Hotel Honolulu

71 Brudda Iz

What set him off was the remark "Whyans not Native Americans. We da kine — kanaka maoli." And a few days after that, the visit from the man known as Brudda Iz, a popular Hawaiian singer who sometimes traveled with a forklift, to hoist him onstage, because stairs were impossible for him. Brudda Iz was a kanaka maoli. He weighed six hundred and fifty pounds.

Israel Kamakawiwo'ole — his proper name — was a distant relation of Keola, his so-called calabash cousin. Iz happened to be on his way from a concert at the Waikiki Shell and stopped in, steadied by his entourage of locals in T-shirts and sunglasses, baggy shorts and rubber sandals. Seeing the vast brown man enter the lobby, propped on two canes, Rose stepped away, retreating in fear, but when Brudda Iz said in his soft, appealing way, "How you gonna hide from dis guy?" Rose smiled and went closer to the Hawaiian giant.

Keola was granted a kind of celebrity through this visit. He had mentioned his kinship with Brudda Iz, but no one believed him. And now they were together, the big brown man who walked like a cripple on ruined knees because of his size, Hawaii's bestknown singer, and his little cousin Keola.

They sat on the lanai — Iz on a stone bench; he didn't trust the chairs — and ordered loco mocos, a Hawaiian item that Buddy had put back on the menu under "House Specialties," for his own benefit after his lung surgery. Although Peewee had been making them in the staff canteen for years, Buddy took him aside and, in his new pedantic manner, described the perfect loco moco: "Pile up a mound of white rice in a bowl, lay a large medium-rare hamburger patty on top of the rice, slip a pair of fried eggs on top of the hamburger, with fried onions as garnish, and then, for want of a better word, ladle on enough brown gravy to cover the whole thing. Serve with soy sauce and ketchup."

Eyeing Brudda Iz, who ordered three of them, Buddy said, "He was nowhere until he got a howlie manager. Years ago I had some real big Whyan singers here at the hotel. I gave them their first break. This place was famous for their show, A Thousand Pounds of Melody."

"What happened to them?"

"We got closed down," he said. "But that was over another show, Tahitian Tita's Topless Hula."

He was so angry he didn't notice I was laughing. He raged over the visit from Brudda Iz, the sudden prominence and power of the janitor Keola, and that fact that he, the owner, was ignored.

"I knew the guy in Hilo that invented the loco moco," Buddy said. "They don't realize I go way back here."

I was only half listening. I couldn't take my eyes off Brudda Iz, who looked to me like a Polynesian monarch ("king of the cannibal isles," Buddy said when I mentioned it), sitting and eating, his big dimpled cheeks against his shoulders, his eyes squeezed deep into his face. People were reverential around him. They tiptoed, they sneaked looks, and when he uttered his high wheezy laugh, they stared.

Brudda Iz, too, had a tank of oxygen, because of his own overworked lungs. When Buddy was eyeing him, holding his mask against his face, they looked like a pair of astronauts, panting and suck-blowing at each other.

After Brudda Iz was gone and Keola returned to his mop, Buddy began to rant against Hawaiians, as though Iz and Keola stood for them all. His sick man's fear made him cynical and reckless.

They camped on the beach, Buddy said. They slept at the airport, they stole the avocados off your trees, they sat on your lawn and refused to go away until the police threatened them. And when at last they did go away, they left dirty diapers and platelunch wrappers behind. They were world-class litterers. Wherever there were Hawaiians, you saw billowing plastic bags, plastic cups, empty soda cans, and a trail of mashed Styrofoam.

I smiled hearing this from Buddy, because he had never been very tidy himself. But he was single-minded in this rant and as angry as any sick man can be. He had nothing else to do, and it was especially awful because he had nothing to lose in denouncing Hawaiians.

Sweetie said, "What's his beef?"

As the general manager, I had no choice but to listen to my owner.

He went on. These camped-out Hawaiians, eating Zippy's specials and saimin and Cheez Doodles, guzzling Big Gulps, said they worshiped the land. The land was sacred! So why did they leave their garbage behind, and all those Huggies and cups. Their beaches were fouled so badly with old refrigerators and rusty cans and human shit they had to be bulldozed and fumigated whenever the cops managed to evict them.

You saw them, Buddy said — "big shaven-headed fatsoes, bigger than me!" — flying the Hawaiian flag upside down from old pickup trucks in protest. They were angry, cranky troublemakers who knew no more than fifteen words of their own language. Even a mainland tourist knew ten after a week's vacation.

