I Went to Honolulu and Found Most of It Missing

I went to Honolulu and found most of it missing. 

The lead vocalist at the Blue Note in Honolulu wore a strapless black mermaid dress. It was like skin on her, fitted everywhere except at the chest, where her boobs threatened to overcome the hem.

“This song is the closest to my heart, so if you have two hands, jive along. Of course, I realize not everyone has them.”

Out of the blue she said that. Such attunement to different ability. Or had she seen the man on the balcony? 

The day before the concert at Honolulu’s Blue Note, I’d seen a man with no arms on a balcony. At least I think I had.

He was standing on a balcony of an apartment building facing the highway, statuesque. Well built. No arms and two solid stumps jutting six inches or so out of his shoulders. Our tourist bus was stalled in traffic, unluckily; I was getting a good, long look at him. But the distance between us and that wavering, pulsing air and light of Hawaii made it hard to be sure. 

The light in Hawaiʻi is like any other place. Around the beaches and parks where the rich live and hang out, it is molten vanilla. Near the airbase, off the highway, at this man’s apartment building, it is the sighing ghost of million-year-old dead forests. At first I thought I was seeing things, or not seeing things like the man’s two perfectly present arms. The man, even in silhouette, was well muscled, sturdy, standing on a balcony. Why would he be armless? 

Then our bus moved on. 

Did everyone in Honolulu know about the man on the balcony? Did the lead vocalist mean him? Was he famous, even? A local phenomenon? A freak, showpiece? Or were there many people in Honolulu missing chunks of themselves?

The lead vocalist’s black mermaid sheath kept threatening to give up the fight with her boobs, slink down her front, making her hitch it up surreptitiously at first and less subtly as the evening wore on. She couldn’t possibly be comfortable in that dress. It seemed capable of great injury to her circulation, so tightly did it ring around her waist, hips, knees. Her thighs and knees had to be smashed against each other by that dress, like the supposed mermaid tail’s solid undivided flesh, obeying the couture metaphor’s insistence. Pleated flounces below the captive knee clamp popped up in sections like flippers every time she kicked back her stiletto-heeled feet in rhythm with her song. Mermaid, or monk seal in heels.

The monk seals of Hawaiʻi were what we had come to Honolulu to save. Monk seals are a threatened species, with only about sixteen hundred of them remaining worldwide. Every day, my friends worried about the seals, the tourists stumbling in or encroaching on their terrain, the attacks on their habitat by fishing boats, plastics, pollution. We were, in particular, hoping to see one of them give birth soon. That seal mother was big with pup but late and apparently exhausted. Her lastborn was around, separation anxiety running late, regularly torpedoing his pregnant mother’s body without ceremony or notice. Anticipation and dread throbbed side by side in the environmentalist community, like the lead vocalist’s melded thighs and knees.

At the Blue Note, people were clapping, swaying, jelly rolling their hands and arms in response to the music. Everyone seemed to have both arms and hands. The legs I couldn’t see, of course, because the club was dark, and because of the tables. The lead vocalist—or should I call her nightclub singer from now on?—treated us to snippets of her biography. Divorced, with a child, activist-artist, thirty-eight. 

At concerts, do you ever wonder which band members are sleeping with each other, or is it just my dirty mind? Or at least which one’s sleeping with the singer? Drummer? Most likely? Or is it bass guitar? Or sax? Least likely? 

I went to a beach town in Oahu the next day. I was on the road of and to Aloha. I was reluctant because I didn’t care for Aloha, had never cared for it from the beginning of the trip, but my friends did and wanted me to care, to experience it and find inner peace, so I was a fellow traveler on the path to inner peace, which seemed very far off to me, but my activist friends were more optimistic. 

What did the man without arms on the balcony feel about Aloha, optimism, positive attitudes? 

How was I to think of him, anyway? Unarmed? Disarmed? Stoic? Suffering? Abject and discarded, or heroic survivor? Thinking raised tougher questions. How did he live? How did he go about the day, eat, clean himself, open doors or pick things up, touch his children’s heads, caress his wife? Did he have children or a wife? I very much hoped he had a family, a support system standing solid and serried behind him like cliffs on a boulder-strewn beach. If he didn’t, he had to eat, wash, pick things up, open doors by himself. How did he do those things? 

I thought, what do you do from one day to another if you are a man with no arms in a low-income apartment on a balcony in Honolulu on a Saturday morning, looking out at the island around you, maybe a home, maybe a place of last resort, the final port of call, the last frontier? And also, by what unknown string of connections had his shadow fallen over a concert evening at the Blue Note where the monk-seal-in-heels singer hoped everyone had enough hands to clap along with her heart’s bliss song? Because the real man with no arms was unlikely to be at the concert where the singer was kicking back her heels as she belted out notes. And if he was there, and had arms, would he clap, and for what?

