Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart (6 page)

Yolo

Yolo? asked the desk clerk? That’s a name?

You betcha, said Yolo. And the other part of it is Day.

He thought, surely living in Hawaii with all these weird Hawaiian names for everything, including people, haoles should have no trouble with something as short and sweet as Yolo.

The guy was wearing one of those shirts every haole who goes to Hawaii buys at the airport. Red with white hibiscus flowers. His blond hair, very pale skin, and eyes just did not look Hawaiian. But Yolo decided not to be critical. He’d come to Hawaii on one of those cheap flights the average working artist can afford, and it had come with this hotel, which did sit, miraculously, right at the edge of the sea. It was ugly, the hotel, the same beige of office buildings in Washington, D.C., but sitting by the water his back would be to it.

He missed his old lady. He imagined her stoned out of her mind, hanging in a hammock in a jungle so far away he couldn’t even imagine it. Why do some people put themselves through it! he thought. Stumped by her persistence.

Up in his room, which faced the beach, he stripped. Throwing off his mainland clothes as if they were infested with lice. Instead of unpacking he simply dumped everything from his suitcase onto the floor. There in the pile was his new palm-green bathing suit. He put it on, facing the mirror that reflected the entire room, and grinned to see how trim and, well, cute he was. He had Frederick Douglass kind of hair, wiry and energetic, and looked a bit like him, because his ancestry was the same: His mother was mostly Anglo-Indian, his father mostly African. This mixture gave you really good skin, he thought, vainly admiring his own, and medium bushy hair that was actually manageable. His hair was long and, released from the braids he usually wore it in, hung nicely down his back. Some of the other mixtures could cause a couple of bad hair days. He smiled, looking for his suntan lotion. Not suntan. He always forgot.
Sunblock.
Horrible, that now humans had to block the rays of the sun. But hey, with his mixture, he got a whopping dose of natural sunblock, from his dad: Thank you, Mother Africa! While from his mom, not to leave out her European contributions, he got a nice reflective quality. He imagined the too strong sun rays bouncing off the mica of her white genes. All things considered, he didn’t expect to suffer from skin cancer.

His mind was like this. Running on a lot of the time about himself. He tried to hide this sometimes from Kate, but she only laughed. Most people are like that, she said. We are our most interesting subject. When we’re free to think about ourselves, not about the kids, not about the car, house, or payments on our various purchases, and not about our work, well, guess what? We natter on about ourselves.

They were both vain. And what do we have to be vain about? they sometimes asked themselves. We’re considered second- and third-class citizens of a country whose government never wanted us. Except as slaves. We understand by now the world will be blown to bits, doubtless by this same government, before people of color get their fair share. We can’t afford health insurance, nor will it even ever be applicable, the way things are going. Nobody but us wants to be Black. And yet, we’re vain.

We like our stubbornness, Yolo had offered.

Our contrariness, said Kate. We never want to do anything the way they do it. We think that of any two choices given they are likely to pick the most boring one.

We like being brown, Yolo said, nose-kissing her underarm. A choice they could have made easily except it frightened them. What did they do with the brown offspring they had? They sold them. What a message to send your kids, of whatever color.

And yet, “sold down the river,” his great-great-grandparents and their parents before them had somehow survived. Though how they’d managed to live without their mothers he simply could not understand. As old as he was the thought of losing his mother, for any reason, including old age and readiness, made him want to cry. Africans were said to be the most attached to their children of all peoples the Europeans encountered. You could make the mother especially do anything by threatening to harm her child.

And our unique hair, said Kate. Do you realize everybody else’s hair, on the entire planet, is straight?

Well, compared to ours, he’d said, laughing and kissing her graying locks.

At last he was blissed out on the beach,
The Mists of Avalon
in one hand, a gin and tonic in the other. Kate had given him another book to read called
Shark Dialogues,
a book about, as she put it, The Real Hawaii, but he had left it in his room. The sea was azure enough to make you weep. He was in paradise. If only his woman was with him and not off in some jungle probably by now trying to communicate with a snake.

In this relaxed, bemused frame of mind, he dozed.

Hey, bradda!

Slowly and reluctantly opening his eyes he saw a very large man. Brown with a protruding belly. Dark eyes and long wavy hair. He was wearing frayed denim cutoffs and that was all. He looked like . . . Damn, he looked like something Yolo had not seen since coming to Hawaii. He looked like maybe a Hawaiian.

Hey, bradda man, for want you come oba deah. The man was pointing.

What was he speaking? Yolo dragged himself out of the land of gin and pleasant dreams and squinted toward the end of the beach where the man was pointing. He could see nothing.

What is it? he asked. What can I do for you?

The man seemed surprised.

Oh, he said. I thought . . .

Yolo was on his feet. Grabbing his straw hat and quickly shoving his feet into sandals because the sand was fiercely hot.

I’m sorry, said the man, I thought you was a bradda.

I am, actually, said Yolo.

There was silence. The man looked toward the hotel, considered something for a moment. Turned back to Yolo and said, If you don’t mind. I’m very sorry. But I need to ask you to do something. It will take only a little while. I have to go home and get something and I need to ask you to stay with something I need to leave protected on the beach.

Oh shit, thought Yolo.

