---

 

This writing was accepted for publication in the 108 page perfect-bound ISSN# / ISBN# issue/book “Nighttime City” cc&d (v260) (the January/February 2016 issue) You can also order this 6"x9" issue as a paperback book:

Order this writing in the book Clouds over the Moon the cc&d Jan. - June 2016 collection book		get the 318 page Jan. - June 2015 cc&d magazine issue collection 6" x 9" ISBN# paperback book:

different birds

Patrick Fealey

    respect your elder. until you realize he is your saboteur.
    my first hawaiian friend fled the islands as soon as he could buy a plane ticket. when i lived with him, he was in revolt against a world that was resisting his desire and attempts to be a part. the financial trials of his youth in Hawaii fixed his sensibility. he dreamed of getting out, seizing the american dream, stock-piling cash and real estate in the most expensive county in the united states. the bank welcomed him because he was one of their kind and he was a genius, which meant he could throw a frisbee to a vice president’s right hand.
    kona. i hear waves. it’s 4:30 a.m. and i am killing time out on the lanai before first light, when i will grab my surfboard and walk down to the beach. there will be one knee-boarder out. jeff, an islander and talkative guy. Waves six feet.
    we snorkeled the coral reef yesterday. more fish, more color, more variation than i had imagined. the fish were unafraid, accustomed to being looked at and enjoying the attention while they fed off the coral. We swam among them as they showed off. i had never seen coral before and cut my finger. underwater, blood poured, thinned by the pacific.
    4 a.m. angela awoke to find me out here. she returned to bed, expecting me to follow her. reassembling from my nightly drug-induced coma, I cannot concentrate on sex. my motive is dawn, not discharge.
    took derek to the pool and hot tub last night. i watched him without going in myself. eighty-six-degree hot tub sounds like abuse and maybe even unhealthy. derek demands to go into the hot tub twice a day.
    gecko’s cling to the front door, the deck, the trees, eyes regulating. i don’t know much about flowers. i don’t know what i am looking at, except i know the birds of paradise. you walk to your car and it’s like you’re in a flower shop, without the gay guy and cash register. the mongooses prowl under the vegetation. i don’t know if they’ve run out of snakes. i guess that depends on the rats. the feral cats loll about this resort, unafraid and antisocial. we have made friends with one small black cat. we feed him milk and fresh fish. He was shy at first. one of his ears is half missing. he rubs his head against my leg and hand. he stands on his hind legs and gives love nips. we want to take him home. but there’s the quarantine. and at home there is the german shepherd. out here on the lanai, the colors rush in. green, orange, black, red, white, blue, green leaves as big as café tables, coconuts and bananas swim in the azure and drop into my morning, ya?
    in the morning driving for the general store for ice . . . I start by looking for a liquor store, but spot the general store open and wonder if they sell ice. driving, i realize i am the most uptight person on the island. my intensity rolls off Hawaii and comes back at me. i am ashamed, but i can’t mellow out without losing who i am. The silence, the beauty seem static and melancholic. It’s life without friction. Existence turned into an aesthetic inertia. i have humanity in my head. it is not a question of adopting island ways or adaptation of the pre-existing ease in the locals. This is their natural state. You see release in some visitors who are for a moment are not who they are, but they are not aloha. for me, i imagine the island as a dropping and tuning out i am not prepared for, a rewiring i’d never want – even if it was possible. i am thoughtless and brutal to their thoughtful and kind, which in my skepticism I consider a kinder way to get what you want. i am a new york short circuit which no mai tai or hula or smile is going to chill. i believe i am the most honest man in Hawaii.
    dad died at 5:45 p.m. eastern standard time. i was in the air, somewhere between western pacific time and Hawaii time. i know what i was doing when he died and i thought of him. we were about an hour from kona and angela and derek and i were having a brawling tickling fight. we were all laughing. in a calm moment, i thought of him and my decision not to visit him when he was alive and his surprise and depression. i thought that maybe there was still time, even though he would not know who i was, but the thought passed, along with him. i’m landing in Hawaii while he’s landing in hell. people like to echo his claims to spirituality, earned mostly by holding the holy bible under a lamp. my father approached the bible like it was a machine which guaranteed that his skin and hair would not be ablaze for many millions of years. in his actions, he was one of the greatest hypocrites i have ever known. he was never in touch with life or god. he was self-righteous and a sentimentalist, and above all, an abuser when he wasn’t feigning kindness.
    mom and sister shannon have made a point of how they were at his bedside when he died. i was in the heavens, so i must have let him down. they were faithful servants to their persecutor. it is impossible to talk to them without saying nothing. it is distressful for me to know i am related to these idiots who forget and misunderstand aggression and abuse out of sentimentality and favor telling me the beatings and degradation are in my head, most likely the result of my manic depression. dad was big on dismissing me for being bipolar. he didn’t accept the nobility of soul and never had. he marginalized and denied. he attacked. my youth amounts to a battle between a big dunce and a little genius. he was pathetic. i tell myself i shouldn’t take it so seriously now, but he was my father and that word means a lot. i wanted and hoped for more. i gave him a long time before i dismissed him, too long. once dismissed, he feared me. he even threatened to kill me one day when i looked at him like he was a piece of shit. he owned a ruger .45.
    my sister has made his suffering over the last three months a public event on facebook. daily updates on his brain, with effusions of emotions, family photographs, biblical quotes, a public saga that would wear down the sympathy of any friend who believed her dream portrait and exaggerated grief. her poor father, a great man, is dying! somebody console me before i stop and think about how he slapped me in the face and told me i was fat and said all my boyfriends were losers! . . . my sister has never broken free. she is like a slave who sheds tears at her owner’s funeral. my father was so bad to us that the crimes were invisible at the time because they were inconceivable and were ever-present. he resentfully supported us while turning his brilliance toward insulting us. i got it the worst because my conception wrecked his life, but i always fought him and paid the price until i was big enough to protect myself. i conquered him physically before i conquered him emotionally. People in the outside world showed me I was not worthless and I brought it back to him.
    angela and i sent a blue and white standing arrangement for the graveside ceremony. mom said she understood and accepted that i was not there. she didn’t expect me to come. she refers to fights i had with my father. she does not go past the fights to what caused them. she did not see the war he took up when i was born. she says she did not notice that dad never addressed me at the dinner table for 18 years. her memories are lost in her own conversations with him, the sex, the prolonged teenaged love pact. in fact, he rarely spoke to me anywhere at any time. in fact, when i spoke, he talked over my thoughts. mom and shannon did not notice. i grew the habit of speaking fast and urgently in order to be heard. it was not my natural manner. later in life this of course worked against me. i had been trained to be someone nobody listened to. i was not allowed to talk. i couldn’t talk. i didn’t talk. my insights overfilled my skull. Today, I speak in a low voice and don’t say much in quantity. only as a writer was i able to convey ideas without interruption. art raised me from the dead.

