A Fable

On our 45th anniversary, it occurred to me that we took our bubble everywhere we went; we didn’t especially need any one environment to flourish in; we loved being wherever we were. We weave our own tides.

We happened to be in Hawaii, and I was staring at the complex roots of coccoloba, sea grape, with a hint of the grey-green misted bay above it. It reminded me of the old Trader Vic’s restaurant down its palm allée in 926 Ward back in the 1960’s. Four months after Vic Bergeron opened it in 1940, he sold it to Granny Abbott, and franchised imitation tiki restaurants around the world, starting with Oakland in 1944.

In 1967 it moved to the open-air International Marketplace up on Kuhio, which at that time was filled with dozens of booths selling Asian trinkets, cigarettes, bongs, and hookahs under the palms, and no doubt the drugs to fill them. Joss houses and brothels seemed to be common, and the giant movie theater was adjacent, a huge room with a sheet over one wall and a projector.

In New York it was at the Savoy Plaza, before moving to the Plaza. I went to every location in the States and Europe, but there were dozens more, especially in Asia. The pressed duck was moist and sweet, the amazing po’e dessert (not to be confused with the taro paste poi) disappeared forever at some point. The Queen’s Park Swizzle had three rums and brandy and almost nothing else, and wasn’t on the menu. Why it still hasn’t come back (except for a few pale forgeries here and there) is a great mystery. Of course, if it were still around, I’d be dead. The Samoan Fog Cutter, the Tiki Puka Puka, the Maui Fizz, Dr. Funk of Tahiti, the Bahia, the Honolulu Punch, the Mai Tai, the Suffering Bastard, the Zombie, the Scorpion, and the cho cho, the cheese bings, the crab Rangoon, the spare ribs, appear here and there in weak versions, but never in their apparently inimitable eidolons. The rattan-backed chairs, the Tongan tapa ceilings. I had hundreds of ecstatic evenings with Cathy and my friends, which often ended with my being upside-down in a taxi (before marriage, I hasten to say). I was on top of one of the polished tables during a drunken fight at someone’s engagement party. (Again, before marriage.)

I was interested in Persian cuneiform back then, an early language cut into stone tablets with a chisel. Its glyphs remind me of Berio’s sprechstimme, or of the early Sony DSD code, which was so close to analogue sine forms that it didn’t need digital translators to read it; it could be run in normal decoders and produce equivalent frequencies. I suppose computer code was the natural evolution of hieroglyphics, without the necromantic exoticism. I still have my Sax Rohmer books from when I was 9. They got me into college, along with the languages.

A glume is a husk on corn, or a sheltering bract that protects the base of a blade of grass, the way a rattan back on a chair shelters legume-like diners.