Are you a fisherman? he asked.

Yes, said the man. I was fishing.

Yolo thought of being asked to guard a boatload of marijuana. He wanted to say no. He wanted to explain about his vacation. How much he needed one. How much he deserved one. He’d painted furiously all year and had made just enough to pay his bills, keep the heat going, and have this vacation!

On the other hand, he was trying to have a vacation where someone else was working. He thought: What would
she
do? He stepped back a bit from the man. Looked him up and down. He noticed his eyes were sad and a bit bloodshot. His hair blown every which way. Still, it was what his father would call “a good face.” Nothing menacing or malignant seemed to have ever inhabited it. He hadn’t missed any meals in his life either, which said something about his stability.

Let’s go, he said.

Down the beach they walked, the big man, who said his name was Jerry SomethingVeryComplicated, (Izkamakawiwo’ole!), leading the way. The beach was longer than it looked from where he’d lain in his incredibly comfy beach lounger. There was a narrow, shallow river emptying into the ocean that they needed to cross. On the other side of the river there were no chairs, no umbrellas. The place seemed still wild.

This part of the beach for da locals, said Jerry, as if to explain.

Does that mean you can’t go to the beach on the hotel side? asked Yolo.

Who can afford it? said Jerry, shrugging.

The beach made a curious turn to the left, around some black, deeply pitted lava rocks. Out of sight of the hotel there was anchored a small, battered fishing boat. They walked toward it. As they came closer to it and because he was looking at the boat and not at the ground, Yolo almost stumbled over a young man lying on the sand. He seemed so peaceful, napping there in the sun, that Yolo could not believe he was dead.

The shock on his face must have been apparent.

He dead, bradda, yeah, said Jerry.

The Curious Thing

The curious thing about the grandmother medicine was that people would take it, even though it tasted ghastly. Even more curious was that it continued to taste horrible, in fact more and more horrible the longer you took it. By now Kate could feel the muscles of her throat contract just thinking about it. If she actually saw it in the shaman’s bottle, she wanted to vomit. Armando laughed at them each time he called them to circle. They all came looking pitiful, he teased them, like goats going to the butcher. He pretended to be unmoved by the disgusting flavor of the medicine, and drank some each time they journeyed. Tonight Kate sat facing the river, which splashed lazily down below their palapa.

She was feeling weak from the continuous internal cleansing of the day before. Everyone else also seemed pale and less than steady on their feet. It was extremely hot; even so, because of parasites living in the sand and poisonous snakes and who knows what all, they were required to wear tall rubber boots most of the time. Entering the large ceremonial palapa they removed their boots and left them outside. Everyone stretched their bodies, settling into their respective seats, and wriggled and massaged their toes.

When it was her turn to take the medicine, she asked, as she always did, for help for the humans of the planet and for the coming generations and for the animals and plants and rocks. She asked that she be guided to knowledge of how to act in the world for the highest good of all. She asked that the medicine accept her and do no harm. She called on the Grandmother Spirit to protect her, while she was being taught. With a tightening of her throat, which she consciously acknowledged and willfully relaxed, she drank the medicine in a gulp. Even so, she gagged. What was its flavor? Worse than any kind of excrement, surely, she thought.

And people had willingly taken this medicine for thousands of years! Repugnant as it was. How could she not love these people? After everyone, including Armando, had taken the medicine, there was a languid, hazy interlude. A feeling of: It is done. Whatever happens now, there will be no turning back. She particularly appreciated this time; it was like being in a small boat, all together, and knowing you would travel the length of the river together and hopefully reach your destination and with good fortune land in a place that welcomed you.

The New Yorker was the first to head for the bushes. Rushing out without his boots or his flip-flops, which lay beside the entrance. Soon they could hear him vomiting. That triggered one of the women, who went out, slowly, calmly, carefully bending over to place her flip-flops on her feet. Next, the man from Utah, his tall body slightly stooping going out the low entrance, his head brushing the palm fronds that formed the palapa’s top. And then the rest of them, one by one, left the circle. Some went to their holes and leaned over them. Others wandered out into the forest. She went to the forest. Found a tree that looked like an ancient woman, her head in the heavens, her feet in the earth, and, touching it lightly to ask permission, she threw up whatever poisons might be left in her body.

Returning, she noticed the light had changed. It was now late afternoon. They would be sitting for at least four hours before the mosquitoes began their nightly hunt. But this did not concern her very much, though she was allergic to insect bites and was already swollen from them. She had no mirror but she felt her eyes were almost swollen shut. She closed them.

The first time she had gone to visit Grandmother she had been fleeing the frightened animal aspect of herself. It seemed to her that humans were now in the position of deer or antelope or buffalo or polar bears. There wasn’t any longer a safe place for any of them. And yet she hated being afraid because fear was so paralyzing. She knew that if human beings, on a global level, gave in to the fear of being wiped out, disposable, like all the other creatures, they would never be able to think and feel their way out of their dilemma.

And so she had sat in a car crossing a long silver bridge, holding a new friend’s hand. This was a woman who seemed to be exactly where she was. In a state of near catatonic panic. Let’s go ask the trees! this woman had said, the first time Kate looked her in the eye and said: Hi, what’s happening?