People who live in Hawaii have something they tell each other about their good fortune to live in what Mark Twain once called “the loveliest fleet of islands anchored in any ocean.”  They say lucky you live Hawaii.  What if you are born there and then move away as a child, however?  Do you still have any residual luck coming?  Can you go back and claim your birthright at some point, let them know that there has been some mix-up, that you were meant to live in paradise?  I have tried to make that happen many times.  Though it’s never come close to working, I seem destined to keep trying.

I first went back with my German girlfriend, Suzy, in 1996, on a package tour to Waikiki.  It rained from the moment we arrived to the moment we left, so hard that it was almost impossible to see the ground. 

The second time I went, in 2001, was for two weeks.  I traveled to five of the islands, Oahu, the Big Island, Maui, Kauai, and Molokai, seeing the best nature the islands have to offer while sleeping in a string of rental cars.  It does not take that long to drive around any of the islands and there are not many places where you can just pull over and get off the beaten track.  It was a long two weeks of ducking and hiding, never really getting comfortable anywhere, doing a lot of sitting around.

In 2008, I went back again and started off sleeping in a rental car, until I discovered a hostel by the zoo and another on the North Shore that I spent most of the week at.  It was during the US Open and one of the cameramen for the event heard me playing a song I’d just written and said he wanted to film me and then mix the performance in with some footage of the surfers. 

That was nothing more than an impulsive idea he was throwing out there, as after the contest was over, he didn’t show up to meet me in the parking lot.  It had at least given me two hours of false hope, however, much more than I’d gotten at any other time on the trip.  Hawaii is a tough nut to crack.

The fourth time I went back to Hawaii, in 2012, was the time I stayed the longest, working at a hostel in Waikiki.  It started off when my parents were invited to house-sit for some of their old friends from back-in-the-day.  I was planning on going over anyway, and this seemed like an incredible opportunity to connect with people and solicit some ideas for getting my foot in the door. 

My father’s friend was now head pastor of a small Lutheran church in Waikiki that had been my father’s first call after getting out of seminary.  That was right before my parents had dropped out of society to join the counterculture, becoming Jesus People, living like hippies and latter-day apostles from the New Testament.  That’s how I’d lived out my early childhood, going from commune to commune, home to apartment to house, like Jesus himself, who’d wandered from town to town with his followers. 

Now we were going back to house-sit in Hawaii Kai.  The idea was that my father would preach for his friend while they were away on the mainland visiting some relatives.  The house in Hawaii Kai was far from any attractions and as hot as a brick oven.  The dog that we were watching almost died of depression and old age.  My father now seemed to be more obsessed with finding a Walmart than trying to recapture his glory days.  I was supposed to be making connections.  Instead, all anyone told me was that it’s expensive to live in Hawaii.

The day my parents left, I tracked down a hostel on Lemon Road, that seemed more like a homeless shelter than anything.  It was fifty dollars a night for a bunk bed.  The bedding was stained, and I shared the room with two convicts who partied like we were living in a dorm.   When I came down in the morning, the manager asked me if I wanted a job, not working for money, but for my bed.  They had me working the graveyard shift at another slum property, where most of my clients ended up being hookers bringing their johns. 

The rest of the time I drank and played music in a garage with a few Samoans and a tribe of other outsiders who lived on the next property.  By the time I got a job in the Middle East, I had twenty dollars left in the bank.

Of all the places I’d been to in Hawaii, the only one that seemed even remotely like a place where I could make it was Hilo on the rainy side of the Big Island.  I’d been there in 2017, then again in 2020, right before the pandemic, for a further assessment.  It seemed the right size, a college town, with interesting old buildings downtown and a few places to play music.  Even that was expensive, however, and the rental rooms I’d looked into had been far from the center.

Now I was trying Hawaii again, this time with a new twist on an old plan.  During the pandemic I’d gone through a huge bin of family correspondence and found envelopes with the addresses of all the places we’d lived at during our scattered Hawaii years.  With the miracle of Google Maps, I’d be able to track the places down, just as I’d recently found all the places on the mainland that my family and extended family had ever lived.  I was also taking a book on Hawaiian Mythology that I wanted to learn about, and my father’s old ukelele, which I planned on loading up with mana energy.

