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.