Spokane
Way I figure, before the first Hawaiians became Hawaiians, it was them back in Fiji or Tonga or wherever and they had too many wars with too many kings and some of the strongest looked at the stars and saw a map to a future they could take for themselves. Broke their backs making themselves canoes to cut through forty-foot swells and sails big enough to make a fist out the wind and then they got free from their old land. Goodbye old kings goodbye old gods goodbye old laws goodbye old power goodbye limits. Came a time in all their salty tattoo-muscle nights on the water when they seen the white light of the moon over the new land of Hawai‘i and they was like: This. This is ours. All us, all now.
That’s me that first night in Spokane. For real I felt all the kings that came before me in a heavy way, like they was right inside my heart, like they was chanting through my blood. I could see them with me, even if my eyes didn’t close. We were the same, me and them: I went launching across the big gap of sky between Hawai‘i and the mainland, seen the big grids of mainland city lights from the plane window, skyscrapers and highways that just kept going and going, all gold and white. For me they was just like those navigating stars for the original Hawaiians, pointing the direction to what’s mine. When I stepped off the night shuttle to Spokane and stood in front the clean lawns and new brick buildings and saw the coaching staff ready to greet me as one of the top freshman basketball recruits in the whole country I was like: all me, all now. King me, motherfuckers.
Before, back in Hawai‘i, all everyone wanted was for me to believe in Noa, to raise him up. Like my job was to be his keeper, to be second place and help him get to the finish line.
Hate to break it to you, but I don’t fit in second place.
And for what? It’s not like Noa ever got us nothing to show for it, Mom and Dad still hurting for money at the end of the month. Same thing all over the islands. Only way you get out of something like that is to be so good the only thing anyone can do is pay you. And pay you big. That’s what I knew I was finally gonna do when I got to Spokane.
This started in, what, fall 2004. Only thing that mattered was basketball. Captains ran the off-season work and so we was all in the arena, upstairs where the track is, wall squats and wind sprints, then back to the weight room. Guys was asking if I’d ever seen a place like this, rows and rows and rows of clean bleachers for thousands of fans, the weight-room facilities with top-end machines and new paint on the racks, and I was like, Just because I’m from the islands you think I never seen nothing like this. But, then, it was true, too, not because the islands but because Lincoln High. I only seen facilities this way when we was playing away games at Kahena or the other rich-ass prep schools. So, yeah, I seen a place like this, but never before was it mine.
All the halls and laboratories and commons like they got fresh paint every other year, pretty little bookshop with all its way-too-fucking-high prices. But everywhere I swear except in the locker room the university was white as milk. I saw brown people on the sidewalk and I was like, Thank God, I was starting for think I was the last one left.
And the classes? Didn’t even know what I’d signed up for, serious, someone from the front office of the team took care of registration, and the homework I got help on, guys on the team tipped me off to finding a tutor first week, sophomore girl if I can help it, big eyes toothpick jeans cross around her neck, like that. She’ll help out, they said, She’ll know who we are. And it was just like they said. I had to write down the numbers and words myself, sure, but if my brain was there it was on the scoop of her elbow, the freckles across her nose. Gotta love college.
But basketball, we went hard. Every day, all the time. Fifteen of us on the grind ten times harder than I ever did back home. Just balling all the time, the tamp tamp tamp of the basketball into that polished wood, the perfect chirp of our shoes. We ran one-on-ones, we ran two-on-twos, we ran two-on-ones. Contested mid-range jumpers and turnarounds and arc shooting drills. This was a whole new level, though. Guys on the team was all way quicker and stronger and smarter than anyone I ever played against back at Lincoln, now I’m playing men instead of kids, and for that first year I felt it. They all had a step and an inch more in the air than me, half my stuff was getting blocked or picked, and it was almost like the atmosphere around me would sink and get soft.
Be bigger. Be stronger and faster. I had to.
