1963
Chapter Four
Treasure Island had now become a sandy Skid Row beach
1963. Cruiseships and hula hips. The nation mourned it's dead president, while Mickey was being born in a placenta backbeat of beachbums, booze and boobs.The beach was bitchin' to paraphrase the day. It's cup began to overflow with tourists trying to fill a beach bra two sizes too small to handle the load. Catamarans awakened from overturned slumber were being readied to cast off to paddle out into the sun drenched Pacific. Surfboards getting a wax job for aerodynamic precision on the curls and rolls to cut a Fellini swath through a waiting tube, the seas legs spread wide for a hang ten lusty entry.
Mickey's eyes took in a beach feast of visual stimuli including cabana after cabana erected with colorful cloth making it look like a Bedoin village that even Lawrence of Arabia would feel at home in, sans camels. It was a movie set staged, lit, camera's ready to roll..action! The players stood their marks, the same kids on the beach Mickey had seen everyday since he arrived in beachbum paradise, only now their forms took on new meaning as he was now one of them. He left the trans-angel apartment just after dawn and breakfast and made his way back to familiar territory by the hotel across from his old studio apartment in Waikiki, not knowing what his next course of action or in-action would be. That was when he met Porkpie Sam who set in motion the promiscuous roller coaster journey he was about to embark on for the next year and half in an amusement park of sex, bums, drunks and thieves, all in collison orbits in a solar system of heavenly bodies, fueled by a sexual revolution rapidly revolving and spinning out of control. Mickey thought to himself.."It's true, there is no gravity. The Earth sucks!"
The underaged boys of the beach (Mickey now one of the little Oliver Twisters) seemed to float by on reed rafts in a stop motion morphine dream, while back home in Michigan it was Friday night lights and the gridiron grind of pigskin, marching bands doing a Sousa march to the sea towards victory and of course, more importantly, the state championship. The go-team-go cheerleaders getting go-team-go banged under the bleachers. Let's face it, everybody scored, on and off the field. Touch down!. Mickey crossed the 20 yards of sand to meet the curious man with the porkpie attitude. "Sam," he said, island born and bred. A Polynesian James Cagney, cocky, short, with a gold tooth gleaming while grinning. "Hey", said Mickey cleverly, "Hey, back at ya," porkpie volleyed across the conversational net. "Been noticin' you comin' to the beach ever day for a month or so and was wondrin' when you'd introduce yourself. Names Sam, good to meet ya." Mickey nodded and felt one of those shitty nervous grins emer that wears like a mask at a ball that you have to remove at midnight. "I noticed you too, and those other kids over there running down the beach. Though you might be a school class or something so didn't want to butt in." Sam gave out one hell of a hearty, almost piratical laugh. "Now, dammit, that is a good one. Yeah, school, that's what it is and those are my students. Always got room for one more for the honor roll you know. If you're interested that is." Mickey was now kill the cat curious.
