Sunday morning I drove over to my brother Haoa’s house for a big family luau. My oldest brother, Lui, was the general manager of the island’s best TV station (at least in my opinion), and Haoa, my second brother, owned a landscaping business. Haoa lived in a big house, lavishly landscaped, in St. Louis Heights, the same neighborhood where we all grew up, but much higher up on the hill than my parents.
Lui and Haoa always competed for attention when we were kids, and that rivalry still continued. Each wanted to make more money than the other, have a nicer house, smarter children, prettier wife. Neither ever scored a particular advantage in this game of one-upmanship; every time one did something, the other aped him or tried to top him. Last summer Lui sent his son Jeffrey to Japan for a summer exchange program; this summer Haoa sent his daughter Ashley to England. Lui put a pool in at his house; Haoa a pool and a hot tub. It’s an accelerating spiral I refused to get sucked into.
Of course they were much closer to each other than they were to me, or than I was to them. There were only two years between them, while there were eight years between me and Lui, six between me and Haoa. In childhood, the only thing they joined forces on was picking on me. As an adult, though, I was reconciled to them, and loved them as much as any brother could. I would always be the “kid brother,” the baby of the family, and just as my relations with my father had improved as I’d matured, my friendships with my brothers had grown and deepened as well.
It was scary to think that I might lose that closeness to them if I told them I was gay. Haoa was the more macho of the two, big, heavyset and blustering, looking more Hawaiian than anyone else in the family. He often made fag jokes, in fact, jokes about almost every ethnic group, even Japanese, and I had often seen our mother wince at those jokes, since she was half Japanese and knew the prejudices her parents went through during the Second World War.
Lui’s eyes were more oval, and he was the shortest of the three of us, barely topping six feet. He was shrewd, with our father’s business sense, but doubled. He was also fiercely competitive, not just with Haoa and me but with the world at large, always seeking to assert his primacy as first boy.
I pulled up outside Haoa’s house and parked at the curb. Already I could hear my nieces and nephews in the backyard, and a stereo playing Keola Beamer’s Wooden Boat CD. “Mama going fishing, Papa going fishing, rocking in a wooden boat,” he sang as I walked up the path. “We’re rocking in a wooden boat, several generations old, we’ll be going on forever, rocking in a wooden boat.”
Everybody wanted hugging and kissing. Haoa wrapped me in a big hug, his breath already a little beery. “Welcome, little brother,” he said. He stepped back from me. “What, no pretty wahine with you? You must be getting old, slowing down.”
“Must be,” I said. Another big hug from Lui, and little kids stampeding around wanting hugs from Uncle Kimo. We took lots of pictures out in the backyard, under the pink tecoma tree, where its fallen petals had produced a pink carpet laid over the lush green lawn. My favorite was a picture of me reclining on the lawn with all my nieces and nephews crawling over me, from Jeffrey and Ashley, who were twelve, down to the little babies barely out of diapers.
We played the Makaha Sons on the stereo, along with Hapa, Keali‘i Reichel, and Israel Kamakawiwo‘ole. The day before Haoa and his landscaping crew had dug the imu in one corner of the yard, and the luscious scent of roasting pig floated out into the surrounding hills.
When I was a kid we had luaus at our house now and then, usually to celebrate something. The best one was for Haoa’s graduation from Punahou. He had been a big football star there, and all his friends came for the luau. My father and brothers and I were up early in the morning, digging the imu. My mother kept saying, “Make it bigger. Lots of mouths to feed today.” We had every kind of food imaginable. Chicken long rice, poi, shark-fin soup, sweet and sour spareribs, Portuguese sausage and beans. And desserts, pineapple like crazy, ten different types of crack seed, malasadas, mango ice cream. I thought we would have leftovers for days but those football players ate everything in sight. At the end of the night, I remember my parents sighing happily, glad that it had gone so well, and equally glad that it was all over.
Haoa’s luau was not as fancy; after all, this baby was the fourth. Still, the people kept streaming in. Old family friends, distant cousins, neighbors, clients of Haoa’s landscaping business, potential clients he wanted to show off for. My father and his cronies held court on the screened porch, a bunch of old men smoking cigars and telling stories from thirty years ago.
My father has been building houses in Honolulu since before I was born, and building friendships, too, across communities. His father, a full Hawaiian, was trained by missionaries, learned to read and write English, and became a teacher at the Kamehameha School. My grandmother was haole, a schoolteacher from Montana who came to the islands to teach, fell in love and never left. My father grew up in Honolulu, and his parents encouraged him to make friends everywhere. As a boy, he had pake, or Chinese, friends, as well as friendships with the leading scions of the haole community. He began college at UH, but World War II intervened, and he served in Europe in a unit comprised of many island boys.
The result was that my father knew almost everybody in Honolulu, in both licit and illicit sectors. One of his best friends was Uncle Chin, a tall, stately man who always had an air of ineffable sadness, even when bouncing his dozens of honorary grandchildren around him. In part that stemmed from a paralyzed nerve in his face that caused the left side of his lip to droop a bit, giving him a faintly perplexed look. Uncle Chin was not really active in his tong anymore, at least not according to police records. But police records weren’t always up to date.
I tried to stay out of trouble during the luau, preferring to play uncle with my nieces and nephews and second cousins. At one point, though, I went up to the bar to get another beer and ran into Peggy Kaneahe.
We always sat next to each other in school, Kanapa‘aka and Kaneahe. When we were sixteen I took her to the junior prom at Punahou, and she was the first girl I ever kissed. We dated for almost three years, through high school graduation and our first year away at college. She was the first girl I had sex with, in her pink bedroom, one Saturday afternoon when her parents were at a christening on the North Shore. I broke up with her right after coming home from my first year in San Diego.
I had never known anyone who was gay until I went to college. Then, on my first day at UC, right after my parents left, I met a guy down the hall who was tall and thin and very effeminate. A lot of the jocks on the floor used to tease Ted, write fake love notes on the message board on his door, steal his towel from the shower room, that kind of thing. I remember once he walked down the hallway, stark naked, his hair dripping wet, making eye contact with every guy who lined up to watch. I got a hard-on when he looked at me.
One night in the spring I got drunk and was sitting on my bed with the door to my room open when Ted walked by. I don’t remember what I said to him, why he came into my room, but I know that after a while he got up, very deliberately, and locked the door. Then he stood in front of me, without speaking, and unbuttoned his shirt. He unbuckled his belt, unzipped his pants, and dropped them to the floor, then shucked off his shirt and tossed it next to his pants.
I remember being stunned that he didn’t wear any underwear. Then he came over to me.
By the time I got home that summer I was totally confused. But I knew that dating Peggy hadn’t cured me of my interest in men, so somehow that meant I had to stop seeing her. I didn’t have a reason to give her, and I don’t think she ever understood.