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

the day with a beer by 8AM.
Mickey’s great adventure of promiscuity on the jailbait drag strip of survival peeled out from the starting line and went full throttle and overheated the engine, coolant evaporating, needle rising, gauge about to redline and burst with plastic shards exploding into prismatic fragments. Idyllic days on sandy shores, so many shoes with so many watches and so many wallets and so little time. Bracelets, trinkets, anklets, ends and odds, a Christmas piñata of pawnable candy spilling out on the beach to be scavenged and sold to seedy brokers dealing in pawn, with sweaty shirts and stinking of too many cigarettes. Travelers checked in and travelers checks checked out...fast, cash, notated in Sam's little haiku book to tally for distribution among the needy. He was the high priest of the homeless and dispensed payoffs as priests dish out penance of so many Hail Mary's and Our Fathers as though religion was methadone being handed out at a free clinic to fix the junkie's need for a quick fix quickly.
Sleeping in a tree a half plus one story in the air agreed with Mickey. The tropical breezes gave a lilting Don Ho voice to rustling leaves, a robust concerto of flora, while the pounding surf added bass to compliment the drums at Duke Kahanamoku's bar and tiki lounge in The International Marketplace, every night, like clockwork, at midnight, native cadence, tribal beat of hollowed logs and big xylophone sticks keeping the tempo with jazzed up fervor. The reed mats nested naturally in the limbs, a deranged sculptor sculpting from clay molding the nest to perfect proportion of its occupant. Rodin couldn't have created a more fitting artistic work of play. The hotel loomed above the treetop, a concrete King Kong waiting for Fay Raye to be scooped from the upper canopy of this leafy bedlam and taken to a secret place on Skull Island. Mickey kept imagining a gigantic gorilla hand giving him the finger instead. The balconies would fill at night with the sound of a million parties, people getting juiced so they could flirt and laugh, and on occasion would look down at the strange sight of three beach bums laying in the top of a tree staring up back at them. It was Gilligan’s Island with a chorus line of Gingers and Maryanns doing high can-can kicks to entice and seduce as muses will do.
Sometimes someone would toss a half a bottle of cheap gin or a couple of beers down to the beach. The libations to Prometheus being returned to the mortals below. One of the limber druids would then climb down from the top of the tree, grab the beach booty and scuttle back up, beach blanket bingo booze in hand. They'd wave a cursory thank you from the tree, and the patio partiers would wave back, cavalierly, drunkenly, but satisfied now that they had some form of social intercourse with the local beach culture. They were the satiated anthropologists studying a lost tribe of booze swilling cannibals they alone had discovered, got the chief drunk, and put the entire village under a microscope to write articles for thesis' and National Geographic. Nothing like rare photos of jungle boobs exposed in print in the name of natural science. "Yes, those are nice tits aren't they. Look how erect the nipples are. Damn fine race of people don't you think, so in tune with nature, in harmony, so free, so carefree, so damned naked. And look at the ass on that one, damn!" Yes, science, my ass.
Getting piss drunk on a regular basis for a 15 year old bum of the Hawaiian beach is child's play, literally. Plenty of everybodies want to get you Johnny Walkered for one mercenary reason or another. Foraging for food, however, was a Honolulu horse of a different color. You had to have your wits honed as sharp as a sword blade composed of fine Toledo steel. The Toledo in Spain, not the one in Ohio. Ohio has buckeyes and do not make swords, or if they do, they're not very good. Mountain men smeared in bear grease, and their buckskinned squaws had wild berries and beaver fever, but beached in the Pineapple Republic with no pelts and no wild game to skin, cook or trade, food acquisition was possible with well coordinated restaurant recon forays. Hotels line up along the sandy beaches of Waikiki, thick brick and imposing heights, almost grotesque Sovietesque as the Berlin Wall, only more hospitable and with room service, something you don't see in the finest Siberian labor camps.
Most had patio's that catered to the romantic notion of diners dining in the tropics where winers and diners could sit, enjoy the hor' d' ouvers, and on occasion leave the table and it's bread sticks and appetizers to dance to the music, leaving platefuls of bon appetite' behind, alone, delicious wallflowers waiting for a hungry William Holden to walk over in white tux and ask them to dance. The ballroom floor would fill with bossa novians and how low can you go limbo Olympians, while Mickey would leap up onto the patio and grab what grub he could make off with, unseen, an invisible Huck Finn as he dashed down the sandy strand to his raft on the Mississippi where he and Jim the negro slave would feast before poling their raft down the Big Muddy to Cairo and freedom.
