Hawaii

I’m sitting on the balcony of my room on the 27^th floor of the Hyatt Regency Waikiki in damp swim trunks and a still-creased OBAMA SURFS t-shirt, purchased yesterday at an ABC store, sipping a little rum and oj. It’s dusk; the sun has just collapsed in a heap over the Pacific Ocean.

Far below me, Waikiki is just starting to put on her night face. There are cars streaming up Kalakaua Avenue, like fish in an aquarium, as everyone heads for their favorite Friday evening destination. Mixed in with the sounds of the traffic are the distinctly Hawaiian strains of electric ukulele music coming from the little park next to the Duke Kahanamoku statue where there’s a free concert going on. Even from here, I can see the hula dancers doing their thing on the stage.

photos by David Lansing

It feels like I’m sitting way-up in the nosebleed seats of a darkened Broadway theater, furtively watching rehearsals for a new big-budget musical that you just know is going to be a smash hit. I mean, nothing much is happening and yet…and yet…it’s all very thrilling and moving and evocative. The whole Waikiki scene below me makes me feel inexplicably happy. Like sticking my head far out over the railing and yelling, to no one in particular, “I love you, man!”

But wait—it gets worse. As I finish off my cocktail and start to make myself another one, that melancholy Iz tune starts playing in my head. You know the one I mean; don’t make me hum it. The one that makes you puddle up even when they use it to sell Volkswagens or life insurance.

I’m sitting on the 27^th floor of my hotel and looking over Waikiki, unshowered, unrepentant, and with a slight buzz on, and even though I’m the most caustic, cynical, misanthropic excuse of a human being you’ll ever meet, what I see all around me are trees of green, skies of blue, friends shaking hands saying, “How do you do?” And I think to myself, What a wonderful woohooorld.

Uncle Joe, who is almost five-feet tall and has a graying ponytail, is all worked up. He’s a Hawaiian priest, a kahuna, and when he picks up a small group of us around 9 o’clock in front of the Hilton Hawaiian Village Resort, he turns around in the driver’s seat and says, “We all one big ohana now so if any one in da family not feel good around spirits, I no want you to go. I really no want you to go.”

photos courtesy of Oahu Ghost Tours

Uncle Joe is not only a kahuna and keyboard player in a band but also a tour leader for Oahu Ghost Tours. (From their brochure: “Catching a ghost on film isn’t as hard as you think! A camera is an effective tool to use to get hard evidence that ghosts do exist. One thing to remember though: ghosts most often appear as orbs, balls of lights, or mist. Don’t get discouraged if you don’t get a human-like form in your pictures. The orbs are just as good.”)

Back in the day, they probably would have called Uncle Joe a Menehune, one the mythical little people of Hawaii—sort of like leprechauns—who live in the forests and liked to roam around at night causing mischief.

Our first stop tonight is the turnoff leading to the Pali Valley lookout where it is incredibly dark—and windy. Uncle Joe says, “Please don’t wig out. If you tink you going to wig out, please stay in the van.”

I guess everybody figures they’re not going to wig out because we all get out of the van. Except for Uncle Joe’s assistant, who is directed to stay in the car and keep the motor running, “Just in case we gotta get outa here fast.”

As Uncle Joe leads our group up the Pali Lookout, chanting and shaking ti leaves at the trees where he thinks he’s spotted some of da Night Marchers, which would be the Hawaiian chiefs who were killed here in a very bloody battle years ago, his assistant calls on a two-way radio to inform Uncle Joe that the van engine has mysteriously died and he can’t restart it.

“Please don’t wig out!” Uncle Joe tells us.

Fortunately, none of us wig out.

Then Uncle Joe commands all of us to stop. He’s hearing the Night Marchers coming up over the cliffs towards us (I’m hearing the famed Pali winds blowing through the trees, but that’s just me).

“Who got da ghost meter?” Uncle Joe asks. The ghost meter—a plastic electromagnetic device that clicks like a Geiger counter at Chernobyl, particularly when we get close to overhead transmission lines, is produced and Uncle Joe uses it to wand us like airport security. The ghost meter goes crazy as Uncle Joe runs it up and down the body of a particularly curvaceous member of our troupe.

“Da ghost right here!” Uncle Joe says. And then he instructs us all to step back while he performs a private exorcism around the woman, brushing her with his ti leaves and chanting. He runs the ghost meter around her again and this time it is silent.

“I tink he left,” Uncle Joe tells the woman. “But just to be sure, maybe you should hold my hand while we walk.”

And so Uncle Joe gets the girl. I told you those Menehune were clever little guys.  

There’s something extremely celebratory about Honolulu. For instance, I’ve never been anyplace in the world where visitors are so zealous about taking photos documenting every single thing they do.

At dinner last night at Ciao Mein, these three young gorgeous Japanese women with gardenias in their hair snapped pics of each other holding out their mai tais as if they were Oscars while across the room a pasty elderly Scandinavian man took shot after shot of his flushed, chubby wife vainly attempting to mimic the figure eight moves of a hula dancer. I don’t think there was a single table in the restaurant (and this is a very elegant, very expensive restaurant) where someone wasn’t taking photos—of their drinks, their giant Tiger prawns, even of the cute wait staff.

photos by David Lansing

If you’re in Paris, yes, you grab a quick photo of you in front of the Eiffel Tower or Notre Dame. But you don’t dare snap photos inside a restaurant. Or get your boyfriend to take a shot of you hugging a long-pole fisherman on the Seine. But on Waikiki, the lifeguards get so many requests to have their photo taken with some cute Gidget that they practically hide in their lifeguard towers.

The other thing is that in places like Rome or Toronto, you go to a nice restaurant and you see a lot of glum, silent couples on holiday doing what I call “This-marriage-is-so-over” vacation routine, which includes getting dressed up and going out and then not saying a single word to each other.

But not, for some reason, in Honolulu. Forever-married couples in outdated outfits and dorky haircuts seem honestly thrilled to be here—and with each other. They get all excited sitting on a bench on Waikiki watching the sun set. And that enthusiasm can be oddly infectious. It makes me happy for them; it makes me happy to be here as well.