"I know about thirty myself," Buddy said.

Hawaiians sang hymns, made a fetish of churchgoing and a pious fuss of the family, unless there was trouble — like maybe spousal abuse — and then they demanded social workers. They used food stamps to buy Puppy Chow and tattoos. They said grace in Hawaiian before demolishing a pile of macaroni, a can of Spam, and a half gallon of Banana Karenina ice cream.

"But that's your favorite meal," I said to Buddy.

"This isn't about me," Buddy said. "Look at Keola. He's half Portugee and he blames Captain Cook for the hookers in Waikiki!"

But it was not unusual for Keola, and Buddy too, to be seen at the side entrance, leering at the hookers taking a shortcut through the alley when they started soliciting each night around ten. "There's a new one," Buddy would say. "Yo, mama!"

Although Buddy did not know the word "sententious," the people he described were the embodiment of it — licensed bores, as all aborigines seemed to be (so he implied), who had a proverb or a biblical passage for every reversal in life. Hearing that also made me smile, for Buddy himself often talked about Stella in heaven, and he believed that the green flash on the horizon at sunset was a coded message conveyed by almighty God to him from her.

"They hang around and pick fights with howlie guys and then try to fuck howlie women," Buddy said, adding that there was hardly a Hawaiian in the islands who didn't have some haole in his family tree.

Hawaiians distrusted each othei and at any one time there were sixty-odd groups saying they wanted the monarchy back and all trying in different ways to get land, because land meant money, and they wanted money to buy a new pickup truck and a TV and a loud radio. Having land meant they could sell it off to haoles, just as their ancestors had done, but these haoles would be casino people who would turn all the so-called holy places into gambling resorts.

Dark, moody, shiftless, ravenous, abusive — they were, most of them, the opposite of the popular stereotype: happy island folk, playing the ukulele, doing the hula, and singing off-key.

They were as puritanical, censorious, and hypocritical as any priest- ridden Third Worlders could be, and in private — because Buddy said he knew their most intimate thoughts — every last one of them was racist.

"Tourists say 'aloha'! Tourists wear leis! Tourists go topless!" Buddy

said.

Local people feared the Hawaiians — the Chinese, the Japanese, the Koreans, anyone with an investment or money, the nonconfrontational Asians who just hid when a Hawaiian blalah raised his voice.

"Hawaiians talk about culture — that's all they talk about," Buddy said, "which is funny, because I mean, what culture?"

The hula, hymn singing, high school football, and Spam.

"You once said that if you lose your language, you lose everything," Buddy said to me.

Had I said that?

"How can you have culture if you have no language?"

"I don't know."

"That's what you asked me once when we were talking story," Buddy said. "Talking story" made him sound so local. "If you don't speak Hawaiian, how can you be Hawaiian?"

"Some of them speak it."

"Maybe three. The rest of them just fiddle-fuck with a few words."

"Lost souls" just about summed them up, Buddy said. They had welcomed the missionaries — and they had swallowed them up. So blame the missionaries if you like — they had transformed the Hawaiians, taken everything away, even their memory. They could not remember a time when they were not Christians. Their history was the Bible, the language was Bible language, and even the ones who claimed they worshiped Pele the fire goddess sounded as sanctimonious and tiresome as Bible-thumping Baptists.

Topless hula was Buddy's obsession. When breasts were bared on the islands there might be hope, but until then Hawaii was just another place with a colorful minority, the least-educated state in the Union.

"What crap I've seen here," Buddy said. "Can you imagine all the Whyan nonsense I've had to listen to? It's worse than all the Paiute Indian crap I had to listen to growing up in Nevada."

Hawaiians were angry, and they were so tongue-tied they couldn't explain why they were angry, so they got angrier, Buddy said, sounding angry himself.

"They come to me for handouts. No one ever says, 'Give me money and I'll wash your car or work in your hotel.' It's just 'Hand it over.'"

The very people who were on welfare, got food stamps, and demanded handouts and government assistance were the ones who claimed they hated the government and wanted to be left alone. The reclaim-our-heritage fanatics wanted to open casinos on ancestral lands.

"They're more American than I am," Buddy said. They loved Twinkies and Christmas and beer and ball games and high school proms. The highlight of the year was the January Super Bowl, which Hawaiians watched at the beach, running an extension cord from the car. Virtually the only Hawaiian heroes were football players and entertainers like Brudda Iz.

Buddy raged on and on, and in describing the Hawaiian people, and especially Brudda Iz, he was of course describing himself.