waikiki
After more than a year of traveling and several months of hospitality at the White home in Ruislip Manor, it was time to take the plunge, return to the United States and find a job. I had a lengthy debate with myself about just where in America I wanted to do that, and eventually decided it would be San Diego. From London to San Diego, it is the same distance going either way around the world so I thought I would go first to Bangkok for a week or two, stop briefly in Tokyo, and then visit Hawai'i for the first time as a way to break the long journey.
In my youth, my mother had always been a devoted fan of Arthur Godfrey and rarely missed first his radio shows and then his television shows. It was my first introduction to Hawaiian music and I was always fascinated by his shows when he did them in Hawai'i and by the Hawaiian music and dancing he often featured on his shows, whether from the islands or the mainland. There was also an album of "Hawaiian music" by Bing Crosby in the house which I very much enjoyed. But despite my wide range of musical interests, the closest I came to island music in later years were the Martin Denny albums (I was listening to Gabby Pahinui, thanks to Ry Cooder, even if the name meant nothing to me at the time).
After my father retired from the Army, he and my mother came to Hawai'i two or three times a year, although no matter how much time she spent here, she never stopped calling it "hi-wah-ya". Their frequent presence here made it a less attractive destination for me, so I never considered traveling to the islands and really only decided to make the stop in Honolulu almost on a whim, not relishing the idea of that long non-stop flight from Tokyo to the mainland which I had made in 1988.
I arrived in Honolulu when the American Medical Association was having its convention here. Every hotel in town seemed to be full up. It was quite late in the evening and the clerk at the Outrigger West told me they had an expensive room which he could let me have at a special rate, but only on condition that I could have it until just the next morning. I happily took it and collapsed into bed.
The next morning I set out to find another hotel and discovered the Hawaiian Colony, the only three-floor building left on Ala Moana Boulevard in Waikiki, across from Fort DeRussy. Not only did they have a vacancy, they had a weekly rate, so I took the room for a week. It was a small studio apartment, with a tiny bathroom and kitchen area, absolutely no view (the sight of a blank white wall of the towering hotel next door was relieved only by a few scraggly trees between the walkway of the Colony and the wall). It was pretty sparsely furnished, but had air-conditioning and a decent color television set with cable.
That one-week stay somehow got extended again and again, until finally I gave up any thought of continuing on my way to the mainland, registered with a temp agency and did a series of routine, fairly boring office assignments mostly in banks. I loved Waikiki. I still love Waikiki. I was less fond of downtown Honolulu, but it was an easy, short bus trip to work and there was at least the fun of exploring Chinatown during lunch hours.
I missed Jonathan and I knew from his letters that he missed me. I had never spent that much time living with a man who wasn't a lover, but Jonathan is a special person, almost always easy tempered and fun to be with. He hadn't found a new job in London and had no special plans, so I asked him to fly over for a visit. He came for three weeks and stayed almost five years.
With that added responsibility, trying to make ends meet with temporary office jobs was too unreliable, so when I was offered a permanent job at the insurance broker, Johnson & Higgins, I accepted it. It had the added advantage of a flex time arrangement so I could go in very early in the morning and be home by late afternoon, and I especially liked my co-worker there, a hard-working and easy-to-get-along-with young woman named Jean. It was a tough, often aggravating job but in the early years there, ample overtime increased the rather pitiful base salary, and we were able to live comfortably and slowly equip the apartment with computer equipment and high tech toys. The addition of a cat, Chloe, completed the picture, and those were good years.
On-line communications became a part of my job at J&H when HEI wanted to be able to shift files back and forth by computer. In those days before internet access was available, the easiest way was to set up a bulletin board. It was rarely used for official business, was much more active as Panther's Cave Downtown. It was frequented by "Jai Maharaj" in the days before he turned himself into a Net Kook, other local regulars, and folks from around the globe (even Saudia Arabia) who would call in to say hello now and then. I spent a lot of time on the local BBS scene, then MUD2 became available again and both Jonathan and I played it. We also spent a lot of time playing Nintendo games, then Super Nintendo, and always had the latest ones as soon as they appeared in the stores.
Despite my later reputation as the champion beer drinker at music gigs all over town, until Gordon Biersch opened, alcohol consumption was usually limited to a glass of wine with dinner and sometimes a beer before bedtime. Jonathan didn't much care for local music, so we rarely went to music gigs aside from a few concerts at the Shell. Life was centered on electronic toys and the computer during the week, the beach and the Zoo and the malls on the weekend.
All things must pass. Jean decided to quit and the job became immediately far less pleasant, aggravated by a drop in income as opportunities for overtime work became less frequent and by lunch hours at Gordon Biersch which made the afternoons back in the office even more tedious. After a long, difficult period of thinking about it, Jonathan decided it was time he returned to England. Shortly after my fifth anniversary at J&H, that gig finally ended in a semi-comic farce which was far removed from the version of the story Maharaj expounds on the internet.
It was just Chloe and me ... and Waikiki.
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