THEATOMIC HULA - 1963
Chapter One
By: Mike Marino
November 1963.
"We're all just passing through life like a bullet ripping through JFK's head!"
DALLAS: JFK SHOT AND KILLED!
The trajectory of the spiraling conspiratorial bullet was propelled by the velocity and the ferocity of the decade, and managed to hit the bullseye as it ripped through the head of the Irish-American bootlegger's son. Kennedy could probably envision his own death and smell the stench of a dead, rotting Camelot, but the newspaper headlines let the rest of us in on the secret with giant King Kongish black and white font ten urban stories taller than the bricks and mortar that comprised the school book depository building just off now, deadly Dealy Plaza. The nation mourned, Cronkite wept. The fuse of the Sixties had been lit.
Mickey stood draped in a cape of silence on that Honolulu street corner, staring at gaping bloody wounds that were now forming and would soon fester, blister, break open, in the American psyche. All caused by the hot lead headlines framed that November day in the sidewalk paperbox. The deadline headline bared it's fangs exposing the incisor hunger of the flesh eating newsprint. Then it dawned on him. "Hell, we're all just passing through life like a bullet through Kennedys head." The Prince of Camelot had his steed shot out from under him in that strange snake handling talking-in-tongues southern drawl-twang thang incest infested courtyard of bloody Remember-The-Alamo Texas. It was a memorable day. It was the day the grassy knoll exacted its toll.
November 1963.
Galaxies and lightyears away, thousands of steel belted asphalt miles across southwest deserts, all leading to a dead end of sand on a west coasted ocean. It was the land of golden sand, silky and sexy beaches soft as the touch of a breast, alive with the activity of bohemians. It was the ukelele dance of Hawaii's happy hulas and hemp happy haiku hobos, and sands were hot, white hot and scorching under Mickeys 15 year old feet even at this late time of the year. An inner black light flashed on and off, and on again, crackling the already frayed mental wires causing memory banks to spark to life, traveling back a few months to August of '63. A portrait of a time before he became a teenaged street beast feasting like an addict on meals of concrete morphine. A time before optimism, principles and innocent passions were forced to work the streets and pimped out like cheap five dollar whores hustling flesh and bodies on the streets in order to survive, to eat, to live, to continue dreaming.
The fantasy alleys composed of bricks and children's dreams were no longer safe for invisible, invincible pirates, cheap plastic cowboys and bendable rubber Indians. Now homeless, but not lost on the streets, Mickey viewed them as dark, dank walled-in avenues of crumbling brick, littered with broken bottles, shattered dreams, death pale skin and collapsed veins from too many nightmare junkie spikes of Neptunian narcotics.
He stood hypnotized on the street, mesmorized by the JFK headlines. Nostalgia inside was building already and turning to dreams of Michigan and what had been home for the past 15 years. In just a few more Michigan days, the forests and low hills of the Upper Penninsula would be on fire, ablaze with a visual symphony and beatific wildfire of ddep reds of maples and the subtle yellows displayed by the shoreline birches. Magnificent Munising oranges guarding the hungry shoreline of Lake Superior, the Gitchigummee of Haiwatha would soon choke on chlorophyl and devour the green until spring released them from captivity. In the Straits of Mackinac where two giant great lakes meet in whitecap, wind tossed copulation, bone chilling winds would soon be charging in from the Arctic north, a gift from the Yukon, seemingly eminating from the loings of invisible and impossible gods sitting high on impeccable thrones. The howling winds would cut and slice through the region like the frozen blue flame of an out of control blowtorch through the thin human skin as they increased in intensity and mush-raced down full throttle from Henry's Hudson Bay in the far north, a land inhabited by incredible Inuits and naughty Nanooks.
The plaid sky paintings of the Great Lakes were hung with great care on the gallery wall to be savored by critics and the proletariat alike, soon vaporized and in a puff of smoke were replaced by the very Vishnu visions of his current reality. How had he ended up in this paradise of palms? Shoeless, homeless, more or less, yet more than less. Happy, dead broke and poor, yet richer than he had ever felt before. Both feelings converging as two rivers colliding at the same time. Nothing was making sense, and everything was out of place on the shelf. Books were upside down and the spines faded, torn and tattered. All the titles were jumbled letters and completely illegible, however, the pages were still intact and readable, but still not making any sense whatsoever.