With that plan in my mind, I found a round-trip ticket to Honolulu, booked a room in a hostel, and set off to Hawaii one more time to see what I could find.

I chose to travel on February 8^th, what would’ve been my father’s 78^th birthday if he hadn’t passed away six years earlier.  Even though it was too large to fit into my suitcase, I was taking the ukelele he’d given me, one he’d brought back from a trip to Oahu on his sixtieth birthday.  Prior to that, I’d been a guitar player for twenty years, but ukelele was the first instrument I’d ever played, at Kaimuki Christian school in third grade, and once I picked it up again found that my guitar style fit it perfectly.  I never looked back.

The flight to Honolulu was from LAX, and I had to call for an Uber at five in the morning to make it to the airport on time.  All night long I’d been lying there wide awake in dread and terror, mostly because I was heading off to Hawaii without enough money to do anything but plunge to the bottom of the barrel, renting a bunk bed at a hostel on Lemon Road, the site of some of the most demoralizing, isolated episodes of my life. 

I had addresses of some of the places we’d lived at in the seventies, when hippies could still get by, but that had been fifty years ago.  I was always looking for that magic moment, the one that only exists in comic books and films.  Meanwhile, life had been indifferent to my dreams.  I’d had to hack them out of reality like trying to cut stars out of canvas with a bread knife.  All of my shining moments had been achieved in wild desperation and the price for them was still being paid.

The flight was only half full.  I was too nervous to concentrate on watching a movie.  When we landed, I took a breath and moved forward.  I’d been given a wrist band to prove that I’d passed the COVID protocol before getting on the flight.  One of the requirements had been proof of a return flight, so I’d booked one a month from the day, back to Los Angeles.  I basically had thirty days to get my foot in the door.  If that didn’t happen, the backup plan was to fly to Central America and find someplace cheap to try to regroup.  I’d been down that road before.

From the airport, I booked a shuttle to Waikiki.  The driver was doing his best to entertain the passengers along the way, pointing out famous sites and naming celebrities, like former president, Barrack Obama, who had a history with the island.  I was the last one to be dropped off, at the Waikiki Beach Club on Lemon Road, right across from Kapiolani Park and the zoo.  Eight years earlier when I’d been working at the Family Hostel, the strip had been something of a drug-infested ghetto, with nightly police raids.  Now it had been cleaned up a little, but the mood upon arrival was still grim.

It was too early to check into my room, so I stashed my bags in the storage room and walked across Kapahulu to get to the park.  The banyan tree in front of the zoo had been a sacred playground of my youth, swinging from the branches like a monkey in the jungle.  Now the benches around it had been tagged by graffiti and the very soul of it seemed stunted by displacement and neglect. 

In 2012 there’d been armies of homeless people squatting in the park all day, lying down to sleep on the sidewalks lining Kalakaua Avenue every night, taking up every inch of pavement, a living land mine that was blowing the limbs off the tourism industry.  Now I’d been told that a new law had been passed prohibiting anyone from sitting or lying on the ground.  It seemed to be working.  There were still a lot of homeless around but nothing like the hordes when I’d been working at the hostel.

Maybe they’d stashed them on a desert island like they’d done to the lepers, sending them to Molokai, beginning in 1866.  If so, I hoped they’d send me there too.  I was tired of looking for somewhere to live, tired of hoping that someday things would turn around for me, when the evidence seemed to suggest that they’d only get worse.  It wasn’t just me.  There were a lot of us in bad shape, a lot of us who’d slipped between the cracks.  If you need to have winners, then you’re going to have losers as well.  That’s just the way it works.

I walked past the zoo and then over to the bandstand, where a statue of a dragonfly hovered over an artificial stream.  There, I sat on a bench with a clear view of Diamond Head and watched a man struggling to pedal a bike across the park.  He looked like he was being pursued by hell-hounds, and at one point he crashed, tumbling head over heels.  He leapt to his feet and staggered toward the bathrooms, leaving his bike just lying there in a pile. 

