Maui, HAWAII—She had me pinned by the wrists in the grass of the Kipahulu Campground. She was saying “You were such a punk. Always fucking up people’s shit. I used to really like you.”
I wanted to tell her that I was different now, better, less violent, but people have a stubbornness in them—they are often more loyal to their ideas of people than to the actual people themselves. People don’t want their friends to change. We are all the people we have been in our past lives, but we never fully remain what we once were. Try telling that to someone who knew you in high school.
“I want you to come and live here,” she said.
“I can’t move to Maui,” I said. “I’d never leave.”
“You’d leave,” she said. “Don’t worry about that. I’ve seen plenty of people come here and say that and they all leave eventually. I’ve been here for ten years. Do you want to dance?”
Then later, lying in her mobile home, in the comfortable, loose dialogue of pre-dawn, I asked her “what do you see when you see me now? I mean, what did you think I was going to be like now? Can you tell that I’m different? Do you see me as changed or just less? Because sometimes I feel like it’s just less.”
She slid open the window and said, “Isn’t traveling amazing? Did you see Venus out there? And Saturn? And Mars? You can see all three of them right now.”
As teenagers, my friends and I, our worst fault was our vandalism. It was also what unified us and kept us interested in the world, but it’s hard to explain what drives small town boys with good parents and good role models, no real problems to speak of, to acts of destruction. You might say we felt too young and too powerless to change our environment save for attempting to destroy it. You might also say we were assholes. We know that now. But we didn’t see it that way then.
When protected by the armor of the mind and memory we choose to remember people in absolutes. They were either Funny, or Beautiful, or Stupid. The impression is formed by how they made us feel, then reinforced by selectively remembering those moments that reinforce that feeling. Many of us are at the mercy of unbidden memories. Even more of us aren’t in control of how we feel about people.
People write you off for an untold number of reasons and you know when a person has written you off without them saying a word. It’s in the way they listen to you. In their eyes, the corners of their mouth. If you don’t know the person well it can be hard to see coming. When the time comes they go nasty and you’re at a loss for what caused it. Because they don’t know either. It’s the crazy ones that talk the most shit, and are often closest to the truth. People can fuck you up with something as easily uttered as a simple line. It’s amazing that we choose to speak with people at all, especially those we don’t know. That moment when a single malicious comment throws you off balance for days exemplifies the curse of living for meaning.
“What was wrong with you?” she said. “All you guys. You didn’t have to do that to all those people you didn’t know.”
Is it overly cynical to say we don’t improve with age? That the longer we know someone the less grace we afford them? People see us not as we are but as they want us to be. We expect people to conform to our ideas of behavior, when in fact we all enjoy the opposite. I have to believe we change, that we improve, if for nothing more than my own sake. I have been a lot of people that I don’t want around anymore. It’s why people move, travel, and make friends with people that speak other languages. I could move to a place like Maui and all my friends would be from somewhere else.
Hawaii is still a lot of people it used to be. If you go to the right places they’ll give you a contrived culture/history lesson for a price. The Royal Lahaina hotel lines them up for luaus at $67 a head at 250 heads the night I stopped and tried not to sound condescending with my questions. All you can eat and drink, hula contests and lava-rock roasted pigs. Tourists with their Maui bodies drinking mai tais and eating coconut shrimp. The voice of Israel Kamakawiwo’ole singing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” to remind them they aren’t in Wisconsin or Kentucky, in case they start checking their Blackberries and thinking about work again.
It happened to me just as it happened to my friend at the campsite: Hawaii captures the imagination of westward-looking Midwesterners. A place without winter, of swimsuits, palm trees and sailboats. As an idea, Hawaii counteracts the depression of a long winter, serves as an antidote against cold and barren plains, and the most seasonally moody of us think of it as the one American place that could draw out the poison from a geographically unfortunate upbringing. It wouldn’t matter what job you did or how you lived—on Maui there is no winter and no winter means no cold and the sun is always shining. Moving west has always seemed like going downhill, following the sun, and in the imagination of a kid from the Great Plains the end of the rainbow was a place known for its rainbows.
I used to tell people I didn’t want to visit, I wanted only to live there. That leaving it for anywhere else would be a flight of depression. The walk back to your friends after you’ve bought a shot for the unattainable girl, who was appreciative and smiling, because everything beautiful can support a small amount of tourism, can be a small death. That was before I decided to move to New York, an equally impossible place, and perhaps the only other place in America that draws, at that level, the geographically ambitious. What Hawaii promises in weather New York beckons with culture.
Learning in my mid-20s that seasons no longer impacted my well-being as they once did liberated me to choose places not based upon climate. I came to Hawaii this time because I knew I could leave it. (Plus, I had a free round-trip plane ticket.) I had lived in San Diego long enough to see what the weather, the sun, the beaches, did to the energy of the culture. I saw of lot of technically good paintings of surf and sunsets, but what I didn’t see were people being challenged by their environment to find comfort and warmth internally, from personal expression and exploration. Tolstoy would not have been Tolstoy if he grew up on the Waikiki beachfront.
Trite or not, the idea of moving somewhere to become successful, a place like New York or Maui, and to have the place defeat you, can be terrifying. When you want nothing more than to make it as a writer it’s easy to procrastinate the move to New York—once you exhaust that option where else is there? There’s Obscurity, an alternate career field, teaching English abroad, writing at night and on the weekends until your family life and age overcomes your ambition. There’s giving up. You live long enough you see people you know fail. You see what trying to make it somewhere impossible can do to a face, a voice, an identity. You hear cautionary tales learned from firsthand experience.
