Half of the passengers on the flight back to Oahu were in the military.  They had their own rows assigned to them.  A bossy Russian woman sitting next to me with a large family enlisted a few of the soldiers to help rearrange her bags in the overhead bin.  I was stricken with anxiety.  It was one of my greatest dreams in life to move back to Hawaii, yet I was flailing and floundering, unable to find a power source to plug into.  I’d scouted out Hilo a few times now but had failed to find the right connections or a way to get my foot in the door.  Now I had one last week in Waikiki that I didn’t even want.  It was clear now I was going to need to go to Central America to recuperate.

To get my mind off my troubles I perused my book on Hawaiian mythology.  There were many elaborate stories and multisyllable names that were hard to keep track of.  Still, I was getting some idea about the Native worldview prior to the arrival of the first missionaries in the 1800s.  What I read about now was the dog people.  They were described as being born with wagging tails.  They intermarried and didn’t descend from any chief clan.  The name for them was olohe.

The olohe were hairless dogs and lived in the sand mountains.  They had a mystical power, that of the big war dogs, and often appeared during the processions of spirits known as the marchers in the night.  They look like any other human but have the tails of dogs.  Some of them set themselves apart by tearing out their hair and coating their bodies in oil.  This is because they are esteemed wrestlers and bone-breakers.  Many of them are professional robbers and lie in wait for unsuspecting travelers among the high mountain passes.

A famous dog-like creature that resides in the Moanalua Valley on Oahu is called Poki.  Travelers go out of their way to avoid passing through his territory.  He is considered to be something of a ghost god in that his form sometimes appears in the clouds, accompanied by the wailing of many dogs.  The Hawaiians believed that animal shapes in the clouds, which they called oila, could be used to predict the moves of chiefs who were their kupua descendants.

When we landed in Honolulu, I picked up my bag and called for an Uber.  The price was almost the same as the tourist shuttle.  Pulling up in front of the Waikiki Beach Club was depressing.  All I wanted was to get into my private room and shut the door.  The woman at the reception checked me in then walked me up to the room to make sure that they key code that she’d given me worked. 

There was a tweaker standing outside of it, pulling on the doorknob in vain, one of my new roommates, apparently.  She opened the door, and he came in and started messing around with some bags on a lower bunk in the dorm area.  My room was past the shared bathroom, private, but not worth a hundred dollars a night.  At least I could lock myself in it and not have to deal with the likes of the guy in the dorm, talking and singing to himself.  It was like he was performing a jazz concert in his mind.

For a long time, I just laid down on my bed and stared at the ceiling.  Then I got up and walked down to the ABC store to get a hot dog and 7-Up.  Kalakaua Avenue seemed bleaker than usual.  I walked up to the Duke statue and then turned around and walked back on the beach side.  I was sitting on a bench with my camera when a young homeless guy came up and accused me of filming him.  He had a prediction for me about how the world was going to end, with a big bomb blast, and it wouldn’t be long now.

I walked over to the empty hula stage and saw another man lying on the ground who looked like he was suffering from leprosy.  He was filthy and emaciated, with no hair, and scabs all over his body that the flies were buzzing around.  He was hugging himself and begging for cigarettes.  It was impossible to imagine that society would just let him lie on the ground like that.

A little further down the strip was an old shop that a lot of homeless people were squatting around.  A kid was lying on his side in the grass.  Two guys were sharing a beer.  A woman suddenly leaned over and vomited all over the ground.  She tried to change her location when she was done and ended up dragging herself through it.  I went back to my room just happy to have a place to lie down.