After practice, there’d be like four or five of us in the cafeteria, knees icing in fat blisters of plastic sports wrap, staring at our plates of limp beef broccoli, no hunger since we was all still on the afterburn of whatever bull-ring-type drill coach had just put us through. The greasy smell of burnt meat filling the cathedral ceiling of the dining hall, the cold of the tabletop, it was all huli-huli in my head. Made me feel faded even though I was sober as a Jehovah.
“I think I just fell asleep with my eyes open,” Grant said.
“You did,” DeShawn said, “I seen it. Me, I’m just trying to keep from pissing myself. How am I supposed to take a leak when I got all this in the way?” He jiggled his ice-packed knees. “They ice up our knees like this, they should give us some diapers, too.”
“You’re, what, rehydrating or something?” Grant asked, nodding at the XL cup DeShawn was drinking from. “This kid’s always trying to rehydrate, but first thing in the morning he’s drinking Diet Coke.” They was roommates, white-ass Grant with his Stockton wigger thing going on and DeShawn from L.A.
“I need the caffeine,” DeShawn said, like he was apologizing.
“Drink coffee, fool.”
“Tastes like your mama.”
“Come on,” Grant said. “I’m tryna relax, here.”
“You been relaxing all semester,” DeShawn said, “with your history classes and all that. All I can think about is Business Calc. Midterm in two days and I’m supposed to study tonight? My brain feels like I been hotboxing.”
“Like a balloon, right? Like if your neck wasn’t holding it on.”
“Yeah.”
“Grant’s head always feels like that,” I said. “I bet he was the kid eating glue in the back of the class.”
“Him in elementary with his big ears,” DeShawn said. “I can see it.”
“Elementary nothing,” I said. “I’m talking about last week.”
DeShawn and Grant both cracked up, like howling, bending forward over the table, other guys, too.
That was it—that feeling. I was starting for get inside something then, I was part of those guys. We was out on that court bleeding and scraping and working together, the way they’d say, Good, get that next pass a little stronger, thread that here, or when I did finally sink a few jumpers they was like, That, do that again, every time—I knew they believed in me. They saw what I was, what I was gonna be.
What was back home? I was calling Mom and Dad from the start of the semester, usually sitting on the couch we’d shoved under our lofted dorm bed, the couch all avocado checker pattern with cigarette-burn freckles and the wall opposite with the mini-fridge. Chicken-scratch sound of my roommate, Price, writing out his homework—he didn’t get a laptop, just like me, maybe the only two guys at school without computers, it’s like I never get a break from being reminded where I came from—and I would talk with everyone on the phone, Mom Dad Noa Kaui, one at a time.
“So, what, how’s the weather?” I would ask Dad, every time, because I know he loved to laugh at my cold ass and say, “Brah, it’s all good, every day, me and Mom and Kaui and Noa at the beach last weekend, sun in the morning and rain at night, just perfect. How’s the land of shave ice? You lick a pole and get your tongue stuck yet?” And then he’d giggle and say, “Nah nah nah. Tell me how’s it going.”
And he would tell me small-kind something, and then Mom would get on and she’d do the same, but both of ’um pretty quick got to the point where they was all like, You gotta see what your brother is doing back here. Every time, every call, it always got there, no matter what I did. They’d say how even the teachers didn’t know what for do with Noa, he was burning through upper-division Kahena classes whether it was chemistry or Hawaiian language or AP calculus like it wasn’t nothing. How had him in the Honolulu Advertiser for his perfect SAT scores and there was all these fat envelopes and e-mails and calls from colleges storming into the house, how they was trying for get him taking classes at the university already. And they was saying probably Stanford was where he was going.
I hated this part of the call. I wanted for know and didn’t want for know what he was doing. Especially what he was doing doing, his kahuna abilities, right? But still yet, when Mom was talking to me, she’d usually be all about some award Noa was getting, his new special classes or whatever, and yet they never said nothing about that other part of him, the part we all still didn’t fully understand. “Sometimes I wish I knew what was going on inside of him,” Mom would say. “Does he tell you anything?”
