Captain cooked, p.13
Captain Cooked, page 13


Chapter 25
Garden of Fiasco
Party over, by 9 p.m. I was back in my room, organizing equipment for the Memorial the next evening. Before the earlier restaurant opening and menu tasting I had, by myself, walked the staging area on the golf course and seen the workers installing a trussed stage, covered with bunting, large speaker stands at either side. Lighting towers were placed down each side of the fairway’s approach to the green where the stage was being erected. The basin would seat comfortably about 2,000 people in a grass lawn picnic setting, and the audience would enjoy the musical acts with the ocean as the backdrop. During my walk, thinking like a producer, I realized I was inadequate. I could take B-roll of the event but to capture the musicians from all the angles one would expect in a television show would be near impossible. I would have to go supplicant, knees-to-ground, and ask Public Relations Director Cardoza to let me use some stock film from her camera people who were there in force setting up for stationary and shoulder-held camera stage shots. What she would give me, I expected, would be the highlights of the Pāhoehoe Sounds concert. Instead of running crazy with my HDTV apparatus, I should enjoy the night, relaxing with Michael.
My limitations so apparent. I was an intern shutterbug and my presence on island my father’s doing, not because a major cable channel thought I was going places. The room phone rang. The front desk.
“Is Mr. Dayne there?”
“No.” I forgot the room I had moved over to after the break-in was under his name, not mine.
“He had ordered a hotel car from concierge. Do you know if he’s going to use it?”
Jeffrey going out, and late at night? Not a good sign.
“Hold it, someone will be down shortly.”
What’s going on? Why didn’t he tell me? Only one scenario permeated my suspicious mind: a rendezvous. For some reason of stealth, I threw on the only dark clothes I had brought with me: black shorts, dark grey Hang Loose XL T-shirt from Crazy Shirts, Tribal He‘e, (a gift for my father) and a Ho‘oilina Kai Resort baseball cap. I rushed to the lobby to see Jeffrey’s back enter a car at valet, Desi Cardoza driving. How could he? A panic attack hit me. A quick stop at concierge and I had the car keys for our hotel loaner: an open Jeep, white, the hotel’s logo emblazoned on the sides. Where were they going? What they — she ― was planning I could almost write the script. As I accelerated, catching up to the car’s red taillights, my memory did an unpleasant flashback.
Mom had taken ill after taping the next to last episode of their cooking television program during the second season. The heartbreak diagnosis was ovarian cancer. It took eight months of chemotherapy before the words “irreversible” and “inoperable” made their way into the doctor’s comments. Ebbing like a summer sun on the horizon, her body wasted away, and she, more courageous than anyone else, decided to end her own life before she lost all motor and mind control.
As the story was relayed to me, she awoke in her hospital room from induced sleep of dripped pain-killers that had worn off far earlier than the nurse in charge had expected of those life-numbing cocktails. Elizabeth had a hit of reality, epiphany of time and place. She kissed her husband goodbye for the last time, he looking drained and haggard from those months during the hopeful surgical procedures, now the uncertain vigil. When he left, she opened a false panel on the inside book board of their first cookbook. At her bedside for the last six months, Jeffrey had read the recipes from this book several times over, reliving the highlights of a meal’s creation, never discovering the more sinister potions hidden at his fingertips. She pulled out the secreted letter written months earlier when her hand could write strong before ravished by the chemo, needle poking and tube insertion. She did not leave a maudlin goodbye. She wrote, as was her personality, her own upbeat recipe of continuing life, a fulfilling guide, food for thought, for her husband and daughter. With the letter came the plastic pouch of hoarded pills. Right or wrong, she retained control of her destiny. I admired her for that, though I miss her horribly, and feel cheated by her absence.
At the early stage of the masticating disease, during my last year of graduate film school in California, I visited her as scheduling would allow in the Chicago hospital. During the subsequent months of gyrating job scheduling, I appeared less often when she went into the hospice, my own life too filled with youth and immortality, self-absorbed, immersed in bright horizons without dwelling on someone’s debilitation. Perhaps I saw too much of me in her and could not bear to see the talent of her creativity disappear unfulfilled. I think she understood my absence. I hoped she did. But in her legacy recipe for the survivors, she did chastise me, not condemning, but the same nevertheless, for abandoning the living in time of need, my father. From that guilt, well deserved, I swore I would never abandon him again in times of trouble, protect him as I could. This was such a time. My mother’s memory would not be besmirched by a hussy’s seduction.
At a distance I could hide in the tourist traffic on Highway 11 until they reached the housing developments of Kalaoa and we headed mauka, land side I smartly recalled, up the road where signs pointed to the dormant volcano mountain, Hualalai, 8271 feet in elevation. God, I hoped she did not live on top of the mountain. The road went from cracked asphalt to dirt and the Jeep began bouncing over washboard ruts. The area looked like small farm plots with housing, economically below the middle-class median, a few mini-mansions popping up in the middle of Kona coffee groves. I dimmed my headlights as the road wound higher with sharp switch backs. A road to a wild life sanctuary went off to the left. I barely missed a turn that would have sent me off-road and plunging down into someone’s orchard. I thought the moon might throw off some ambient lighting so I could trail their tail-lights from a safe distance.
