Pau Hana was one of the oldest tiki bars in America. It had been established during the first tiki craze in the 1950s, survived the ghastly era of fern bars and Long Island Iced Teas with its Mai Tais intact, and emerged on the other side with a new generation of fans.
The huge restaurant, with a dark bar that looked like the inside of a sailing ship and a lush garden in back, was a tropical island unto itself. Fort Lauderdale had grown up around it, but if you half-closed your eyes and ignored the looming furniture store next door and the surrounding traffic, you could imagine you were in a Polynesian paradise.
I’d been to Pau Hana once before. Aunt Celestine and I had stopped here during a road trip when I was a teenager. It was shortly after my parents sent me to live with her in Bohemia Beach, after Hurricane Katrina devastated our world in New Orleans.
Pau Hana was one of the reasons I fell in love with Florida. It had seemed so exotic at the time, yet somehow quintessentially Florida, especially among the palms and orchids in the garden. The dazzling floor show, with dancers representing islands and cultures of the Pacific, had completely captivated me. So did a sip of my aunt’s Moonkist Coconut, served in a real coconut.
I’d heard a lot about Pau Hana’s drink menu over the years, but I hadn’t been fully initiated into the tiki cocktail revival until recently. I was excited to have this chance to come back as a mixologist and, let’s face it, a demanding drinker.
“Happy hour is killer here,” Barclay told us, nodding toward the bar off the lobby. He’d grown up in nearby Miami, and his parents lived here now, so he knew the place better than the rest of us.
I blinked, trying to get adjusted to the murky interior. It was always nighttime in Pau Hana.
“I doubt we’ll have time for happy hour today,” Neil said, adjusting the strap of the big bag of bar tools he carried on his shoulder. “I’ll owe you all a drink if we can get through the next few hours. Fizz said he’d meet us in the kitchen.”
A white-suited host greeted us and volunteered to lead us back. As we walked, I gawked at the layers of vintage South Pacific decor in the multiple dining areas that surrounded the stage. The prevailing theme was dark, carved wood, from the posts supporting the roof to the artifacts hanging from the walls.
Thatched overhangs made it seem as if huts were tucked under the high ceiling. Above, hanging lamps in a rainbow of muted colors and island styles added to the ambience. There was no audience yet, but a smattering of what I presumed were Hookahakaha volunteers and Pau Hana staff scrambled around, preparing for the event that would start later this afternoon.
As we pushed through the “in” door of the kitchen, the mysterious island lair was left behind in favor of a vast, brightly lit, colorless warren of prep and cooking areas. It was maybe 2 p.m., and the event was in two hours. Happy hour started at five. And already dozens of kitchen staffers were chopping and prepping huge bowls of food for the Asian-inflected Pau Hana menu.
The host led us through a maze, eventually pointing us around a corner to a smaller prep area next to one of the biggest ice makers I’d ever seen. The niche was stuffed with several prep tables, sinks, a door labeled “storeroom,” refrigerators and boxes of produce.
There we found Fizz Martin clutching a small, rough wooden box branded with an old-looking logo of a ship and a faint “JAMAICA.” He was animatedly talking to a cluster of about ten tiki types. No mistaking the clothes of the tiki 'ohana. It was like a radioactive flower garden had blossomed in the gray backstage of Pau Hana. Plus they had badges around their necks that indicated they were all convention staff or VIPs.
Fizz looked slightly older than his publicity photos, close to forty, I guessed—dimpled and boyishly good-looking, but with a little gray in his wavy, longish, light brown hair and goatee. A pinkness of cheek suggested he’d imbibed early and often.
“Almost four hundred men came out to fight the fire,” Fizz was telling the group in his charming Australian accent. His voice crescendoed with his unfolding tale. “They fought the fire with pumps and with boats. Rivers of flaming rum poured out of the warehouse, still on fire, sizzling into the waterways that would take the burning liquor to the Thames and oblivion. There was blue fire on the river. The firemen got drunk from the fumes!” There were exclamations among his rapt audience, and Fizz’s gray eyes shone with excitement.
“The entire city of London glowed to the light of rum fire that night. Some firefighters were set afire themselves when flaming rum sprayed out at them, and they had to be doused with chemical extinguishers. They battled the blaze to exhaustion but in vain. The fire burned for almost three days, fueled by some four million pounds’ worth of rum, the equivalent of more than 375 million dollars today. But it was truly priceless, a huge stock of spirits from the Caribbean. Some sixty-five hundred casks went up in flames, the jewels of the West Indian rum trade.”
