Neil Plakcy - Mahu

The result was that my father knew almost everybody in Honolulu, in both licit and illicit sectors. One of his best friends was Uncle Chin, a tall, stately man who always had an air of ineffable sadness, even when bouncing his dozens of honorary grandchildren around him. In part that stemmed from a paralyzed nerve in his face that caused the left side of his lip to droop a bit, giving him a faintly perplexed look. Uncle Chin was not really active in his tong anymore, at least not according to police records. But police records weren’t always up to date.

I tried to stay out of trouble during the luau, preferring to play uncle with my nieces and nephews and second cousins. At one point, though, I went up to the bar to get another beer and ran into Peggy Kaneahe.

We always sat next to each other in school, Kanapa‘aka and Kaneahe. When we were sixteen I took her to the junior prom at Punahou, and she was the first girl I ever kissed. We dated for almost three years, through high school graduation and our first year away at college. She was the first girl I had sex with, in her pink bedroom, one Saturday afternoon when her parents were at a christening on the North Shore. I broke up with her right after coming home from my first year in San Diego.

I had never known anyone who was gay until I went to college. Then, on my first day at UC, right after my parents left, I met a guy down the hall who was tall and thin and very effeminate. A lot of the jocks on the floor used to tease Ted, write fake love notes on the message board on his door, steal his towel from the shower room, that kind of thing. I remember once he walked down the hallway, stark naked, his hair dripping wet, making eye contact with every guy who lined up to watch. I got a hard-on when he looked at me.

One night in the spring I got drunk and was sitting on my bed with the door to my room open when Ted walked by. I don’t remember what I said to him, why he came into my room, but I know that after a while he got up, very deliberately, and locked the door. Then he stood in front of me, without speaking, and unbuttoned his shirt. He unbuckled his belt, unzipped his pants, and dropped them to the floor, then shucked off his shirt and tossed it next to his pants.

I remember being stunned that he didn’t wear any underwear. Then he came over to me.

By the time I got home that summer I was totally confused. But I knew that dating Peggy hadn’t cured me of my interest in men, so somehow that meant I had to stop seeing her. I didn’t have a reason to give her, and I don’t think she ever understood.

“Hello, Kimo,” she said. We kissed briefly, like friends.

“You look great,” I said. She wore a pink polo shirt and a navy skirt, and her hair, which was usually pulled up on her head, now hung free to her shoulders.

“I’m sorry I’ve been so busy,” she said. “And I can’t even stay long today, because that jogger hit and run is coming up before Judge Lap tomorrow and I’ve still got pages of discovery to go over.”

“Your parents look good,” I said. I nodded toward them, a nicely-dressed couple who had always been friendly toward me.

“You’re lucky you have brothers,” she said. “My parents are still waiting for me to give them grandchildren.” She made a face. “Peggy, when you gonna find nice boy, have keikis for us to play with?”

“I still get that. Parents have no shame when it comes to grandchildren.”

We talked for a while longer, walking around the party together. I wondered how I was going to tell Peggy that I was gay, that I’d been fooling her as much as I’d been fooling myself. I hoped that we had so much history that it didn’t matter that there weren’t any sparks between us anymore, that we were really just friends. At least, I told myself it didn’t matter.

Monday morning I was up at first light and on the waves at Kuhio Beach. By the time I made it to the station I was feeling almost myself again. Akoni arrived a few minutes after I did, and I said, as he arrived, “Hey, brah, how was your weekend?”

He pulled a chair up next to me and said in a low voice, “Look, Kimo, I don’t want to know about your personal life. I don’t want to know what kind of magazines you got stashed under your mattress, who blows in your ear and who you grab your ankles for. All right?”

All my good spirit evaporated. While the weekend had helped me put aside some of the problems of the week before, it obviously hadn’t worked that way for Akoni. “You want another partner? You want me to put in for a transfer? I will.”

“I don’t know who you are any more.”

“Well, here’s a news flash, buddy,” I said, as I turned to my computer. “I’m not sure I do either.”

We were scheduled to meet Harry back at the Rod and Reel Club at eleven. At about ten of, I asked Akoni if he wanted to come with me. “You handle it,” he said. “I don’t know any of that computer stuff anyway.”

Harry and I met up in the alley behind the bar. Arleen was on the phone with her mother, as usual. I introduced Harry as “my computer expert” and she waved us into Tommy’s office.

Harry sat right down at his computer and turned it on. “Let’s see what he’s got here.” He’d asked me to prepare some basic information about Tommy for him-his birthday, his wife’s name, birthday, and anniversary; Derek’s name and birthday. He did some typing and after a couple of unhappy sounds, the computer started whirring to life.

“Easy as pie,” he said, as the Windows warm-up screen appeared. “That’s not to say some of the files aren’t encrypted, too. We’ll have to see.”

Most computerese was gibberish to me. The computers we used at the station were very simple, and pretty user-friendly. You moved a cursor around, clicked on items on lists, typed in what you wanted to search for, that kind of thing.

Around noon Arleen came in. “It’s almost lunchtime,” she said. “My boy’s on a half-day today, so I’ve got to go pick him up.”

“I wish I had a kid,” Harry said, shocking the hell out of me. “How old is he?”

“He’s five,” she said. “You want to see a picture?”

Harry nodded. She opened her wallet and pulled out one of those studio pictures, the kid posed on a carpet with a teddy bear. “Cute,” Harry said. “What’s his name?”

“Brandon.” She had a couple more pictures, which she showed us. I looked at them politely, Harry with more interest. “He’s why I have this job, you know. I’m not some kind of criminal or anything. I just need to work, and this way I get to see my son as much as I can.”

“Cool,” Harry said.

“I actually have an associate’s degree in computer science,” she said shyly, making eye contact with Harry. Once again I was amazed at his ability to attract women. It was almost like I wasn’t there, this thing that was going on between them. “But I make more here than I could as a junior programmer somewhere, and the hours are better.”

Arleen gave us a menu for a local deli before she left, and we ordered take-out. Harry sat back down at the keyboard and I wandered around the office, looking for anything we might have overlooked. But I guess there just wasn’t much there to find, and I’d been over every inch by the time the delivery boy came. I paid him, tipped him, and took the sandwiches in to Tommy’s office.

“Find anything interesting?”

“Nothing much. But I still have to crack into his Palm backup software.”

Just then we heard the door open. Arleen had that same cute little boy with her who I’d seen before, with coal-black hair in a short crewcut, wearing blue and white striped overalls with a pattern of trains across the bib. He looked hapa haole, or half white, his eyes a little too round to be fully Japanese.