1963
Chapter Five
1964. The young president had been dead now for just over a year and it would only be four more years until another bullet used a Kennedy for target practice. The new cowboy president was over his head in political mud and the quicksand that would be Vietnam was already beginning to suck him down as it would the rest of the country in just a few years. It was the year of the British Invasion when a little mopped topped group from Liverpool hit the charts in America with their first number one hit, "I Want to Hold Your Hand," and the box office was boffo with The Pink Panther and Goldfinger with enough Peter Sellers and glorious Pussy Galore to go around. In the southern fried deep south the bodies of three young civil rights workers, Schwerner, Goodman and Chaney were found in an earthen dam in Mississippi. Racial unrest was brewing in the land of the free and American pilots were getting shot down, killed or captured in rice paddies as the technological military might of the United States was getting a licking, but kept on ticking, until it finally ended, 50,000 plus bodies later.
Mickey managed to survive the first year living on the beach without any serious assassination attempts on his life. The difference between a beach bum and a popular politician. They are red, white and screwed. In that space in time he had morphed from a homeless haoli into a haiku hobo. A tree and a parking garage had more square footage than a suburban condo as the sky was limitless with infinite ceiling and 90 degree walls were smashed by the Sherman tanks of illusion, leaving endless horizon to horizon living space. It was the kid's mondo condo. No mortgage. No rent. No limits, no rules, no shit to put up with. A mandala waiting for inclusion of personal illusions.
Back in Detroit, the factories were going at it at a fast and furious pace, cranking out automobiles for a hungry planet, global, universal, the Motor City, King of Cars. Muscle flexing machines screamed with a vengeance in 1964 as the birth of the Muscle Era was heralded by the unleashing of the GTO. John DeLorean packed a mighty motor under the hood of a Tempest and the wild child era of screeching tires was off and running, up and down Mainstreet USA, everywhere. That would all come crashing down in the 1970's when fuel was short and regulations handcuffed the muscle car era. He often wondered what his friends, ghosts now from his past, were doing. Sockhops and rockin' around the catholic school clock, cruisin' Woodward Avenue on a Saturday night now that they were old enough to drive fast and drunk and the backseat was a mobile brothel. Homework, schoolwork, allowance, movies, radio, television and drive-in sci-fl at the Ford-Wyoming drive-in. Then he'd shrug it off and start the day with a beer by 8AM.
Mickeys great adventure of promiscuity on the jailbait dragstrip of survival peeled out from the starting line and went full throttle and overheated the engine, coolant evaporating, needle rising, gauge about to redline and burst with plastic shards exploding into prismatic fragments. Idyllic days on sandy shores, so many shoes with so many watches and so many wallets and so little time. Bracelets, trinkets, anklets, ends and odds, a Christmas pinata of pawnable candy spilling out on the beach to be scavenged and sold to seedy brokers dealing in pawn, with sweaty shirts and stinking of too many cigarettes. Travelers checked in and travelers checks checked out...fast, cash, notated in Sam's little haiku book to tally for distribution among the needy. He was the high priest of the homeless and dispensed payoffs as priests dish out penance of so many Hail Mary's and Our Fathers as though religion was methadone being handed out at a free clinic to fix the junkie's need for a quick fix quickly.
Sleeping in a tree a half plus one story in the air agreed with Mickey. The tropical breezes gave a lilting Don Ho voice to rustling leaves, a robust concerto of flora, while the pounding surf added bass to compliment the drums at Duke Kahanamoku's bar and tiki lounge in The International Marketplace, every night, like clockwork, at midnight, native cadence, tribal beat of hollowed logs and big xylophone sticks keeping the tempo with jazzed up fervor. The reed mats nested naturally in the limbs, a deranged sculptor sculpting from clay molding the nest to perfect proportion of it's occupant. Rodin couldn't have created a more fitting artistic work of play. The hotel loomed above the treetop, a concrete King Kong waiting for Fay Raye to be scooped from the upper canopy of this leafy bedlam and taken to a secret place on Skull Island. Mickey kept imagining a gigantic gorilla hand giving him the finger instead. The balconies would fill at night with the sound of a million parties, people getting juiced so they could flirt and laugh, and on occasion would look down at the strange sight of three beachbums laying in the top of a tree staring up back at them. It was Gilligans Island with a chorus line of Gingers and Maryanns doing high can-can kicks to entice and seduce as muses will do.