    dad had a lot of bad luck. it’s funny, because mom always persisted in telling how lucky he was. He often won $2 on scratch tickets, so she said he was lucky. i suppose she knew she was a part of his bad luck. dad’s life was marked and guided by bad luck, from his birth on april 20, 1945 to his death by brain cancer 65 years later. his mother was pregnant two months into her marriage. she had not wanted any children (but she was a catholic who liked to fuck.) dad came into the world unwanted and precocious. she beat him, whipped him with wire hangers, and locked him in the basement beginning when he was two years old. (dad waited until i was four before he beat me with wire hangers. dad was born to an anti-semetic family and grew up in a rigid, cold household, the least liked by his parents, who also expected the least of him. He was on the outskirts of humanity and was destructive toward the family he created, especially me, the bright-faced jew boy. mom is a jew and my conception in the front seat of a pontiac convertible at the beach locked him into a job and a marriage with a wife who spent every dime he made ($1,000,000) and whom his parents rejected. i was the cause of his fate and he let me know until i punched him in the face. i put the sonofabitch in the hospital and told him: “this is for the last 40 years.” he admitted his guilt, he got it, and he was mostly subordinate, except for the time he said he would kill me when I gave him that look. after knocking up his 17-year-old jew girlfriend, dad was sent to vietnam, where he was shot at every day for 18 months and breathed under a blanket of agent orange, pure dioxin, the most cancerous substance man has ever created. after vietnam, he worked to support us, but he made us pay. he resented all of us, except perhaps when my mother was fucking him. she relates tales of a man who sounds like he was a sex maniac, or sex addict. she traded her pussy for his money. this is a statement i have not kept to just my writings. i have told mom to her face. she didn’t talk to me for nine months after i told her she fucked him and overlooked the child abuse because he insured her financial security. mom stood by silent while dad beat the shit out of me for the most trivial reasons. she let it happen. she did not protect her son. it is something you’d say she has to live with, but her denial and sociopathic chemistry prevent her from even contemplating. this is something which has always interested me. people doing wrong to others without even knowing they are doing it. it’s an abundant phenomenon and in my family it seems to have been the rule. what you’d call consideration and conscience did not exist. so, dad knocked up mom with me, was sent to vietnam, and was forced to give up his sports car and take a job to support the family he had created by his own wanton carelessness. he was sick with resentment. against his country, his parents, his employers, and his family, which included a kid who could out-litigate him at the age of four and was not afraid to do so. what did dad and i fight about? it was very simple. when he said or did something to hurt others, i spoke up. When he said something I did not believe in, I spoke up. i took a lot of abuse defending mom and shannon who now say i was not abused. I do not believe in irony. they have never transcended the violence of our household. They do not know the truth, which means they do not know their true worth. or who they are. dad said: you are fat losers who wrecked my life and so they live on, believing him because to do otherwise would be to dismiss the love they believed they had felt and received. a pathetic man had filled the role and with time, the role meant more than the man. the only way for me to transcend it was to become a monster of a different sort. dad, you did not love me. dad, I was afraid of you. dad did not learn love from his mother. even years later when she was done hitting him with hangers and he was 30 years old, she was unable to show him love. She denied recommending he join the navy to avoid vietnam. She told him he was boring — to his face, as an adult. if we gain our sensibilities from our mothers, he had a poor experience which he never transcended. if there is any doubt, look at the overbearing bitch he chose for a wife.
    i wanted to kill him when i was a kid because i was afraid of his powers to hurt me physically and I knew he was treating us like he didn’t love us. my rage was born mostly of his physical aggression and less by the emotional abuse, which i was too young to fully comprehend. I just knew he made me feel bad. a kick to the ribs for pulling the head off my sister’s barbie doll is much more tangible than the concept that he resented me. i prayed for a divorce and considered running away. in retrospect, i should have moved back to new york city to live with my grandparents. dad and i did respect one another, as worthy enemies do. i was smarter than him and he was bigger than me. that i was his enemy was his choice, not mine. i was an enemy because i resisted his wrongheaded actions and statements. he could not be wrong, and no kid was going to point out that he was wrong, therefore we fought, which mom remembered after his death. i adapted to circumstances and suffered his strength, size, and rage. dad had no temper. he had no buffer. the best i can do is consider that he had post traumatic stress disorder, because there was no lapse between my “no” and his knuckles. add ptsd to his resume of bad luck. more than anything, he was jealous of me. i looked like him, but there was an angel on my shoulder. what i touched became gold. people. school. music. in my life away from him and outside the home i thrived. his disdain grew. he denied me, withheld recognition and encouragement. 3.89 gpa, three scholarships, beautiful girls. he never said good job. mom recognized and encouraged despite his hard silence when she did. if there was an angel on my shoulder, dad tried to kill it. but you can’t kill an angel or the one who it protects. he tried to make his void mine, but couldn’t. in his envy and resentment of my existence, he confirmed my existence. i rose against him; he created his own bad luck. dad carried the holy bible to his breast, but never considered that he might be worthy of an angel. It was as if he knew he was bad and could not change this. it was his choice that i lived under and with. i remember when i was the only freshman to make high school jazz band and when i went out for pizza with the seniors i never had a cent because dad wouldn’t give me a dime and so my friends paid my way and i got looked upon myself as a charity case. dad handed over $1,000,000 to my mother’s cunt, but when i was a freshman, too young to work, he would not give me $5 once a week to go out for pizza with my band buddies – and i did cut the lawn. he never encouraged my success and later on in life put down my success. there was something fundamentally wrong with him that required me to dismiss him as pathetic if i was to have my own healthy existence. In this way he forced me to believe in myself. he didn’t, so i had to or die. should i consider this a gift from the old man? the self-made man! eighteen years under the roof owned by a man who hated me is beyond compensation. (mom tells me now after his death that his coldness was a “fealey thing” and that he loved me though it was not in his nature to say so.) once again, mom avoids the heart of the matter. it was just “fights,” not a personal lack of love. for 18 years i was trapped under the roof of this “impersonal” man who flinched if I walked into the room. mom tells me now that he loved me. what is it when someone has to tell you your father loved you? dad never said a word about my education, except once. from kindergarten to my senior year in college he made one comment: “your major is useless.” nevermind the gpa, national honor society, opening for miles davis at the newport jazz festival, how the u.s. navy recruited me to be a fighter pilot, the scholarships in music and engineering, and the literary accomplishments of the future. “worthless” was his decree, then and when I was 40. my realization that he was wrong and i would never get the approval i sought came late. i had to unwind the ropes. the need, the compulsion to gain a father’s approval is so strong that when it is absent, recovery and reorienting your identity is like moving a mountain. after i gave up on him, he was a bad joke to be navigated superficially. i never had a serious, deep, felt, honest conversation with my father. mom and sister did, they say. he was unavailable to his son.

    the different birds have awakened around me. you’d say it’s dark, but the sky is visible as an overcast with clouds dashing through the darkness. blue is a supposition now. when to head out? after this beer? no smokes in six weeks. i started 13 years ago after a brutal fight with the old man. of course i proved he was wrong, but i left the house shaking. i leaned on camels and that was it for more than a decade. that i quit just before his death is timely. freedom from suicide makes sense.
    dad is dead. smugly underground. no reconciliation is possible now. he departed without ever admitting. the best i saw was as his mind left him he became less aggressive. i will not view this as an admission or even a truce. he just kept his mouth shut because he knew i’d crush him for his lies. the years and time gave me all the power and i did not exploit it. now something is different. that blink of hope is extinguished. toward the end, he said things which a hopeful man might construe as an acknowledgement, but not an apology. toward the end, when he did not make sense most of the time, his thoughts subverted by the cancer in his brain, he said things. “we didn’t always see eye to eye . . . but it was all good . . . wasn’t it?” what could i say to my dying father except “yeah . . .” wasn’t it all good? does he not know or is it another lie? could he have shielded himself from his actions so completely? or is it the dream of a dying man? when family visited him, i did not. i told him i would not be visiting when he asked. mom had told him this too, but he had misinterpreted it. he thought i was coming. Either that or my mother had told him I was coming. after i said i was not, he fell into a depression for days. he was dying and his only son had no compulsion to get on a plane. for me, his meanness was thorough, like a project. i owed him nothing. i am not sentimental. by illness or design, he told shannon that i had yelled at him. she wrote me a nasty e-mail. i called her twice to tell her the truth, left messages, but she did not answer her phone or call me back. i wrote to her and my mother. i had not yelled at my father. my sister finally wrote me a flippant and idiotic message: “sorry dude. i must have misunderstood him. this is another reason why we should not talk to each other.” whaa?? she’d prefer to believe that i had yelled at dad? could she make a weaker and less offensive apology? If dad somehow gets into heaven, maybe he can pull some strings for us, though i believe that “all is forgiven” is a lie. Heaven and hell are on this earth. And if god does give him a kingdom, he will have a mortgage on it.