I forgot him. A little. It was a long afternoon at the beach town with little to do and lots of rain, the kind of afternoon whose very emptiness short-circuits your feelings, your analytical mind, ability to engage with, absorb new surroundings. Takes you back to a past, wet, sad century, the suffering of natives. Memories of kings and queens cut off at the knees by American business. Things unhinged, uncoupled, missing. Not your own, yes, but when you are there . . .

An island is a body of land surrounded by an ocean deep and plotting on all sides with distant continents.

The day after the concert at Blue Note, the monk seal mother had still not given birth. She lay like a glistening cigar against a parapet on the beach, most people not bothering to observe the sign saying she needed a fifty-foot berth, especially since she might give birth any second. Tourists in Havaianas and strappy sandals and sneakers and barefoot went tramping, padding past her. Her flippers moved very slightly now and then, nothing of the Blue Note mermaid’s flounce in them, maybe no music in her heart either, maybe because as soon as she gave birth and returned to the water, a whole gang of seal boys and men would show up to mount and impregnate her again. 

But the monk seal is no pushover, no floor-rug fruit de mer on the sand. One mother with her pup, feeling a snorkeler getting too close, went on the warpath. The snorkeler now misses one buttock and half a shoulder. Her head might have gone missing too were it not inside her snorkeling helmet, because it had been inside the mother seal’s jaw lock. Still, two weeks after discharge from the hospital, the snorkeler had to return. Doctors diagnosed her skull badly fractured by the monk seal’s clamped jaws. 

You could go missing, the monk seal had spoken, if you missed the nonnegotiable boundaries the animal world sets against humans. Don’t lose your head, snorkelers and surfers.

How did the man without arms lose them? In that island paradise, where soft breezes blow and tsunamis threaten, what does it take to become armless and still remain standing, a lone man on a balcony on a Saturday morning? Did he lose his head metaphorically during a brawl, and then his arms objectively and correlatively? Or did he fight some foreign war for the country that occupied the island more than a century ago without permission or right and hasn’t let it go since, still clamping it between the jaws of capital and empire? Did he lose his arms then? Or had he had an industrial accident? Did he qualify for extraordinary veteran’s benefits, or workers’ comp? Or was it a surfing adventure gone wrong, both arms exacted as punishment by someone to whom the ocean properly belongs? 

He is a kauwā now. The lowest of the low in recent recorded Hawaiʻian history. Like the untouchables of India who somehow millennia ago found their humanity gone missing by some priestly diktat. Kauwā were the untouchables in the ancient Hawaiʻian caste system. Forbidden joy by the kapu code of living. Forbidden life itself. If a Hawaiʻian kahuna or aliʻi noble needed a human sacrifice, a kauwā was summoned and had no choice but to submit. 

The Blue Note singer said she was a Maui girl. Who touches her, I wondered again. When she wears her mermaid monk seal outfit and back-kicks her spiked heels in a frenzied guitar-mauling spree, which band member does she dare? Carpe diem. No Kapu tonight if you hold me. Touch me not, mostly, but touch me when I tell you. Don’t worry, I don’t bite. You’ll keep your arms, your hands. I just need your applause, your touching.

That would rule out the man with no arms, the modern kauwā.

And more than a century ago, even before the island’s head vanished inside the maw of the great American empire, Western missionaries came to Hawaiʻi and saw men and women missing clothes, riding and sliding along the whipped-egg-white-crested plumes of the ocean on wooden logs. Animals, the missionaries concluded quickly. Maybe worse, since they were, after all, forked bipeds, unlike seals, sharks, whales, and dolphins. Devils. And so the missionaries made the men and women find clothes. Shifts, sacks, and rough-hewn gowns turned cavorting bipeds into shuffling knock-kneed landlubbers. A new kind of kauwā. Cut off at the knee like their sovereigns, if not armless like the man on the balcony. Their innocence, such as it was, gone missing.

So much missing. Answers to questions about concupiscence and carnality in female-led bands in Honolulu, at the Blue Note next to the restaurant of the greatest surfer of all time, Duke Kahanamoku, now icon of rich white boys and girls. Answers to questions about what handless concertgoer’s plight weighed on the singer’s mind that night at the Blue Note. The missing arms of the man on the balcony. Hawaiʻian national sovereignty. The monk seal’s freedoms. The insolent snorkeler’s flesh. The hands of phantom concertgoers that will not clap. The corded bare legs of naked pre-Christian Hawaiʻians. The souls of kauwā and kahuna and aliʻi. The treasures of the ʻIolani Palace, the royal residence, gone missing helter-skelter all over the world, the docent told us, after the takeover of the islands by Sanford Ballard Dole Pineapple in the grim dusk of the nineteenth century. And lately, huge chunks of Hawaiʻian land secretly bought up by Salesforce founder Marc Benioff; no one knows why.