Mickey didn't know where to start, so in typical midwestern fashion, began in the present. "I ran out of money and lost my apartment so I need to find a place to sleep and stuff like that." Sam's eyes got big as coconuts, "Well, you've come the right place me boy. Tell you what, you can stay with a few us and I can teach you the ropes, the ropes of survival in this so called paradise. Game?" Game. Set. Match. Mickey took the bait. Hell, he had no choice. 'Sounds good but where d'ya'll live?" Sam simply pointed upwards, to the god's on thrones, Zeus and Company, high in the sky, and also to the roof of the Reef Hotel. Mickey tried explaining he had no money to kick in to share expenses and just wouldn't feel right doing it. Shit, the porkpie has a penthouse! Sam, had heard it before and started that laugh of wisdom and been there done that before. Porkpie laughed until he choked this time. "No, no. Not there man. Here! This tree, this tree right here, ain't got no roomservice but each room has a view." Now it was time for Mickey's eyes to get saucer big. "The tree? How the hell you live in a tree?" Once again, Porkpie divined wisdom from atop the mount of the homeless and the helpless. "See those beach mats over there, the ones the haoli's use to lay on so the beach, she don't burn their skin from the heat? Well we each have our own, stashed during the day down in the garage here and at night, we grab 'em, climb up and make a sort of nest, a hammock in the limbs and sleep with the stars," he said as he stared at invisible starry heavens not due for another 12 hours. Mickey saw the mats stacked on the beach and Porkpie nodded to him to go get one, which he did and returned prize in hand. Then Porkpie motioned to follow him through the small openings on the beach to the inside of the parking garage of the hotel and led him to a stash of mats hidden on top of the steel beams at the far end. "We keep 'em here so's nobody steals them." That's irony don't you think he thought, but what choice did he have. Had to protect his stolen property from being taken back by the rightful owners, and what better place to stash them then in the parking structure owned by the rightful owners. Mickey placed his there and went back out through the same opening, spelunkers in paradise, a concrete cave with no bats. Just cars and mats. No bats.
"Now if you noticed down there they got mini showers so's the tourists who go back into the hotel at that entrance after rolling around the sand and surf can rinse off before hitting the elevators and going up to their rooms, and not leave a trail of sandy footprints all over the place. Well, that's where we wash up in morning. Gotta keep clean you know." Mickey was beginning to feel better already, safer, not so homeless, only half-assed-homeless. "What about food," he said, feeling he was pushing his luck now. Christ, the guy was offering him a home, such as it was. "Well, you can roll drunken sailors and soldiers for me down on Hotel Street or you can borrow a few trinkets and odds and ends from these tourists here. Tribute to the tribe, I call's it. Look. See that couple over there, getting ready to go in the water, now watch what they do." The couple got up after lathering in sunblock, then, carefully and carelessly the guy removes his cheapass Timex, and places it along with his wallet and room key inside a shoe, careful to tuck it deep inside so it was buried treasure, out of sight. Then the lady places her dainty watch with cheap jewelled face and silver braclet inside of her shoe, and then, as though the she were hiding the Maltese Falcon inside of Fort Knox puts her purse under the goddam beachmat leaving a telltale bulge the size of the Phillipines. Secure in their seeming cleverness at twarting evil, they then dashed hand in hand happily and falsely secure into the waiting Pacific whose waves gently caressed the shore as though it were a virgins breast on a first date.
"Now, these mainlanders come over here to get all tropical and such, hit the beach and think a shoe is a goddamn safety deposit box inside old Fort Knox which it ain't. Look, see those kids over there running around? Watch." Sam had the air of an Eisenhower commanding D-Day forces ready to breach the bunkered beaches at Normandy. Each kid glanced around like mechanized radar towers, scanning the beach and it's unwary tourists getting ready to baptize themselves in the holy Honolulu waters, amen, brother. First one, then the other would stand up after taking off their shoes and setting them down in military formation on the sand. Then a magneto would whisk the watches and superflous jewelry from body as they were removed and placed, tucked deep inside of the canvas cavern near the toe. Unseen like submarines. Once they felt they were secure from theft they made their mad from here to eternity dash to the sea, oblivious lemmings while the prying radar eyes of vagrant buggers made the dash for the cash and to liberate the pinata of jewelry and money in one swift, adroit movement, with the precision of Jack the Ripper ripping away in the East End. Watches, assorted jewelry, cash, coin, travelers checks, credit cards, and room keys themselves that would open the gated treasure rooms now vacated while the residents vacationed obviously oblivious.