    it is now time for me to put on my trunks and take my surfboard to the beach. two blocks. i can hear it. the surf is up. dad was always against my surfing. he was jealous and lashed out like a maniac when i bought my first new board. i didn’t understand his rage at the time. how dare i have fun doing something that is healthy for me? that board improved my surfing and surfing has been one of the best things i have ever had in my life. it was good. dad was against it. i have to keep reminding myself that he was a pathetic man and i might say too much about him. the only justification i arrive at is that he was my dad, who was supposed to be a father. i had expectations of the word.

    i walked back from the beach with cut and bruised feet, limping away from the reef nauseated by the salt water i’d swallowed. the waves in Hawaii have more wave than any waves i’ve ever surfed before. a six foot wave here is like a 12 foot wave back east. geography – deep water rolling onto shallow coral – conspires to create the most powerful and sought-after waves in the world. one mile offshore, the water is 3,000 feet deep. back east, one mile offshore it is 100 feet and swells experience drag as they come in across the continental shelf. there is no continental shelf in Hawaii or california. the ocean swell here collides with the shallow reefs, breaking in three feet of water. the swell is hurled into a tube that slams one into the coral and lava. the water temperature was 78 and my surfing was uninspiring, but the knee-boarder had some good rides. he’s surfed this spot for 20 years. just getting out there after so long was nice.
    we drove north out of kona through sharp black lava beds with the sun’s rays boiling off the black earth in search of a beach we could not find. none of the beaches are marked here and i like that because a beach is better without people on it. adventurers like us turn off on the unmarked roads and drive to the end. we did not find the white sand beach we were looking for, but we found the white sand beach that put itself in our path. we hiked across sand which burned our feet under the palms with green coconuts. “beware of falling coconuts.” never seen a sign like that before. we swam with the fish and two green sea turtles arrived and we swam with them. i felt crude beside their underwater ballet. eye to eye, their eyes were black, solid shining obsidian orbs until a shift in the sunlight revealed the pupil looking into my eyes. the honu are safe here and do not fear humans. green mottled and yellow necks, moving along with a shell covered with slippery green algae, underwater dinosaurs – i am communing with an ancient hawaiian god. it is a calm and generous god full of grace and tolerance. i follow it out to sea, caught in those unworried and fearless eyes. the turtles swam on and on and into the depths without ever surfacing for air.
    i wrote, shannon wrote, and mom wrote: our collaboration produced a good obituary for dad. the only part i didn’t like was about how dad is now with “the lord, christ, our savior, jesus” but otherwise it profiled a kind, decent, intelligent, creative, and loved man. mom ran it in the dailies in maine and rhode island at a cost of $1,800. he deserves it, she said, needlessly justifying it as if i disagreed with the expenditure, as if i had not loved him.
    “it was all good . . . (nervous laugh) . . . wasn’t it?”
    “ . . . yeah.”
    a son seeks approval until he is on his knees, but not unto his own dismemberment. I rendered onto him indifference. the man who harmed his son out of envy will die young of brain cancer, for his brain had always been a cancer. he will die shortly after the son totally dismissed him. we left each other at the same time.
    the mongooses run around the perimeter of the lanai. one came in the sliding glass door to have a look at our living room. i scared it off because i didn’t want him stuck in the place behind the couch. i have no idea how mongooses think, but i have seen ferrets and they are crazy and love to hide in small spaces. Hawaii imported the mongoose to eat the snakes whose population bloomed after they were brought in to eat the rats captain cook gave the islands before the hawaiians cut his head off. some say the mongooses were imported to eat the rats, but that doesn’t explain the snakes. captain cook also brought with him mosquitos from the bilges of his ships. today, the mongoose dominate. what to import to control the mongoose? bigger snakes. bigger mosquitoes. Some day a python will eat that salesman from omaha . . .

    mom opted for a sealed steel casing for dad’s coffin because the water table in milo is high and she was disgusted with the idea and image of dad rotting and floating in a waterlogged casket. he has not been embalmed to save money and the casket will be closed for the funeral, with no visiting hours. friend and family will not see dad. i believe mom did not want to see him again. she didn’t have the courage to look death in the face one more time. The wake is always the hardest part and she skipped it. a u.s. flag will be draped across the coffin and a two man honor guard will fold it into a triangle and present it to the widow. a flutist will play patriotic music. when dad was in boot camp, he played taps and he sang and played guitar in vietnam, two things he gave up when he had a family. the funeral is now opened to the public, not private, as mom originally intended.
    “men, as tough as they try to be, are more spiritual and sensitive than women,” i said. “this is why there are so few great women artists.”
    angela walked off, saying: “i think i’ve heard enough of you.”
    dad felt gyped and he was. he drank a bit in the earlier years, and had quit smoking when he was about 20. Lately he drank wine once a week and his family had no history of cancer. all he had was a heavy dose of dioxin –courtesy of henry kissinger.
    with angela not talking to me, i am free to work on this tale of love and death and paradise found, the unfound man found lost.
    when i mentioned to angela that the only child born should be the child the father insisted upon, she lost her cool. the man does not have the exaggerated life instinct. he does not take parenthood as easily as the woman, if he is dedicated to parenting. he owns more conflict and investment in sweat and semen. a child born of a man’s intent has a better chance at life than a child born of a woman’s wiles, deception, or carelessness. A mother loves her child, but the father guides him. my accident was despised by my father. his exaggerated death instinct came to bear on the child. whereas the child demanded by the father, the inheritor of the throne, is the child with the best chance to thrive (and survive.) a mother’s child, a son more affected by its mother, must struggle against his weakness. i have been formed by a father’s hatred that was compensated for by a sentimental and overemotional mother who now denies their plot to send me to live with a friend in sidney.
    angela and i were talking about women novelists. jane eyre: romance writer. jane austen: exquisitely dull. marguerite duras is strong and she was more of a man than tolstoy, who wrote like a navel-gazing hermaphrodite on meth amphetamines. duras’ lover is better than most of hemingway, who was better than most. angela said i was an ungrateful misogynist on a vacation she paid for. i think i need a cigarette . . . women killing men. if i am a misogynist and am as objective as I know I am, then everyone should be a misogynist. it’s another easy label suggesting that i have a presentiment. i have no sentiment and take men and women one at a time. don’t give me your opinion; match my facts. lay it down for me, your true experience. men are pricks and women are cunts and there will be no resolution, thankfully. as for this trip and angela’s capabilities as a woman, i am in complete respect, yet i still believe that most women, not all women, are not sensitive, perceptive, realistic, thoughtless or brutal enough to be prophets, nevermind a picasso.

