THE ATOMIC HULA - 1963
Chapter Two
"It was the kilts wot kilt 'im!"
Flashback - August 1963
First Day in Hawaii
The European penis had finally entered the volcanic vagina of paradise.
The semen of seaman and missionary machetes sliced and cut wide paths of Caucasian conquest through the paradise of Kamehameha's Kingdom, bearing a colonial giftbasket of biblical christian scripture and European syphllis. Don't ask how, but somehow, God and gonorrhea had teamed up in a macabre Faustian exchange for native land, bodies and souls.
Hawaii's seductive powers have captivated captains and cooks alike, luring heavily laden vessels of adventurers and sailors to her tranquil shores of warriors and maidens. The islands inject the soul with an invisible, living lava bed that carries warm ocean winds and exotic scents of intoxication that forces a gentle, willing "fall to your knees" submission of the spirit. Today, the seagoing scoundrels and run soaked salty dogs of olde, have been replaced by Honolulu highrise hoteliers and jet-set jesters in search of the perfect Maui martini. The land on the runway and disembark the plane only to embark on a new journey into the ample, fleshy waikiki waihini bosom of the Big Kahuna's Oahu Mama-cita herself.
Mickeys middle-class, middle-west, plaid-proud sensibilities were poked Stooges style, in the eye and he numbly stumbled dumbly, clumsily, at first in a darkened room of frayed old wiring from 1910, broken lightbulbs and an eerie blindness, caneless, with an equally blind three legged no seeing eye-dog appropriately named Tripod to guide him. Slowly, it dawned on him. This was freakin' Hawaii, man. Freakin' Hawaii. Ha! He made it, damn it afterall. His sensory eyesight was returned to him along with the occasional nude muse as a gift from the harem bedrooms of unknown Polynesian kings, and their switch hitter queens, quite queer for the princess and bearing a bitch on a leash for the darling butch.
Happy teeny bop-hot humidity was everywhere in the air that warm August morning, slapping his face fanny spankin' red and ko'd him to the ten count canvas, like that ol' punch drunk broken down boxer his grandpa had talked about named Killer Bixby from the Bronx. The sun and wind rocketed Mickey down the quarter mile of his emotional dirt hotrod racetrack, fueled by hot 1963 teen-angst when he stepped from the Pan Am jet on the ground in Honolulu. Gliding on gilded wings he began to drown delightfully in the sea of rays that showered him in an erotic sunbath and had to admit that from now on he was hooked, lined and sinkered on hookers with hookahs and hip, swingin' hulas.
Mickey stepped outside the airport terminal to hail a hack to make the backseat trek into the land of beach blanket bingo. Soon from hack hell it appeared,;a beat-up cab with an equally beat cabbie pulled up curbside and Mickey jumped into the backseat with one easy, fluid and poetic motion. The meter clicked up and he settled in to enjoy the scenery, his own personal thoughts and his own private past pass by.
The taxi was taxi tacky, and stunk that taxi stink that never quite goes away. A toxic mixture of a cheap pimps cologne, a hard working whores perfume and patchoulie incense combined to create a bistering mustard gas of primping pansys powerful enough to lob in battle on the Western front creating a death trap trench of taxicab stench!
The door shut tight, not hermetically, but tight enough given it's age and condition. Mickey noticed the dashboard with its protective statuary of little plasic St. Cristopher, patron saint of all travelers. The kid swore he saw a lecherous grin on the saints face as it stood next to a gyrating hula dashboard ornament that wanted to rub against he the most holy. A plastic Mary Magdaline with full swing hula hip-action and a prophylactic profile.