A few minutes later, a guy stopped his pickup on Kalakaua, got out, and threw the bike into the back of the truck.  It was nice to be back in paradise.  Good thing I’d shown up with real low expectations.

When I got back to the Waikiki Beach Club, the woman at the desk let me check into my room early.  It was a giant dorm, with four beds in one room and four beds in the other.  In between, was a passageway with lockers and a sink.  Fortunately, there was a lower bunk open, right across from the bathroom.  That kind of bed assignment is golden, and I rushed down right away to see if I could extend my stay for another week, but they were all booked up. 

The room looked like a bunch of teenagers had been crashing in it, suitcases wide open and spilling out all over, wet towels hanging from the top bunks, as much sand on the floor as there was on the beach.  I did my best to spread a sheet over the formless mattress, then unpacked my small bag and left evidence strewn around to let others know that the bed was taken.  All moved in, I changed into a pair of swim trunks and headed back out to explore.

My first stop was the Family Hostel, which had once occupied one end of the block, one of the shadiest, most ramshackle lodgings I’d ever stumbled across on any of my travels.  Most of the guests had been on disability, spending a bulk of their check to pay for a month in a bunk and a party that rarely lasted longer than a weekend.  After that it was all scraping up change for a tallboy of PBR and scrounging through the ashtray for cigarette butts. 

While I’d been working there someone had died in one of the private rooms and no one even knew until the stink gave it away.  The guy had been collecting urine specimens in gallon jugs for the past few months.  The poor soul who went into to clean up the mess stumbled out with his tongue hanging to his knees, his frail body racked with sobs.

I’d become friends with two Samoans who lived in the midblock extension of the Family Hostel, now the only property that remained.  They were big guys who worked construction and could pound pipes through concrete with their bare hands, yet they loved to play music and sang in high falsetto voices, never making it through a single song without busting out laughing in pure joy.  They’d been my protectors during the few months I’d spent at the hostel and a whole network of seedy alliances and homeless folk attended our nightly luaus in the parking garage, beer, weed, and sirloin steak, which the two brothers always spent all of their construction wages on.

Now the Family Hostel looked more than ever like a homeless shelter.  Any joy that had ever happened there had long ago been snuffed out.  The Samoans were gone.  A few shadowy figures flitted around.  There were cars parked in the garage and a lock on the gate, but I didn’t want to go in.  I was lucky just to have survived the season.

The establishment at the end of the block, which had once been the headquarters of the Family Hostel, now rented scooters and bikes.  I went down and asked about renting a bike for a day, thinking I could probably get to all the places we’d ever lived during my childhood in one afternoon.  I’d do a search for the addresses on Google and try to make some kind of a plan for that in the next few days.

The shady nightspot that I’d worked graveyard shift at ten years earlier, the Love Hut, was all the way down Kalakaua Avenue, at the juncture of Ala Moana Boulevard, a distance of nearly two miles.  To get there I passed the whole of Waikiki Beach, one of the most mythical strips in America and the stomping grounds of my youth.  On my way I passed along Kuhio Beach, around the bandstand where they used to put on nightly hula shows before COVID, the Duke Kahanamoku statue, his outstretched arms draped with leis, the Moana Surfrider, and the Royal Hawaiian Hotel. 

On the other side of the street was the Saks Fifth Avenue version of the International Market Place, once full of exotic characters and colorful souvenir stands.  There was the Waikiki Shopping Plaza, the Royal Hawaiian Center, a California Pizza Kitchen, Kate Spade outlet, and Tiffany Jewelers, right across from the Harley-Davidson Boutique. 

When I was born in Honolulu there was only one skyscraper downtown.  It housed a nursing center and the church that my father preached at was on one of the top floors.  Back then you could look down from one of the balconies and see all of Waikiki.  Now, I felt trapped in a commercial maze that could’ve been any big city.