    (here we are, several weeks out of Hawaii, and mom admits something to me that is criminal – without seeing the crime in it. we were talking about dad and how he told her he loved me on his deathbed. i said this didn’t do me much good when he was beating me in the hall while she sat at the kitchen counter drinking her lipton tea, milk and sugar. “you didn’t try to stop him,” i said. she said, “dad and i aways had a rule to stick together. otherwise, your children will try to come between you.” i said i never did such a thing and that her first job was the protection of her son and daughter, not her husband. his behavior was unacceptable. She should have made him go to counseling, thrown him in jail, and divorced him. to go deeper into this we need to understand the bargain they had made with each other. he gave her money. she gave him pussy. we kids were negatives who went more tolerated by her than by dad. dad had never wanted me and treated me the same insane ways his mother treated him. mom admitted that she saw dad perpetuate his mother’s abuse of him, but she claimed that she was at work and didn’t see the things that i described. it is true that dad preferred no witnesses. this is when i told her about her sitting at the counter drinking her tea while in the hall dad backhanded my head and kicked my ribs over some trivial matter. her admission that she put her husband over her children’s safety shows how much they tried to perpetuate a warped incarnation of the teenaged lovers. kids were an irritation and unfortunate consequence. their response to children was immature. that dad said he loved me is a recent event. after i put him in the hospital and told him to go fuck himself, he expresses love for me for the first time in 41 years. at 40 years he was throwing out my paintings without telling anyone and telling me i was worthless. what a difference imminent death makes. his claims of love fall in a forest that’s too late.)

    back to kona, an island much more pleasant than the one i grew up on: angela is not answering my calls. i can’t even get her voicemail. first i checked the pool and hot tub for them before i noticed the red rental car was missing from the lot. she had taken off without telling me. now i can’t get a hold of her. i am the misogynist. she is the woman. i suppose i’ll have to get my own dinner: cocoa puffs and and potato chips. i called again and got her voicemail. i left a message: “when you’re done flipping out, maybe you can tell me where you are.” she called a little while later, denying that she was upset.
    i’d like to write about the joy of grabbing angela’s breasts, but i don’t think there is enough paper. she says so and i feel so. her breasts make an enormous presence on the island. how can it be that my life has changed so much after I got on a plane two years ago in maine? dad had dropped me off at the airport. all I could summon was “see ya.” he replied, “maybe not on this earth.” i didn’t believe it.
    where the hell is the slotted screwdriver?! you put it in the wrong slot! wrinkled forehead, contorted face, antagonizing lips and pulsing temples. sometimes i hoped that his heart would give out and he’d drop dead at my feet. i was such an idiot and menace to his mental health (and my well-being) it seemed like the death of one of us would solve both our problems. i don’t think he knew that he wanted me dead. he would never admit such a thought into his consciousness. consciously, he worked at keeping me down and away from my mother and grandfather. people now talk about his good traits and it is easy for me to agree with them. it was their experience. mine was different. a nightmare which my family does not understand. you could call it a father and son thing where the father beats his son in his own best interest, but this is more insidious because dad’s war was mostly psychological and he never had my best interest in mind. it’s the kind of war that is easy to hide from others. he never replied to anything i said and in groups this was easily accomplished and unnoticed. most of our talk was him yelling and me making what he called back-talk, which to me was an honest defense against a misguided and malignant person. much of the violence was the result of his inability to beat me in forensics. my good defense was back-talk worthy of being beat in the head. Dad called it back talk. the school said i had an iq of 195.
    dad is dead. his funeral is tomorrow. mom has ordered a tent because rain is forecast for milo, maine. she has received calls from unexpected people. she is enjoying contact with those who remember and cared about dad. none of these friends will show at his funeral. there will be a thin representation of family and no friends for dad. two non-family members will show: my friend joanne, my former landlord; and mom’s hair dresser. later i called joanne and she said she went because she was hoping to see me there. i guess she expected me to fly out for the funeral. she didn’t know anything about dad and me. i made a presence in my absence. it’s a public aspect and statement i never wished to make. it’s between me and my “father.” i did him a favor and did not come to pay my disrespects, even though i might have confirmed he was dead. i treated his death as honestly as i could while hurting the fewest.

    blue sky 87 degree journey through black lava moonscape to the petroglyphs north. we’ll find a new beach at the end of this rough road if our tires don’t go flat. yesterday’s beach was a discovery at the end of a road to nowhere. new fish! sea turtles! i snorkeled out to 25 feet of water. there are more fish in seven feet of water. i got the idea. there are different fish out there and the fish inside don’t like those fish. we saw a tuna jet across the reef, an iridescent cobalt entrance and a three-foot getaway. out there i did not fear the reef sharks because i could see everything. it was too bright and clear and green a world to die in. even if the few fish out here hung by the bottom inches from ledges into which they could vanish in the blink of a tooth. i was mesmerized by the sea world with a feeling of weightlessness, flying and looking down onto inner earth. the pressure hurt my head when i dove for the bottom. i found a cave that went into the side of the reef and opened at the top of the reef a few feet away. a tight fit to consider, stupid bravado.
    my old man allegedly goes to the paradise he studied for while i am in paradise, as removed from his suffering as i can be. i was not there for him and this is better and more truthful than how he was there for me. the eighth wonder of the world is how fathers can either nurture and encourage their sons and others brutalize them. certain fathers nurture systematized destruction. elaborate and consistent repression of what is good. some sons will become stronger and some sons will decline. fathers can wear their sons to dust, can stunt evolution and progress, and even sabotage and unravel greatness. i made it through, damaged. i do wonder if his relentless attacks made me stronger. as if he was doing the right thing. if he prepared me for the world and i owe him some gratitude. does my scrappiness come from him? just as my lack of self-respect? i was on a jet one hour from kona when he died. derek and i were tickling angela. she was about to pee her pants. then angela and i tickled derek. during a lull in the laughter, i suddenly thought of him. it was a moment of doubt. should i have visited him? could i yet visit him? was i on a jet headed in the wrong direction? the idea passed quickly in the present. I lived with my decision. we were landing in Hawaii. i was with two people i loved. they made me feel loved. we were a healthy family. the most frightening part of my childhood was six-feet under, in a steel box sealed from the outside.
    derek is a snorkeler. casual as a turtle, fast as a humu.