1960.
Mickey's mother had gone and done the unthinkable. The first unthinkable was divorcing his dad in 1948, the year he was born, in a time when Harriet stood by Ozzie's side now matter what he did. Then, she had the audacity to fall in love again and decided to remarry. In Mickey's eyes, this was the crime of the century. Loeb and Leopold were good samaritans by comparison. The marriage meant moving Mickey's life from the industrial riverfront Motown eastside comfort of the Italian garlic and pasta plenty of Three Mile Drive of old world catholicism to the insidious, unknown and uncharted sea monster infested edge of the world lands west of Woodward Avenue.! The fucking suburbs!!
The burbs were bullshit filled little croissants of leviatan Levittown communities of conformity all served up by a topless waitress who in turn was remote controlled by anal probing Ed Woodian aliens from B-movie planets who dared to go where no man had gone before! This was exactly what Kevin McCarthy warned us about. An invasion of procto-pods from Outer Space, intent on filling empty human cavities with cotton balls and rubber gloves.
The suburbs lacked many things. For instance it was devoid of imaginary pirates to pillage and plunder with in imaginary alleys that could become Tortuga. The ranks of Audie Murphy were empty of brave and brazen generals to charge across backyards turned into Nazi battlefields. Worse yet, all the leather faced cowboys had savagely rounded up all the Indian nations and placed them on out of the way shelves, out of our way and onto out of the way red dirt Okie reservations where they now had the redmans right to sell cheap ass pottery and beaded blankets to passing tourists who could give a shit less about conditions in rundown redskin trailers that sat crookely on rundown redskin lands.
The new school he was to attend, far from the nunified and priestifide old baroque St. Clare de Montefalco was now to be a public school instead. Mickey's teenaged angst years were about to become more pubic in nature as well. Testesterone testy, he got into fights constantly, mostly over girls, or sometimes for no reason at all. Arguments at home flared up too for no reason at all. His synapse was begining to fray and couldn't be fixed until after the weekend because the minds inner electician was out of town hunting for whitetail deer until Monday.
Fights. It didn't matter what day or night it was. Horrible hormonal Vikings were setting sail in his imagination on his envisioned North Sea to conquer and assimilate whole cultures and assault sealskin clad virgins, whose virtues were suspect, in faraway Greenland. Defeating first one army, then another, composed of one breasted fighting Amazons, then impregnating them as great and grand pyre fires stoked by the wood of their defeated bows and arrows shot flame and smoke high into the jungle skies.
Westside kids played tennis. Tennis fer crissakes, fucking tennis! They wore penny loafers of brown, worth a penny at most, and yes, they had names like Penney, and Muffy, and Eliabeth! Too many tennis courts, and not enough alleys for play. Blue collars faded to a starchy white as GM and Ford executives along with Dodge and AMC hurried about in a Fritz Lang blitz of anticipation of a Christmas bonus once a year. What's good for GM is good for the country.
Woodsided station wagons and barking border collies roamed the streets, and in the school, hell, it was all so different. The school halls were all highly "see your own reflection" polished to a high gloss Charlie-like sheen. Sweaters with letters and cheerleader skirts hiked up thigh high as the crowd yelled louder ..."Go Team Go, Lift Them Higher" to celebrate the Friday night gangbang taking place on the fields of pigskin honor across Midddle America.
Suburbs were also afflicted with a mania known as Madras madness as the mindless minions dressed in cocky khakis created a canyon so grand, it was a social chasm too wide to breach for even the eviliest of Kneivels. Mickey had come to crashing stop at a brick wall and to break through it, he came to a decision. Life and the 'burbs sucked. The time had arrived to toss it all in a trash can and leave school behind and go away from all that had been taken away anyway. Mickey had some savings stashed away, money saved from the past four years mowing meandering lawns in summer, shoveling shitloads of snow in the dead of winter. Raking leaves in the spring and other odd carwash jobs had filled in the money mandala. Now, it was time to jump the chasm and escape...and in August of '63 he did just that. No 2 minute warning. Nothing. He just packed his small gym bag, minus the jockstraps, went down to the Ben Franklin where they had a pay phone, called a cab to take him to Detroit Metro Airport. Demons of determination were driving him to go as far west, young man, as a young man, boy really, could go. Going. Going. Gone!
