The Atomic Hula, Mike Marino [best novel books to read .TXT] 📗

them then in the parking structure owned by the rightful owners. Mickey placed his there and went back out through the same opening, spelunkers in paradise, a concrete cave with no bats. Just cars and mats. No bats.
"Now if you noticed down there they got mini showers so's the tourists who go back into the hotel at that entrance after rolling around the sand and surf can rinse off before hitting the elevators and going up to their rooms, and not leave a trail of sandy footprints all over the place. Well, that's where we wash up in morning. Gotta keep clean you know." Mickey was beginning to feel better already, safer, not so homeless, only half-assed-homeless. "What about food," he said, feeling he was pushing his luck now. Christ, the guy was offering him a home, such as it was. "Well, you can roll drunken sailors and soldiers for me down on Hotel Street or you can borrow a few trinkets and odds and ends from these tourists here. Tribute to the tribe, I call's it. Look. See that couple over there, getting ready to go in the water, now watch what they do." The couple got up after lathering in sun block, then, carefully and carelessly the guy removes his cheap-ass Timex, and places it along with his wallet and room key inside a shoe, careful to tuck it deep inside so it was buried treasure, out of sight. Then the lady places her dainty watch with cheap jeweled face and silver bracelet inside of her shoe, and then, as though the she were hiding the Maltese Falcon inside of Fort Knox puts her purse under the goddam beach mat leaving a telltale bulge the size of the Philippines. Secure in their seeming cleverness at thwarting evil, they then dashed hand in hand happily and falsely secure into the waiting Pacific whose waves gently caressed the shore as though it were a virgin’s breast on a first date.
"Now, these mainlanders come over here to get all tropical and such, hit the beach and think a shoe is a goddamn safety deposit box inside old Fort Knox which it ain't. Look, see those kids over there running around? Watch." Sam had the air of an Eisenhower commanding D-Day forces ready to breach the bunkered beaches at Normandy. Each kid glanced around like mechanized radar towers, scanning the beach and its unwary tourists getting ready to baptize themselves in the holy Honolulu waters, amen, brother. First one, then the other would stand up after taking off their shoes and setting them down in military formation on the sand. Then a magneto would whisk the watches and superfluous jewelry from body as they were removed and placed, tucked deep inside of the canvas cavern near the toe. Unseen like submarines. Once they felt they were secure from theft they made their mad from here to eternity dash to the sea, oblivious lemmings while the prying radar eyes of vagrant buggers made the dash for the cash and to liberate the piñata of jewelry and money in one swift, adroit movement, with the precision of Jack the Ripper ripping away in the East End. Watches, assorted jewelry, cash, coin, traveler’s checks, credit cards, and room keys themselves that would open the gated treasure rooms now vacated while the residents vacationed obviously oblivious.
Little demons would then fade into the crowd as though they were the unheard horror voices in a schizoid’s mental amusement park of paranoia and delusion. Just one more particle of sand on a beach full of sand, ditching empty wallets in nearby dumpsters, and then hold audience with Sam who would take the fenceable lootables, mark down who had stolen what so he could split the payoff with them. Mickey's question had now been answered. So, that's what Sam was always writing down. Not haikus, poems, dirty ditties or Irish limericks. In time, he learned, Sam was extremely organized and exceptionally honest, for his line of work anyway, proving to Mickey there was sort of a thing as honor among Honolulu thieves. Never mind these same kids would knife a sailor in a back alley for a few bucks of shore leave cash meant for whores and bartenders. Mickey would spend the next year earning his gold watch, although the watch would invariably belong to someone else who put in the old thirty and out kiss my ass retirement scenario. He did wander to the hotel district one night to see what goes on in the world of neon drunks and brown skinned muses who lie on their backs while soldiers and sailors would lie through their teeth to themselves and think they had fallen in love. Love by the way only lasted 20 minutes and cost fifteen bucks. One night, hidden in the shadows of the street, he watched a few of the kids he knew, and liked, wait in a doorway by the corner alley to pounce on their prey. Hunting lions at night bringing down water buffalo's with a crash and splash of blood. A stumbling drunk in dress whites from the USS some shit or other would weave a zigzaggy path towards the darkened doorway, then woosh...would be whisked into the waiting alley, the lions den, punches flying, feet kicking the wounded beast prone on the ground, muffled groans, too drunk to yell aloud and soon the victim would pass out and be as limp as a rubber after it's been tossed in the trash. Stripped of watches, cash, even some of the insignia buttons and military ribbons as they were worth money too, Popeye had been punched out as he was punch drunk anyway. He's down for the count and there would be no rematch in the ring. He had witnessed a Kubrickian scene straight out of Clockwork Orange, me droogies. (The alpha male of this marauding pack, Chaika, would later be the administer of a severe beating that landed Mickey in the hospital for two weeks when he ended up in juvenile hall. But I'm getting ahead of the story.....)
