Neil Plakcy - Mahu Surfer

“For your sons,” I repeated. The TV camera for Lui, the football for Haoa, the surfboard for me. While we had been going on about our lives, leaving our parents behind, our father had been memorializing us in tile. “I hope you have the same number of each tile. You don’t want us to get jealous.”

“Always the same for each of my sons. No difference.”

We walked into my father’s favorite restaurant, a hole in the wall at the far end of the shopping center called Papa Lo’s. I didn’t know if there was a Papa Lo; if there was, I’d never met him. Instead the place was staffed by eager Vietnamese women who spoke only enough English to take orders and make change.

While we sat at a linoleum-topped table and waited for our food, I said, “I met with my new boss today, and things aren’t going to be as easy as I expected.”

“How come?”

I squirmed uncomfortably on the hard plastic chair. “He wants me to lie about something. And I don’t want to.”

“Lie? About what?”

“Something in an investigation. One he wants me to work on.”

“I don’t like him asking you to lie,” my father said, shaking his head. “Why be a policeman if you can’t tell the truth?”

“You told me once,” I said, recalling a conversation we’d had only a few weeks before, “that you and Uncle Chin, when you were younger…”

“Yes, yes,” he said. “What?”

Uncle Chin is my uncle in all but blood. My father’s best friend, he was once a powerful leader of a Honolulu tong, or Chinese gang. Now he is old and sick, but he and my father have always been, well, as thick as thieves, though I’ve never for a moment had reason to doubt my father’s honor.

“You told me you had always acted with honor, no matter what you did. Was that true?”

The waitress brought our lunches and laid them before us, bowing her head slightly. My father began to eat, without answering my question. Finally, he said, “You know the expression, no honor among thieves?”

I nodded.

“You may not understand, but your Uncle Chin was always an honorable man. And me, too, I try to live with honor and respect, try to teach that to you boys, too.”

“I’m not sure we always paid attention.”

My father made a noise in his throat that is impossible to render into an alphabet, but it is the same noise he made when any of us came in late with improbable explanations. Its meaning was something along the lines of “You expect me to believe that?”

We ate for a while in silence. Eventually, my father finished, wiped his hands on his napkin, and crumpled it into a ball. “Will you still have a job if you don’t agree to do this thing he wants, that will make you lie?”

I understood then that whether he knew it or not, my father was giving me the opportunity to take the job, even if it meant lying to him, to my mother, my brothers, and everyone else I knew. All I had to do was lie. I could tell my father that there would be no job for me with the HPD if I turned this opportunity down. It would give me a reason why I was leaving the force, a reason my parents, with their strong beliefs about honor, could understand. Instead of appearing weak, making it look like I could no longer handle being a cop now that I was out of the closet, I would be strong, holding on to my values in a world that didn’t appreciate them.

Of course, the irony was that I would be lying as I pretended to be unable to lie.

But what else could I do? Six years of work with the Honolulu PD had shown me that being a cop touched something deep inside me. It was a privilege and a responsibility, and I could not turn my back on either of those things. If I had to make a few personal sacrifices for the public good, tell a couple of small lies to my family and friends in order to catch a killer, that was nothing compared to the men and women who had given their lives in the line of duty. To pretend otherwise would demean them, and the badge I believed in.

It was time for me to make a decision, and there would be no going back on it. While my father waited for my answer, I felt that my senses were magnified. I smelled the chickens roasting in the back kitchen, and the pineapple an elderly couple were sharing next to us. The sun streaming in the front windows was almost too strong, hurting my eyes. When the door opened, I heard a siren outside, police, fire or ambulance rushing to provide help to someone who needed it.

“Sampson said we’d talk about that,” I said. “But I have a feeling I won’t be reporting to work at the headquarters downtown any time soon. And if that happens, I think I might just go surfing for a while.” »

I met with Sampson again the next morning, ready to make a deal. “Who will I report to up on the North Shore?”

“No one up there will know you’re working on this case. I’ll give you my personal email address and my cell phone number, and that’s the only way I want you to contact me.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Any particular reason?”

“I have no idea who’s behind these murders,” he said. “But I have to be suspicious when two good detectives in District 2 can’t come up with any information. I’m not saying that I think there’s a cop, or cops, involved in this, but something doesn’t smell right.”

The thought that someone on the North Shore could be sabotaging the investigation made me uncomfortable, but it was just one more problem heaped on my plate, a plate that had gotten fuller and fuller since the day my closet door opened.

We mapped out a strategy. I would tell my family and friends that I had decided not to accept the department’s offer, in order to sit back and think about all that had happened to me in the last few weeks, not just my coming out but the man I had killed in the course of solving my last case. I was going to take my severance check and head for the North Shore, to surf while I thought about my next move.

Sampson would issue a press release to local media indicating that while my name had been cleared, I had chosen not to return to the force, and he would field all inquiries regarding me. He would work out the details to ensure that my salary would continue to be deposited into my bank account, and that my benefits, including health and life insurance, would continue.

One of my brother Lui’s reporters, a Korean guy named Ralph Kim, had followed my story from the beginning. After I left headquarters, I called Ralph to break the news of my resignation from the police force.

I had to leave a message on Ralph’s voice mail, but he called me back as I was walking into my apartment, excitement and feigned outrage in his voice. “I knew this was going to happen,” he said. “That department is never going to accept a gay cop.”

“It’s not about the department. It’s about me. That’s why I want to talk to you.”

“Have you hired an attorney? You know that series we ran last week, about gay cops around the country? There’s some big money in discrimination settlements.”

I stretched out on my sofa, the phone at my ear. “I need some time off, Ralph. That’s the story. It’s not about discrimination or how the HPD treats its cops. If you want to talk to me, those are the ground rules.”

“I want to talk to you, but that’s not much of a story.”

“Sure it is, if you pitch it right,” I said, sitting up. I found myself waving my free arm around, even though I knew Ralph couldn’t see it. “What effect does coming out have on somebody’s life-career being one part of that? You could talk to that guy at the power company, and that top salesman at the big car dealership near the airport. Some other high-profile gay men and lesbians. You might even get another series out of it.” I paused, giving Ralph a chance to think. “This could be a big career move for you, Ralph. But the story’s got to be about me, and my decisions, not a smear campaign against the HPD.”