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

rah and all that. So, you ready yet? I kin 'range it and have you back where you belong in no time." Mickey knew this conversation by heart although this was the first time he heard it, he imagined it, he played it out in his mind, he talked it out with himself so was ready to go, verbal volley to verbal volley. "Doc, I like this life. You know what a sense of freedom this is? I've never felt like this before and it's like, well, I can't step backwards, to my parents, teachers, and really don't think my "friends" would get it, know what I mean. Sam and Tommy and the others are my family now, my friends. That tree is home, Tommy is a desk clerk, yes, but I also get my mail at the desk through him, so he's also the mail guy, postman or whatever he's called. Sam is a great teacher, like an uncle who used to be a tank driver in WWII or flew jets to break the sound barrier, he got me through a barrier and I can't go back again. Everything back there already seems so small, and hazy."
True. His parents and grandmother especially would write to him and it would be addressed to the hotel, Tommy would hold it at the desk until Mickey came in to ask if he had anything. The hotel was a mall of survival for Mickey. He'd take the elevators up to various floors where the cleaning maids were changing sheets and making up the rooms. While they were inside busy and overloaded Santa Claus carts left unattended in the hallways Mickey would grab some of the wrapped soaps and small wash rags and stash them in the rafters in the parking lot so he always had a ready supply. Most people would hop into an enclosure to shower or bathe, small rooms forming mildew that had to be scrubbed, tubs shaped like feeding troughs and a room no bigger than a large closet. Mickey on the other hand, would just wade out into the ocean early in the morning into the world’s largest bathtub, suds up, scrub up and let the sunrise dry him off. He would sleep in the tree, or if the weather weirded out, he always had the parking structure or under an overturned catamaran. He also had spent the night at his girlfriend Kali's house when her parents were visiting relatives on the other islands and when involved with an adult female tourist would usually spend the night enjoying a full dinner, room service and a large breakfast before he left in the morning, along with a contribution for a sexual sermon. He wasn't stealing as much from the beach either, like the younger kids were still doing. He was making plenty of money now from the tourists who handed it over and his marijuana merry-go-round. Tommy did run the hotel operation for the older women who visited the island, matching them up with the boy of their choice, but Mickey found that he could get "dates" on his own so wasn't part of that anymore. He ate well and he lived well and wouldn't trade it for anything, and Doc knew that.

"Know kid, they got Chaiku the other day and he's in juvenile now. Stealing for Sam, he was, and that could happen to any of you," Mickey’s eyes widened, "Goddamn it Doc, I ain't Chaiku or any one of his shit friends, I'm smarted than that asshole, he's got fuckin' seaweed for brains along with piles of shit." Mickey had trouble before with Chaiku. He was older, been with Sam's crew for a long time and resented Mickey mainly because he was white and seemed to replace him as Sams favorite pupil. Chaiku also had a penchant for violence and anyone who didn't believe you should hurt someone and take their money was a pussy. Mickey didn't believe in that creedo, and that led to a fight one night on the beach between him and Chaiku who taunted him in front of his crew. Mickey told him to fuck off and that ignited Chaiku's already short fuse and the battle began. Both boys were matched in size and height and Chaiku didn't know Mickey liked to fight and had plenty of experience back on the mainland in school, so it was evenly matched in determination and mutual hatred by the bucketfuls. Mickey took the first punch as it came out of nowhere and blood started pouring out of nose and he was dazed a bit at first but managed to land the next in Chaiku's stomach and as he double over, knee'd him in the jaw so he went reeling and fell on his back on the beach. Mickey then jumped on him and was greeted by an uplifted Chaiku foot and he went flying. It went on like this for several minutes until someone in the hotel started yelling at them and they broke it up, a dead draw and everybody ran from the scene in different directions.
They didn't speak to one another after that, but their paths would cross again in the future and swords drawn once again in battle. Doc knew it was a loosing battle so backed off and dropped Mickey off at the library for one of his literary forays in the world of words and punctuation, but mostly ideas and adventure. He had been spending a lot of time at the library reading everything he could get his hands on. Not having an address, he found his beach combing talents handy in boosting a book at a time out of the library to finish reading at his leisure. When finished he would then get it back into the library and onto the shelves, wrong shelf though so when found, those wiley librarians would surmise it had been misplaced and not misappropriated. He would then replenish the returned Hemmingway for an outbound Heyerdahl.
