Hello, Hilo

OK so when we last left our hero or anti-hero or whatever the hell he is, he'd just come in for a landing at Hilo International Airport, from whence he would conduct the search for a missing person named Wendell. So w/o further ado... ("Ado" huhuhuh...)

Once we’d deplaned and were walking toward the terminal, (this being a puddle jumper and all, there was no fancy corridor connecting you to the gate,) the air was warm and gelid. The intensity of the wind and rain surprised me. The water seemed to cling to things in viscous drops, instead of sinking in and dampening. (Tht was just an impression, I guess, because by the time I left Hilo International Airport, my bag and myself were pretty well soaked.)

The airport’s single terminal is about the size of the lobby of a large Howard Johnson’s. Come to think of it, it even feels like a Howard Johnson’s, or maybe a small convention center of some sort—though it’s hard to say why, exactly. There’s nothing specific— just glimmers in the hard, clean light (which makes everything seem too defined, too solid,) or in the shallow industrial carpet. Here and there are self-consciously "rural" handrails made up of unfinished logs and branches.

It took me a minute to figure out that there were no luggage carousels in the terminal. I was starting to worry that there weren’t any at all, which seemed impossible. So I just followed the crowd, and that proved to be the right thing to do.

Here’s one more unusual feature of Hilo International Airport: the luggage carousels are outdoors. There's a roof over the area, and it’s thoroughly illuminated by ugly fluorescent lights. Underneath them, there' s a chaos of moving shapes—particularly disorienting thanks to elongated shadows. The lamps do a fine job of attracting a wide assortment of the island’s many, often quite large insects. Not a bad thing, cause you better start getting used to them as quickly as possible. You’re going to run into them fairly often.

All of my fellow passengers seemed familiar with the whole procedure here, and had already scooped up their luggage and disappeared into the rain. Pretty soon, I was the only one left, watching the belt of the one operating carousel wind past me. A few bags lay on it, but none of them were mine. I waited, refusing to allow the slightest doubt. At some point, my luggage would join the other shit on the belt. It was an immutable fact. Except truth be told, the first time the belt went around without any sign of my luggage, I knew it wasn't going to show. I am pessimistic by nature, but somewhere in the back of my head I knew. The luggage, most painfully, my beloved flamenco guitar, never showed.

Slowly, my dulled wits began questioning the wisdom of placing the carousel outdoors. Might not that lead to a higher incidence of theft? And like, why was there fucking no one here to monitor the area? (Not that it would've done much good. If someone was going to walk w/ yr. luggage, it would be fairly easy to do at any airport I'd visited.)

And then I saw this stall at the edge of the roofed-in area. It was about the size of a toll booth, and inside it, a young, reasonably good looking Hawaiian man was talking on the phone. I wasn't sure if he'd even noticed I was there, watching that goddamn carousel go round and round.

I sashayed over, preparing myself for the usual airline service rigamarole. Once I was closer, I noticed a small set of black and white security monitors. The guy gestured for me to wait, then after a moment, told his party goodbye. He wrote something down on a piece of paper. Then he looked up at me, smiled and nodded. I told him my luggage didn't seem to be there.

He said, "Oh," then began ponderously writing something else down. It seemed to take around three minutes—though I'm sure it wasn't really that long—for him to fill out two lines of stuff. He passed the document to me—a report form that I needed to fill out. In the meantime, he said he'd see if my bags could be found in Honolulu. His theory was that the bags had been placed on a later flight.

I was writing out a description my luggage when it occured to me that he might very well be right. Back at O'Hare International Airport, when I was checking in, a seemingly robotic clerk had cooly told me that she could only send my bags as far ahead as Honolulu. It wasn't very clear why. Something about switching airlines to Aloha, which seemed odd to me, since in my experience, they'll forward your bags even if you switch. This automaton wasn't particularly willing to explain or discuss it beyond that—she just opened a can of DW-40 and began slurping the stuff down. It pissed me off, but eager to move things along, I said yeah whatever, figuring it'd be only a moderate hassle really.

OK, so then, when I got to Vegas and had to check in again, a much friendlier clerk asked me about my luggage. When I told her about the cybernetic bitch at O'Hare, she shook her head and said that whole thing was bullshit. She asked me what my bags looked like, then disappeared through a door behind the counter. She was gone for a little while, and although there were several other clerks there, I could feel the eyes of my fellow passengers boring into the back of my head for holidng things up. When she came back, she had my luggage with her. She put new tags on it and said it would be sent on to Hilo. I thanked her profusely and moved along on my way.

So now, in Hilo, I figured that maybe somehow in this modified luggage arrangement, my stuff had gotten delayed, or worst, sidetracked, or really bad, lost. I wasn't happy, but not generally the sort of person to take it out on everyone around me, I didn't lay into the guy in the booth—nor this other guy—fatter, shorter, paler, in some sort of dark blue uniform—who kept going through a door next to the carousel. He pissed me off more, because I knew he'd watched me standing there, as he'd gone into and out of the door several times and hadn't said a single word to me.