Sometimes someone would toss a half a bottle of cheap gin or a couple of beers down to the beach. The libations to Prometheus being returned to the mortals below. One of the limber druids would then climb down from the top of the tree, grab the beach booty and scuttle back up, beach blanket bingo booze in hand. They'd wave a cursory thank you from the tree, and the patio partiers would wave back, cavalierly, drunkenly, but satisfied now that they had some form of social intercourse with the local beach culture. They were the satiated anthropologists studying a lost tribe of booze swilling cannibals they alone had discovered, got the chief drunk, and put the entire village under a microscope to write articles for thesis' and National Geographic. Nothing like rare photos of jungle boobs exposed in print in the name of natural science. "Yes, those are nice tits aren't they. Look how erect the nipples are. Damn fine race of people don't you think, so in tune with nature, in harmony, so free, so carefree, so damned naked. And look at the ass on that one, damn!" Yes, science, my ass.
Getting piss drunk on a regular basis for a 15 year old bum of the Hawaiian beach is child's play, literally. Plenty of everybodies want to get you Johnny Walkered for one mercenary reason or another. Foraging for food, however, was a Honolulu horse of a different color. You had to have your wits honed as sharp as a sword blade composed of fine Toledo steel. The Toledo in Spain, not the one in Ohio. Ohio has buckeyes and do not make swords, or if they do, they're not very good. Mountain men smeared in bear grease, and their buckskinned squaws had wild berries and beaver fever, but beached in the Pineapple Republic with no pelts and no wild game to skin, cook or trade, food acquisition was possible with well coordinated restaurant recon forays. Hotels line up along the sandy beaches of Waikiki, thick brick and imposing heights, almost grotesque Sovietesque as the Berlin Wall, only more hospitable and with room service, something you don't see in the finest Siberian labor camps.
Most had patio's that catered to the romantic notion of diners dining in the tropics where winers and diners could sit, enjoy the hor' d' ouvers, and on ocassion leave the table and it's bread sticks and appetizers to dance to the music, leaving platefuls of bon appetite' behind, alone, delicious wallflowers waiting for a hungry William Holden to walk over in white tux and ask them to dance. The ballroom floor would fill with bossa novians and how low can you go limbo olympians, while Mickey would leap up onto the patio and grab what grub he could make off with, unseen, an invisible Huck Finn as he dashed down the sandy strand to his raft on the Mississippi where he and Jim the negro slave would feast before poling their raft down the Big Muddy to Cairo and freedom.
Doc's car horn signaled a Viking invasion from cabbie Valhalla. "Doc, didn't expect you until next week sometime, any news?" Doc had kept in touch with Mickey since he ended up on Pitcairn Island as he referred to it from time to time to time. Sometimes it was Treasure Island fresh from the mind of Stevenson and others, well, it could be a sometimes violent, sometimes comical sexual island of Dr. Moreau run by the Marx Brothers, Groucho, Chico, Zeppo, Harpo and the secretive Karl the Red Marx Brother. who wore outlandish Goering sized Brando kaftans. In the year he had been carving out a living as a beach bhiku, Mrs. Kuramoto had gone back to Japan, to Sapporo, with her husband having sold the small apartment complex where Mickey had stayed. Doc had now been keeping the kid's gym bag and clothes at his house. Whenever Mickey earned a few bucks he would make a deposit in the Yucatan bank of Doc, who would dole it out to him in small increments as he needed it, small, miniscule money amounts to make sure Mickey didn't spend it all. Doc made one hell of a socialist.
He also kept in monthly contact with Mickey's family back in Michigan, to keep them up to date on whether their kid was dead or alive. It's not that the kid didn't care about them, but on the rare occasions when he did his mother would start getting emotional, fire a volley of tears that would eat away at his foundation like termites, weakening his resolve, so to resolve the problem, he simply asked Doc to go into the parental trenches on his behalf. They had offered numerous times to foot the bill to fly him back to the mainland, but he had always refused. He was Peter Pan now, or maybe Leo Gorcey, and he enjoyed his new roll as one of the Dead End Kids with the other Lost Boys.
