Mahu by Neil Plakcy Page A

I remember my parents sighing happily, glad that it had gone so well, and equally glad that it was all over.
    Haoa’s luau was not as fancy; after all, this baby was the fourth. Still, the people kept streaming in. Old family friends, distant cousins, neighbors, clients of Haoa’s landscaping business, potential clients he wanted to show off for. My father and his cronies held court on the screened porch, a bunch of old men smoking cigars and telling stories from thirty years ago.
    My father has been building houses in Honolulu since before I was born, and building friendships, too, across communities. His father, a full Hawaiian, was trained by missionaries, learned to read and write English, and became a teacher at the Kamehameha School. My grandmother was haole, a schoolteacher from Montana who came to the islands to teach, fell in love and never left. My father grew up in Honolulu, and his parents encouraged him to make friends everywhere. As a boy, he had pākē, or Chinese, friends, as well as friendships with the leading scions of the haole community. He began college at UH, but World War II intervened, and he served in Europe in a unit comprised of many island boys.
    The result was that my father kn e w almost everybody in Honolulu, in both licit and illicit sectors. One of his best friends was Uncle Chin, a tall, stately man who always ha d an air of ineffable sadness, even when bouncing his dozens of honorary grandchildren around him. In part that stem med from a paralyzed nerve in his face that cause d the left side of his lip to droop a bit, giving him a faintly perplexed look. Uncle Chin was not really active in his tong anymore, at least not according to police records. But police records wer en’t always up to date.
    I tried to stay out of trouble during the luau, preferring to play uncle with my nieces and nephews and second cousins. At one point, though, I went up to the bar to get another beer and ran into Peggy Kaneahe.
    We always sat next to each other in school, Kanapa‘aka and Kaneahe. When we were sixteen I took her to the junior prom at Punahou, and she was the first girl I ever kissed. We dated for almost three years, through high school graduation and our first year away at college. She was the first girl I had sex with, in her pink bedroom, one Saturday afternoon when her parents were at a christening on the North Shore. I broke up with her right after coming home from my first year in San Diego.
    I had never known anyone who was gay until I went to college. Then, on my first day at UC, right after my parents left, I met a guy down the hall who was tall and thin and very effeminate. A lot of the jocks on the floor used to tease Ted, write fake love notes on the message board on his door, steal his towel from the shower room, that kind of thing. I remember once he walked down the hallway, stark naked, his hair dripping wet, making eye contact with every guy who lined up to watch. I got a hard-on when he looked at me.
    One night in the spring I got drunk and was sitting on my bed with the door to my room open when Ted walked by. I don’t remember what I said to him, why he came into my room, but I know that after a while he got up, very deliberately, and locked the door. Then he stood in front of me, without speaking, and unbuttoned his shirt. He unbuckled his belt, unzipped his pants, and dropped them to the floor, then shucked off his shirt and tossed it next to his pants.
    I remember being stunned that he didn’t wear any underwear. Then he came over to me.
    By the time I got home that summer I was totally confused. But I knew that dating Peggy hadn’t cured me of my interest in men, so somehow that meant I had to stop seeing her. I didn’t have a reason to give her, and I don’t think she ever understood.
    “Hello, Kimo,” she said. We kissed briefly, like friends.
    “You look great,” I said. She wore a pink polo shirt and a navy skirt, and her hair, which was usually pulled up on her