The cab and the cabbie then roared to life. "Where to, Mate?" asked the cabbie. Mickey was startled, here the swarthy Hawaiian in the front seat let loose a spigot full of language that poured forth like a tankard full of the Queens English. Blimey! The cabbie was a Limey! "Not sure, not sure at all" was all he could stutter and stammer out. The cabble fixed his gaze on him through the looking glass of the rearview mirror and let out a laugh, a roar really. "Not to worry, lad. Mos' folks don' know where they's headed anyway, and my young friend, thats cuz, they don' know where they bin in the firs' place!". The last sentence exploded as if it were a landmine taking his leg off with it just above the kneecap.
The cabbie drove deftly with one hand on the steering wheels suicide knob while t'other hand reached for and fully orchestrated the downing of a handful of pills with the flair and precision of a flambouyant Berstein, baton grasped firmly in his delicate ivory hand. Gawd dammit, these weren't just any old pills either. They were a colorful cornucopia Wizard of Oz over the rainbow assortment that would make Dorothy/Judy salivate and pant like a dog in heat.
There were ruby-red pills; yellowbrick road pills; little blue smurfy Munchkin pills to munch and crunch; and some were twin engine two-toned Toto inhalers. There were numerous types of pills to choose from in the Mason jar/holy chalice gaping open mouthed on the seat next to him. It proved only that the cabbie was an enlightened pill popper and would not party-cipate in a policy of pharmaceutical apartied!
The yellow amphetamine submarine ripped away from curbside and began a cool cab cruise along the beachside highway of Kalakaua Avenue. "Names Doc, Doc Yucatan, kid. I may looks a little Hay-why-yan, but me pop was a kilt happy Scotsmun and me mum was a grass skirt'd native girl, when they met in '25. Pop was a missionary, holy pious man he was, trying to save the savages from the snake charmers!" Ha! "These native girls, lad, they'll bring you to your knees everytime, with a wink in their coy eyes and of course, happy lip smackin' delicious hips! Anyway, they ends up in a most un-missionarylike missionary position, and as a result they had me."
Doc was as colorful as a boxful of Crayolas. His rapid fire speaking in tongues intoxicated the young runaway enough to lure him staggering, stammering, drunken, deeper and deeper into the Cabbie Cave of giant ferns and even taller tales. A storytelling spelunkers Alice in Wonderland, and somehow, Mickey, somewhere, had broken through the looking glass guided by a happy hookah haiku hobo as his guide to all things new and outlandish in whacked out Wonderland.
Doc flipped the page and continued his story. "Strange it was, growin' up in that household. Me mum, she wore the grass skirts on occasion, ceremonial though most times in those days. Hell, they used to be bareassed nekid before the dmaned priests and pastors got here. Anyways, Pop was partial to kilts, bein' a Scotsmun and all as he was. On more than one occasion Mum and me caught Pop dressed up in one'ov her grass skirts, just a sashayin' real nice like, all by himself in the bedroom. Strange thing though, is that it was alright with me mum. Sometimes she had pop dress up in one of her skirts and do a hula for her and damned if she didn't like to wear his damn kilts herself. We didn't have pants in the house, so Mum used to joke around that she was the one who wore the kilts in the family!" The Tartan Clad Princess of Wahoo Oahu.
"Mum and Pop was both whacko, schizo. Inner workin's split in two like kindlin'. Well, one day, I sneak out of the mission school early and head home. Damn cops all over the place. An ambulance, people everywhere, neighbors running around, and Mum cryin' her brown eyes out somthin' fierce." The pause was long enough to get itself boinked and pregnant. "What happened then?" Mickey blurted out, louder than he expected. Doc reflected. "Well, see, pop was dead on the spot. Heart attack brought 'im down like an old bull elephant. The worst part? Here's the worst part. When he was lyin' there dyin' the 'mergency people was there to try to save 'im and they found him on the floor dressed in kilts and a deep purple bra! Seems he Was dancin' 'round the room in a grass skirt when he keeled over, stroked. Mum found 'im and knew he couldn't be seen like that so she stripped 'im bare, took of the kilts that she was wearing and switched 'em onto Pop so's he'd look proper when the authorties came. 'Cept she forgot to take off the damn bra!" He paused again. "Yep, could say, it was the grass skirt and bra, and not the kilts wot kilt 'im." Ha!