The guy in the booth was put on hold. He gave me a sympathetic smile, so I asked him what it was like to work as the luggage guy. He seemed surprised, (maybe a little grateful?) that I'd asked this question. He said it sucked—as I'd expected he would. He said that people were always pissed off, and he understood that, but they just like freakin' attacked him half the time. And I could just picture the poor fucker surrounded by fat white tourists, ready to flay him over their missing bags. Since he was young and Hawaiian, I figured he probably caught even worse shit than he would've otherwise. I resolved, to the best of my ability, to be patient with this kid, slow moving as he was.

He hung up, and without a word, started typing some shit into the computer. I asked him what was up with the luggage. As he typed, he told me that they hadn't found it in Honolulu. It was probably on the next plane. Unfortunately, mine was the last flight of the day, so... no luggage till tomorrow. (And of course, it might've been lost for good.)

He printed up a receipt for me, and then nodded, as if to say goodbye. I said, "So, like, how will I know if my luggage turns up, and when might I expect to hear from the airline about it?"

He told me they'd call—probably in the morning. In yellow, he highlighted a number on my receipt. "Call them if you haven't heard anything by noon or so."

I asked him if he knew where the rental car pickups are at. He pointed off into the rain beyond, where I could now the airport parking lot. There was a long line of booths along a raised strip of concrete. It was thoughtfully covered with a little overhang, so that you, the non-booth having party, would not get completely doused while conducting your business.

It occurred to me that I'd had some good luck also. Not only had I packed my essential overnight shit in my carryon, (a change of clothes, some personal "toiletries," etc.) but I'd just missed having the rental car places close on my ass. I really had been on the last flight of the day. The whole fucking airport closes down around 10, and the rental places only stay open for another hour after that.

The only soul in sight, I approached the long line of stalls. All of them were lit, and most of them were populated by young Hawaiian women. They all seemed to be reading or talking on the phone. The stalls appeared claustrophobic, but definitely more expansive than the space that poor fucker in the luggage booth was allowed.

My place was about half the way down the line. The girl behind the counter was friendly and more effusive than my friend from the luggage booth. She was thin and pretty—with a bad blond dye job that had left an orangish brown tint in her long, wavy hair. She wore dark red lipstick and smiled with very white teeth. Holy fuck, she was young! All of them—the rental car and clerks—like barely 20, if that. I wondered how safe a girl like her really was, alone in this place at night—though she was one of many clerks located up and down this line of booths.

The light inside the stall was florescent—pale, harsh and depressing. It isolated us in the dark and the rain, like we were on some sort of island. She tapped away at a computer that appeared to consume half the space inside the stall. She pulled up my reservation and began compiling a sheaf of papers, printing up some and producing other carbon-copy type forms from somewhere else. In the end, the stack was approximately 3' tall. She x-ed the various points where I was supposed to sign or initial, then pointed out other blanks I was supposed to fill in with information.

I got to work, while she explained the various insurance options available to me. I said thanks but no thanks, and was just finishing up with the paper work when the villain from Godzilla vs. Gigan swooped down onto the counter. “Gleeagh!” I said. Shocked ‘tho I was, I had enough presence of mind to be surprised that the booth had not collapsed under his (its?) weight. The clerk glanced at this gargantuan horror, then, somehow, brushed it away with her hand. "Termite," she said.

Later, upon reflection, I decided that my mind—over-taxed by surprise and exhaustion—had exaggerated the size of the insect. Still, it had been pretty fucking big—maybe 3"? And the longer I was in Hawaii, the more I realized that a lot of the classic insects that you found on the mainland came in economy sizes here. (The ants I saw—and I saw plenty of them—were the only exception. They were of that tiny red variety that one seems to encounter pretty much everywhere in the continental U.S.)

But so anyway, I checked, signed, filled in blanks, and then passed them on to the young lady. She handed me my copy of the receipt and a mass of other papers. I was tired and it would’ve been awkward to set down my carryon, so I just kept the scraps of paper wadded up in my hand. They quickly amalgamated into a soggy mass. One form she didn't point out to me was that little diagram of the vehicle that you mark up with dings and scratches and dents and such, after examining it at the time of rental. Not sure if this was more potentially implicating for me or them, but I didn't notice the white, yellow and pink copies of this form for some time. They remained joined and unmarked, as I carried them with me on my travels.

The clerk asked me where I was staying, how long I was gonna be on the island, etc. I answered: Akiko's #1 Best Buddhist Bed & Breakfast and about 2 weeks, respectively. To her credit, she didn't so much as blink at the name of my lodging place. She'd never heard of it, and so had no clear idea where the it was. I showed her the directions I'd received by email, and she produced a crappy little magazine-type guidebook. It contained a pretty skeletal map of Hilo and its environs, which a few landmarks, as well as the grocery stores, department stores, and restaurants the average tourist would want.

On the map, she traced a path with a ball point pen. That would get me to the general area of the B&B at least. After that, I'd have to rely on my directions and my luck. It was a rural area, and the streets might be a little weird.

Before I left, she asked me if I was vacationing. I said, "Well, it's sort of a working vacation." I told her about my luggage, and she was genuinely (or so it seemed) surprised and sympathetic. She wished me a pleasant visit, and I thanked her. Then she directed me toward the area where all the rental cars were parked. I found my crappy Neon in its numbered, rainy spot. Then I orientated myself inside the car and was on my way. All I had to do now was find Akiko's #1 Best Buddhist Bed & Breakfast.

More on the way...