By the time I hit the parking lot of the Hilo branch of Wal-Mart, I was running very late, and the bad news was that I'd either have to arrive even later or forego lunch. I pulled into a nearby lot where a couple of fast food restaurants were located. There was a long line at the Subway counter. The windows of Pizza Hut didn't allow you much of a view, so I had to go inside to find out that it too was packed.
Bad luck. Under the circumstances, I decided to skip lunch, figuring I might be able to pick up something later along the way. And if not, how long could all of this possibly take? I might become hungry, but I felt OK now and figured I could hold out for a late dinner if necessary. Besides which, I had the peanuts. They'd hold me over for a while. They do when you’re at the bar, right?
I hauled ass back to Akiko's place. Unfortunately the traffic had intensified. When I finally pulled up at the bed & breakfast, I was almost an hour late.
I hurried over to the loft, but didn't even make it through the door before Akiko called to me from inside her office.
"Niko was looking for you. Could you go tell him you're here?"
With Akiko's urging, I headed over to the large house and called his name through the screen door. There was no answer.
I knocked loudly on the door. Nothing. I called louder. After a moment, I heard footsteps, and there was Niko. He wasn't especially impatient. In fact, he told me to give him about 10 minutes. He'd just taken a shower.
I headed back over to the loft. Akiko poked her head out and asked me if I'd talked to Niko. I told her that he'd asked me to wait. She thanked me for helping out w/ all of this. I said no problem and went out about lacing up my new boots and loading all the other shit I'd bought into my pack. Then I went and sat in one of the plastic lawn chairs and waited for Niko.
After a long day of travel, everything seemed surreal. I was on the Big Island of Hawaii. The luggage, the rain, being lost on that mountain road—I hadn't even had a real chance to stop and think—or even to just be in Hawaii. All of the visions I’d had of wandering languidly on a beach, maybe walking along paths in well-maintained but nevertheless lush fern growths—those images seemed hazy now, lost in daylight.
And now I had all this other shit to adjust to. I was still trying to process the strangeness (for me) of Akiko's place, not to mention of Hilo. And then there was the afternoon and evening ahead of me. Again, with no time to think, I'd been pulled in by circumstance. Again, I could've said no, but volcanoes? Lava?
I felt a small thrill at the idea. I remembered those 2 dark shapes as I'd seen them from the window of the plane last night. They seemed real, even now. Sure, they were dormant, but I could feel their influence. It was almost physical. Maybe it was my imagination, over-stimulated by a lack of sleep. I'm not one to believe in metaphysical forces, even subtle ones. And yet somehow, everything—every detail—seemed so weirdly appropriate.
Still, even if I was OK w/ where I was and enthusiastic about where I was going, I knew there was still a lot of difficult shit ahead. The drive to the park was going to be a job in itself. The full significance of traveling w/ & being responsible for a 16 year-old kid was beginning to sink in. Even under the best of circumstances, hanging out w/ a teenager was supposed to be difficult. And I didn't know how difficult. I hadn't had any real contact w/ someone that age since I'd been in high school myself. Add to that the facts that I'd just met Niko, he barely spoke English, and I barely spoke German. All in all, I was pretty sure it spelled hijinks.
And pretty soon, there he was, hauling his own pack. I opened the trunk for him and he threw it in. He was smiling, shyly, rarely meeting my eyes. A quiet kid, but easygoing, it seemed. We got in the car, and I headed off toward Hilo.
I had some trouble with the whole Highway 19/Kamehameha split. I hadn't had any trouble with it on my way to Wal-Mart, but I was still adjusting to the geography. I asked Niko to look at the map and to tell me what I should do next. But by the time he'd processed my request, (if he ever did at all,) I'd discovered that it didn't really matter. The street rejoins the highway just before you hit the big turn at the airport.
To get to Hawaii Volcanoes National Park from Hilo, you have to take Highway 11 SSE for about 30 miles. Once you get past Wal-Mart, the buildings quickly disappear, and the traffic dramatically thins. Pretty soon, it's just you and maybe a few other cars—sometimes none at all—and you can open up to a nice pace.