Now the crowd moaned in mourning, Barclay among them. He must have seen how confused I was, because he leaned over and whispered in my ear. “He’s talking about the London docks fire in 1933.”
“Oh, right.” I pretended to understand as Fizz continued.
Neil, on my other side, harrumphed and put down his tool bag, either unimpressed or already well-acquainted with the facts.
“To this day,” Fizz said, “we don’t know the true extent of what was lost. Many of the records were destroyed in the Blitz during World War II. The assumption is that all of that rum from the famous Rum Quay is lost to time.”
As more among the audience murmured for the elixirs they would never taste, Fizz’s voice dropped to a whisper. “But I know a secret, and I’m going to share it with you.” The tikiphiles were immediately silenced by his theatrical urgency and leaned forward so they wouldn’t miss his revelation. I found myself doing the same thing, caught up in the drama.
“The historians’ assumptions are wrong,” Fizz said so softly, he was almost drowned out by the drone of the air-conditioning. “Because right here in my hands is the last known bottle of London dock rum to survive the fire in 1933.”
“Holy hell,” Neil breathed as the rest of the crowd gasped, shouted and applauded.
“Oh, Fizz!” one slim woman with shortish, white-blond hair said from the heart of the crowd. In her thirties, she wore all black and had an aging punk rocker vibe, and her eyes shone with emotion. She also looked vaguely familiar. Had I seen her at Cocktailia in New Orleans?
“That’s wild,” Barclay said under his breath.
“Why isn’t your head exploding?” I asked him as the tiki folks shouted questions at Fizz. “Isn’t that like the holy grail of rum collectors?”
“One, my head is exploding, and yeah, it would’ve been the holy grail, but no one thought it truly existed till now. I mean, I heard stories when I visited London last summer, but I didn’t know what to believe. This is amazing.”
“And my bartenders are here! Neil!” Fizz called out.
Of course Neil knew Fizz. Neil knew everybody.
“Nice to see you again,” Neil said with a smile, reaching out to shake Fizz’s hand. At least, the hand that didn’t have an iron grip on the wooden box.
Neil introduced us all. Fizz ignored Barclay’s enthusiasm, kissed Melody’s hand with a little too much effusion, eyeballed my cleavage, and perused Luke with amusement as Neil said, “And here’s Luke Wisnia, your dogsbody for the day.”
“Ha, Twilight,” Fizz said with a grin.
“What?” Luke looked confused.
“You look like one of those teenage vampires. I’m calling you Twilight. OK, Twilight. You stick with me like glue. And if I don’t have this box in my hands, then you have the box. Someone must be with the box at all times.”
“Um, I’m not a security guard,” Luke said as Barclay and Melody snickered.
“Don’t worry, man,” Fizz said. “We’re surrounded by people, including your team. And hardly anyone knows what’s in this box. And none of you are going to tell, right?” Fizz called out to the rest of the tikiphiles, who were starting to break up to attend to whatever tasks awaited them before Fizz’s opening program.
A chorus of assent seemed to calm Luke a bit.
“I have some questions about that rum,” Barclay said as our team gathered around Fizz.
“Later, my friend. You guys have a drink to make for me, right?”
“For you and a hundred and fifty other people,” Neil said. “It’s from your book. The Molokai Mermaid.”
“Oh, that’s a tasty one,” said the blond woman I’d overheard earlier, her wide, light brown eyes alight with enthusiasm.
Fizz reached out and wrapped an arm around her, pulling her close. “You know my wife, Kim, right?”
Neil shook her hand, and we all said hi. “You were at the awards at Cocktailia, weren’t you?” I asked.
“Good memory,” said Kim, smoothing Fizz’s rumpled hair. “We won best American cocktail bar that night for our New York place.”
“One of my proudest moments. So were you surprised, honey?” Fizz asked Kim.
“I’ll say! Just when I think you can’t surprise me any more, you actually track down a bottle of London dock rum!” He grinned and pulled her in for a quick kiss. “You’ll have to have a special case built for it,” she added.
“Well, I have an even bigger surprise. I’m going to let people taste it.”
Her eyes widened. “You what?”
“You’ll see.” He laughed.
What did Fizz have planned? Kim seemed about as clued in as I was. I guess that’s what you get if you marry the equivalent of a circus ringmaster.
“Get to work, you guys,” Fizz said. “I want to go over my presentation one more time. Twilight, you’re with me. Kim, can you supervise these fine mixologists?”
“Sure,” she said as a less than happy Luke followed Fizz. “But I think Val will be more help.”
