Even as a young child, I was possessed by dark fears and deep insecurities.  I frequently had lucid nightmares and would wake up crying and go and sleep at the foot of my parents’ bed.  Stories from the Bible, and the idea that there was a Devil running around out there frightened me terribly.  I was full of jealousy and lust for the sensual world and thought I really must be one of the worst sinners of all time, so the idea that there was some God up there looking down on me from heaven worried me as well.  The Jesus Freaks my parents were associating with didn’t give me much faith in mankind either.  In short, I trusted no one.

Although I tended to stick to the yard and street out front when we lived on Maunaloa, I had one memory, perhaps a partly invented one, about my brother John receiving a little Flintstone dining set on some occasion.  Angered that I hadn’t received anything, I’d taken the cup and bowl out and smashed them to pieces with a log.  Right then I looked up and saw my mother looking out the window at me, so I started to run.  I remember running all the way to a department store and then running and hiding in a rack of clothes.  A few moments later there were some feet, and when the clothes on the rack were pushed aside, there was my mother in a rare fit of fury, with a wooden spoon in her hand.

That was the direction that I headed now on my rented bike, making my way towards the next rental property we’d lived at nearly fifty years ago.  It was a condominium complex called Tropic Gardens that we’d stayed in for a year back when Frank and Malou were paying our rent.  On my way there, riding down Waialae Avenue, I reached the Kahala Mall, right next to the H1 Freeway.  That was during the last year we lived in Hawaii, and I remember my father walking my brother and I down to get us on the bus to school, from under the freeway overpass.

Tropic Gardens was still there.  There were many apartment buildings and two divisions of the complex.  I managed to find the unit we’d lived in, my parents, my brother John and new brother Luke, a Filipina girl named Kathy who stayed with us, and a parakeet named Sonny.  The greatest thing about living there had been the swimming pool, which John and I swam in so much our hair had turned green from the chlorine.  Incredibly, the pool was still there, looking very much like it did back in the day. 

I remembered going to the park across the street, the Wilson Community Park, and seeing kids blowing off fireworks on Chinese New Year.  In many ways the world was the same as it had always been, but the people were all different.  I still felt like a kid but was well on my way to becoming an old man.

From Tropic Gardens, I made my way to my next destination, which was in Palolo.  I had to follow Waialae Avenue back to 10th Avenue and then take a right.  As I approached the Mau’umae Ridge, I began to have flashbacks.  The hills were peaked, the color of jade, like something out of a Chinese painting.  There was the ballpark where my little league had practiced.  There was the hill where my mother had crashed the Volkswagen Bug, driving down to pick me up from practice.  There was the spot where my brother had got his foot caught in the chain of a bicycle.  What a mess that had been. 

By the time I reached Yvonne Place I was pushing the bike.  The road was that steep.  Then, there it was, the house where my brother Luke had been born.  The house was still there, as well as the one next door, where our friend Jeanie had lived with her family.  She’d been a few years older than me and had used my brother and I as human guinea pigs in her experiments, coaxing us into conjuring up the spirit of Bloody Mary in the bathroom, goading us into hiking up to an insane asylum that she claimed was on top of the hill.

It was still all jungle in back of the house, secret caves, vines that swung on their own volition.  The world had been a frightening place back then.  It was even worse now.  I used to cling to the thought of Jesus, like a talisman, and sleep with my back to the mountain, where all the bad dreams came from.  Now there was no place to escape from those nightmares.  They’d all come to life in the real world and here I was, still trying to navigate my way through them, looking for the light on the other side.