her-we’d been high school sweethearts, and then broken up after our first year away at college. While I’d come back to Honolulu after four years in California, it had taken her longer, and she’d only returned about six months before, to take her current job. We’d started dating again, very casually, hadn’t even gone to bed yet. As she’d put it, “In my job all I meet are cops and criminals. And if I’m going to date a cop it might as well be one I already know.”
There was an edgy tension between us even at the best of times, as though she was just waiting for me to hurt her again, and that night we hardly talked except for the bare details of the failed bust. A couple of the guys decided to go to a cop hangout on Kuhio Avenue, a few blocks mauka from the beach, and I went along. Peggy declined to join us.
I spent some time talking to Evan Gonsalves, over the blare of rock and roll from the bar’s speakers. It was nice there, under a thatched roof, with a cool trade wind fluttering the paper flyers on the table. Around us, couples cuddled in the shadows, and single men prowled the edges of the dance floor or stood idly around the well-lit bar.
“How’s Terri?” I asked Evan. Seven years before, he had married Teresa Clark, whose grandfather had founded Clark’s, the biggest department store chain in the islands. Nobody had been more surprised than I was. Terri and I had been friends in high school, but I’d always thought I was out of her league as boyfriend material. When she married a cop, the son of a Portuguese fisherman, I’d joined the crowd in wondering why.
Evan winced. “She worries a lot. You know.” He leaned over closer to me, his beery breath in my face. “Sometimes, I wonder what more I can do for her. She deserves a hell of a lot more than I can give her.”
Evan was a nice guy. He was handsome and well-built, with wavy black hair and intense eyes; he spoke well, and he was clearly on his way up in the police hierarchy. Like everybody else, I’d expected Terri to marry better, somebody with a mainland education and a lot of money. But so far, they’d seemed very happy, with a five-year-old boy they both doted on.
I didn’t know what to say. Fortunately, at that point Akoni came over to say goodbye, to head back to his pretty little wife, and so Evan realized it was time for him to go too. A couple of the other single cops and I remained well after midnight, getting progressively drunker as we trolled for wahines.
At least that was what I told myself I was doing. I had a reputation in the department as a love ’em and leave ’em type, because I never seemed to settle down with a girl. It was trendy to pass such problems off as fear of commitment, and Akoni regularly got on my case about growing up and accepting my responsibilities. But I knew the problem went much deeper than that.
By two a.m. the cops who were still there had paired off with wahines, except for me. I wasn’t interested in a wahine, and I was tired of lying to myself that I was. I hadn’t really been in danger that day, but I could have been, and every time I sidestepped trouble I wondered, what if today had been my day? Was I ready to die? Had I lived my life the way I wanted to?
I was more than a little drunk, and horny too, and generally disgusted with myself. On the job, I was pretty fearless. I trusted my instincts, my weapons, and my backup. I went out and did what I had to do. In my personal life, it was a lot harder.
I dropped some money on the table for my beers, waved goodnight, and walked out into the cool velvety darkness. It had turned breezy, and clouds scudded across the canvas of the sky. I saw the crescent moon reflected in the darkened window of a shop that sold thousand-dollar Hawaiian shirts to Japanese tourists.
Unconsciously I found myself heading for the Rod and Reel Club. It was only a few blocks away, almost on my way home. There had been a couple of incidents of gay bashing outside the club in recent weeks, and I tried to tell myself I was just being a good neighborhood cop, checking out the scene and protecting the population. Right.
From the outside I could hear the thump of a bass line, and when the door opened and a couple of guys spilled out, their arms around each other, I heard the blast of rock and roll. I stood around outside for a couple of minutes, debating whether I should go in or not, and then said to myself, Shit, Kimo, don’t be such a wimp, and walked inside.
The Rod and Reel Club was decorated like one of those old fishing lodges, wooden paneling and stuffed yellowfin tuna and amberjack on the walls. It had a very masculine feel, but on the walls where you’d expect to see pictures of guys with their fish, there were photos of guys in drag, guys kissing, guys dancing on tables in colored jockstraps.