Mickey had to stifle a laugh out loud. The thought of a grass skirted Scotsman playing with his own bagpipes was too much. He smiled and kept it, the laugh that is, inside of him, and instead leaned back nestling into the vinyl to watch the buildings flash by and to enjoy the visual arcade of the bikini clad peekshow visible through the walkways between the hotels. It was a carnivale of a beachful of catamarans and joyous heaving mountains of fleshy female cleavage. The portal to paradise was spreading it's legs and opening wide, offering it's soft wet treasure to him on a silver platter....and man, was he thirsty!
The sugar plum dreams were soon smashed and dashed like a piece of old melon. Doc's voice. "Seen any zombie movies, kid? Damn flesh eatin' bastids' anyway. Bringin' hell with 'em right from the grave. Hoowee! Hell, they even look like hell, eh?" Again the laugh that came from deep inside the bowels of the very earth itself erupting Vesuvian in the front seat.
Vampires! Zombies! Giant spiders! Monsters! Movie matinee monsters! Popcorn and people-eater monsters, all manner of monsters shot by his imagination. "Naw, not yet. Just been travelin', well wantin' to travel. Actually, this is my first trip. Not too sure of where I really want to go, or where I'll end up. It's all been pretty good so far though, considerin' I ain't been anywhere yet at all anyhow."
Doc looked in the rearview right at and his gaze bore right through Mickey. Doc's face took on an eerie look as it lit up brighter than highbeams on a Plymouth Fury. "Zombies do put a fear in folks, don't they? Hells bells, they don't even know where they're goin' either. Just rise up from the grave, all hungry like and just want to have look-see for human food is all. A feast of flesh and it scare's the shit out of folks. Damndest thing those zombies, damndest thing ever you seen". Mickey absorbed the zestful zombie stories of living deads and undead dreads. "Lemme get this straight" he thought quietly to himself. "I run away from home, travel damn near 5,000 miles and end up in the backseat of Cab Nine From Outer Space with a voodoo/vampire/zombie worshipping cult high priest from the planet Glen/Glendora that had somehow ejaculated itself from an Ed Wood movie and ended up as a stain on the tiki-tacky wiki-waki Waikiki sheets and a taxi on the Honolulu streets!" How fuckin' cool is that?
Day dreams overpowered Mickey as he closed his eyes to see. He could hear, feel, haunted Haitian drums beating out a heated beat in the coal black dark of the night in the muddy middle of a dense negro island forest. Great bonfires of ganja tossing illusory gifts of wafting smoke and colorful visions, in pagan offering to the stars held fast above them high in the sky. Pins. Painful millions of tiny pins piercing his own effigy. The voodoo doll of Mickey squirming to escape, but as in all dream sequences, he know that is all but impossible.
Soon, he was transformed into one of the dreaded undead, denizen of the dark, doomed to walk the earth for all eternity, or longer. Longer than eternity? Shit! Dragging one foot in a hopeless cross between stop action and slo-mo. He would learn the tricks of the dream art of actually overtaking a victims who could elude him at warp speed if they so choose, but, for whatever reason, chose not too.
The drums got louder, the smoke got thicker and he could hear the blackened voice of doom, hellfire and damnation growl from within. "They're coming for you Barbra, you fucking tramp! They're coming for you!" Goddamn it! Somehow, he ended up in a script, a scene right out of a goddamn B-movie! Barbara and the Zombie. The Voodoo hooker and the zombie pimp. Trampy Camp meets Campy Tramp!