A woman who’d been hovering on the edge of our group moved closer. “I was just waiting until Mr. Martin finished entertaining us.” Her dry tone matched her expression. I guessed she was about thirty and almost as tall as Barclay, our tallest member. (I was the shortest.) She had bright pink hair cut short with bangs that fell into her pale face and heavy eye makeup.
“Great to see you, Val,” said Neil. My radar activated at his warm tone. How did he know her? “What have you been up to?”
“Consulting, these days. And supervising the cocktails for Hookahakaha.”
“Miss your bar?”
“Sometimes. But this kind of work gets me out of New York regularly, which isn’t a bad thing.”
She introduced herself to the rest of us, and I learned her name was Val Helena. I knew that name. She’d owned a fabulous craft cocktail bar in New York, got written up in all the magazines, but it went under a few years ago.
“I’ve got stacks of limes and oranges awaiting your ministrations,” she said. “You ready?”
Now that the small crowd had cleared, I could see the boxes of fruit looming like the tower at our hotel. Holy crap.
Neil elbowed me. “Ready?”
I turned to him. “I think so?”
Val laughed. “This is nothing. I’ve ordered ten thousand limes for the weekend.”
I tried to contain the launch of my eyebrows. “Great.”
“Why don’t you start squeezing the citrus? Keep count,” Neil said to me. “I’ll get you final numbers in a sec.”
Barclay and Melody got to work making the garnishes from orange slices, cherries and mermaid-tail picks. With Kim looking over his shoulder, Neil spent a few minutes double-checking his calculations for the batched drink, given we had to fill a hundred and fifty cups (“totally biodegradable,” Val told us). Kim went off to check the projector setup, and Val helped with the garnishes.
I spotted a coat rack with a couple of clean white aprons on it and grabbed one. Wearing that and thin vinyl gloves extracted from a box on the counter, I started slicing and squeezing. With one of Pau Hana’s electric juicers, of course. It wasn’t like I was behind my bar in Bohemia on a slow night, where I’d lovingly squeeze each lime fresh as I crafted a cocktail.
Neil oversaw the mixing of the light and dark rums, the juices and the allspice dram in a big, clear bucket as we lined up the cups. Then he got out his Lewis bag, filled it with ice cubes and started pounding it with a mallet. It was a noisy, violent way to make crushed ice, but it was also snobbishly vintage, so it was perfect for Neil.
I couldn’t help sneaking glances as he slammed the hammer over and over into the canvas, shattering the ice inside. There was wiry muscle built into his trim frame, and I’d had only teasing glimpses of that body so far. And his nerdy focus was incredibly sexy. So sue me for looking.
By the time I was done producing a couple of gallons each of lime and orange juice, you could’ve licked my glasses and gotten your daily dose of vitamin C. Beyond the noise of the kitchen, I could hear the rumble from the restaurant—the guests were arriving.
Fizz appeared with Luke in tow. Luke clutched the wooden box with the London dock rum and also had a big bag that looked like a padded cooler slung over his shoulder. He seemed disgruntled and nervous.
“You ready?” Fizz asked us, peering into the clear, square buckets. He looked up at Melody and winked. “Dip me up one of those, sweetheart.”
Barclay rolled his eyes. Luke’s face went sour. Neil, still flushed from beating the hell out of the cubes, showed no reaction as he scooped crushed ice into a cup and handed it to Melody.
As Fizz hovered, she ladled in the drink and garnished it, then handed it over. Fizz put his hand over hers as he eased the cup out of her grasp, bathing her in his glowing gaze. Melody just quirked her mouth into a half smile and raised an eyebrow.
Fizz took the cup, regarding it with pursed lips. “These are better in a tiki mug, but whatcha gonna do?” He tipped up the drink, drained it in one go, smacked his lips and let out a satisfied sigh. “Thank you, darlin’,” he told Melody. “If I do say so myself, I make a damn good drink. OK, Twilight. I want you in the wings with that thing. Everyone’s in place. Time to serve!”
“Hang on a minute,” Val said.
Fizz looked her in the eye, meeting her glint of hostility with one of his own. “You have a problem?”
The lean, tall cocktail manager crossed her arms. “No, but I don’t want to start serving until after you’ve started. It’s dark enough in there. I don’t need our people tripping over everyone still milling around.”
“Not a problem, because I’m starting right now. So serve.”
I didn’t like the way he said serve.
Val didn’t say anything at all, just stared him down till he spun on his heel and headed around the corner and out of sight, trailed by Luke.
I could’ve sworn I heard Val say “dick” under her breath.