When I passed Fort de Russy and turned left on Ala Moana, the Love Hut was gone, along with Island Getaway, the scooter rental shop that shared the same office.  What remained was just apartment buildings.  Working there had been a low ebb of my existence, slinking up right before midnight, relieving the swing shift dude, checking the receipts, knowing that after two o’clock if no hooker showed up with a last-minute catch, I had the next six hours to hide behind a paper and doze.

In the morning, after being relieved of duty, I’d go sit under a banyan tree in Kapiolani Park and watch the homeless come to life, rising from the ground like a tribe of modern Lazaruses, pouring from the woodlands and ravines, filling up the park, occupying most of the picnic tables, causing me to fret and write the most haunted songs to ever come out of a ukelele.

One time I’d been sitting in the park in the morning and a missionary group of kids had presented me with a bag of groceries, assuming I was homeless.  I was at the point of turning them down when I happened to look inside and see that it was full of candy bars and ramen noodles.  When I took it back to the Family Hostel my roommates tore into it, almost like wild beasts, except wild beasts don’t know any better.  My roommates knew better, they just didn’t care. 

Now I had a week to reacquaint myself with Waikiki.  Since I couldn’t extend my stay at the hostel, I’d probably move onto Hilo.  That is if I could find a room there.  Wherever I was going next had to be cheap.  Those are the wrong words to say in Hawaii, but it was true.  With my book on Hawaiian mythology and ukelele, I could find ways to keep busy.  As long as the ABC store didn’t run out of spam musubi and hot dogs anytime soon I could probably survive another month.

On the way back to the hostel, I stopped and laid down on a strip of grass besides the Duke statue at Waikiki Beach.  I didn’t care if I was breaking the law.  My back and legs were hurting, and I wasn’t the only one lying there.   Right across the street were hotels that cost thousands of dollars a night to stay in.  Most people can’t afford that.  There was still a sizeable contingent of homeless people on the beach.  They were taking up tables and benches.  A few were lying in the grass a few feet away from me.

I got up eventually and stumbled towards the ocean, the setting sun casting a golden glow on the water.  Before we’d moved to the mainland, in 1976, the year of the American Bicentennial, I’d come to Waikiki Beach with my fourth-grade class at the end of the school year.  Walking out alone on a rock jetty, I’d looked into the water and seen a naked toddler being swept out to sea.  I’d jumped in and grabbed him, holding him up over my head until we got back into the shallow surf.  The mother and some of my classmates had seen me that day and made me feel like a hero.

Where was that hero’s welcome now?  On this day I could’ve been invisible, or even worse, gotten into trouble just by looking so rootless.  There are poor people all over the world, yet only in America are they blamed for being poor.  The idea is that we could’ve been anything and yet chose to fail, out of laziness or moral ineptitude.  That is a bitter pill to swallow when it happens to you.  Every citizen deserves a place to lie down, at the very least.

There was an old woman in a hula outfit, walking around taking pictures with the sun at her back.  She might’ve been there to represent the old days.  Until very recently, they’d had hula shows on the beach and in the International Market.  Perhaps, they’d return at some point, but any sense of Aloha on Oahu has long been an endangered species. 

When I got back to the hostel, I took the book I’d brought along, Hawaiian Mythology, by Martha Beckwith, down to a hammock in the common area.  I was a generation older than most of the guests and though I felt friendly towards them wasn’t about to sit and do shots with them, not any time soon. 

I’d gotten a look at the guy sleeping above me and he was even older, lying in bed, so flat he was hardly discernable.  The fact he was in bed already showed how much he had going on.  One of the strange twists about Hawaii is that some folks that can’t afford nursing homes stay in youth hostels.  I was well on my way to being one of them.

It was a big book to get into, as thick as a phone book.  I started at the very beginning.  Who are the Hawaiians?  They are Polynesians, the indigenous island people of Oceania in the Pacific Ocean.  There may have been two waves of migration to Hawaii, the first from Micronesia and the second from Tahiti.  They are polytheistic, meaning they believe in many gods, and animistic, meaning they believe that every natural thing on the planet, people, animals, rocks, plants, water, soil, fire, have souls.