"Hey, Doc. Got some more cash to stow away in that treasure chest of mine" as he jumped in the front seat of the cab, reserved seating for the seatless homeless. Doc gave out with a laugh from deep within the center of his centered earth. Goddamn, Doc was as cool as a body in a morgue. Nothing got by him, and nothing upset him. Must be the drugs, or at least the marijuana that he kept in his pocket. The kid remembered the first time he and Doc smoked themselves into Olympus, driving around in the beat up chariot cab heading towards Diamond Head, the ocean undulating, the sky dancing in veiled seduction and Diamond Head ahead sexually erect. It had been 6 months now since he added dope to a regime of booze, not the junkie in the alley shit, but good smokable shit, Asian, not Mexican, heady not heavy. Dealing dope and getting high was a high crime and not a misdemeanor in those days either. Cheech and Chong hadn't flown into popular culture on their organic magic carpet of rolling papers and the roach clip hadn't yet replaced the class ring as a symbol of undying lust to the big buxom blonde in study hall. "No, really, I think I'm in love with you because you understand physics and Greek literature. Has nothing to do with your boobs, honest. Now, you wanna screw in my car or yours?"
Mickey was not only smoking it but found it made a great uninhibitor to loosen the loins of the uninitiated. The tourists came to experience the islands and it's Kodak moments of flowered shirts, swaying palms and hips, but instead of just coconut boys and hula dancing girls they discovered more than they hoped for in the forbidden pleasures savored by those who frequent opium dens for their illicit dangers and rainbow visions. The 50th state was now a dirty back alley in Tangiers with intrigue and shadows in bas relief of a cannabis Claude Rains chasing a silhouette image of Peter Lorre across the black and white silver screen in a Fritz Lang movie of dark danger complete with oh so foreign subtitles.
It was Bogart in neutral Casablanca double dealing in diluted drinks, delusional drunks, doctored documents and clandestine cloaks and daggers. Now, "don't bogart that joint me friend, pass it over to me...." Marijuana was kept under the felony covers throughout the Fifties and early Sixties, except in poverty places, places of non-plenty, such as negro Harlem and the Old Mex southwest . Beat up hipsters, Errol Flynn, Lenny Bruce, jazzed up Charlie Parker musicians and North Beach beats were toking, joking and jazzin' softly while William Burroughs was handling the rough trade and jamming needles into his arm in vein. In addition to some of the suburban tourists who had ventured to tip-toe to their version of the dark side with Benzedrine, martini's and Rusty Warren records on the hi-fi back home, Mickey also found a ready made made to order tailor made marijuana market in the vast number of hungry hordes of army green GI Joe's and shitloads of shiploads of sailors who were already buying it from cock banging Bangkok to Hotel Street in Honolulu. Money was good if you didn't smoke up all your profits which was usually the case. The whores bought it too, at least those that weren't strung out on heroin with dead eye sockets to stare out at nothing with and tracks running up and down their arms and legs so you could connect the dots and end up with a painting of dogs playing poker around a table. The good whores though, the angels of the bedsheets, were dancing hulas dressed in marijuana skirts and grassy bowl bra's.
Mickey exhaled and a Cheshire cat appeared to form in the cloud of smoke, and then was gone, just smoke playing tricks. "How's the beach been boy?" Doc had that look and tone that made him appear to be inside out of himself. Putting on skeptical spectacles and performing his role in a parental tone. "Good, Doc, real good, why're you asking like that, not like you, know?" Doc took another hit too and smiled. "just curious, thought you'd be heading back home by now, had enough and all. Get back to a nice home, you're family is real nice and they always say they'll send a ticket for you, get you back, get back in school, rah, rah, rah and all that. So, you ready yet? I kin 'range it and have you back where you belong in no time." Mickey knew this conversation by heart although this was the first time he heard it, he imagined it, he played it out in his mind, he talked it out with himself so was ready to go, verbal volley to verbal volley. "Doc, I like this life. You know what a sense of freedom this is? I've never felt like this before and it's like, well, I can't step backwards, to my parents, teachers, and really don't think my "friends" would get it, know what I mean. Sam and Tommy and the others are my family now, my friends. That tree is home, Tommy is a desk clerk, yes, but I also get my mail at the desk through him, so he's also the mail guy, postman or whatever he's called. Sam is a great teacher, like an uncle who used to be a tank driver in WWII or flew jets to break the sound barrier, he got me through a barrier and I can't go back again. Everything back there already seems so small, and hazy."