He had been a voracious reader from a young age devouring words like a hungry cannibal devours fresh meat. Mark Twain mostly, river rogues and dubious adventurers on a riverboat rampage. Tom Sawyer. Injun Joe. Aunt Polly. Puddin' Head Wilson. Huck Finn. The big old man Muddy, a river older than measured time, with the dirty little river town, Hannibal stranded drunken face down on its banks. Mickey would hide in the literary bull rushes that lined the pages of Twain's tales, lying quietly in the reeds with the ribit'ing bullfrogs and chirping crickets and slithering dark snakes on evening patrol looking for tasty mice and voles. He became immersed in the quicksand of words and could feel the cold Midwestern mist on his face and the soaking dampness of bottomland riverbank earth seeping through his clothes, chilling his body to morgue temperature. Fog and mist radiated from the pages of books, causing mirages of the imagination and lifting him high above the reality of Newton’s ground of gravity, freeing him to soar with Twainian bravado and excitement.
In the fog he could clearly hear the unclear, muffled voices aboard the boats docked, loaded with cargo and passengers ready to disembark to embark down past New Orleans. In the dark, the fog was punctured by voices now audible without the need of mental subtitles. The boatman would release the riverboat from its dockside umbilical cord to begin its journey of fornication as it struggled to enter the swift, changing vaginal currents of America's mightiest river. The whistle would blow, lonesome, and the groaning, moaning engines would jump to life with a nautical sexual erection and roar with mechanized machismo, while throbbing smokestacks would ejaculate large clouds of black smoke in heated frenzy, as the paddle wheel engines pumped harder, harder, moving the Memphis Queen forward in accordance with the natural undulating flow of the river. finally reaching peak top speed in one final orgasmic upheaval.
Old Muddy was a madam and the riverboats and showboats, her gilded girls, entertaining a colorful cadre of tycoons, travelers, pimps, cutthroats and gamblers with pocket watches, loaded dice and marked cards. Fathoms would deepen as the ragtime music kept time with the big wheels in perfect paddle wheel harmony. As the big boat disappeared, obscured by the southbound fog, Mickey/Huck poled his raft behind her taking every advantage of her wake, following the soft glow of lanterns hung on her stern as decorative ornaments on a Connecticut Christmas tree. The words in the book were more than paragraphs, they were beacons illuminating the passageways to discovery, where he would meet other characters on other pages of other books written by Jack London, James Fennimore Cooper, and stories of the expeditionary visionaries Lewis and Clark. They would climb out of the confines of printers ink and glued book bindings, climb aboard his raft and regale him with tales of Northwest Passages, Alaskan gold rushes and Mohicans.
Later his appetite would be appeased by books by Hemmingway, romantic wars, civil in Spanish nature, fought by Republican patriots and foreign mercenaries. Tolkein, painted brush strokes of strange new worlds, Hobbit inhabited, and Aldous the Huxley would unlock and open the doors to new perceptions. Steinbecks dust bowl dissertations of Tom Joad and the Mother Road, Route 66. H.G. Wells and Jules Verne. where he could escape warring worlds by hopping trains of time to an age in the future of Eloi and Morlocks, and get his kicks on a Jules Verne rocket ship racing to the surface of the moon.
The silver screen had as much influence over him as literate adventure-lit. Why, just a year before he began his own travels and travails he saw Lawrence of Arabia in all it's wide screen David Lean techno-splendor. There he was, Lawrence, O'Toole'd and Omar, Sharifing across the silver screen's ocean of sand. T. E. Lawrence, a British stranger in a strange Bedouin land, a Great War rebel with an Arab cause that was not his property to begin with, but car jacked it by breaking and entering and made it his own. Long, cascading robes, flowing in the wind, a waterfall of soft fabric billowing in desert sun taking the shape of an angels wings, to whisk him along, atop and astride the exotic desert mammal the camel that transformed into a charging Roman chariot rushing headlong against a line of Turkish artillery. So impressed was Mickey by the film that he went to the bookstore and bought a copy of T. E. Lawrence's "Seven Pillars of Wisdom" and read it two times in the year. Another film that influenced him greatly was "Mutiny on the Bounty" with its mutineers throwing off the shackles of convention and class, sailing away to escape the blight of Bligh and to seek a better life. A copulating paradise populated by a Tahitian temptress or two, who stroked the psyche and stoked the fires of tropical lust.
Mickey had to laugh as now in Hawaiian reality, he was Fletcher Christian, in a tropical paradise. When he left home in Detroit, he did not runaway he merely mutinied against suburban convention to follow a bare chested inner muse whose name was unknown and whose face was unclear her bare flesh needed no introduction. He was in Hawaii..paradise found, and had lived like a king for over a year, but that was about to change. His metaphorical coconut hut was about to burn, baby, burn, and the skies of reality would darken into night. He didn't know it that day as he left the library but that night, the sun would begin to set on him and the fireball would burst into fire and flame, consuming him whole as it began it's descent below his paradise lost horizons....Pele had abandoned him, and Prometheus was pissed!
1963 - Chapter Six
Atomic Hula - 1965. Chapter One
Mini skirts were beginning