Alan Sincic

            The neighbors showed up when they heard that I was going to be preparing dinner for the Hawaiian Club. It was going to be just like a Luau but slightly different so that they (the Hawaiian Club) would see that I was no virgin when it came to tropical entertainments. When they (the neighbors) first appeared, I was out in the backyard in my lime-green wetsuit, eating a mango salad and weaving palmetto leaves into a set of placemats. I could hear the whispering as they pressed their faces up against the chain link fence. Some of them had binoculars. Some of them were on the shoulders of the others.

            If you want to get into the Hawaiian Club you cannot sit on the sidewalk and whimper. Stop whimpering. Get up off the sidewalk. Here is the toothbrush, here – brush your teeth. If you want to get into the Hawaiian Club you are going to have to put on some clothes.

            I add salt water to the aquarium and paint a surfers’ stripe down the middle of the ironing board. I throw my biography of Captain James Cook into the blender and add some coconut milk and punch-flavored Kool-Aid. I string together the empty Kool-Aid packages to make an attractive Hawaiian lei.

            The difference between a regular pineapple and a Hawaiian club pineapple is that the only kind of pineapple that they will sell you is a regular pineapple. The regular pineapple it tastes like pineapple, but when you eat it there is a syrup that dribbles down the side of your mouth and when you try to wipe your mouth it dribbles down the length of your arms and the hairs on your arm stick to your skin and when you stick your arm under the faucet the water zips down the bones of your wrist to the bones of your elbow and dribbles down onto the crotch of your white khaki dancing shorts and in walks the pretty girl and the meaning of this big yellow blotch of pineapple syrup is that in the eyes of the members of the Hawaiian Club you are no longer the sexually attractive being that at one time you promised to be.

            I cannot afford to appear too closely identified with the regular people, no, but neither can I adopt too Hawaiian a tone in my dealings with them. Congeniality. That’s the word. That’s what the word is. And no doubt, there is no doubt that if you could meet the members of the Hawaiian Club – even just once – then it is certain that they would want you to become a member of the Hawaiian Club. But how could this be possible? If they lived in the place that you live in, if they ate the snacks that you left in your fridge for them or slept in the cot that you made for them or drank the drink that you ordered for them, yes, but they do not. They do not live in the place that you live. The place that you live in does not have the proper Hawaiian atmosphere.

            The Hawaiian Club will be arriving at 6pm and it is already 5:55pm. I hurry back to the bedroom to strip off my clothes and to cover my body with coconut oil and even though when I put my clothes back on again they will not know what I have done, I feel pleased for myself that I have done it and that in a sense there is a part of this island of Hawaii that I carry with me on the secret island of my own individual skin.

            8pm and the big oak in the front yard is filled with neighbors. I can hear the rap-rap of their cameras against the bark as they climb higher. They rain down such encouragement upon me that I am ashamed to explain to them what I know about photography: they will be too far away from the Hawaiian Club to get a clear shot, it will be too dark for their tiny flashbulbs to have any effect, the members of the Hawaiian Club will be moving too rapidly to be captured by a ten-dollar instamatic. Even in broad daylight and at close range there are no clear pictures of the members of the Hawaiian Club. Although I explain that this is because of the vigorous personalities of the Hawaiian Club members, and although I do not want to disappoint them (the neighbors), I know in my heart that Hawaiian Club members are not recognized because they do not want to be recognized. At the last possible second the expression on their face will suddenly evaporate into the friendly vagueness of a chummy vacuum cleaner salesman who smiles at you when you open the belly of the vacuum cleaner to show him the seven detachable attachments that belong on the outside of the belly and explain that in some sort of frenzy of cleanliness your wonder vacuum has devoured itself and he smiles at you and nods as if you were a long distance operator from Venezuela trying to connect him in an incomprehensible tongue to a person that he has never heard of before.

            If just anybody could get into the Hawaiian club then it would no longer be the Hawaiian Club. The people who cannot get into the Hawaiian Club they are the Pacific Ocean and the Hawaiian Club it is the island of Oahu. The front door of the Hawaiian Club is like the beach at Malibu where the Pacific Ocean is trying to climb up onto the island and it is slipping back down into itself and climbing back up again and it is like some sort of sexual thing that is happening and the sound of the big blue ocean banging up against the white beach walls of the Hawaiian Club is a musical sound inside of the ears of the members of the Hawaiian Club.

            The wild boar has escaped again and is rummaging through the sugar cane. Again my imperfections pursue me. Already the Hawaiian Club should be feasting on this meal that I have raised from birth for just this occasion, but I am a weakling, I cannot bring myself to roast my little buddy, my confidant, my confessor, my friend.

            9:42pm Sound of drums in the distance. We investigate the source.

            9:47pm Wilma Fredricks has stolen my set of bongos and is instructing her son Bobby in their proper use. I give Bobby a dollar.

            I lay the bamboo poles round the perimeter, out yonder by the parrot cages at the foot of the drive.

            hammock

            Polynesian manhood ritual

            Don Ho Records

            conch shells

            Wah-heeni

            Tonka torches

            the flaming baton dance, the hula, the limbo

            Parrot

            grass skirt

            signal flares

            11pm. The Mai-Tais are melting. I break out the emergency supplies and festoon the lawn with hibiscus blossoms and chunklets of coconut. Arrival of the Indiana Highway Patrol. There has been some sort of misunderstanding about the roadblock. I show them the diagram etc. Explain etc.

            The neighbors refuse to leave, so I invite them in. We wait.

            Dawn. The plume of a jet across the sun’s red face. Exhilaration and relief. No word from the Hawaiian Club. No sign. No appartition.

            In the chill we sit, huddle for warmth, eat the baloney – island style, with our bare hands – and pass the canteen of ceremonial papaya and coconut milk. From out the empty blue, from a ways off over yonder, from over the curve of the earth, a breath to bind us all together.

            The wild boar settles in beside me. Aloha. Between my bare feet he shuffles his head, and with the snout he tickles me, and in the heat of the breath and the spring of the bristle a promise of a day to come, of a day of a size, of a someday. Aloha, amigo. Aloha.