My heart was pounding worse than it had that evening out behind the zoo. I walked up to the bar and ordered another beer, then found a piece of wall I could lean up against. The bar was partly enclosed and partly open-air. From where I stood, under the roof, I could look out to the patio and see long strands of white lights hanging from the high trees. There was a big-screen TV in the corner playing the videos that went with the music on the loudspeakers. At that moment they were playing Bob Seger’s Old Time Rock and Roll, probably just so they could show Tom Cruise dancing in his underpants.
I didn’t know what I was doing there. I was too scared of AIDS, and of facing the truth about myself, to pick anybody up. Maybe it was some kind of practice run for actually having a life, forcing myself to look in the mirror often enough so that someday I’d be able to look without hating myself. I had known I was attracted to guys since I was about twelve or thirteen, but except for some experimentation I had managed to ignore it. I’d created a personality for myself as a stud, forcing myself to go out night after night, dating and bedding women, hoping the next one would be the one who could change me.
One of the last women I dated was a Wisconsin high school phys ed teacher in her mid-twenties, on spring break with a couple of college friends. There wasn’t an ounce of fat on her, and she was very athletic in bed, too. It scared me how much I was attracted to her biceps and strong calves. I found myself fantasizing she was a man, and we had the best sex I’d ever had with a woman. It scared the hell out of me.
As my eyes got accustomed to the darkness I started checking out the other guys. The bar was halfway between the dance floor and the patio. About a dozen guys were dancing to the pounding beat, and there were another dozen or so clustered around the bar. There were a few mixed couples, and a few groups of guys seated in the plastic chairs out on the patio.
I took my Longboard Lager and made a slow circuit of the bar and patio area. A gray-haired guy, in his sixties maybe, cruised the room counterclockwise to me, and I had to look away every time we passed. There was a cute guy in a rugby shirt leaning up against a palm tree, but he never seemed to look my way. It was easy to find excuses not to talk to anyone. No one seemed able to make eye contact with anyone else, and none of the guys who stood alone appealed to me. One was too thin, another too fat. I couldn’t talk to the guy in lime-green bell- bottoms and tank top because he looked too faggy. The two beefy guys in muscle shirts looked too mean, and too caught up in each other anyway.
At the side of the bar there was a long hallway. The first two doors I saw were clearly marked Kane, for men, and Wahine, for women. There were other doors, though, farther down the hall, and every now and then someone would come or go down the hallway, and I didn’t want to know what was going on back there. Or rather, I did want to know, desperately, but I wouldn’t let myself admit it. I found a place by the patio wall where I could see what was going on in the bar, on the patio, and down the hallway. I cradled my beer like it was my only friend, and watched, and waited. A really buffed guy in a tank top kept going in and out of the hall, and two Japanese guys holding hands went back there and disappeared.
About half of the guys standing around the bar wore their hair just a little too short or their mustaches a little too trimmed, but others looked like guys you’d see on the street. I started to feel more like there was a chance I might fit in here someday. Of course, it was kind of sad seeing all these guys who couldn’t connect with each other, and striving on my part just to get to that level, where I was comfortable enough with myself and my sexuality to stand around in a room full of gay men and not feel desperately awkward.
I was almost through my second lager when a guy came up to me. I was still dressed in my moke outfit, still hadn’t shaved. He was tall and thin, gawky as a giraffe, his head shaved so that only a blond stubble remained. He almost passed me, then leaned up close to my ear and whispered, “I like it rough.” His tongue grazed the outside of my ear.
I shivered, and pushed away. Suddenly I knew I had to get out. If I didn’t I’d do something, I wasn’t sure what. I might follow the giraffe into a back room, or punch his lights out, or tear off my clothes and jump up onto a table and dance. I dropped my empty bottle on a table and nearly ran for the door.
Outside, I stood next to a lamp post, gulping moist warm air. A wave of traffic passed on Kuhio Avenue, and