Somewhere in this vicinity, Niko and I struck up a conversation. It was predictably muddled, but not entirely unsuccessful. In some ways, I think it's less frustrating to attempt to communicate w/ someone whose language you don't understand at all, and vice versa, then it is to try to establish some sorta situational pidgin. If, for example, you speak some German, and the other party speaks some English, you find yourself chasing after these elusive, half-remembered pieces, and being lured into various dead-ends by words or phrases that seem equivalent but aren't. Whereas w/ someone who speaks an entirely unknown language—well there you pretty much let any notion of translation go from the outset and look for alternatives to it.
An example: Niko was very interested in the fact that I wrote. He wanted to know what I was writing about, of course. Aside from my blog and some journaling and that sorta horseshit, I also occasionally write fiction. Mind you, I am no good at it. It's something I do out of a love of writing rather than any literary aspirations. Mostly I write short stories, but here and there I work on a novel. It's wholly ridiculous—all about the metaphysical truths discovered in a guy's bowel movements--and I was having some trouble getting this across to Niko.
Part of it had to do w/ my reluctance to use the word "shit" (here Scheisse,) cuz like, you know, some people don't want you using that sorta language w/ their kids. Granted, Niko was a pretty old kid, and there seemed to be a "progressive" upper middle class parenting dynamic here. (E.g. w/o the slightest trace of irony, Niko referred to his dad as "Stefan.") Nevertheless, you never know how other people view some things, and people are often esp. sensitive where their kids are involved.
My sister, for example, was upset at a book I'd picked for my 2 year old nephew to read when he came to visit me. Walter the Farting Dog. I thought it was a hilarious, good-natured book. She was appalled by the word "fart." She said she didn't want my nephew using the word at daycare, thus leading the other parents to wonder what sorta person she was. To me this seems, uh, a bit excessive, but hey, he's not my kid.
Nevertheless, I resisted using the word "shit" until I ran out of options. Didn't help that the only other words that I could think of that had anything to do w/ shitting were Arsch, "ass," which you gotta admit, is pretty far removed from shitting, and the more pointed Arshloch, you guessed it, "asshole," which if German expletive coinage was of roughly equal value to that of English, well, asshole, shit... Which one's worse? Standards have changed, and I use both of 'em alla time anyway. Beats me.
Anyway, there we were, driving into increasingly wooded countryside, with the altitude increasing, and never have more fumbling attempts to mention taking a shit w/o the use of the word shit been made—and in some bizarre German/English linguistic hybrid at that. The conversation woulda been hilarious to watch, I'm sure. Belongs in some comedic film, maybe w/ both languages subtitled so that everyone out there could, we hope, know what the fuck is going on. I know I didn't. But so eventually it came down to shit. I just, uh, couldn't eliminate the word.
I think Niko apprehended the whole thing a long time before he made it clear that he did. I suspect that he was thinking he must've been reading me wrong--that some linguistic quirk was at work here, 'cuz like, is this guy telling me he's writing a book that, when you boil things down, is about a guy shitting?
Fact, he thought it was pretty funny, but he wanted to know what, if any, larger significance the excremental focus of the, uh, tale had. If shit had been hard to describe, satirical magical-realist stuff was even harder. He didn't know from Garcia-Marquez or Nabokov or anybody like that. In fact, and I'm not sure about this, the little fucker didn't seem to know who Kafka was! Holy shit! And he calls himself a kraut! Well, actually, I doubt he calls himself a kraut. He never did in my hearing, but you know, he is a kraut, and he didn't seem to know who Kafka was. I think. I could never quite ascertain that.
But so, OK, I mentioned Kafka and friends because just telling him what kinda story it was didn't make any sense to him—or not much anyway. His phrasing of English was so awkward that half the time I thought he was saying something entirely removed from what he meant to say. What's more, his accent was thick—not as thick, I imagine as was mine, when speaking German, but going back & forth, we got bogged down in discussing the story's tone—about which he really wanted to know. That's why I started listing off the names of authors, which largely or entirely he didn't recognize. I had a fuck of a time trying to say that these guys influenced, no, inspired, no, motivated—ah fuck—me. He didn't know any of these words. And it wasn't till about 10 minutes after we'd let the thing go that I remembered the word inspiriert. At which point, I hit myself in the forehead approximately 5714 times.