But you don’t have to visit to know how hard it would be to show up here without a job and make it. You could move to Maui and work three shitty jobs and still have to take your debt and leave after two years. At the worst of the trip’s dinners, seated along the sidewalk of the quaint shops of Lahaina, I looked over and saw the busser, a guy about my age, strong, clean cut, apron mottled in the red, cream, and pink of ketchup and tartar sauce, posture and actions hostile. I had that job not too long ago. I know what it feels like to work for minimum wage, cleaning up other people’s uneaten food, to be at the bottom of a hierarchy of servants. I’ve known that humiliation, and no warm water or sunshine anywhere can make up for how that feels. It’s easier if you’re anonymous, but you can’t hide from pride.
Seeing the people that do live there, that seem to be making it, makes you question your status, and when the only status you attach importance to is the ability to move freely about the world, you can try to come to terms with your position, but how do you settle for living in a lesser place? How do you go through life not wanting everything?
I could tell you what I wanted and you wouldn’t know any better than I do how to get it. Not for yourself and certainly not for me. I might try for it with Work, Effort, Passion, Desire. These are nice ideas, but they don’t trump Time, Life, or Money. I have gone through so many phases of wanting. I have tried to be what I am and in doing so became someone I am not. Life is not a futile enterprise but it is impossible.
I was an iconoclast once but let that part of me diminish in order to live more easily in the world. As is true for all men I wage a constant battle to keep my edge. Time dulls all blades. I’ve accepted it. The better we are in life the worse we are as artists. The world wants its writers Tortured, Maladjusted, Struggling. The hedonist never made a good artist. Despite the nice weather, the people here looked like they were hustling. But it’s hard to get a good read on the populace, not knowing who is local and who is bound for the morning flight to LAX.
What I knew I could identify flashed like billboard ads for Unrequited Love. The girls in rashguards and bikini bottoms ahead of me in the lineup of Pai’a Bay, the honeymooners on their after dinner beach walks in Ka’anapali, that one particular type of car she drove with two surfboards strapped to the top. I saw the girl I had loved once everywhere.
We are never given that which we want the most—and I’m realizing now that I left my feelings for her, along with my romantic notions of this place, there on the tarmac of the Kipahula Airport. I don’t love the girl anymore, and I don’t need Hawaii to be happy. As we taxied for take off, I wasn’t worried I would fly back to Korea, as I had from the bookstore in Paris where the kids slept on the shelves, tortured by the idea of leaving the place behind. On that plane off of Maui I felt liberated from myself. I no longer wanted rainbows and warm water, coconuts and sunsets. I wanted something far more impossible.
Isn’t it something how you go from a little boy,
a boy who only went to places that felt good,
who would run away from boring people
as soon as the conversation slowed,
to bars, to small places with strangers,
to drink and sit and listen and stay in one place.
There is a moment when you know for certain that your youth is gone.
That it’s no longer a choice to hold onto it. The respect for time and the way it wins over everything, that you have lost friends that aren’t coming back, that all your decisions matter. That they always have.
This is a different feeling than regret or settling.
It has to do with conceding that the reason you’re not who you thought you would be at this age is because no one is.
Men are poured into molds that can be ornately decorated or chipped and plain, but the size you’re given doesn’t change.
So then the only right response is to own your position, your place, and turn your life into the life of a man.
To become a man. To stop chasing things that aren’t real. To begin what can be finished. To own who you have become.
Only by doing that will you ever become anything more.
It is a coming to terms with one’s self.
It is what must be done in order to win.
I left my jacket on the chair but I can’t go back to her.
We stay in Portland and the rain.
We send messages with the subject line: New York City.
We get caught wishing someone had told us what we were in for.
The women you knew don’t care enough now to save you.
You spend your days waiting for time to make you wise.
You lie to yourself about anything you want.
You tell yourself people improve with age.
Take the risks that are available.
We look at our feet all day.
We concede what’s been done.
We let our troubles keep us scared.
Stay in touch if you can stomach the messages about new relationships.
Be happy for each other if you like pain in your moving on.
Pledge not to write about people and break your promise.
On the same day the unrequited love writes you
with news of the love of your life’s new boyfriend
you get a message from a girl who doesn’t speak English.
There are so many ways to say hey.
A lover that may or may not be sends you one word
in the middle of the night:
cherries.
To tell you what
I did when I was with you
would only widen the wound.
What could you say to make me stay in Korea when New York is waiting.
The nearest we come to traveling
is dreaming ourselves into
places we’ve never been.
They’re not parting shots when you’re already gone.
I write this on a phone
with headphones plugged into it
strapped around my bicep.
My nose has gone red
from straining against genetics and
the darkness in my bloodlines.
I do a superset of lat pulldowns
and incline curls with the straight bar
then tap out a line about memento mori.
It has taken me twelve years
of steady work to get this strong.
Still I am not the strongest man here.
There’s the guy on the bench with liver disease doing three hundred crunches.
There’s the young father with a sick daughter repping two fifty on the Smith machine.
There’s the old man who just lost his brother leg pressing four plates on each side.
I’m not the only one here thinking about age and women,
suicide and heart attacks,
the strength of my father.
Money,
work,
new plans.
First there is the rise—
strength,
power,
confidence
then there is time—
loss,
relief,
compromise.
The comfort in conceding
that the only way to win
is to quit wanting the world.
But my session isn’t over yet.
There are still more sets.
More reps to failure.
New essay about Portland life up at Thought Catalog.