The way that information and tradition was passed down was by storytelling.  The ancient Hawaiians had petroglyphs, but no written language so everything was memorized and transmitted from generation to generation in the form of chants, dances, and stories.  There were two types of stories.  A kaao was a make-believe story, told for entertainment, while a moolelo was a historical narrative, about the gods or the ancestors.  The moolelo, or sacred stories, were only told by day.  You could get in big trouble for messing around in the middle of them, just like a fidgety kid in church.

The Hawaiians called their gods akua, and they could be anything in nature.  The god that a family might claim as a guardian god was called an aumakua.  The child of a god born into a family, always with special, remarkable traits, like Hercules, the son of Zeus, was called a kupua.  Above and beyond the everyday gods that inhabit the islands, the Hawaiians also believed in four great gods, Ku, Lono, Kane, and Kanaloa.  Tiki gods are usually carved to represent one of these major deities.

Before the coming of the Westerners, the Hawaiians lived in a society that was broken down into four classes, the Chiefs, Priests, Commoners, and Slaves.  It was dictated by a very strict set of tapus, or regulations.  The old ways began to crack around the time that King Kamehameha rose to power, influenced by contact with outsiders such as Oriental sailors and the first missionaries.  Oral recitation of their own legends began to get mixed with stories from other cultures and sources such as the Bible.

There was a lot to read about.  In the meantime, was it true that we lived in a free society now, or had the four classes only changed names and faces?   When I tiptoed into my room that night, I stood beside my bed and looked at the old man in the bunk above me, his face wrinkled up in worry, trying to escape, through sleep, from a room that was flooded with noise and light.  With enough money, you can sleep like a chief.  Without it, you’re just lucky not to be on the street.

In the morning the bed began to shake, as if the island was being rocked by a major earthquake, and my eyes shot open, only to see the old man in the bunk above me, climbing down from the ladder, his legs as thin as white railings, his ass flat in his underwear.  He was making a break for the bathroom.  When he came out, I watched him through squinted eyes as he got dressed and put on his cap.  It was no surprise to see him eating his breakfast, plain oatmeal, when I went down to the kitchen.  I sat down and introduced myself. 

Jerry, as it turned out, was an evangelist.  He had a week off from his job as a security guard in Cleveland and was here to witness to the lost and disenfranchised of Oahu.  Waikiki is the epicenter for them, so he’d come to the right place.  He already knew that, however.  It was his third time preaching on the islands.  The last time he’d actually been mugged and assaulted in the park. 

I was careful not to tell him too much about my father and his ministry in Hawaii as he seemed eager to take on a partner or apprentice.  He’d be there as long as I would so I had to strike a fine line between being friendly but not too friendly.  I had plans of my own.

Taking leave of Jerry, I made my way to the closest ABC store.  The hostel was right next to the Queen Kapi’olani Hotel.  When I’d come to Hawaii with my parents in 2012, my father’s old church, Our Redeemer Lutheran, had been renting one of the banquet rooms for its services.  There had been a small handful of people who’d known us from back in the day, nearly fifty years before, but no one had offered any help on extending my stay.  Those few months I’d still made it a point to attend every Sunday service. 

It had been a great relief to get a job at a university in the Middle East right before my money ran out.  I’d been able to save some face without letting on what an unnerving disaster the whole experience had been.  Now the church was gone, moved to a new location a few miles away.  I thought about visiting, but had also seen on their website that my father’s old friend, who’d been pastor for many years, had recently retired and moved to the mainland to live with his kids.

After getting a coffee, muffin, and banana, I was back in Kapiolani Park with my ukelele, sitting on a tattooed bench beneath the banyan tree of my youth.  How many hundreds of hours had I racked up in that park?  Too many to mention, often daydreaming about pitching myself off one of the skyscrapers.  On some days there’d been so many homeless people in the park it had seemed like an episode of The Walking Dead.  On this morning, I felt good, however, and could feel the mana energy blowing off of the sea and gathering around the base of the tree.