As if that wasn't bad enough, I asked him what his novel was about. Huh. Well, OK, it was about a party of adventurerers and some orcs and elves and other Tolkienalia. It had a complex narrative of both epic and human scope, as these things tend to. There was betrayal, struggles with the desire for vengeance, battles, quests, an 80 zillion year mythology type back-story etc.
I describe it this way less to belittle the kid, who I gotta say, I both admired for his ambition and imagination and just plain liked. (Plus, I'd be a hypocrite, as in my day, I spun many 20-sided die, as my 18th level paladin hacked off heads w/ his vorpal blade, etc.) (P.S. R.I.P. Gary Gygax. Just gone as of this writing.) Besides which, I'm not sure my story is as good as his. At the very least, he seems more certain about where it's going than I do about mine. I mean, fuck, he could probably give you a 100pp. synopsis on request. He probably has them lying around. And if that seems like a long synopsis, lemme just say that I'd be surprised if he pulled the whole novel off in less than 1200 pages.
Oh yeah, and did I mention that he writes poetry too—on nature subjects and about elves, etc.? He sez he finds the Hawaiian landscape inspiring for the type of story he's telling. I don't doubt it. Some places on the Big Island are at least as fantastic as any thing Tolkien dreamt up after smokin' a bowlful. (Notice how he’s holding a pipe in, like, every photograph that's ever been taken of him? Pot n' hobbits: 2 great tastes that taste great together.)
Anyway, the good news was that we had a common interest: writing, and we could work out a rudimentary sentence or two together, usually. The drive went faster, and I think Niko liked me better than he might some adults. Or maybe I'm wrong. He seemed pretty easy-going anyway, but he seemed interested in me and what I was about.
Fact, I got the sense—and maybe this is just me projecting my own analytical horseshit onto him--that he sorta looked at each of the adults around him while I was there—i.e. Akiko, Stefan and myself—as not exactly role models, but grist for the mill of looming adulthood. Dad was dad. I was a weird hippie artist type—at least that's how Stefan seemed to view me. And Akiko... Well, she definitely had a big influence on him.
When I remarked that I might like to attend morning meditation w/ Akiko, but I couldn't get myself outta bed much before 5 or so, and I always write 3pp longhand straight outta bed, (true,) he told me that meditation focused his mind, and as a result he got way more writing done. In his mind, that made the punishment of a 5 a.m. waking more than worth it. Hafta try it some time. (Unfortunately, I never made it to even 1 session while I was there.) He did seem to be on a roll.
A more sinister part of Akiko's influence was the way in which he was absorbing her taste in music. Every morning, right before she'd start in on breakfast, Akiko would put some new age muzak on an overhead speaker system. It had lotsa Chinese type harps n' percussion and that sorta jazz. It was inoffensive, but not esp. something you'd want to listen to. Unfortunately, you were sorta stuck w/ it while it was on, unless you were gonna crank yr. shit up really loud—headphones or otherwise. Like Run-DMC in the video for “Walk this Way. (Which I guess, at the end of this video, would mean you’d end up w/ some unholy union of Iggy Stooge and Yanni, or something like that.)
Anyway, this poor kid said he liked the same music as Akiko. I had a pretty strong feeling he hadn't heard it before coming to stay & that B&B. Again, a real whirlwind convert.
What's worse, aside from the new age shit, the only other music he could think of that he really liked was, gulp—if I was understanding him correctly, & I hope--River Dance! Aggggh!!! All this because I made the simple mistake of asking him if he wanted to turn on the radio. I figured he might force me listen to some crap top 40 stuff, but River Dance? Thank fuck they don't play that on the radio—or so he said. I don't know. We never bothered to turn the thing on & look for it.
See? Deeply frightening...
And I know I'm probably being an ass. I'm told I place way too much emphasis on someone's record collection as a means of getting to know him or her. (It does tell you a lot though.) I guess it's not a crime to like new age plink plunk or... even... (shudder) River Dance. (I guess.) But holy shit am I never asking him to make me a mix tape!