    toward the end, dad showed fear-respect. he opened the front door with a .45. “if you hit me again, i’ll fucking kill you.” it was apparent that he did admit to himself that he deserved to be hit after telling me i had done nothing good in my life. i now had respect, but it was the respect for me as someone who could hurt him, not the respect that was 40 years accumulated as a journalist and novelist. he wanted to kill me, but would not get away with it. otherwise would he have shot me? absolutely. since he could not kill me and feared the son he had created, his tone dropped a bit. he showed more humility in my presence. he believed i would kick his ass again if he stepped out of line. he no longer said anything negative toward me, except that he wanted to kill me. we had a truce that did not include any change of hearts. i gave him a brutally absurd story i had written about him in vietnam and he said “it’s great! i love it!” it had taken him 42 years. i believe that with that story he realized i was not full of shit with my writing endeavors, that i actually produced stories. it was a rare approval and i wanted it, but it was tempered by how i had risen up against him and defeated all authority. he had always dismissed me without reading my work. A part of his war, the idea was in part grounded in my lifestyle, which must have looked pretty good to a guy locked into marriage, kids, and a job at 21. my ways were abhorrent, contemptuous. manic-depression was especially abhorrent. They thought of themselves and marginalized me. The first words out of their mouths when I was diagnosed? “it skips generations.” when things got rough, they let me starve to the point of scurvy. they lived ten miles away, just far enough to ignore my menu. their apathy consisted of sirloin and shrimp, lobster and flounder, mai tais, cabernet, sam adams lager, new cars and decks, and $1,500 dogs . . . for my commitment to art, i dined on my own teeth. dad was against giving me one penny. i was sober and off drugs for seven years during this time, so they could not have kicked me in the balls on those. mom tried, illicitly mailed me a $20 every few weeks without telling dad. now and then she hurriedly brought me groceries. she couldn’t be away from the house for too long or she’d have some explaining to do. these problems could be directly connected to manic-depression and its stigma, but it was also a continuation of dad’s sentiment. he was against allowing me to live with them when i got sick. In the beginning, grandma chipped in $300 a month for rent at the rooming house. mom and dad pledged $100 a month assistance. i had $90 in food stamps, which were more consistent than my folks’ $100. it was a paltry sum for a couple making $100,000 a year and they were never prepared to give it to me when i arrived. the check had not been written. nobody offered to write the check. so i had to raise the subject. dad exploded. it was all insult. when he was done, he wrote the check and threw it at me. i left their house feeling like i was asking too much of them, like i was a shit, like i had no support from the very people one should be able to count on. i knew that i would react differently and better. when i had been a musician and journalist, i had been a star to my mother; when i quit the paper due to illness, i was an untouchable. see, this was all about them and their pride and role in producing me. my success was never about me. if it had been, my illness would have engendered compassion. as he always had, but more, dad exploited my weakness. i struck back and his response was fear and homicidal ideation and sentimentality. “we didn’t always see eye to eye, but it was all good, wasn’t it?” i couldn’t kick a man who was falling. he either believed the reality he had constructed or was trying to deflect reality, which is a father who raged an emotional and physical war against his son for 40 years. until that son gave it back to him once and he became terrified. a classic tale of the death of a bully. i had learned through school that some bullies could be beat with a strong attack, especially one that embarrassed them. i should have shot my father when i was 12, but i didn’t know anything about just cause or juvenile hall and exoneration and release at 18. we would have lost his income, but gained the absence of a man who was always worse than absent. but it’s complex. i wrote stories to escape, but dad bought me the typewriter. The house where he beat me with wire hangers is where he taught me to ride a bike. He could divide a person from himself.
    mom wanted to help her children but did not. she did not protect us from his violence and verbal abuse. she did not tell him to leave and she never called the police and she never asked him for a divorce. they had always had an “it’s us against the world mindset” because their parents had given their marriage six months. they never forgot these insults and devoted much energy into proving the naysayers wrong. this included their pact to put themselves above their children. youth, the new generation was not viewed in our house as the future. we were static interruptions to their original 1967 cabal. we navigated school and friends without them. when it came time for college, they resisted every idea i had, including places where i had been offered scholarships. it was fixed in their minds that we would attend the local college. it didn’t matter that one of the best universities in the country had offered me a scholarship, or that another school gave me a scholarship to play trumpet, which mom had encouraged my whole youth. mom would not even look at the paperwork. they had always encouraged good grades and now my gpa and scholarship offers meant nothing. i was thrown into a university where i did not want to be and was not commensurate to my abilities. It was a high school with ash trays. my depression worsened and i drank vigorously. b+ in pre-med. word on the street was that it was not good enough for med-school. turned out to be absolute bullshit, but i had quit to pursue writing, the patience and time and shelter to think and the guts to share inspirations I believed would alleviate suffering and reach and change minds and souls.
    i am no longer imprisoned by reconciliation. i can no longer hope, dream, imagine the day when he admits what he did to all of us and become enlightened. the last thing a parent will admit is that he hurt his child. i have been freed from the potential by death. i relax, forget, and swim in a new ocean. an important man is dead – as he was. i never would have wished for that father, yet i wouldn’t surrender him to anyone else. he was mine to hope or kill.
    sunday. another day in kona. beer #5. tourists jog and eat eggs. i discern a slight nausea. everyone you see at our resort, the elite, is wealthier than 99% of the world’s population. it is an unlikely place for me. the best i can say about living among the thieves and parasites is that it is quiet. we have bought silence. the plants are not quilty of anything and have always been silent, so i identify with the palm trees. ultimately it’s the beer which saves me from my human environment. i know i am not yet free of the life i lived for 15 years. absolute destitution is close by, stealing toilet paper, shoplifting beer, ramen noodles, isolation and the lunatics i lived with and ate with at the soup kitchens. i am in Hawaii thanks to my girlfriend and her generous parents.
    drink because you are afraid of yourself sober. it’s a remedy which limits your powers, but allows you to go on. maybe the friction will be of some use. often, you will suspect you have become the anti-christ.
    1 a.m. making coffee. breezy on the lanai. feel more awake than sleepy. in 10 hours i will be out on a charted fishing boat, trolling for marlin, tuna, dorado, wahoo, a fight. dad used to go on these charters every summer. he never took me.
    today dad will be buried in a khaki steel coffin, in the ground he chose seven years ago. i suppose it would have been better to see him dead instead of dying, but i could not have trusted his corpse. he might sit up and snarl a last insult. or maybe he would lay there so peacefully that regret would creep in on me. he’s got on his blue blazer and funny fish tie. in the end, the corpse would have shown me more respect than he’d ever offered and admitted. considerations of a provider. consideration of an extortionist. i’ll make you cry and bleed for every dollar i bring home. he wished i had never been born, but fucking without protection was a choice. he failed at making me wish i had never been born, as he failed at so many things. i found love elsewhere. the more dad failed, the more he despised me. he grew desperately violent. when my health failed and i was jobless, he marginalized me and allowed me to wrestle $100 a month out of him, but he did soften his attacks – as if he believed my illness meant he had won.