I launched into my signature shuffle style and got caught up in a new melody, inspired by the site of a homeless man rising off the ground and brushing off his clothes.  It felt like I’d been sitting in that park my whole life, like I was one of the trees, a brother of the sea, a relative of the grass, a grandchild of Diamond Head.  Later, I got up and walked to the seawall, taking my melody there for a spell, staring into the clear waves, the green coral below, with small yellow fish darting around it.  There was something about my music that was tied to Hawaii.  When it got turned on, it stayed turned on. 

Just then I heard some beautiful notes bending in the breeze and recognized that they were coming from a lap steel.  I got up to investigate and found a man sitting right by the Surfer on a Wave statue, coaxing a moaning, reverb-laden solo out of a guitar that he held on his lap, picking the strings with his right hand, and running a steel bar across the strings with his left.  I got to talking with him and found he was selling a book on Hawaiian music and the development of the steel guitar.  I had to have one but needed to run back to the hostel to get the money.

When I got back, another passerby stopped by right when I was exchanging the cash for the book and monopolized the conversation from there on out.  At least I had something new to study up on, even if I didn’t manage to get another word in. 

Hawaiian folk music started off as chanting, accompanied by rhythm instruments such as the gourd and drum.  The chants were used to transmit information, such as genealogy and mythology, and also to tell stories.  The word for song in Hawaiian is melee.  Chanting alone, often for religious purposes was called melee oli.  When drums and dancing were added, such as the occasions when hula was performed, the song was called melee ‘auana.

Starting in the late 18^th century, during the age of exploration, the people of the islands were exposed to outside influences.  The European and American missionaries brought their church hymns.  Later Mexican cowboys, or paniolos, introduced the guitar and the falsetto singing style.  Portuguese farm workers brought over instruments that developed into the ukelele, or the jumping flea, as it was referred to.

Between 1900-15, the Hapa Haole style of music came to be when English language songs were created that featured superficial Hawaiian elements.  Hawaii had recently been annexed and Hawaiian musicians traveled across the states performing on the vaudeville circuit.  In 1915 Hawaiian performers were featured at the Panama Pacific Fair in San Franciso, and a radio broadcast, Hawaii Calls, brought Hawaiian music into homes across America.  In the next few years, it outsold all other forms of popular music.

When it came to the guitar, most Hawaiians adopted their own open tunings of it, a style that has come to be known as slack-key.  Joseph Kekuku is often credited with inventing the steel guitar when he brushed a steel bar over the strings of a guitar in 1890.  If he wasn’t the one to invent the style, he was surely the one to master it.  In 1912 he appeared in a production of a musical called Bird of Paradise that featured Hawaiian music and costumes.  Other performers, such as Sol Hoopii, followed in his wake, introducing the steel guitar to millions.  Over time the slide style began to appear in blues and country and western music, as well.

I was introduced to the ukelele in third grade at Kaimuki Christian School when we were all taught to play it so we could perform Mele Kalikimaka at the Christmas pageant.  The most popular TV character on the islands at the time was a Japanese superhero named Kikaida, a half-android who rode a motorcycle with a sidecar.  Although I was no instrumental whiz, I still managed to pick out his theme song by ear, which got me some positive attention for a change.  All the cool kids lined up to be my friend.  I saw the rewards that the life of a musician can bring.

There are also some serious downsides.  It takes a long time to develop a craft such as learning how to play an instrument and write songs.  If no one supports you, you can find yourself in a terribly desperate spot.  Either way, you’ve got to be committed.  Beautiful music is timeless.  Even if you fail to it produce it, it is still a noble pursuit.  It’s what led to me sitting in Kapiolani Park in my mid-fifties, as broke as I’d ever been, still somehow getting a thrill about hearing a new song come into being.

When I was walking back to the hostel in the early evening, I came across another man with a ukelele strapped to his back and a wild look in his eye.  Roger told me he’d been living in the park for the past four years.  He was ready to get out of the city and go live off the land.  In the meantime, we traded songs. 

He played a song stuffed full of atonal jazz chords, at least I think that’s what they were, and hopped from foot to foot while he played.  When I played him my song, he played the same song over the top of it and continued hopping from foot to foot.  When we finished, his gangster partner flashed us both a shaka sign and we all bumped fists.  Even if you can’t keep time, you can always find a way to keep it real.