Homeward Bound

The old neighborhood is gone. Next door used to be a thicket, home to songbirds and strutting mynahs. How sweetly it lingers in recall of a gossamer complex, X-spiders weaving their scrim over a houseless person or two and the occasional mongoose. But it’s hardly the same—no more sunbeams in foliage; it’s opaque to the south, in monolithic tribute to the will and bankroll of Stan Goodman, who made it very big in waterbeds, liberating a grateful nation from box-spring sag for a market share to bankroll twelve thousand square feet of stucco, granite, marble, glass, and steel. The front deck could be a bowling alley, and waving off the end a portly, silver-haired woman calls, “Hell-oh-oh!”

Getting to know the neighbors doesn’t take long, and some of the old crowd turn up at the grocery store or the beach or out and about. Talk is warm but sparse, what with everyone aging and the old crowd thinning, mostly returning to America or gone to more practical economies or just gone.

Gene is around, getting by on coffee and nicotine. She says she’s happy enough, after damn near crying on seeing Ravi and going whole sob on seeing Skinny. She takes walks along the road, now that it has a sidewalk. So she stops in, or he visits with flowers or something good to eat. It’s not like it was, practical and soulful, but it’s something.

Crusty Geizen keeled over about a year and a half ago on the way home—opened his mouth and bulged his eyes halfway in from a second dive site on flat seas under blue skies, on a day recalled for clarity, with viz running two hundred feet like nobody could remember. Crusty tensed up and toppled, not to worry—gone before he hit the deck, coronary thrombosis.

Crusty met his match, which seems a blessing in hindsight. He’d confided to a group of doctors, game fellows up from the dive of a lifetime, ready to deepen the bonding process. He said he’d reached that point in life where a perfect day was four hours of work, maybe a dive trip like this one, nice people, yadda yadda and so on to the image of a crusty geezer getting a blowjob on a dash of curiosity as to who might be delivering, and the punch line: “I’m not doing not too bad. I got about two more weeks of yoga to stretch my neck.” Uproarious laughter broke like a wave on cue.

Crusty might have looked a little queasy as he gave up center stage to a surgeon from Portland, who said Hawaii is such a wonderful place, so full of surprises. “Why, I was in Waikiki last week—and I saw this hooker. Beautiful woman. She was everything you might want in a woman, physically speaking. She’s standing on the corner with this cat under her arm, and I was checking her out, thinking man, she looks good, but I got closer and saw she was holding this cat backward. I had to look twice because she had the back end up and was licking this cat’s asshole. Beautiful woman, so I says to her, I says, ‘What in the hell you wanna do that for?’ And she says, ‘Oh, that. I just blew a lawyer and I want to get the taste out of my mouth.’”

The next breaking wave took Crusty on a guffaw, what was easy for everyone to call the way he would have wanted it.

Maybe. Crusty was sixty-four. Ravi wants it some other way, wants to find a friend to sit with and talk about things and what to do. He knows what to do, but viz is down around twelve feet, so he isn’t clear on how to do it.