Fog not vog found me instead. A fine mantle of ghostly mist obscured the road. I could barely see two feet ahead. Headlights back on did little good. The Jeep crept. I strained looking for their car, her house. Ten minutes later there it was: the Cardoza name on a flowery cutesy mailbox, and a road leading up into veiled darkness as the clouds hugged the ground. I found a turn-around and aimed the Jeep downhill, for a quick getaway, if that was my plan, if I had a plan.
I walked up the drive, catching my breath every hundred feet. Through the fog yellow glows set out the hazed windows of the house. I could not be as asinine as pounding on the front door. Was I protective or curious? Both. This woman was not worthy enough for my father; he deserved better. A person like my mother. Before I reached the house, I skirted off to the side into what I thought was a grove of Kona coffee trees. I used this cover as I circled towards the back of the house where I could see better, gain a view into the living room and kitchen, both brightly lit. I saw two forms in the window. Not sharp enough. I had to gain a better observation point, but I had run into a fence blocking my access. The wired obstacle seemed to run from the house down the hill into the deeper jungle vegetation. A gate provided the solution and I opened it, my feet treading carefully between rows of what I guessed were vegetables. My eyes focused on the movement within a room.
Jeffrey seemed to be admiring her floor-to-wall bookcase, tugging at various volumes, flipping through pages. At a sideboard she mixed yellow alcoholic potions in cocktail glasses. They stood close together, sipped their drinks, and looked happy. What was I doing here? What right did I have to interfere in Jeffrey’s basic male hormones for a momentary fling to have his horns rubbed down to the nubs? They were walking to the back deck. I ducked under some giant-size tomato vines and kept skirting sideways through the garden. She had brought pūpūs from the kitchen. She was seducing with his greatest weakness: food. My, God, were there poi fritters on that plate? Taro tacos with salsa poi? Poison poi in the batter?
I needed to shout, throw a rock, distract them, destroy the ambiance of their first hot, steamy touch.
I heard a noise. I ducked down. Another noise, plants being crunched underfoot. Someone was in the garden with me. I could not be discovered; the mortification would be too great. I crab-walked in a crouch, trying to move down the hill, away from the approaching steps getting closer. I stopped, held my breath and started crawling through a patch of onions, Maui onions, no doubt. At a trellis of colored peppers I defined a new noise.
A snort?
I pulled back some leaves and carefully put my face forward, my ears listening for the next…snort.
A giant snout poked me in my face and snorted snot on me. My shouted ‘Yipe!’ coincided at the moment the pig made a hairy night piercing squeal. Pigs were on the left of me, pigs on the right of me. With pigs scattering around my feet, I stumbled up and downhill through the rows of the garden. From behind me, I heard a shout, a woman’s angry voice. Suddenly, large floodlights lit the backyard. If I kept in a running crouch I would not be seen, I could make my escape, easily; yeah, right. Hardly.
Another noise added to the pigs squealing and trampling through the garden, a dog’s bark, two dogs, vicious barking, coming closer. Desi had loosed a wolf pack on me; she would have her revenge, she would have Jeffrey to herself!
I hit the garden fence at the back of the lot and bounced to the ground. The hill sloped enough so that I could not see the back deck of the house, but I could hear the voices of two people, Desi shouting. I found a guava tree, climbed a few feet and jumped the fence. My landing was off in the darkness and I started rolling through the jungle vegetation, coming to rest in leafy weeds. Thank God, no thorns, but I was scraped and muddy. Which way was the roadway? My mind took moments to sense my bearings, up was up, the road down, somewhere. Without warning, the mountain side reverberated with a gunshot echo, not a crack of a rifle, a whoomp blast. Shotgun! I prayed it was for wild pig scaring, and nothing more sinister. Where a second gunshot might land pushed me away from the threat; paying little attention, I bounced against trees, tore through bushes, tripped over roots.
I sat in the Jeep, drained of feelings, a mess. I released the brake, put the Jeep in neutral, and in the soupy fog coasted down the road with a troubled soul, worried beyond worry about my father’s safety. Two Blue Hawai’i drinks later, slurped at the beach bar, I slumped over in such a battered condition that glib male strangers steered clear. My growing numbness was replaced with deep-sighed relief as I saw my father walking through the torch-lit hotel grounds. I called to him and he joined me.
“Pineapple Bomber,” he ordered, and to me said, “My second of the night.” He gave me the once over, my features lit by orange blazed tiki torches, accented by purple bar neon with assorted flying bugs. In that décor ambiance, without makeup, my resemblance would suggest Goddesses Pele and Medusa, co-joined, an opinion to which Jeffrey concurred.
“You look like hell. What happened?”
What could I say?
“Went walking on the golf course and tripped into the rough.” He picked a leaf out of my hair, looked at it with the curiosity of a tenured botanist, and sipped his drink. He leaned over and picked greenish snags out of my white socks. My socks, shorts, hair, my whole body, looked like I rolled in green mulch, as I had.
When you lie, it is best to change the subject to the offense.
“And what did you do this evening?”
“Desi Cardoza wanted to show me her cookbook collection of Hawaiian recipes.”
