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.