. Mike and I had done the same thing, a combination of our family legacies and all that free-floating testosterone between us.

We talked for a while, and I kept yawning, even as I devoured the shredded chicken and the short, gooey noodles. Finally I couldn’t stay any longer, and I gathered the papers up, kissed my parents, and got into my truck.

Only by blasting a CD could I stay awake enough to keep my truck on the road down to Waikiki, and as soon as I pulled into my parking space I had to lean my head against the steering wheel and rest for a minute before I went inside.

I fell asleep almost as soon as I crawled into bed, though it was only six o’clock outside. I slept till midnight, when I awoke with a full bladder and an empty stomach. After I took care of the bladder, I pulled on shorts, a T-shirt, and rubber slippas and headed out to Kuhio Avenue to handle the stomach.

Sitting at a table by the window at Denny’s, listening to an instrumental number by Hapa coming out of the speakers, I stared out at a couple of drunken twenty-something guys laughing and mock brawling on the street. The way they were having so much fun reminded me of the good times Mike and I had had-and then of the vodka in Mike’s water bottle.

There was something seriously wrong with that. But what could I do about it? I could say something to Mike, but I doubted it would do any good. If anything, it would make the relationship between us that much more strained.

I could go to his boss-but that would mean a suspension, maybe losing his job. I could never do that to him, even after what he’d done to me.

I didn’t know any of his friends; he’d always been careful about keeping our relationship a secret, though he’d met my family and Harry, Terri, and Gunter. He’d never introduced me to his parents, either. But I had met them once.

A week after Mike returned from his conference, I woke up with a yellowish discharge and pain when I tried to urinate. I did a little online research before I had to leave for work, and that’s when I figured it out.

Mike had given me an STD.

Which meant he’d been with somebody else, when we’d agreed to be faithful to each other. We’d used condoms for any penetration, but because the chance of transmitting something was so slim with activities like blow jobs and rimming, we’d been less careful with those.

I’d had this romantic ideal when Mike and I were dating, but now I saw that I’d been foolish. It was the first real relationship for both of us, and we were both feeling our way along. How much time did we want to spend together? How much did we have to share about our past, and about who we saw and what we did?

Mike was stingy with details. I told him about every guy I’d slept with, each bad date and embarrassing rendezvous. But all he said was that he’d gotten his first blow job from another guy in college and that he’d fooled around with a couple of men he’d met online-nothing serious.

I see now that he wasn’t ready to commit to a serious relationship. He still had wild oats to sow; he had to date a bunch of jerks in order to recognize a keeper. He was still figuring out what he liked in bed, too, as I was, and we both needed more experience before we settled down to monogamy.

Sitting at my computer that morning, with the evidence on my screen in front of me, I was so angry with Mike I was tempted to drive over to Fire Department Headquarters and out him. But hell, I didn’t even know what I had. And then, fear jolted through my body. If Mike had passed me an STD, was there was a chance he’d passed me HIV as well? Had I ruined my life by trusting a guy who couldn’t be trusted?

All I wanted was to curl back up in bed and cry-out of fear for my life, out of sadness that Mike had cheated on me. Out of general despair that a world that had seemed so happy and full of possibility the night before had suddenly turned dark and deadly. My limbs felt heavy, as if I could barely stand up, and I kept imagining tiny viruses circulating from my dick throughout my body.

But I had to go to work, and I wasn’t going to create an audit trail on my office computer that showed me visiting gay Web sites or googling STDs. All day long, it felt like the bottom had dropped out of my stomach, and I couldn’t concentrate on anything. Ray made a couple of cracks about my grouchiness and distraction, and I wanted to confide in him, but something held me back.

We were working the homicide of a teen-aged girl who had also been raped, and the sense of violation I felt pushed me over the edge as Ray and I interrogated the suspect, a lowlife friend of the girl’s mother who already had two convictions for sexual assault under his belt. When he refused to answer and I raised my hand to smack him, Ray grabbed my arm.

I turned on him, vicious as a caged animal. “Don’t touch me!”

Ray dropped my arm and held up his hands. “Cool down, Kimo. Don’t do anything you’ll regret later.”

“It’s too late for that,” I said, but I recognized I was out of control. “Can you finish this up? I need to get out of here.”

Ray agreed and I signed out a couple of hours before the end of the shift, telling Lieutenant Sampson I needed personal time. He was busy with a funding request so he just nodded his head and I hurried to my truck.

By the time I got there, my hands were shaking, my throat was parched, and I felt like I could burst into tears at any moment. All the way home, I gripped the steering wheel and repeated “maintain” to myself as a mantra. I nearly knocked the computer off the table trying to get it turned on, and kept fumbling the keys as I typed.