True. His parents and grandmother especially would write to him and it would be addressed to the hotel, Tommy would hold it at the desk until Mickey came in to ask if he had anything. The hotel was a mall of survival for Mickey. He'd take the elevators up to various floors where the cleaning maids were changing sheets and making up the rooms. While they were inside busy and overloaded Santa Claus carts left unattended in the hallways Mickey would grab some of the wrapped soaps and small wash rags and stash them in the rafters in the parking lot so he always had a ready supply. Most people would hop into an enclosure to shower or bathe, small rooms forming mildew that had to be scrubbed, tubs shaped like feeding troughs and a room no bigger than a large closet. Mickey on the other hand, would just wade out into the ocean early in the morning into the worlds largest bathtub, suds up, scrub up and let the sunrise dry him off. He would sleep in the tree, or if the weather weirded out, he always had the parking structure or under an overturned catamaran. He also had spent the night at his girlfriend Kali's house when her parents were visiting relatives on the other islands and when involved with an adult female tourist would usually spend the night enjoying a full dinner, room service and a large breakfast before he left in the morning, along with a contribution for a sexual sermon. He wasn't stealing as much from the beach either, like the younger kids were still doing. He was making plenty of money now from the tourists who handed it over and his marijuana merry-go-round. Tommy did run the hotel operation for the older women who visited the island, matching them up with the boy of their choice, but Mickey found that he could get "dates" on his own so wasn't part of that anymore. He ate well and he lived well and wouldn't trade it for anything, and Doc knew that.
"Know kid, they got Chaiku the other day and he's in juvenile now. Stealing for Sam, he was, and that could happen to any of you," Mickeys eyes widened, "Goddamn it Doc, I ain't Chaiku or any one of his shit friends, I'm smarted than that asshole, he's got fuckin' seaweed for brains along with piles of shit." Mickey had trouble before with Chaiku. He was older, been with Sam's crew for a long time and resented Mickey mainly because he was white and seemed to replace him as Sams favorite pupil. Chaiku also had a penchant for violence and anyone who didn't believe you should hurt someone and take their money was a pussy. Mickey didn't believe in that creedo, and that led to a fight one night on the beach between him and Chaiku who taunted him in front of his crew. Mickey told him to fuck off and that ignited Chaiku's already short fuse and the battle began. Both boys were matched in size and height and Chaiku didn't know Mickey liked to fight and had plenty of experience back on the mainland in school, so it was evenly matched in determination and mutual hatred by the bucketfuls. Mickey took the first punch as it came out of nowhere and blood started pouring out of nose and he was dazed a bit at first but managed to land the next in Chaiku's stomach and as he double over, knee'd him in the jaw so he went reeling and fell on his back on the beach. Mickey then jumped on him and was greeted by an uplifted Chaiku foot and he went flying. It went on like this for several minutes until someone in the hotel started yelling at them and they broke it up, a dead draw and everybody ran from the scene in different directions.
They didn't speak to one another after that, but their paths would cross again in the future and swords drawn once again in battle. Doc knew it was a loosing battle so backed off and dropped Mickey off at the library for one of his literary forays in the world of words and punctuation, but mostly ideas and adventure. He had been spending a lot of time at the library reading everything he could get his hands on. Not having an address, he found his beach combing talents handy in boosting a book at a time out of the library to finish reading at his leisure. When finished he would then get it back into the library and onto the shelves, wrong shelf though so when found, those wiley librarians would surmise it had been misplaced and not misappropriated. He would then replenish the returned Hemmingway for an outbound Heyerdahl.
He had been a voracious reader from a young age devouring words like a hungry cannibal devours fresh meat. Mark Twain mostly, river rogues and dubious adventurers on a riverboat rampage. Tom Sawyer. Injun Joe. Aunt Polly. Puddin' Head Wilson. Huck Finn. The big old man Muddy, a river older than measured time, with the dirty little river town, Hannibal stranded drunken face down on it's banks. Mickey would hide in the literary bull rushes that lined the pages of Twain's tales, lying quietly in the reeds with the ribit'ing bullfrogs and chirping crickets and slithering dark snakes on evening patrol looking for tasty mice mice and voles. He became immersed in the quicksand of words and could feel the cold Midwestern mist on his face and the soaking dampness of bottomland riverbank earth seeping through his clothes, chilling his body to morgue temperature. Fog and mist radiated from the pages of books, causing mirages of the imagination and lifting him high above the reality of Newtons ground of gravity, freeing him to soar with Twainian bravado and excitement.