    the plan was for angela to drop me off at the docks and pick me up when the boat came in. this way, she would not spend the morning without a car. on our last vacation to memphis I took the car to visit a friend and she exploded on me when I got back. Hawaii: later at the house, she said, assumingly: “so you’re taking the car in the morning.”
    “no.”
    “i thought you were taking the car in the morning,” she said.
    “we agreed that you will drop me off and pick me up, so you won’t be without a car. i’m not taking the car and i don’t appreciate you assuming things for me. remember our last vacation? we agreed i’d take the car to visit james for a couple hours and when i got home i walked into the fires of hell.”
    angela did not sleep in our bed last night. she slept with derek. tennesee she had made me feel like a true shithead taking the car and she was not going to do it again. i have never had a girlfriend who excels so well at making me feel like a shithead. she suffers an elaborate neuroses, who’s sense is that i must be challenged at every opportunity. she incites disagreement. she seems to seek verbal abuse. i snap and give her what she wants and so am a shithead again, which is also what she seeks. This makes her happy. She admits to self-flagellation. she wants to be hurt/she wants me to feel bad. this is the loop i find myself spinning around inside. the best i can do is keep my mouth shut (without agreeing with her) and defend myself against a woman’s insanity. she intrudes upon my writings, by which I mean she sneaks reads. i will have to take this notebook on the boat. i can’t leave it at home because she considers my thoughts our shared property. “i don’t hide anything from you,” she said. i had never considered i was hiding my notebooks until i met her. i love her, but she goes out of her way to create moments we both dislike.
    probably the most significant and maybe even positive thing dad gave me was contact with a twisted genius. our fights were litigations founded in right and wrong. they were emotionally charged trials of truth versus ignorance and lies. i learned from him how to present and fortify a point of view. i learned insistence in spite of physical harm. i don’t recall dad ever winning one of our fights. but i did not learn my sense of right and wrong from him. if i had believed he was right, i would have become a serial killer. i did not learn my sense of right and wrong from anyone else either. it was always there, i had been born with it like a cosmic child who beamed goodness and was wrathful of evil. dad was brilliant and aggressive, but he was in the dark. he was evil, and therefore weaker, scuttled away in the light like a cockroach throwing fists. his wrongness was contained in condemnations and beatings. the “beats” hitchhiked through america’s great wasted lands and wrote about it, but they didn’t talk about what “beat” really is. the only ones who know what beat is are the ones who resisted it.
    it’s easier to forgive dad now. it’s the one option. last night he told me he would understand if i didn’t. in death, he admits. in death he has lost his elaborate defenses against our life. six feet under in a steel vault in his funny fish tie he starts talking straight. i really don’t want to forgive him, but to assure the new time     gotu kola. memory-enhacing herb. whatever may bring it back is worth a try. my memory is specific and involuntary. i don’t say “remember when . . . ?” i cannot recall, but when memory arrives i say, “there is something in my skull and i can’t talk right now.” Experience of this type of memory is FACT. It is also a verb. ///amnesia acres. the name of grampa’s farm in the catskills, the same grampa who taught me i was worthwhile, and even priceless. amnesia acres, a very thoughtful and poetic name from a guy who dropped out of school at 11 to work and help support his family during the great depression, then went to war, then a construction worker. i think most of the amnesia he hoped for had its foundation in world war ii, which plagued the last 53 years of his life. his life was split into two parts: the great depression and the war. he never recovered from either, but the killing and death were worse than poverty. in both, someone in power is trying to kill you, but war is more immediate, graphic, and overpowers the senses. for him, someone was trying to kill him his entire life. some said he was “paranoid,” but i’d say by the time he was 25 he had all the facts he needed. he bought guns. he threatened the president. the secret service came to our house. he wiggled his way out of federal prison and johnson went on to kill another million. i’m sure johnson had gotten many similar letters and the industrial military complex was drawing his baths slightly too hot.
    i wish i could talk to my sister, but she married this guy. she has made an oath to him. she feeds his obese ass. tolerates his love of money. hears his ignorant judgments. he is my sister’s second husband. throughout her life, my sister rejected the smart, good-looking guys who pursued her. she was quite beautiful and she let you know it, yet she always rejected the good men in favor of the grossly flawed. she fails or refuses to see how this is the result of her father’s constant abuse. you’re not the smartest and most talented and you look a little fat to me. i feel sorry for her because it appears she has no choice. she fears the good man. she does not feel worthy of the good man. she is at an artificially reduced level which forces her to choose men who are many levels beneath her. her fat slob of a dickhead husband must have considered himself a wolf when she said “yes” and “i do.” the failures she chooses tell her how to feel and think. they work as secret police who control who she sees. she adopts the ways of these failures so quickly that it seems automatic, as if she is a void, yet she proclaims: “i think for myself.” myself, i consider how many people i have heard say that in my life. so very few . . . //blind silly cunt arrogant in her self-promotion of identity, compensation for the lie dad gave her and she lives by. mom says my sister will never talk to me again. one more victory for her father and husband. her fat boy from the swamps has a running campaign to separate her from her friends and relatives, to isolate the beauty so she fails to see she has options. divide and conquer, just like dad. but he underestimates the power of blood and how my sister and i shared ourselves for 18 years during the most formative parts of our lives. so, i called my sister a dumb cunt. she will talk to me again. she can call me a fucking asshole and we will laugh.
    interruption: mom just said she would “fucking sue you” if i write about how she did not protect her children from my bastard father. it was a balancing act for her and she leaned more toward his money, jewelry, clothes, cars, boats, vacations, dining out. she said things were different in those days. it was okay to beat four-year-olds with wire hangers and beat a 12-year-old’s head. in the background of all this is that my family does not see my complete relationship with my old man, which was second-to-second degradation. it was easy to go unnoticed, except for the violent outbursts, which half the neighborhood must have heard. (he actually once slapped my sister in the face in front of her next-door-neighbor friend kelly.) (kelly, who is still one of my sister’s best friends, did not attend the funeral. he lacked restraint and context.)
    dad listed me on his tax return as a dependent long after i had moved out and was supporting myself. i was working and being robbed by the irs. i mentioned this to him and he exploded. another stupid fight to stop him from claiming me. he was fucking with my withholdings long after i was out of the house and receiving no support from him. this is how my dad was when it came to money – with me. for himself and mom he spent $1,000,000 on every manner of comfort and recreation. as i lay dying of starvation with my teeth falling out, he had $400,000 and said, “it’s his fault he’s a manic depressive. i’m not giving him a dime.” baudelaire said that great men succeed in spite of their families, not because of them. i have succeeded despite them, so well in fact that they wish to sue me. if my mother knew she could get a piece of my royalties, she would try. which is amusing because i have always imagined supporting her in her later years. the bitch turns a gift into an extraction and robbery. It’s the only way she knows.
    eating a baked potato with salt, pepper, and butter. time for eggs and toast. 3 a.m. 9 a.m. in maine, one hour until dad’s funeral. i’m awake. they are awake, feeling worse than i do. i will miss the dirt and prayers i want to see and hear. i want to look into the hole from which he will never insult me again. i want to see the flowers and the tears of his wife and daughter and sister. here on the big island i am spared the misunderstandings of others, but do not get to see the dirt. I want to see them roll the sod out. on the day of my dad’s funeral, i will be sportfishing in Hawaii. sport fishing, a thrill he engaged in. he took photos of the still boats at a green dawn and the fish on the blue sea and in the boat and showed them to me. i was so jealous.
    i asked allen ginsburg for a glass of water. he was behind the bar. he gave me a beer. probably safer than the water, but not what i needed.
    the motto of mokulele air is “the spirit of Hawaii.” but they wouldn’t let me take my surfboard from the big island to maui. the woman at the gate says my board is too long. it is over 6 feet. my board is 9 feet. angela tells the woman the board was okayed by the airline months ago.
    a copilot comes out of the back office. pressed white shirt, cap, tall and tanned, lanky in his ray ban aviators. a flippant prick with a crew cut flying nine-seaters and imagining himself at top gun.
    “who said you could bring your board?” he snaps at angela.
     “go!” she says.
    ”do you have a specific person’s name?”
    “ . . .”
    “that’s go!”
    (go! owns mokulele . . . )

    the woman at the desk had been reinforced and was now adamant. no surfboard. no aloha at mokulele air. this was after angela had called go! and made the reservation. she had actually measured the board while she was on the phone with the airline and all was clear.
    i said, “instead of saying ‘no’ and forcing me to leave behind a $900 surfboard, why don’t we both try to come up with an answer.”
    the copilot retreated to the back office. he had not looked at me during his exchange with angela and did not look at me when he came back out to board his plane. the point was he didn’t have the space on his plane. the other point was we had been told by go! there was. obviously go! had switched planes on us.
    the woman pointed to a building around the corner and said, “you can try freight.”
    the first freight place was not set up to bill people off the street, so he referred me to another freight company. the board was in maui the next day, unharmed, for $44. back at mokulele, the woman at the desk did not bill us for our luggage. some aloha in the end.