"There is another way to cash in too. How old are you anyway?" queried the quizzical Sam. Proudly, Mickey blurted out, "Fifteen." Sam put his arm around his shoulder and began walking him down the beach to get a better view of the Reef and its rooms. "See all those rooms? Well lot's of them have tourist ladies who travel together. Usually single, some married on a girls out vacation, no husbands around, back home they are, the husbands I mean. Sometimes they want a little action and I try to supply that to them with the help of my friend who works in the hotel on the night desk. Now, looking at you, young and all, these old broads would probably pay like they do for some of the other guys over there. You'd make money, I'd make money and my friend in there would get his money, finders fee we call it. Been laid yet, kid?" Mickey was awash in stimuli now, trying to absorb everything and said "Yeah," he said, thinking fondly of Debbie back home. and about the lady on the loose job offer, "Gotta think about it," and think about it he did. "Couple of broads like that a night and you can eat like a king my young friend. Sex, and you get paid for it in paradise no less." Sam continued along the same lines trying to reel in his fish. "Now, they do like them young but don't want to get mixed up too much with jailbait so you say your 15, right? Well, now, you're 17 going on 18 and because you're white we'll say your mixed race, besides you brown up pretty good in the sun here, so look kinda Hawaiian. Yeah, your mama a native girl, daddy a sailor or sumpthin'. They like the local boys but a mixed breed boy could do very well here.!"
Mickey thought it over and the thought of getting banged and paid was too inviting. Food money if nothing else, 'cept he already had a girlfriend who worked at a restaurant that would boost food for him on a daily basis and he was dating the daughters of tourists who would spring for a beach bums meal and that sort of thing. Most days his hours would be spent committing bank robbery on unsuspecting tourist shoes for the treasure within Davey Jones' Dr. Scholls locker. Meeting girls, posing for surfboard photos for the tourists for a buck and at nights on occasion going inside the hotel room of some widow or spouse intoxicated by the sun, the surf and the chance to cheat on their husband back home without guilt or a relationship. Mickey now understood what was meant by getting lei'd in Honolulu, as he was being officially sacrificed and tossed headlong for the next year into a sexual volcano to appease the Goddess Pele.
Chapter Five
1964. The young president had been dead now for just over a year and it would only be four more years until another bullet used a Kennedy for target practice. The new cowboy president was over his head in political mud and the quicksand that would be Vietnam was already beginning to suck him down as it would the rest of the country in just a few years. It was the year of the British Invasion when a little mopped topped group from Liverpool hit the charts in America with their first number one hit, "I Want to Hold Your Hand," and the box office was boffo with The Pink Panther and Goldfinger with enough Peter Sellers and glorious Pussy Galore to go around. In the southern fried Deep South the bodies of three young civil rights workers, Schwerner, Goodman and Chaney were found in an earthen dam in Mississippi. Racial unrest was brewing in the land of the free and American pilots were getting shot down, killed or captured in rice paddies as the technological military might of the United States was getting a licking, but kept on ticking, until it finally ended, 50,000 plus bodies later.
Mickey managed to survive the first year living on the beach without any serious assassination attempts on his life. The difference between a beach bum and a popular politician. They are red, white and screwed. In that space in time he had morphed from a homeless haoli into a haiku hobo. A tree and a parking garage had more square footage than a suburban condo as the sky was limitless with infinite ceiling and 90 degree walls were smashed by the Sherman tanks of illusion, leaving endless horizon to horizon living space. It was the kid's mondo condo. No mortgage. No rent. No limits, no rules, no shit to put up with. A mandala waiting for inclusion of personal illusions.
Back in Detroit, the factories were going at it at a fast and furious pace, cranking out automobiles for a hungry planet, global, universal, the Motor City, King of Cars. Muscle flexing machines screamed with a vengeance in 1964 as the birth of the Muscle Era was heralded by the unleashing of the GTO. John DeLorean packed a mighty motor under the hood of a Tempest and the wild child era of screeching tires was off and running, up and down Mainstreet USA, everywhere. That would all come crashing down in the 1970's when fuel was short and regulations handcuffed the muscle car era. He often wondered what his friends, ghosts now from his past, were doing. Sockhops and rockin' around the catholic school clock, cruisin' Woodward Avenue on a Saturday night now that they were old enough to drive fast and drunk and the backseat was a mobile brothel. Homework, schoolwork, allowance, movies, radio, television and drive-in sci-fl at the Ford-Wyoming drive-in. Then he'd shrug it off and start