The sun had set an hour before we left the house. It was summer and the world went dark around 9. My brother drove my mom’s ’93 Camry and I rode shotgun. We listened to Frank Sinatra and Sex Pistols while we drove around the mountain looking for the parking lot party. Mount Haleakala – or House of the Rising Sun, I was told – rose two miles above sea level and housed several observatories at the top. Before dawn, tourists were driven to the top of the mountain and given bicycles to ride all the way down. It took four hours.
By this time we’d moved from the south tip of the island to a small hippie town halfway up Haleakala. At that altitude the temperature was cooler, if not quite comfortable. On occasion we suffered as the mercury rose to 90, but more often the evenings and nights waned breezy and relaxing. It was a night like this that found us in search of our friends from high school. Mostly it would be my brother’s friends; mine were still a year off from partaking in any alcohol or recreational drug use.
We found it in an hour. There was a small parking lot across the street from several houses on stilts over rock faces. The lot itself was only separated from a 100-foot cliff by a modest guardrail. By the time we arrived, the street 100 feet below us was already littered with broken bottles. There wasn’t much else to do on the island; there were few concerts and fewer road trips. If you didn’t surf, skate or work, it’s likely you drank, smoked or played video games – or all three.
The muggy air thinned by degrees and our friend Jenny saw us first. She yelled to us and we made our way around the cars, talking to everyone sitting on hoods and trunks, music blaring out through windows.
I went to talk to Jenny’s car. My brother’s friends had never thought much of me and I always desperately wanted to change that. Jenny held out a bottle.
“Hey, try this.”
“What is it?”
“Peach Schnapps.”
“What the hell is Schnapps?”
I took it and sniffed the mouth. It smelled like paint.
“You’ll love it; it’s so good,” she said, as I glassed the party through the rippled glass of the bottle. I took a swig and it felt like fire burning down my throat and lungs into my belly.
“Jesus Christ!”
“How amazing is that?”
“Keep it.” I coughed and moved on, alcoholic saliva falling out of my mouth and onto the pavement. Even still, I felt a bit fuzzy and warm and the stars twinkled a bit brighter than they had.
Lono was there. For all intents and purposes, Lono was the luckiest guy we knew. He had epilepsy and got something like $1,500 a month from the government for disability, which was enough to pay his rent and buy his groceries. Luckily for him, he lived with his girlfriend and she paid their rent so he had $1,500 a month for bills and whatever else he wanted. He was also the most reliable person we knew; I never saw a day where I couldn’t go over to his house and play video games with him.
Thomas was there too. Thomas stood six-and-a-half feet tall and had shoulder-length fire engine red hair. As far as I knew, he was full-blooded Hawaiian or close to it and I always thought he looked like Perry Farrell from Jane’s Addiction. A couple weeks prior to the parking lot party he’d had an embarrassing incident in History class. The teacher was waxing endlessly about George Washington Carver and mentioned his work with the peanut. Thomas had a mouthful of potato chips and said “I like peanuts!” but the “t” was muffled and everyone thought he said “penis.” I walked over to his car at the party while he was looking away.
“Peanuts anybody?”
“Shut up jonny.”
Everyone loved Thomas; he was nice to everybody no matter what. He was friends with the other seniors his age but he always made time to hang out with the freshmen and sophomores like me and my friends when we started at Maui High. He also lived closest to school so whenever we’d ditch, we’d go to his house and eat and watch TV before we went anywhere else.
So the parking lot was packed. Only a couple of my friends were scattered about and had been invited by the older kids. The night trod on likewise; the moonlight and one flickering streetlamp lit our adolescent debauchery as we walked around making and breaking conversations with friends from around the island. An hour in, Dome spoke up.
“Hey jonny; Jnana’s over there.” He pointed off to the side and I saw her silhouetted against the sky; she was reclined sitting on the grass beneath a large oak tree. It was then I remembered where we were; the parking lot was less than a block from her house. I hadn’t noticed her the entire time. She’d been sitting there since we arrived.
Jnana was great. She wore chest-length flowing Irish red hair. Her sister used to run around with Dome; nobody would ever talk about how it ended. I met Jnana in 8th grade, over a year prior. She just showed up at school one day, from God knows where. That year she had a pixie cut and started taking all this shit from the locals about it.
“Ho, braddah, is that one boy or one girl?”
I thought she was unimaginably cute; she had this Pearl Jam shirt from their 2nd album, Vs., and I could never take my eyes off her. My biggest regret on Maui was probably not becoming better friends with her faster. Underneath all my delusions of fair thinking and open-mindedness I was still too chickenshit to really open up to her. I knew the locals didn’t like her, and they didn’t like me. More than almost anything, I’d just wanted to be left alone and I was enough of a prick to pay for that shyness with friends.
But the parking lot party was all smiles. I’d slowly earned Jnana’s friendship, whether I deserved it or not, and her long hair blew in an increasingly violent wind. Dome’s voice broke my heady daydream.
“jonny?”
“What’s up?”
“I said it’s time to go talk to her, man.”
She was staring off into the distant horizon, where the valley met the Pacific and where the starlight crashed into the sea. “I don’t know, man.” I went anyway. Jenny would later say the Schnapps was helping me muster up what little bravery I could.
I tried to look impressive but apathetic walking over to Jnana.
“Hey Jnana; what’s up?”
“Hey jonny. How’s it going?”
“Good. You?”
“Good.”
I sat next to her for a minute. Away from the cheap jokes and anecdotes of the bottle-and-joint party to our left, we could hear the trees rustling in the wind. I looked down at the grass. Jnana had taken her shoes off and her bare feet were nestled into the ground. Her dark dress was a shadow on her and for the only time that year, it suddenly started to pour rain.
It started as a heavy mist and by the time everyone could organize carpools and run to them it was a monsoon. My brother and I jumped into the Camry and rode off back down south towards our house.
The rain fell so hard we maxed out the speed of the windshield wipers and visibility was still less than 30 feet. “Man, we are so fucked.”
“Shut up; shut up!”
As we adjusted to the mayhem, we realized we were lost. We were headed in the right direction, but the street names and buildings were alien. “Where are we?”
“I don’t know; be quiet.”
We turned the music down and traversed narrow streets while clouds pissed on us triumphantly. Things got quiet; we only heard the spatter of the rain and the windshield wipers. Neither of us talked. I thought about Jnana, her dress and bare feet amplified by the moonlight. Then I was screaming.
“Jesus, look out!”
A large white owl was beating his wings in a slow flight across the street. My brother tried to yell “Owl!” but his mouth had been closed and it caught him by surprise, so it came out “Ndyowl!” and I ducked my head down by the passenger glove compartment.
I heard a high-pitched thud. The owl’s feet caught the upper driver’s side corner of the windshield. I kept my head down for a moment, buried under my arms, and finally released and looked around. My brother had done the same and wasn’t watching the road.
“Drive, dumbass!”
And he did. We got home and I crashed, dressed, into bed, and the cheap liquor and various smokes wafted into my nose as I fell asleep, and I dreamed of owls and grass blowing in a violent wind.