He checked in at the terminal and asked about the student standby fare he had heard about, afterall, he used to be a student didn't he? After he completed the negotiation, of which there really was none, he forked over the necessary cash and got his one-way ticket to paradise...a paradise that in time would transform itself into a sexual sideshow complete and replete with hookers, trannies and street kids on the make trying to survive and make a buck anyway you could or were willing to do. A mental institution couldn't have electro-shocked any more severe, than the stark haiku hobo reality of life on the streets.
He was on his way to the boarding gate, when he passed a bank of public phones and noticed others making those last minute "I love you and just wanted you to know in case the plane crashes" phone calls.
Mickey was overcome by a desire to dial and call home too, in case he personally crash landed, and not the planes own mass of metal. He just wanted to tell the folks what he was up to and that it would be alright. Hell, he had just turned 15 a month ago, right? A man of the world now by all accounts, but first he had to inseminate the world with himself, so he just kept moving past the phones, walking down the long tunnel halls of the airport to Gate 17B. Soon they called his plane and he boarded the jets pressurized belly for distant Los Angeles, where he would then transfer planes again and hop aboard a Pan Am flight across the wide Pacific. Next stop after that? Honolulu, Baby! Honolulu!!
The Hawaiian islands transformed Mickey's world of midwestern black and white into a peacock network of Polynesian color. In his minds eye, the nuns of the church would strip for his pleasure and dance bare chested before pleased pagan statues and the leering eyes of appreciative missionaries. Priests would cast aside their frocks, rosaries and piety, and shed their pale skin like the snakes of Eden, soon emerging as beautiful bronze men with brown eyes and ukeleles. The Catholic classroom walls imploded as the library shelves exploded with so much literature to be studied, homeworked and absorbed. The ordnance had now reduced the tomes of prose to the nuclear rubble of pocketsized 17 syllable Japanese haikus.
Breeze of sea, heat of sand, trees of palm, played poi-boi games of a phallic nature with Mickey's budding sexuality, causing him to pop his cherry like a sunburned blister and loose his mainland virginity. All without a whimper or a cry for help from the young yelp. Young, naive and haoli, he had come to hear his first not so naive, yet very, very cocoa native "Aloha".
They were stacked like a great cord of hardwood outside a cabin in the forest. Honolulu's finest babies, goddesses really. Nubile all. Big beautiful saucer sized brown eyes, with matching, inviting "soft to the touch" cop a feel breasts; nipples standing tall and proud at full colonial attention for Mickey's personal inspection, The Muses descended from thrones of soft clouds and placed a scented boa of intoxicating Kapiolani flora gently over his head in welcome. A ceremonial "Aloha" at first, followed by a ceremonial "mahalo". At last, at long last, he realized what it was like to get "lei'd" in Hawaiian!
Honolulu. Bitchin' surfs up dude paradiso, eh, Freako? Soon the young modern day Capt. Cook would set out for his first day on the islands beach, kick off his sandals while the soles of his feet, still midwest tender, would turn a gentle feminine pink, and then into a fiery bottom spanking red outrage. In time, they would harden and toughen, as tough as a Cherokee Indian Nation tanned leather hide, and he would be able to brave the hot beach sand as easily and as religiously as the most devout firewalkers in all of transcendental India.
He was a punk at 15 and ready to live life as a holy haiku hobo of Honolulu; a son of a beach in the land where armor plated coconuts make great protective furry bras for cocoa brown breasts, and the dance fantastico of the hula-girls make the grassskirts sway suggestively and sing silent songs of dripping, Bessie Smith sweaty blues, just as Suzi Quatro would do for tight leather pants in the future crotch erotica glitz and glamour of the 1970s.
August. 1963. Mickey was high on a pubic mushroom cloud of Godzillian proportions and the sexual heat of the Pacific Islands.
November, 1963.
Kennedy was dead and Camelot lost it's erection.
Mickey was also dead...deadbroke, and marooned to the homeless madness of life on the beach. Yeah, he was dead alright, dead and fucked!
End of Part One