Little demons would then fade into the crowd as though they were the unheard horror voices in a schizoids mental amusement park of paranoia and delusion. Just one more particle of sand on a beach full of sand, ditching empty wallets in nearby dumpsters, and then hold audience with Sam who would take the fenceable lootables, mark down who had stolen what so he could split the payoff with them. Mickey's question had now been answered. So, that's what Sam was always writing down. Not haikus, poems, dirty ditties or Irish limericks. In time, he learned, Sam was extremely organized and exceptionally honest, for his line of work anyway, proving to Mickey there was sort of a thing as honor among Honolulu thieves. Never mind these same kids would knife a sailor in a back alley for a few bucks of shore leave cash meant for whores and bartenders. Mickey would spend the next year earning his gold watch, although the watch would invariably belong to someone else who put in the old thirty and out kiss my ass retirement scenario. He did wander to the hotel district one night to see what goes on in the world of neon drunks and brown skinned muses who lie on their backs while soldiers and sailors would lie through their teeth to themselves and think they had fallen in love. Love by the way only lasted 20 minutes and cost fifteen bucks. One night, hidden in the shadows of the street, he watched a few of the kids he knew, and liked, wait in a doorway by the corner alley to pounce on their prey. Hunting lions at night bringing down water buffalo's with a crash and splash of blood. A stumbling drunk in dress whites from the USS some shit or other would weave a zigzaggy path towards the darkened doorway, then woosh...would be whisked into the waiting alley, the lions den, punches flying, feet kicking the wounded beast prone on the ground, muffled groans, too drunk to yell aloud and soon the victim would pass out and be as limp as a rubber after it's been tossed in the trash. Stripped of watches, cash, even some of the insignia buttons and military ribbons as they were worth money too, Popeye had been punched out as he was punch drunk anyway. He's down for the count and there would be no rematch in the ring. He had witnessed a Kubrickian scene straight out of Clockwork Orange, me droogies. (The alpha male of this maurading pack, Chaika, would later be the administer of a severe beating that landed Mickey in the hospital for two weeks when he ended up in juvenile hall. But I'm getting ahead of the story.....)
"There is another way to cash in too. How old are you anyway?" queried the quizical Sam. Proudly, Mickey blurted out, "Fifteen." Sam put his arm around his shoulder and began walking him down the beach to get a better view of the Reef and it's rooms. "See all those rooms? Well lot's of them have tourist ladies who travel together. Usually single, some married on a girls out vacation, no husbands around, back home they are, the husbands I mean. Sometimes they want a little action and I try to supply that to them with the help of my friend who works in the hotel on the night desk. Now, looking at you, young and all, these old broads would probably pay like they do for some of the other guys over there. You'd make money, I'd make money and my friend in there would get his money, finders fee we call it. Been laid yet, kid?" Mickey was awash in stimuli now, trying to absorb everything and said "Yeah," he said, thinking fondly of Debbie back home. and about the lady on the loose job offer, "Gotta think about it," and think about it he did. "Couple of broads like that a night and you can eat like a king my young friend. Sex, and you get paid for it in paradise no less." Sam continued along the same lines trying to reel in his fish. "Now, they do like them young but don't want to get mixed up too much with jailbait so you say your 15, right? Well, now, you're 17 going on 18 and because you're white we'll say your mixed race, besides you brown up pretty good in the sun here, so look kinda Hawaiian. Yeah, your mama a native girl, daddy a sailor or sumpthin'. They like the local boys but a mixed breed boy could do very well here.!"
Mickey thought it over and the thought of getting banged and paid was too inviting. Food money if nothing else, 'cept he already had a girlfriend who worked at a restaurant that would boost food for him on a daily basis and he was dating the daughters of tourists who would spring for a beachbums meal and that sort of thing. Most days his hours would be spent commiting bank robbery on unsuspecting tourist shoes for the treasure within Davey Jones' Dr. Scholls locker. Meeting girls, posing for surfboard photos for the tourists for a buck and at nights on occasion going inside the hotel room of some widow or spouse intoxicated by the sun, the surf and the chance to cheat on their husband back home without guilt or a relationship. Mickey now understood what was meant by getting lei'd in Honolulu, as he was being officially sacrified and tossed headlong for the next year into a sexual volcano to appease the Goddess Pele.
