Why do people want to buy sex? Sex is so easy to come by.
If I could, I would buy love.
If it were for sale.
No matter how much it cost.
I have seen the ugliest eyes. You get rubbed to raw in this place, ugliness rubbing itself up against you like sandpaper, jealous that you still hope. You get a habit to put up between you and them, you buy yourself designer eyes, fashionable and cold, empty as hell.
You was the best of all of us, Little. They couldn’t shovel in the money or The Blues fast enough for what you gave them. And they knew it. It made them proud, the ugly ones.
The ugly ones. It took an ugly one to know what I couldn’t, what you were worth. Made him so jealous he had to snap out that light if he couldn’t make it his own. But it could never be owned, that light. Not by him, not by me. Not by The Blues.
Sentiment. When the feeling’s gone, you replace it with sentiment. Cheap sentiment and superstition. No matter how many times you told me.
I really love you, Ruby, I really do.
And I survive. Used to wish I could die, used to wish I could get dead. Used to think I’d never live this long, not in this business. But since I’ve learned that you hang on, you hang on, dead as you might wish to get. I do not live so sharply anymore. My edges are worn and so I bounce, I don’t clatter now, I don’t shatter.
I remember one time me and you rode the bus together, going home to my place after we’d been out dancing all night. It was so late they were going to work already, the nine to fivers, and we started kissing, just to jack them up. It was easy to make them jealous of us, because we looked so happy; we were young and good looking and we made each other crazy.
I remember I used to mix my own colours of nail polish in those days and I used to try and get it to match your turquoise eyes. So we were sitting on this bus kissing and my hand was resting on your cheek and I took my tongue out of your mouth and pulled my face back just enough so I could see how well I’d matched it… and I had, exactly, until we got off the bus, because under the sky your eyes looked like they were lit from the inside, and they haven’t invented the nail polish yet that can do that.
I used to love to dress up with you and go out on the street and be stared at; it made me feel like a queen from another planet.
Now I think I’d like to be on an airplane with you. On the way to Japan, to a place like Kyoto: a raked garden, full of stillness.
Mostly I want not to be broken anymore, to no longer be afraid of winter because it makes everything come apart. I want to pull myself back towards the sun from this place where I am now; wherever it is, it’s scary.
Kaolani, from Kaua’i
WE SPENT ANOTHER WEEK together after we camped in Haleakalā, staying in the spare room of a tin roofed, one-storey house on a back street in Lahaina; one of those gravel streets under bedraggled coco palms, poi dogs asleep under cars, a corrugated tin wall around the yard you’d throw your laundry on to dry, after you’d washed it by hand in the empty lion-clawed bathtub that sat in the centre of the yard. I asked you why you didn’t just take it to the coin wash, and you said you hated laundromats; the reason being you used to go to the post office in Kaunakakai, years before when you lived on Moloka’i in the Hālawa Valley, to get your mail and read it while the laundry spun but nobody in your family wrote to you anymore, none of your friends back home in Canada, where we were both from. And so now laundromats reminded you of not having mail, of your abandonment.
The house belonged to a new acquaintance; you met Michael at May’s and an hour later anyone watching the two of you talk would’ve thought you were the oldest of friends. Michael was hardly ever home, and gave us the room happily and for free, or else you offered a little work in exchange. You had nothing either but you knew how to trade. Because of this he respected you. Just like May, or is that Mei—the Chinese woman in the restaurant who gave us free food because you’d repaired her door.
It was in the fancy Lahaina bars that people sneered at your bare dirty feet although lots of people in there had plenty worse. Maybe those waitresses wanted to sleep with you and you wouldn’t, and if that was the case I couldn’t really blame them.
You’d come in on a sailboat days before, up from Tahiti. Your friends were taking their boat from Lahaina to a dry dock in a hick town on the ‘Iao side to do necessary repairs to the hull; unlike sailing from Midway, they could do it two-handed. Why didn’t you and I hike through the crater, you’d meet your friends after, I could come along if I wanted, re-caulk the boat with the three of you; it was up to me.
Michael was half Portuguese, half Hawai’ian. He had a fishing boat, but he didn’t go out every day, and made the other half of his living by odd-jobbing and barter. In his yard he had a pomelo tree and an avocado tree, and he didn’t eat from either of them. We went to the park and collected fallen mangoes. Michael laughed. “Mangoes for the pigs, avocados for the dogs.” He had a friend across the road who used to take them to feed his animals. One night he came home with fresh mahi-mahi; you sliced it up sashimi-style and mixed wasabi for it, and I made a big bowl of guacamole out of Michael’s avos, first going to the store and buying tortilla chips and tomato and garlic. I’d meant to buy lemons too, but found fallen limes in front of a tree on the way. A Chinese woman came out of the house and I felt bad, but she said, “Take them all, they’ll just rot,” and was only a little bit condescending.
We drank Primo and smoked local pakalolo that Michael had. We felt lucky: usually people smoked imported Mexican; the Hawai’ian was so costly most of it went to the mainland or else you couldn’t afford it. Mexican was cheaper. I hated Primo and went back to the store for Kirin, using up almost all of the rest of the money I’d made working on the poultry farm with Lulu, but it was a celebration, although I’m not sure what we were celebrating. I suppose because we could. So quickly afterwards, celebration was no longer possible. Almost certainly, you knew. After we’d smoked I sliced up the sweetest mangoes and even Michael liked them, and after that he ate pomelo and avocado every day.
“You have to eat the healthy food,” you said to him, “not the junk food,” and I wondered if you weren’t being a bit patronizing.
When Michael was home with his girl we’d go out to Mei’s restaurant. She had a back room for people like us, or at least, people like me. Mei understood immediately that you were different. I wonder how she did that? Maybe it was just her age—she was over forty and could read people as I couldn’t. All the young backpackers would chat and gossip in the back room; Lulu had discovered the place.
It was all a game to me, an As If. I wasn’t really living my life. But it’s as though I left a part of myself in that time, waiting for the moment when I could become a part of a community, have a sense of belonging. And that time is now. But I’m afraid of failing again, just like I did then, at the difficult task of being human.
I’d tried, of course, thinking, “This is just like high school…” and ordered tea and enormous almond cookies like everybody else, and maybe, I think now, I was more successful than I thought, coming at the difficult problem of being human. In that room, before I left, I reached across the table and took the hand of the dark-haired girl you’d slept with even though we were ostensibly together, and smiled.
I’m grateful; you were witness to the brittleness of my youth. How vulnerable I was, wearing my solitude and harmed quality on my sleeve in place of a heart. That you got to see that side of me I will never be able to forgive you. It is better to have the distance, to write to you. It is so easy to idolize the past, but perhaps all I say here is true.