Boy, that really frosted me; he told the truth. “Is that sort of like, ‘Want to come up to my apartment and see my etchings’?”
“A very innocent evening until feral pigs broke into her garden.” I said nothing when I should have asked to hear the whole story. “But even if it wasn’t innocent, do you have a problem with what goes on in my private life?”
There, it was out on the table for discussion. I could ignore, I could yell at him. Instead, he eased me through my tribulations.
“You know, Madison, your mom was that special person in my life, and now it is you. She has been gone for two years. I mourn her daily, but I realize my life goes on. This trip was the symbolic purging. It’s not working. Too soon. In a not too distant future, there may or may not be someone out there who shows me life still holds exuberance. But, Madison, when the time comes, the choice, the person, will be mine. Without interference, understand? Until then, your role is to be supportive to a father and a foodie entertainment personality, in that order.”
I nodded with alcoholic haziness, the hurts of the day and evening surfacing into my joints. A lone tear fell onto the bar.
He rubbed my shoulder, gently, sensing my bruises, my internal aches.
“In turn, I will try to help your career and protect you from bad influences. Neither of these tasks do I seem to be doing well. In the future, I will be more diligent. You accept?”
I capitulated to his parental wisdom.
“Yes, Father.” Not ‘Jeffrey’ I had answered.
“Good. First things first, when you go up to your room. I want all your clothes into one pile. Do not touch them. I will take care of them myself.”
A strange request.
“I can clean myself, take care of my own dirty clothes.”
“See this leaf, Madison?” I nodded tired, ready for bed.
“A plant of the cannabis variety. Marijuana. The golf course has some mighty potent roughs. Definitely out of bounds.”
He led me back into the hotel, and to the elevator. “I’ll be along shortly.”
My worry about a late night liaison with you-know-who showed on my face.
“Madison, I have to go and make amends about your Jeep out front. You parked in a flowerbed of azaleas.”


Chapter 26
Plot Stewing
I slept the sleep of the dead. Wrong metaphor. Late morning I woke to angry voices in my head. Not in my head, but outside my window, and we were five stories up. I threw on my robe. My trashed clothes from last night’s jungle foray nowhere to be seen.
Below, in a grassy courtyard, ironically near a bush of Angel’s Trumpet, I could see Uncle Joe Coffee yelling at Michael Ka‘aiea, and doing so in Hawaiian. What surprised me was Michael’s response, snapped back, not at the same level of anger, but likewise spoken in Hawaiian. All the more interesting were small clusters of people surrounding the two of them; as my Father would have noted, three groups, each in the colors seen several days earlier at the front gate. I even saw Larry Tutapu in his green-yellow T-shirt with his followers. Every once in a while the revolutionary First Mate threw out his contribution in a cursed epitaph, frustration at not being part of the dialogue.
I felt like I was watching street gangs in strutting positioning, Sharks versus Jets. No one could prevent the old man from waving his arms to enunciate his shouting. Everyone stood poised, on brawl alert. The Monarchy fogies against Green Shirt rappers.
Only the White Shirts stood aloof. From that group, I had yet to pick out anyone of leadership authority. They seemed a protest movement run by committee.
Michael, I could see, paced uneasy, glancing around, cognizant the one-sided shouting match from Old Joe Coffee could be overheard by the hotel guests, staring down, as I was, from their balconies. In his ranting, Uncle Joe saw me and his arm pointed my way, shaking his hand viciously. Noticing me in attendance from on high, Michael let his voice rise to overwhelm the old man’s vitriolic spew. His Hawaiian spit out rapidly, showing him to be a fluent native language speaker. No casual pidgin expressions.
Old Joe fell silent. In moments, they all stalked off, three separate pathways, in various degrees of agitation; the only thing in common, each group threw backward stares, looking my way. Michael looked at me and walked off. No smile, more a grimace of pain.
Maybe my body could cause the launch of a thousand war canoes.
Ah, from towel to ocean, the sand burned underfoot, the water a tolerable coolness, I stood neck high and let my pains soothe. I would have tipped heavy for the return of the old medicine woman with her magic massage potions? Here I am in paradise and I have only two hours of beach time before Michael is to escort me to the Memorial concert.
Back on my towel the sun rays purged my mini-hangover. I took stock of what happened last night, and what I had rolled in. Marijuana leaves stuck to my clothing. Maybe I did not know all the history of my father that he could recognize the leaf so quickly; then again, he was a former defense attorney and used to looking through evidence exhibits. I accepted that answer.
As much as I could see honorable citizens growing a few plants for personal use, I considered Desi Cardoza more a fashion hound than a pot freak. However, another suspect, rose to mind: Johnny Rocket. He definitely had druggie habits. Desi, in fact, had said casually that Johnny and his fellow merry prankster band members, except for Kukui, all shared the same apartment, for creative purposes. Without going back to the scene of my crime, which I would not, what with wild pigs and guard dogs and scatter shotguns with shells filled with rock salt (as Jeffrey told me the story this morning), I could envision that below his Mother’s garden, in the dense undergrowth, Johnny Rocket had his own hidden farm plot of a cash crop.