The lurch of the cab snapped it's fingers and it was time to leave the world of daydreams far behind. The sails were hoisted high to catch the winds for Mickeys return trip from Voodoo Island and blondes named Barbra, Question. "Doc, why's it you seem to know so much 'bout things? You know, people and all, movies and stuff like that?" Doc bared a huge laughing mouth full of pearlies. "Don' know boy, don' really know all that much, Kid. It's all about perception, you unnerstand? It's what you make other folks think they see or hear about you and what you have to say. Fer 'xample, "do you want to pass away the night, or do you want to pass away tonite?" Two diff'rent questions, two different answers, dependin' on the persons frame of mind. Perception. Take this rearview mirror here. See, it says, "Objects In Mirror May Be Closer Than They Actually Appear". Doncha see? It's all smoke and mirrors with a leetle bit o' bullshit is all it is Kid. Smoke and Mirrors!" Mickey added "..and bullshit. Don't you forget the bullshit Doc." Doc took up the chorus, "Bullshit it is, Kid. Big-assed steamin' bowls of bullshit it is!" Mickeys own personal taxi perception of things at that particular space, in that particular time, was that everything was right with the world. In fact, it couldn't get any better!
Docs cab slowed down, easing curbside. A behemoth yellow cruiseship berthing itself neatly next to a two story building stacked delightfully deli sandwich high with boxy little studio apartments, one on top o'tother. They seemed, at first glance anyway, to mimic a lost pueblo village of long ago Anasazi redmen. Dormant burial grounds laced with spirits, adobe ghosts, coyotes and peyote. Perception, he thought. Perception..and bullshit of course, don't mean shit, without the bullshit!
Exiting the cab, Mickey grabbed his bag and stuck his head through the taxi's window, a penitent parishoner fessin' up to a litany of immoral sins, some venial, some mortal to a penance pushing priest in a confessional. "How much I owe you, Doc?" Doc, amused and bemused at the query at the same time. "Damned if I don't rightly know, young friend. See, I was spendin' all that time jes' yakin' away, an' well, damned if I din't forget to set the meter. I'll tell ya what. Gimme a couple a bucks, and the rest owed to me in plain old fashioned karma, and we call it kosher, done. Allright with you Kid?" Mickey beamed and handed Doc a five. "Thanks Doc, thanks for everything." Doc gave his hand a friendly island shake, and handed Mickey a smudged "bidniz" card as he liked to call it, being as he was a Honolulu bidnez-man. "Here, keep this on ya. It's got my number and all, and if you need anything, jes' holler loud, like them old island drums you gonna hear at night comin' from Duke Kahanamoku's bar." Those haunted Haitian walkin' talkin' voodoo ganja Negro drums. Maybe those were the drums he heard earlier in his daydreams. The dreams of drums, the drums of dreams.
Doc pulled away and as the taxi shrunk to the size of a small yellow dot in the growing distance Mickey stood alone, more confident now, on the spirit world street in front of the "puebo village". It was now his new world. He, Mickey, as Eric the Red, Viking explorer in search of Canadian coastlines to conquer. He smiled, grabbed his satchel and dashed up the steps to the door marked "Manager" and knocked.
These were no ordinary apartments either. Naw, these were clean and lean, and operated like a well oiled Pearl Harbor Machine. No bull, Halsey! A battleship, under the flag of a slightly built, attractive, mature Asian woman who went by the name of Mrs. Kuramoto, because, that was indeed her name, so why not, by all means shouldn't she go by it.
This Hannah of Hiroshima, would, like Doc Yucatan in months to come, play a pivotal role straight out of Hollywood central casting, leaving a long, lasting impression on this most impressionable of kids. Hell, the kid still believed in invisible pirates, pixie dust and Lost Boys.
The door opened and beheld an Asian goddess, an angel of mercy. Madame Butterfly Kuramoto appeared before Mickey as a beautifully, delicate carved bonsai vision framed in a soft aura. Mickey stopped dead in his tracks. His heart pounding fast, ready to rip from his chest. Puppylove and a teenage crush, just add water. The same force that made schoolboys fall like slaves to their knees, panting, in heat before certain teachers, rushed over him like a tsunami over breakers on the beach. She was porcelain and barbed wire. She was a lustful lover, teacher and mother at the same time. She was wo-man, he was womb-man. It was obviously Oedipus and his wonder dog Rex.