    i had a dream about dad. i felt bad. there was no admission or remorse from him. i tried to beat it out of him and his last words were, “deal with it.” my anger, my sadness. how pathetic he was. forgive me lord for i know not what i do? dad knew exactly what he was doing. “deal with it” is an admission, a nasty, careless, final bite before i pounded the fluid out of his eyeballs. i got nothing out of him before he went to his grave. he was more machine than man. there is no reconciling. “deal with it.” i pounded his face for a confession and he talked about our times together on saturdays.
    saturdays we were both home. it was not a comradery or time spent together. he just had more time for his silent disdain. when we went to the lake to fish, we parted and fished alone. dad did not impart any philosophies about life at the lake and maybe i should be grateful because his ideas were warped. he became enraged when i caught more fish than he did and he had to take the hooks out. he yelled at me for catching fish. he screamed when i tangled my line. i was taking time out of his fishing. when we took the john boat, it was all about preventing me from capsizing us. when he wobbled the boat, it was okay; when i wobbled the boat less, we were about to drown. fishing with dad was all about the things i was doing wrong, which included catching fish. the closest he got to philosophy was when he quoted the bible in order to put us all down. we were the sinners. we were the takers. that he had produced us was irrelevant. here we were and there he was with the whip. “deal with it,” he says from his fresh grave. it is recent that i have realized the extent of his dismantling operation and attempt to divide us and conquer us, which he partially succeeded at.
    i’d say my mother put him in his early grave. willful, spendy, calculating, always demanding, never satisfied, screaming to go on vacation, she stressed him out of existence. she fucked $1,000,000 out of him without ever protecting us from his rage, which began with his own insecurity and sense of worthlessness. he saw how he had been trapped. He attacked her relentlessly. He was trapped by love, but also something carnal. what always amazed me, and was a source of respect and sadness, is that I want to say he took responsibility for us. he could have left us early on, but he stood up and commenced extracting emotional payments. once an asshole, always a dead man? or is it once a dead man always and forever an asshole? i have sympathy for him and the turns of his life, which he never transcended. his mother beat him with wire hangers and he beat me with wire hangers. of course was i the same kind of kid as he was? did we both deserve punishment? the tradition stops with me, for i am not sentimental about him. i always challenged his violence and insane speeches. gramps had put some muscle on my sensitive soul. i was a vulnerable kid who the bullies feasted upon, yet i stood up and took the punishment. it was not until i was 17 that i challenged dad physically. he came at me with clenched fists, ready to dole out his usual love. he should have known what kind of son he was going to create – one that would destroy him, in life and in memory. i was 17 and athletic. i closed my fists and said, “c’mon.” he did not doubt me, he was confused, and finally withdrew. he turned and left the kitchen. one day i would kick his ass so severely he would be hospitalized. i owed this to him. paradox ran through our relationship, and as i have said, he and i knew one another better than anyone in the family.
    an objective presentation of a subjective experience, a subjective inquiry into objective truths.
    the crime may not exist. paranoia and alienation are the crimes, which are not illegal.
    my brother-in-law forced my sister to leave the side of my grieving mother. my sister cried while he dragged her off to the minivan. mom said to me, “it’s okay. i don’t need a babysitter.” next day mom fell into a teary depression. i have been talking to her every day since dad died, about two months. she is doing better than most widows. she has a life ahead of her, which includes suing me. failed me once, failing me again. she and dad had that pact: never let the children come between them, even if it means turning a blind eye to atrocity. And it’s fixed even in death. she’s as guilty as he is and in that one conversation she admitted she was not there for me. the difference between them is that my father wanted to crush my spirit while my mother wanted me to do well. my father was not a father, but rather a built-in instigator of a cold war.
    i viewed the photos of his coffin with relief in the surety that a funeral was held in his name, the near surety that he is gone. only better would have been to see the corpse plowed usunder. we could have had something, but he refused me. in many ways he marked me for challenges in the adult world. he never made me feel worth listening to. there are moments when i wish to be more sure that he is dead, but i suppose never talking to him or seeing him again is decent evidence.
    angela and derek sleep late. it gives me time to be alone and write. by the time they open their eyes, i am ready to jump in the car and scout out beaches. instead, i take part in their waking process, which involves bickering and food. it’s all good when it’s good, but yesterday i asked her to stop (in maui) so i could get a beer. she drove by the liquor outfits and instead said we should all go out for lunch and drinks. i watched as she drove past all the beer stations and eight restaurants onto a main thirsty highway. i let her have it. i told her she was just rushing to get to the condo, like some kind of lemming set loose in paradise. twenty minutes later we saw a plaza and she turned in and parked. when we got out of the car, she said: “i’m stopping for you.” i said, “bullshit! it was your idea to go out. all i wanted was a beer from one of the five gas stations you drove past.” she said she didn’t stop at those places because they were on the right and she was in the left lane. this was a boldface lie. we had been in the right lane the whole time, with me pointing ahead at possible destinations on the right side. angela was acting fucking nuts. the only excuse she could have leaned on is she is a nervous driver, but her pride would never allow that. we finally ended up in a small thai joint, where derek picked up on the tension and asked us why we were so quiet. i said, “sometimes people make mistakes and don’t admit it.” angela said, “sometimes people don’t see that someone is driving in stressful traffic.” stressful traffic on maui? angela had never wanted to stop anywhere as she rushed for the condo. in the thai joint, she made her point by ordering nothing but water. she had said it was her idea to go out for lunch, but now she was going to make us eat lunch at her emotional expense. derek and i ordered and when the food came, she couldn’t resist. her small manipulations and and lies push me toward drawing my knife, the one to sever ties. and i know she enjoys her role as bitch and the wrath it elicits. she has a persecution mania and when the persecution is not forthcoming, she creates it. i have known for 23 years that she suffers from persecution mania, but i had no idea how far she would go to fulfill and indulge her sickness. in this relationship, guarantee means bastard.
    maui? it doesn’t seem like Hawaii as I had imagined it after two weeks on the big island. It reminds me more of southern California. Hawaii you are in a sparsely populated paradise. maui may as well be new jersey, or even manhattan. it exists by condominiums. so many have been built that the island rises into the sky, a white beacon for boats from afar. the maui shoreline is overwhelmed by people who seem more decayed and aggressive. surely, a visitor from minnesota would notice the temperature difference, white beaches, and palm trees. they would also note that the shoreline has been exploited and is dirtier than the big island, which was not dirty at all. there are fewer tropical birds and more rental cars on maui. traffic jams are a daily rite because everyone has moved to maui. the malls on maui are like rodeo drive. the top designers show there, as well as some of the most horrifying artists i’ve ever seen sell paintings. on the big island, a town consists of a surf shop, restaurant, and stop sign. on maui, the guy behind you at the checkout is in such a hurry that his agitation infects the others in line. on the big island, the people are kind and talk to you. they are aware of their separateness from the rest of the state. on maui, there is a high concentration of burnouts who came to Hawaii as failures some years ago and can’t leave. they try to get one up on you and deny generosity even when it be common courtesy. i am expecting edgy locals in the surf. angela’s mom believes that because there are many surfers here it must be a good spot. maui is a good island for surf, but she knows nothing of the politics and aggression in the water. the economy of waves and the certaintly of human nature, especially among the obsessed and immature, say that surfing here will be less spiritual and more contested. on the big island i found more empty point breaks than i could surf. in maui, i love the green: the trees and rivers and flowers and waterfalls. maui is Hawaii, but not the quiet island of my dreams.
    the hawiian islanders warred between themselves. there was no peace in paradise. neighbors always have wars. except when kameakamea was king and united the islands. hawaiians fought epic battles with spears. they were as bloodthirsty as stalin and hitler. it should be remembered that “aloha” originally meant “good wishes so long as you are from my island.”
    in kona, we went for a night swim at a sandy beach near the apartment. while walking atop a stone wall to find the descent to the sand, a hawaiian who was drinking beer, said “aloha” from the heart. he was a man alone with his thoughts by the water and was kind to three white strangers passing by on his island. The kindness and humility in his voice, all the others sounded rote or were selling it.
    agreement means a constant state of alert.
    below me sugar cane blows flat and rises in the wind.
    i wake derek with a cold beer to the stomach.
    “you lazy bum!” i say. (he’s been asleep 14 hours)
    “i’m not a bum! i just like to sleep!”
    “just not at night,” angela says.
    “that was a cold beer,” i say.
    “yeah!”