First couple of times she did that—asked me about him, like me and him were talking with each other behind her back, the way normal brothers do, I guess—I thought she didn’t understand how things was.
I snapped this one time. “You know,” I said, “maybe I don’t believe in him so much anymore. Not the way you do.”
“There’s nothing to believe,” Mom said. “You’re going to lie about what you’ve seen with your own eyes?”
“I’m not saying what is or isn’t here,” I said. “But how come I never felt anything like that myself? How come if there’s gods they’re not in all of us?”
“Where’s this coming from?” Mom asked. “Haoles getting to you? You never talked this way before.”
“It’s just I figure you’re not seeing the right things,” I said. “Full-ride scholarship, Mom. People that come here go early in the NBA draft. Every year. Maybe you’re not gonna see it until I bring in that first fat check, though.”
“All I asked is whether Noa was talking to you or not,” Mom said. I let her squash it. Maybe I don’t feel anything the way you feel it because I’m the only one paying attention to how the world works, I wanted for say.
“Noa doesn’t tell me nothing special, Mom.” Which was true. When me and him talked on the phone—you could hear Mom and Dad make him take his turn—we’d be all like, What’s up, nothing, heard there’s gonna be some new laboratory at school, yep, I guess you and the team got a road trip coming up, yep, cool, it’s raining here right now, which sucks, I wanted to go to the beach, you got any other news, nah, me neither.
But check it: there was always this pause. That’s how I knew there was stuff happening inside him that he wouldn’t tell no one about. But I couldn’t ever cross over from where I’d gone to where he was. I don’t know why. Take me back there now and I’d jump that gap in a minute, even if it took some mahu-style crybaby speech, some sort of over-the-phone hug. You take me back now and I’d do it like nothing.
On those family calls usually I would get Kaui last. I bet Mom-guys was bribing her, like she couldn’t go Prince Kuhio mall unless she talked to me, but honestly talking with her was the best part. Surprised me as much as anyone.
I remember this one time when she was, like, “Did they do that thing where they start asking you about Noa?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Every time! Why do they always do that?”
“I swear sometimes it’s like they forget I’m here, Dean,” she said. “They tell you how I got on Principal’s List at Kahena? Or the National Honor Society?” She was still, what, fourteen or whatever, but I was always like, whoa, because of how much she sounded like she was already out the house. Almost like I could hear her comparing mortgage rates and checking off a packing list for a New York City conference with a glass of wine and Sudoku in one hand while she’s still talking story with me in the other.
“I dunno,” I said. “I think so.”
“Don’t lie.”
“What about hula?” I asked, anything to have us both not be pissed for a minute.
“Hula’s good,” she said. “I’m in the performance group. We did a thing at Ala Moana last weekend, and we have another performance coming up at the Hilton. Like we even get paid for it, but we have to give it back to the hālau.”
“Sounds like you’re mostly dancing for haoles,” I said. “You like that?”
“Oh my God, kiss my ass, Dean,” she said. “I bet that is even browner than your face now. How’s the cold weather, making you haole, right?”
“No,” I lied.
“And I bet they give you starstruck and Brazilian-waxed freshman girls to do your homework.”
Me laughing. “Come on, I was just joking about the haole hula,” I said, even though she was right and I was right, and we both knew it. Now when I think about it, seems pretty funny, how we both had each other figured out and we both hated it.
“Everyone’s always ‘just joking,’ right?” Kaui said. “Except when they’re not.”
“Easy, killer,” I said, even though I knew what she had. That hunger, that rage.
I think even talking about Noa, small-kind the way we did, was still something. We had that together, our own way, you know? Mostly Kaui didn’t like me, I don’t blame her, especially later, when things was bad at Spokane and she was out on her own, college in San Diego, that time she liked me even less. But for a while when it was just us talking on the phone we’d brag a little to each other, hold each other up, stuff that no one else was gonna do for us. And I seen that even if I was the first canoe out to sea, crashing through what we figured was possible for our family, Kaui and Noa was coming right behind.
