The segment ended with a shot of Ralph framed against the surfers at Kuhio Beach Park. “This is Ralph Kim, in Waikiki with former Honolulu PD detective Kimo Kanapa’aka, who has just announced his decision not to return to the force after his very public coming out story. Stay tuned to KVOL, “Erupting News All The Time,” for more stories about ordinary men and women and their experiences coming out of the closet.”
When the news was over, my mother stood up, said, “Dinner now,” and we went into the equally formal dining room and ate, talking carefully about my brothers and their wives and children. I could tell the story had moved them, though we didn’t talk about it. That didn’t change the fact that I had lied, and I would have to live with the consequences of that lie, particularly when it came to light, but it did make me feel better.
We watched TV together after dinner, and then I went up to my room, just the way I had as a teenager. It was frozen as it was when I was seventeen, leaving Hawai’i for college on the mainland. The walls were lined with surf posters, the shelves crowded with every trophy I ever won in a surf competition. I sat on my twin bed and tried to remember that boy, or the young man he became, who returned to the islands with the idea that he could be a champion surfer. I remembered the day my parents picked me up at the airport, how I told them I was moving to the North Shore to surf even before we had left the parking garage.
In many ways I’m lucky to be the youngest. By then, my oldest brother, Lui, was married, a father, and moving up in the hierarchy at KVOL. Haoa, two years younger, had just gotten married and started his own landscaping business. Their success bought me freedom, and my parents agreed to let me take a year to surf. My father hired me on as a laborer and carpenter until the fall, letting me bank every penny I earned to fund my North Shore adventure, and I surfed every morning before work, rising in the pre-dawn darkness, and every evening. I left them in September, as the North Shore waves began to improve, and didn’t return until winter had passed and I had given up that dream.
I tried to read but I couldn’t concentrate. I checked my gear again, waxed my short board, reorganized the books on my shelf, which I hadn’t read since high school and wasn’t likely to ever again. At eleven, I turned the lights out.
I couldn’t sleep well, hyped up by the nervous energy of what the next day was to bring, but I did doze a little. I was grateful when light began seeping in my window and I heard the slap of the morning paper in the driveway. I pulled on a pair of board shorts, slippas and an old t-shirt that read, “Hug a Pineapple.” Before I opened the door, I looked outside for reporters lurking in the underbrush. Fortunately there were none.
There was a breeze blowing up from Diamond Head, and I could smell just the faintest hint of salt water. Down the street, I heard the soft whoosh of someone’s sprinklers, a dog barking, a siren passing far below. A yellow and orange sun was just coming into view over Wilhelmina Rise, to the east, and there were thin wisps of cirrus clouds high in the atmosphere. I picked up the paper and went back inside.
Opening it, I saw that I had reclaimed the headlines I’d been so glad to relinquish only a few days before.
“ Gay Cop Resigns,” they read. Someone, identified only as an “unnamed police source,” said that while gay men and lesbians had been successfully integrated into police forces around the country, there was no formal policy at the HPD prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, and that some officers might not feel comfortable serving with someone who was openly gay. Sampson himself was quoted as saying, “Mr. Kanapa’aka has gone through a very difficult time in his life, and the Honolulu Police Department wishes him only the best in whatever the world brings his way.”
My father was up at first light, too, and while my mother slept in we read the paper and he made scrambled eggs and Spam for both of us. We Hawaiians take pride in the fact that we eat more Spam per person than any other group in the United States, something like five and a half cans per person per year. Hormel has even made a special limited edition hula girl can for us, available only in the islands.
“At least you get to surf for a while,” my father said, as we sat down to eat.
“I will,” I said. “Big waves coming soon.” It was October, and the best surf of the year was on its way to the North Shore, monster waves that attracted the best surfers from around the world.
“You have to be careful,” my father said, between forkfuls of egg. “People will know who you are, and some of them won’t like you. You won’t have your badge or your gun to protect you.”
“They never really protected me while I had them. The badge is just a way of convincing people to give you the information they know they should. And a gun doesn’t protect you; it’s a means of last resort. The only protection you really have is your own common sense.” I reached over and touched his shoulder. “Besides, if I get in any trouble, I still have that pistol you gave me.”
When I left for the North Shore the first time, after returning home from California with a BA in English and no job prospects in sight, my father had given me a. 9 millimeter Glock, one he’d had for years. It was more male bonding than out of any sense that I was in danger. I had grown up around guns; they were as much a part of our family life as luaus and slack key guitar music. Another father might have given his son a book, an heirloom watch or an embroidered ball cap. Mine gave me a gun.
He’d kept it lovingly polished and oiled, and I had tried to take as good care of it as he had. At that moment, it was locked in the glove compartment of my truck-which of course he had handed down to me, too. I believe you don’t draw a weapon unless you are ready to fire it, and you shouldn’t be ready to fire it until you have exhausted every other opportunity. I’d never fired either the Glock or my service revolver at anything more than a paper target, though I had killed a man with his own gun only a week before. The memory of that incident still haunted my dreams, but I had done it to save my brother Haoa’s life, and I did not regret it.
“Good,” he said, smiling across at me. “You know I worry about you.” He took a forkful of eggs and Spam, and smiled at the taste. “Just don’t tell your mother.”
“Don’t tell me what?” my mother asked, coming in to the kitchen in her white terrycloth robe, a gift from a spa vacation my father had treated her to the year before.
My father’s eyes widened. “I wasn’t supposed to tell you he had Spam for breakfast,” I said. “You know how you worry about his cholesterol.”
I was surprised at how quickly the lie came to my mouth. I try and believe I am an honest person, but years of harboring secret desires, lying to myself as much as others, had made the habit easier. So much for my new honesty; like the position I thought I was getting at District 1, it had evaporated quickly.
“You shouldn’t eat like that, Al,” she said, taking the half-eaten plate from him and scraping the Spam into the garbage. “You know what the doctor said.”
“He said, don’t eat anything that tastes good,” my father grumbled to me.
Let’s Go Surfing Now
I left them a little later, taking the Kamehameha Highway up through the center of the island, past pineapple plantations and tourists in rented cars. It was a sunny day, clear skies and gentle breezes ruffling the papery blossoms of wild red and purple bougainvillea along the highway, and I rolled down my windows, turned the volume up on an early Hapa CD, and tried to relax.
It had been a rough couple of weeks, emotionally and physically, and I knew it would take me a long time to process everything that had happened. But now I had to focus on the case, and solve it quickly so I could get back to Honolulu and get on with my life.