Chapter 20: The Broken Heart and New Adventure

Of course there so many reasons to be utterly sad about having to leave my new home. But I tried to treat the situation as totally temporary, the height of denial. I was going to have to leave behind my girls, my loves, do it with my virginity intact.

Linda was distraught about the idea of me going to war. Siza was very unhappy but in her own way she knew how to do denial just as well as I. She refused to let herself accept my leaving as anything but ordinary. It was like I was just going to be gone for a month or so.

My grief was just piling up. There would no more fun, or skinny dipping, or Siza pulling me around by my penis. There was no more.

It was decided as well my sister was leaving the island to return to our home in the Pacific Northwest. She said she felt lonely. Apparently my paradise was not hers and she loaded up the kids to fly back to the mainland.

My brother in law would also have to leave, selling their home and leaving his career, a really great job. He and I spent time detailing his car, getting it ready to sell. He didn’t seem as distressed as I was about leaving. But I surely was completely unhappy.

We had been talking, negotiating with our car lot owner friend Dave about a business venture that was exciting. My knowledge regarding new environmental consciousness, Ecology, gave rise to the possibility of starting a first ever recycling auto wrecking business on the island which could replace the simple piled up yard of mosquito breeding car carcasses that were an environmental disaster. This was something badly needed in Hawaii in 1967- 68. Dave was the financing and we were the hard work in building it. There was a lot of research needed plus it was pretty much a given success, just a matter of doing it.

But of course I would be drafted into the Army and my brother in law would follow his wife and kids back to the states. That business dream went poof as well.

I had been co renting a house with a new salesman at Pepo, Marty, who was good at his profession. He got a house to rent and he wanted to know if I wanted to rent a room. This was prior to my having to go back to the states and I thought it was time to let my sister and brother in law have their home to themselves. So I agreed and moved in with him.

He had color TV which would be a new experience for me. My share of the house was tiny, a little room with a single bed and two windows, both of them interior views to other rooms. But I was happy.

Before long he allowed a girl friend and her two kids to also move in. Shirley was Samoan and she had two girls, one 13 year old and the other a precocious 7 year old. Those kids were characters and Shirley was very sweet. The girl’s father, now gone was a haole. Shirley worked nights at a bar in Waikiki which was the meeting place for Marty. And in effect I ended up baby sitting the daughters evenings. That was okay because they were fun and nice kids too. The only problem was I didn’t get a lot of studying done with their inquisitiveness.

Life went on day after day, all routine it seems except after coming home from work one late afternoon, after Shirley had gone to work and Marty of course was on duty at the car lot. I now had my orders to report for induction, was ready to leave in a couple of days. The girls came to me acting odd, very serious, not like themselves.