THAT FIRST YEAR, yeah, I was getting my head up and starting to hang with the other guys on the court, but I was still the backup to Rone, who was the starting two-guard and the guy everyone looked to when the games got tight. By the time sophomore season started, I was doing everything I could not to be his dick rider, hitting the weight room and the stairs and the box jumps, had the ankle weights strapped on every minute I wasn’t at practice even, calluses growing around where they rubbed my legs raw when I walked. Started for be like I fell asleep and woke up on the court, bleeding or sweating or spitting over equipment in the weight room, the cheep of shoes on the polished court floor, the flow and dip and rise, me and the ball. But nobody, the team, coach, nobody, still knew what I was.
And then there was this one night when we had a home game and they called it Hawaiian Night, where they gave every fan a plastic lei for wear in the stands and had rum punch and pineapple and shitty kalua pig at the concessions. When we stepped into the arena for warm-ups and I saw that some people in the stands must’ve known beforehand and had their cheap polyester online-bought aloha shirts, straw hats, and those stupid drinks in their hands, I wanted for punch every haole I saw in the throat.
I remember all this like I’m still playing the game right now, like the part that happened next happened in my body and keeps happening every time now, when I remember. We had Duke there that night, huge early-season game where we wanted for show everyone what we could be, but by halftime we were down by twelve and sinking.
When we were standing in the hallway, waiting for come back out for the second half warm-ups, something happened to me. Maybe it was how they had an Iz song playing on the sound system, maybe it was seeing all the aloha prints, maybe somehow the smell of bullshit concession kalua and poke got the taste of the real stuff from back home going in my mouth, maybe it was something coming from the actual Hawaiians that was in the stand—had more of ’um than I thought in Spokane—or maybe it was just something in me, rising up only because I knew where I was from and what was happening that night.
I don’t know. Something in the air. Something green and fresh and blooming, I swear I was smelling the islands, how it was when we was little, back in the valley, ferns after rain and the salty mist by the black sand beach. Almost like there was voices in my head, chanting. That same king feeling in my chest, ancient and big.
I got back on the court and I was everywhere, all at once. All the other players was exit signs I was passing on the freeway. I poked the ball away from their slow stupid fingers and crossed over and blitzed and had skyhooks and floaters and threes from so deep might as well I was taking shots from outer space. Everything went in. Like I was throwing pebbles into a lake. Coach was pissed I think because I didn’t hardly pass, I was coast-to-coast half the time, got to be that everyone on my team and everyone on the other team just stopped to watch, I swear. Whole arena like, Here he comes again.
Final buzzer goes and we win by ten and I’m right in the middle of our jumping chest-beating mob on the court. Whole place exploding with cheers and noise and all us on the team shoving and screaming in each other’s faces, where you can feel the heat and spit of all your brothers, like, We won. And later, when wasn’t no one left in the locker room and I started out across the campus by myself, dirty snow and wet brick walls, that feeling from the islands was still inside me, running under my skin like blood, even when the air was so cold had steam cooking off my head and my breath smoking out into the freeze.
I didn’t slow down on the court after that. More games went that way. And things started for change, about who knew me and who didn’t. Got for be that when I did my phone calls home, Mom and Dad started talking plenty about me, Mom saying how people was asking about me when they seen her at J. Yamamoto and the local news stations started following all our games, saying how I was from Hawai‘i and look at me now at the university, plenty people on the islands talking already about the playoffs and the tournament, where I’m gonna go in the draft, clapping Dad’s back during his airport shifts, How’s your son’s double-double last night, yeah? Those days, all those games after Hawaiian Night, I was holding that big feeling inside me, what woke that night at halftime, something like a hurricane, and—even if it wasn’t the same as what was in Noa?—I knew it was still giant, still powerful enough to yank my family up from that shitty house in Kalihi and set us all down someplace better.