In the fog he could clearly hear the unclear, muffled voices aboard the boats docked, loaded with cargo and passengers ready to disembark to embark down past New Orleans. In the dark, the fog was punctured by voices now audible without the need of mental subtitles. The boatman would release the riverboat from it's dockside umbilical cord to begin it's journey of fornication as it struggled to enter the swift, changing vaginal currents of America's mightiest river. The whistle would blow, lonesome, and the groaning, moaning engines would jump to life with a nautical sexual erection and roar with mechanized machismo, while throbbing smokestacks would ejaculate large clouds of black smoke in heated frenzy, as the paddle wheel engines pumped harder, harder, moving the Memphis Queen forward in accordance with the natural undulating flow of the river. finally reaching peak top speed in one final orgasmic upheaval.
Old Muddy was a madam and the riverboats and showboats, her gilded girls, entertaining a colorful cadre of tycoons, travelers, pimps, cutthroats and gamblers with pocket watches, loaded dice and marked cards. Fathoms would deepen as the ragtime music kept time with the big wheels in perfect paddle wheel harmony. As the big boat disappeared, obscured by the southbound fog, Mickey/Huck poled his raft behind her taking every advantage of her wake, following the soft glow of lanterns hung on her stern as decorative ornaments on a Connecticut Christmas tree. The words in the book were more than paragraphs, they were beacons illuminating the passageways to discovery, where he would meet other characters on other pages of other books written by Jack London, James Fennimore Cooper, and stories of the expeditionary visionaries Lewis and Clark. They would climb out of the confines of printers ink and glued book bindings, climb aboard his raft and regale him with tales of Northwest Passages, Alaskan gold rushes and Mohicans.
Later his appetite would be appeased by books by Hemmingway, romantic wars, civil in Spanish nature, fought by Republican patriots and foreign mercenaries. Tolkein, painted brush strokes of strange new worlds, Hobbit inhabited, and Aldous the Huxley would unlock and open the doors to new perceptions. Steinbecks dust bowl dissertations of Tom Joad and the Mother Road, Route 66. H.G. Wells and Jules Verne. where he could escape warring worlds by hopping trains of time to an age in the future of Eloi and Morlocks, and get his kicks on a Jules Verne rocket ship racing to the surface of the moon.
The silver screen had as much influence over him as literate adventure-lit. Why, just a year before he began his own travels and travails he saw Lawrence of Arabia in all it's wide screen David Lean techno-splendor. There he was, Lawrence, O'Toole'd and Omar, Sharifing across the silver screen's ocean of sand. T. E. Lawrence, a British stranger in a strange Bedouin land, a Great War rebel with an Arab cause that was not his property to begin with, but car jacked it by breaking and entering and made it his own. Long, cascading robes, flowing in the wind, a waterfall of soft fabric billowing in desert sun taking the shape of an angels wings, to whisk him along, atop and astride the exotic desert mammal the camel that transformed into a charging Roman chariot rushing headlong against a line of Turkish artillery. So impressed was Mickey by the film that he went to the bookstore and bought a copy of T. E. Lawrence's "Seven Pillars of Wisdom" and read it two times in the year. Another film that influenced him greatly was "Mutiny on the Bounty" with it's mutineers throwing off the shackles of convention and class, sailing away to escape the blight of Bligh and to seek a better life. A copulating paradise populated by a Tahitian temptress or two, who stroked the psyche and stoked the fires of tropical lust.
Mickey had to laugh as now in Hawaiian reality, he was Fletcher Christian, in a tropical paradise. When he left home in Detroit, he did not runaway he merely mutinied against suburban convention to follow a bare chested inner muse whose name was unknown and whose face was unclear her bare flesh needed no introduction. He was in Hawaii..paradise found, and had lived like a king for over a year, but that was about to change. His metaphorical coconut hut was about to burn, baby, burn, and the skies of reality would darken into night. He didn't know it that day as he left the library but that night, the sun would begin to set on him and the fireball would burst into fire and flame, consuming him whole as it began it's descent below his paradise lost horizons....Pele had abandoned him, and Prometheus was pissed!