Doc's car horn signaled a Viking invasion from cabbie Valhalla. "Doc, didn't expect you until next week sometime, any news?" Doc had kept in touch with Mickey since he ended up on Pitcairn Island as he referred to it from time to time to time. Sometimes it was Treasure Island fresh from the mind of Stevenson and others, well, it could be a sometimes violent, sometimes comical sexual island of Dr. Moreau run by the Marx Brothers, Groucho, Chico, Zeppo, Harpo and the secretive Karl the Red Marx Brother. who wore outlandish Goering sized Brando kaftans. In the year he had been carving out a living as a beach bhiku, Mrs. Kuramoto had gone back to Japan, to Sapporo, with her husband having sold the small apartment complex where Mickey had stayed. Doc had now been keeping the kid's gym bag and clothes at his house. Whenever Mickey earned a few bucks he would make a deposit in the Yucatan bank of Doc, who would dole it out to him in small increments as he needed it, small, miniscule money amounts to make sure Mickey didn't spend it all. Doc made one hell of a socialist.
He also kept in monthly contact with Mickey's family back in Michigan, to keep them up to date on whether their kid was dead or alive. It's not that the kid didn't care about them, but on the rare occasions when he did his mother would start getting emotional, fire a volley of tears that would eat away at his foundation like termites, weakening his resolve, so to resolve the problem, he simply asked Doc to go into the parental trenches on his behalf. They had offered numerous times to foot the bill to fly him back to the mainland, but he had always refused. He was Peter Pan now, or maybe Leo Gorcey, and he enjoyed his new roll as one of the Dead End Kids with the other Lost Boys.
"Hey, Doc. Got some more cash to stow away in that treasure chest of mine" as he jumped in the front seat of the cab, reserved seating for the seatless homeless. Doc gave out with a laugh from deep within the center of his centered earth. Goddamn, Doc was as cool as a body in a morgue. Nothing got by him, and nothing upset him. Must be the drugs, or at least the marijuana that he kept in his pocket. The kid remembered the first time he and Doc smoked themselves into Olympus, driving around in the beat up chariot cab heading towards Diamond Head, the ocean undulating, the sky dancing in veiled seduction and Diamond Head ahead sexually erect. It had been 6 months now since he added dope to a regime of booze, not the junkie in the alley shit, but good smokable shit, Asian, not Mexican, heady not heavy. Dealing dope and getting high was a high crime and not a misdemeanor in those days either. Cheech and Chong hadn't flown into popular culture on their organic magic carpet of rolling papers and the roach clip hadn't yet replaced the class ring as a symbol of undying lust to the big buxom blonde in study hall. "No, really, I think I'm in love with you because you understand physics and Greek literature. Has nothing to do with your boobs, honest. Now, you wanna screw in my car or yours?"
Mickey was not only smoking it but found it made a great uninhibitor to loosen the loins of the uninitiated. The tourists came to experience the islands and its Kodak moments of flowered shirts, swaying palms and hips, but instead of just coconut boys and hula dancing girls they discovered more than they hoped for in the forbidden pleasures savored by those who frequent opium dens for their illicit dangers and rainbow visions. The 50th state was now a dirty back alley in Tangiers with intrigue and shadows in bas relief of cannabis Claude Rains chasing a silhouette image of Peter Lorre across the black and white silver screen in a Fritz Lang movie of dark danger complete with oh so foreign subtitles.
It was Bogart in neutral Casablanca double dealing in diluted drinks, delusional drunks, doctored documents and clandestine cloaks and daggers. Now, "don't bogart that joint me friend, pass it over to me...." Marijuana was kept under the felony covers throughout the Fifties and early Sixties, except in poverty places, places of non-plenty, such as Negro Harlem and the Old Mex southwest. Beat up hipsters, Errol Flynn, Lenny Bruce, jazzed up Charlie Parker musicians and North Beach beats were toking, joking and jazzin' softly while William Burroughs was handling the rough trade and jamming needles into his arm in vein. In addition to some of the suburban tourists who had ventured to tip-toe to their version of the dark side with Benzedrine, martini's and Rusty Warren records on the hi-fi back home, Mickey also found a ready made to order tailor made marijuana market in the vast number of hungry hordes of army green GI Joe's and shitloads of shiploads of sailors who were already buying it from cock banging Bangkok to Hotel Street in Honolulu. Money was good if you didn't smoke up all your profits which was usually the case. The whores bought it too, at least those that weren't strung out on heroin with dead eye sockets to stare out at nothing with and tracks running up and down their arms and legs so you could connect the dots and end up with a painting of dogs playing poker around a table. The good whores though, the angels of the bed sheets, were dancing hulas dressed in marijuana skirts and grassy bowl bras.
Mickey exhaled and a Cheshire cat appeared to form in the cloud of smoke, and then was gone, just smoke playing tricks. "How's the beach been boy?" Doc had that look and tone that made him appear to be inside out of himself. Putting on skeptical spectacles and performing his role in a parental tone. "Good, Doc, real good, why're you asking like that, not like you, know?" Doc took another hit too and smiled. "just curious, thought you'd be heading back home by now, had enough and all. Get back to a nice home, you're family is real nice and they always say they'll send a ticket for you, get you back, get back in school, rah, rah,