    dad could have said: “go to your room!” instead he hit me in the head and kicked me in the ribs. nothing was too small to assault me. obviously a presentment was in play. maybe he believed his folks who had said he was trapped and the baby wasn’t his. maybe it was my cold shoulder on his return from vietnam. an analogy: a light bulb pops out. dad goes down to the basement and pounds the circuit board with a hammer. the circuits short out and he throws gasoline on them. the board ignites and the house goes down in flames. our house went down in flames. he forced his destructive, negative, paranoid sensibility on us for decades. as kids, we didn’t know that there were different fathers out there. this was our father and we tried to work around him. you wonder why mom’s grief is tempered? it’s release, freedom from a crazed persecutor who thought he owned us because he paid the bills. he did not support us lovingly or with joy, or pride. he abused and insulted the life out of us. it’s an extraction, blood for money. all accounts had to be paid, in blood, to balance his ledger. his paycheck was permission to violate the laws of humanity and common sense. my sister has minimalized and repressed our suffering because it does not fit with the “he-was-a-good-man” burial she wants to have for the bastard.

    hana
    we’ve rented a cabin by the ocean. it’s owned by the state department of recreation. it’s primitive. no glass, but screen windows, no stove, a pair of single beds we needed to push together. Four bunks in the other room, where Derek will sleep on top. There are several other green cabins in the area. there is a path down to the black lava beaches. last time angela was here she was hospitalized for mosquito bites. the was feverish. the mosquitos here are smaller and faster than their sisters back east or in california. i have been out here since 3:30 a.m. and have seen only two. the rain comes down in tropical torrents. the wind blowing through the palm leaves sounds like a gentle rain accenting the downpour. my shoulders, neck, and back are sore from swimming in the big waves with derek last night. angela has been bitten, but we have not. she is a pale redhead of a very tasty disposition. it is easy for her to become feverish.
    mom has doubts about going to live with shannon, and her husband especially. she loves her grandchildren, but they are obnoxiously self-centered and loud teenagers who rule their liberal parenting mother. steve believes in families helping each other. he is a big family man. it’s one good thing about him. he lost both parents to alcohol and was raised by his grandmother, who shannon took care of in her final days. he and shannon helped me when i was down and out in 2000, after i was kicked out of the seaman’s church for heroin use. it was generous of them, though steve and i did not have one decent conversation, and i created openings. he was closed. he let me sleep on his couch downstairs with no heat, but it was because i was his wife’s brother. essentially, he ignored me. my nephew was about two then and i flushed several grams of heroin before i moved in because i didn’t want that going down in a house where there was an innocent. mom does not want to spend winters alone in northern maine, but she also does not want to be anyone’s babysitter or maid or cook. shannon tried to dump kess on her so she and steve could take their son to a concert in maine. reo speedwagon of all bands. the kid is 11. i saw that band 25 years ago. kess refused to go because it was ryker’s birthday and kess refuses to do anything with her brother and refuses many more things, except food. food in, refusals out. mom said she would not babysit, and, to me, said she felt left out. shannon stopped talking to her. i said, “she doesn’t talk to me either.” as mom had told me, “she isn’t going to talk to you for the rest of your life.” mom prevailed and they bought her a ticket to the concert and forced kess to go and fall asleep. mom’s a little worried about what it would be like to live with them. “i want my own time. i want to see my friends and swim in the uri pool on tuesdays and thurdays. i don’t think i can handle the noise and stress in that household. kess has shannon wrapped around her finger.” kess may be a victim of bovine hormones as well, but that’s too big and uncomfortable a story for me to tell. the girl doesn’t have that special place in her father’s heart. what else is there to do but to control her mother while she eats herself to death. steve gives ryker an inordinant amount of time and “love.” in general, he dislikes women, as he dislikes everyone. women are breeding material. shannon is blind to his misogyny because she had an abusive father, the one she now sentimentalizes in public commemorations. dad is on the altar with “our lord, our savior, jesus christ.”

    recovered my surfboard from aloha air transport intact. the gps was sending us in circles around the airport. the man on the phone had given me directions: “it’s the long building with the green roof. you can’t miss it.” i have never seen so many green roofs. steamed, i ignored the gps and headed straight for my surfboard.
    derek lost his retainer in the surf. a wave knocked it out of his head. after that, back at the car, i noticed he’d left his boogie board back at the beach. angela was upset, but chilled out. derek’s misdeeds are more acceptable than mine. “i bet that is a record for losing a retainer,” she said. “he just got it in april.” (derek would lose the next one in a matter of weeks. we forced him to pay for the third. so far, so good with that one, but he doesn’t wear it. easy come, easy go with derek. he can’t even lift the toilet seat before he pisses. when he takes off his pants, his underwear are brown.
    we have sand everywhere in the house, in our noses and ears, sticking to our scalps and teeth. two weeks back in california i will still be shedding sand.
    they call it a “highway,” the road which runs east from hana back to our home in the isthmus. it is one lane, often dirt and today mud. it rained all night and it was mud all day to ulupalakua. the pacific was laid open below. i had only seen that much ocean from an airplane and the water thousands of feet below was so wide. i popped bikini blondes and drove two feet from the cliffs. “can you grab me another beer? i need to be sharp.” alenuihaha channel and on the right the dried up cattle ranches. the rare car. finally kihei and the west coast beaches.

    dad’s sister mary called mom and said, “i can’t believe he’s dead.” mom said, “believe it. i was there. he is dead.” when someone you know and love dies, there is a lag-time during which death is not recognized. for mary, she was not there and when she was there the casket was closed. he and mary had been close for many years, not as they had been with their two brothers. dad was kind to mary, as he was kinder to mom and shannon, but in our cold hatred of one another, i would say that dad and i were more in tune with one another’s thoughts and actions. the better you know someone, the better you disagree. it was how we disagreed that was tragic.

    36, the road to hana . . . the hana highway . . . call it a country road sided by flowers and waterfalls . . . rain dops rolling down the roof across the windshield . . . namesless green endless green . . . one lane bridges mark the waterfalls . . . white water falls into seven sacred pools . . . you are on your own here in sudden showers . . . water slips off the surfboard and bends the windshield . . . wait! a food court in the middle of the jungle, run by renegade chickens . . . you land in hana . . . it’s quiet . . . fifty-seven percent of the population is native . . . a slow town where everyone has it made, where the dream exists. blessed isolation, graves marked by surfboards, vines draped along the road, lava caves, 225 inches of rain, good for sleeping our one night in the state cabin, a humid morning walk to the black lava beach . . . last night swimming up and over and under giant waves with derek at hamoa beach, angela alert on shore while i showed derek how waves break . . . he catches on fast and will apply his knowledge with the boogie board for the rest of our stay . . . another fight with angela last night, we bring our strife with us . . . i said, “you think it’s a coincidence your son calls you godzilla and i call you a fucking bitch?” she did not contest the labels and did not fight back, but asked me not to call her names in front of derek. she knows she is moody. she is depressed. she won’t do anything about it but make us feel wrong all the time. you can transport yourself to paradise, with the best hopes for harmony, but you take your sicknesses, your biases, your prejudices, your angers and dissatisfactions . . . angela and i have too many fights and we do not make up with great sex. her point of view and the arguing itself repel me.
    the hawaiians have a bumper sticker: if you don’t like hawaiians, why the fuck did you move here?

Copyright of written pieces remain with the author, who has allowed it to be shown through Scars Publications and Design.Web site © Scars Publications and Design. All rights reserved. No material may be reprinted without express permission from the author.

Problems with this page? Then deal with it...