Chapter Four - A-Row-ha My Ass

The ocean breeze from Waikiki woke him gently and he looked around the room, rubbing his eyes. He was really here. A sense of optimism filled him while the warm beach breeze filled his room. He was really here.

He showered quickly, dressed in khaki shorts, sandals, white cotton shirt and he carefully placed his new shell neck chain where his tie would have gone just a couple of days ago. He excitedly made his way down to the lobby, certain now that he was an islander through and through. From behind the front desk, yet another beautiful brown face smiled at him.

“Aloha.” He said brightly.

“Aloha.” Came the smiling reply. He was really here.

At the open-air grill next door he ordered a breakfast of eggs, Portuguese sausage and two gooey scoops of rice. This was a real Hawaiian breakfast, the likes of which he hadn’t had since he’d lived on Molokai many years ago.

While he enjoyed his authentic breakfast and the morning sun at his sidewalk table, he perused the “For Rent” ads in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin. He looked up from busily circling ads and noticed a sign across Kuhio Street at the car rental agency. “Cash Deposits – no credit card needed”.

An hour later he was crossing the Ala Wai canal in a very used Nissan Sentra with a rather nasty rattle in the brakes and cockroaches crawling out of the A/C vents. These must be the cars for lolo Haoles with cash. It was going to take more than a few cockroaches to dampen his spirits today though; he was just glad to be mobile. Things were looking up.

From Waikiki he headed north on the Nimitz Highway to H-1 toward Pearl City to inspect a vacant apartment. Along the way he passed the Aloha Bowl, a stadium he’d seen many Utah and BYU games broadcast from. From the freeway it looked like a giant pile of rust. Just like the Forum and Boston Garden. He smirked at the idea that these icons were actually such dumps.
He located the apartment and arrived a few minutes early. After waiting there for over an hour he found a nearby pay phone and called the landlord. No one answered so he reluctantly left to find change for more calls.

Typical of several unsuccessful calls was a landlord in Halawa Heights who said rather briskly that the apartment had been rented. Then another in Iwilei asked several pointed questions before finally voicing the real issue: “We don’t rent to no da kine haole.”

After several more calls he was finally encouraged when he called on an ad to share a large house with three other males. After a good conversation, the person on the other end said, “We’re all Christian here. Have you accepted the Lord Jesus Christ as your personal savior?” It was presented as an afterthought but Rudy knew it was the most important point the potential roommate wanted to make. He was a live and let live kind of guy but he was pretty certain that these three roommates wouldn’t let live.

Call after call ended with some lame excuse or “Sorry, rented.” And a few more “We don’t rent to haoles.” He thought back to the 6th grade, after he’d been on Molokai for a year or so and had developed a pretty native-sounding pidgin. Right now he was really wishing he could recall that skill.

As a naïve white man, he’d always assumed that greed eclipsed prejudice. Didn’t greed pretty much eclipse everything? Now he was coming to the sinking realization that minorities have always known. No, it didn’t. Don’t let those smiling faces fool you haole tourists, they just want you to leave your wallet and go home. By sunset his optimism was sitting at the bottom of the Ali Wai Canal.

He was feeling pretty jet lagged and that had been compounded by the boat load of frustration he’d picked up throughout the day. By 9 PM he was mentally exhausted and he crawled between the sheets. He pulled a pillow over his head in a vein attempt to kill the cacophony of horns, screeching tires and loud voices from the street below.

These were the same sounds he’d found so exotic and exciting just that morning but now he cursed the hotel for not having air conditioning so that he could shut the lanai door.
He finally drifted off some time after 2 AM only to be startled awake by a group of Japanese tourists shouting “A-row-ha” in unison six or seven times from the street directly below his lanai.

“A-row-ha, my ass,” he muttered as he pulled the pillow back over his head. It was as ineffective at blocking the sound as it was at blocking the smell of the auto exhaust coming through the open window.

The next three days were much the same and seemed to drag on interminably. He wandered the Island in his rattling, rented Nissan, looking for rooms for rent or cars for sale until he thought that if he had to put another smelly, germ-infested payphone handset to his face he would freak out. Each night he returned to his hotel room dirty, demoralized and exhausted.

Landlord after landlord stood him up or saw his white skin or heard his haole voice and told him to go home - in a manner of speaking, of course. Paradise was looking like a real crock and the rusted out Aloha Bowl had become his personal symbol for the place.

© 2008. David Heiniger. All Right Reserved.