She sized up the young boy in a single slice of the knife and determined the best, the only course of action that she would take. Runaway kid, for sure, she surmised. She comtemplated, comisserated and them communicated.
She would allow him to have a room but, (monster "but" coming here) but, on the condition that he pick up the phone and trans-Pacific pacify his parents with a call simply to let them know how far he had traveled and where he was. There was no quarter to be given, no room to squirm. He did the only thing he could do. He accepted the victory won by her divine kamikaze wind, laid down his arms and unconditionally surrendered to her terms.
The call was placed and parents and child connected by hardwire. Tears traveled down their faces, across the Continental Divide, the high plains, the mainland, all the way to the shores of the ocean then set sail bounding over the main and out again through the phone.
Mickeys stutter returned with a personal vengeance this time detonated by rife and strife and tears. Soon, the mother and child reunion was one of unity, and semi-understanding so Mickey said his "good-byes" and handed the phone to Kamikazi Kuramoto as he exited the room to let the wimmen tawk!
Hushed tones. Muffled laughter. Conspiratorial infernal maternal instincts were mainifesting themselves before him. Two to one. Fuck! "It's ok, Mickey. I gave them my address, and of course they have the phone number now so we can all keep in touch. Now, you're to look at this as though you were on a vacation because they will be sending you a plane ticket and you have to be home before December and then back to school when it starts up again in January." He thought it over, and realizing he had no choice, nor did he intend to stick to the deal anyway.
So, nothing to loose, he agreed to all the terms. Hell, he'd even send them a postcard or two from "The Wish You Were Here" islands of palm fronds, sweet tasting brown skinned ass and skirts of grass. Mickey turned over the first months rent, which left him with $250 and some spare change to spare.
Mrs. Kuramoto gave him the studio apartment right next, wall to wall, to the office, her apartment. That way she could keep a watchful eye on him just as she had promised his parents she would do; and his gaping mouth open lovestruck look hadn't gone unnoticed to her either. The kid was young, but attractive; innocent to a degree, but, lets face it; he's gonna have to grow up someday anyway somehow. Besides, he was toting around a fully laden cargoe hold of hormones, typhoon powered, that would be raging across the froth of the South China Sea, cresting and peaking with undulating motions, then, ultimately make landfall. So, why not just BE the landfall he'd end up on anyway?
She also knew that first real puppylove could whip itself into a potent and highly powerful sex elixir. Dr. Jekyll meet Mr. Hardon Hyde. Offer him a teasing taste to tempt and wet his appetite and she could then direct, control and harness that puppy love; using it as a puppy leash to keep Mickey close to her bedside.
She did, afterall, promise his parents to keep an eye on him to protect him from predators, and God knows they were/are numerous and wily. She got lonely at times too. Her husband, of 21 years, business tripped to Tokyo on occasion, leaving her alone in paradise, and she could now use that now promising precious promiscuous time to train her new young pet on a leash a few rollover and beg tricks in bed of her own. It was true, she thought, you can't teach an old dog new tricks. Now a young puppy, fresh meat, that is another story. She was his first, and without regret, the most unforgettable. Mickey would dive in headfirst, as deep into her rich garden soil as he could plant his roots, many, many musky times. The moist petals of her Lotus Blossom would open wide, hungry and inviting, not to mention deliciously and devastatingly demanding, to devour and swallow whole, the cherry from his own blooming tree of blossoms.
One night as he was lying naked on her bed she came in the room wearing only a double-breasted pinstripe suit top and a grey fedora hat. Marlene and the Cabaret Crowd swinging on a trapeze in the fog. the look on his face made her smile and laugh. "Doc told me once I looked like a double brested dyke." Mickeys eyes flying saucered once again. "But you see, I can't be all that" she said. "One quarter of my sexuality is saved for you."
