Hana

This may be a rather desultory post as I have many chronologically-scrambled impressions to record. It is actually kind of cold here right now, but that may be partly due to coming back to Haiku after spending the night in Hana, where humidity hangs like a muggy curtain of vapor in the air all the time. It’s definitely rain-forest climate. The house there, on Maia (means “banana”) Road, the one that used to be the bed and breakfast, is a little less well kept than the Hohani Place house – most notably, the pool and hot tub are dry, except for gross algae-infused rain water at the bottom, which Cousin and I spent some time pumping and scooping out – but it is BEAUTIFUL, and I can imagine how great the parties they used to throw there were. David Lachapelle, the photographer whose twisted, bad-acid-trip work I’m a fan of (his subjects include Courtney Love and the repugnantly fascinating tranny Amanda Lepore), came to one of their pool parties. The backyard/pool area is completely private and enclosed by the house and trees; what you see from the front/driveway doesn’t give any inkling of how gorgeous it is in back. They have several acres of land and it’s like a maze with walls of lush green growth and bamboo, palm trees, shower trees, and African tulips (an invasive, destructive, yet pretty exotic species) that have been sculpted with the landscaper’s hands in such a way that it creates a labyrinth of interconnected trails with walls, floor and ceiling of verdant, pungent foliage. I went for a walk through the green maze after smoking some of D’s hash and felt so strongly the green Alice in Wonderland earth magic of the place. Hana exudes a potent and sensuous enchantment. It made me wish I wasn’t single. You can see why so many people take their honeymoons there. But I didn’t get to enjoy it much; I did a lot of weed-whacking (fun, compared to machete work or indoor cleaning, but still draining in the hot sun), cleaning, vacuuming, mopping the wood floors with Orange Glo (a scam like Riddex: doesn’t really work: the floors don’t look much better, and we still have mice and cockroaches), not much else, really. J. and I went into town to get dinner at the restaurant (maybe the only one in Hana) and a redneck guy at the bar while we were waiting for the food razzed J. about his man-purse. Back at the house we found J. and Cousin’s friend Marlena and her husband/boyfriend visiting, but after eating my “saimin” (name for a ramen-noodle type soup they have here, sort of the Hawaiian equivalent of pho, but not as good) I completely fell into a sleep coma: it was like someone put a spell on me; just went to bed and couldn’t even think about getting up for hours, although I wasn’t fully asleep, and heard it when the rain started falling, INCREDIBLY hard, like a SOLID WALL of tropical rain just deluging everything, and the windows were all open so I could hear it so loud all around me, and it was like being outside, but it was nice, having a roof overhead and yet feeling like I was in the middle of it, and of course that’s what rain forests do, baby....they rain. A lot. It stopped and started a few times. I could have slept straight through until morning, but I had enough wits about me to realize I’d wake up at 4 a.m. and be in limbo, so I made myself get up around 9 or 10 and watched TV for an hour or two (including a movie called “Boys Over Flowers” on KBS which I think must stand for Korean Broadcasting System or something like that, and a Discovery Channel show on the hunt for an elusive nearly-extinct ancient fish called a goblin shark that could also be called the Pinocchio shark because it has a grotesquely elongated nose), then went back to bed, woke up this morning and we finished cleaning (Cousin in one of his stormy angry moods where I just need to get away from him until he calms down) and drove home. The road to Hana, though dangerous indeed (I was tense the whole way, especially on the way back, with the road slippery from rain and the truck occasionally fish-tailing across the road), was gorgeous beyond belief, even with vog (volcanic fog) obscuring the view: breathtaking ocean vistas, waterfalls, a place called Rolling Pig Park (I forget the actual Hawaiian name), and vegetation so dense and vibrant I can’t imagine the rain forests of Brazil being any more lush. Oh, and I forgot to mention that the other day when I went to the nude beach with J. (Cousin stayed home, stressed about the dogs) a big sea turtle swam right by me in the shallow water, between me and the shore, close enough I could have touched it. It was such a peaceful lovely animal (and so cool knowing something like 1 in 10,000 of them actually make it to adulthood) and I want to think it was attracted by the mellow non-threatening energy emanating from me into the water: it recognized me as a fellow aquaphile. Really made my day, and I called Mom to tell her, since she’s always loved turtles, but I woke her up from a nap and she sounded confused and didn’t know whether it was morning or night, or even what day it was. (Poor woman. It has to end soon.) So now we’re back in Haiku and J. and Cousin are watching silly reality TV shows downstairs and I made fruit salad for breakfast tomorrow and I changed my Ben W. portrait (HER BEAUTIFUL SON) a couple more times since the photos I took and I’m happy with it at last, actually it kind of lights me up with love and affection when I walked into the studio this afternoon and looked at it for the first time in a couple days after getting back, so yes, I love my painting. I was going to say a couple other things about Grey Gardens, too: something about the line between fantasy and mental illness (you've got to be a little loose in the wiring to live in such filth for so long) and also about the poetic beauty of the fact that Little Edie finally got to have her movie-star moment because of the documentary made about how tragic it was that she never got her movie-star moment (!) And I came up with a great new working title for Cousin’s book that I think may be THE ONE, and I wish I could tell you it, but I’d better not, because I said I wouldn’t, and we don’t want people stealing our ideas, but suffice to say it is fabulous, and it IS Cousin, it is one of his catchphrases and it encapsulates him to a T and I can see it written in lipsticky flowing script over a hilarious photo of him with a lipstick kiss mark over it – oh lord, yes, let it be, it’s purrr-fect, this book is going to be a whole lotta fun.