Mickey had heard of dykes, from Doc, and wondered what they were exactly or not exactly. She was sexy though with one breast escaping the double breasted cage of pinstripes. "What is a dike exactly, ma'am"? She had trained him well to call her Ma'am and he did as she told him. "Well, there is DIKE, spelled with an "i" and that is where little Dutch boys put their fingers in, then there is DYKE, with a "y", and that is where little Dutch girls put THEIR finger in."
She stripped but kept on the fedora and sat on the bed and caressed him and held her head to her breast as he tried in vain to get her milk, long since dried up, but it quenched his thirst anyway. He was an only child, but now, not a lonely child. He now belonged to her, and her to him but she wanted him to explore the beach and the others on the beach, but always come back to her when she called, and we would do just that.
Street level apartments in Honolulu just happen to sport spectacular voyeuristic views of the King Kong thong throngs that perform daily and nightly across the street. Haughty hoteliers and conivial concierges arm wrestle one another in the Beach Blanket Bingo Battle Royale for very real estate. The frontlines, no more, no less then mere thinskinned walkway sidewalks allowing access to the ocean and it's sandcastle palace of pleasures.
The wenches and the wretches alike, oozing a sexy, subtle brown Coppertone hot-skin smell, little flecks of sand hidden, embedded, in the fog of it's sweet sweat. Coconuts, high up in the trees, hiding until they can be fashioned into fine exotic breast wear; balmy skies, palmy trees; frondy foliage, stacked, racked surfboards; outriggers and catamarans adding to the cacophony of sound and sensory assault of sight as all was being made ready for The Minnesota Tourist Creatures from The Beach Lagoon! Yelling out to the mountain tops of their lungs, ALOHA! YOU'BETCHA!
Hyena laughs coming from the haoli hordes; locals, ever watchful and wary of these post-missionary invaders from Mars; heart pounding waves, skies of the bluest of hues, and in the trpical backdrop cloth of a background the sensous vibrating g-spot strings of an idyllic islandic ukelele.
Mickey was ready, for what, he didn't have a clue, but damn, he could feel the readiness take hold. The bitch of the beach beckoned to him, all come hitherish more like a tenderloin whore with too much makeup and too many miles on 'er. It was it took. He was off and running in all directions. He put on some old raggedy cutoffs and ran out of the apartment, straight for the beach, breathing and heaving heavily. Once again, the whore had won.
Mickey walked "gingerly", (jes' always wanted to use that word, feel free to insert your own if that pleases you!) barefoot in the footsteps of Gallileo and other men and women of pure crystaline science and unholy blasphemy. He beheld enlightenment in the form of a tiki torch and discovered that the earth was indeed round, eggshaped and elipsing about the universe wobbling all the way. He also found that man would sail under the ocean, fly around the world in 80 days and one day, one lunar tune day, man would walk on the surface of the moon.
Mickey stood still, silent, jaw gaping as he absorbed the scene as much as his little sponge of experience would allow. Gaping and gazing. A numbstruck dumbfuck at best. The promise of promiscuity made itself visible in the short time it takes to crack a whip. Son of a beach, he had been jolly rogered and jolly and joyfully marooned on an amazing atoll of fantastic, bombastic bikini's.
Fuck science. Fuck fusion and fuck fision. Bombholding bikini's held massive warheads that if unleashed could be, would be, no doubt about it, devastating. They would release massive megatons of countdown cleavage ten times more powerful than the Nagasaki nuke. Atomique breasts armed with detonator nipples, shared the beach with silos of failsafe missles of mile high thighs!
Mickey could only stand there, immovable, immobile when he noticed the bulge in his pants rising like the full moon. He was racing headon for a collision with a hardon that was expanding like it's mushroom cloud over Alamogordo!
The time had finally come. Mickey had unlocked the key to sexual univers and was more than ready to split his own sexual atom and detonate!>
