My Kind of Town
Out, out,
damn spot!>> Honolulu Soap Co.
One of the things Sheets Ah Sun enjoyed was giving folks a tour of his plant. He'd built the company with little more than sweat and dreams, and was proud of the operation.
But this wasn't like other tours. His guest was HPD Detective Sherlock Gomes. Sheets knew him by reputation. Gomes couldn't possibly have linked him to the illegal chemical dump site in Waimanalo already, could he?
Logically, Gomes would have visited Sheets' brother Mits first. It was his police pistol in the pit, after all. But Sheets didn't inquire about the nature of Gomes' visit as they walked down to the production chamber, and the detective offered only a commentary on how clean the air smelled.
Sheets opened a door, showed Gomes into the first of two vacuum-sealed chambers, led him to a large sink where they scrubbed their hands with an anti-bacterial soap of Sheets' own making.
"And you'll have to put this on," Sheets said, handing Gomes a packet that contained a sterile suit, cap, mask, gloves and booties.
"Whoa, you guys are serious about this purity issue, aren't you?"
"Have to be," Sheets replied.
What Gomes didn't know is that Sheets' insistence on total purity came from his start in the soap biz. In those days he was a waiter at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel's Monarch Room. Every day in the back of the house he'd see all of the barely used soap bars being tossed out. And the way Sheets and his brother Mits were raised in Pearl City by their grandparents, with that plantation mentality to waste nothing, it drove Sheets crazy. So he started collecting soap shards from housekeeping, took them home and devised a way to melt them down and filter out human hairs, etc., and pour it into bars -- using his kids' Popsicle maker. It was for family use at first, that's all there was to it.
But that was a time when an island boy could stay in the islands and dream big. A few sons and grandsons of the plantation were becoming very wealthy, and Sheets wished to be among them. So he started collecting used soap from all the hotels, and was soon reselling his soap to them. The company grew from there.
Pulling on his white suit, Gomes thought back to his days at Leilehua High, wishing he'd paid more attention to Miss Yamata. What was that Shakespeare play, where the woman kept washing her hands. "Out, out, damn spot!" Was that what Sheets Ah Sun was doing? In a commercial way?
Sheets led Gomes into the second sealed chamber and they breathed deep the wonderful aroma of "the purest soap on Earth." Sheets did love it so.
Don Chapman is editor of MidWeek.
His serialized novel runs daily in the Star-Bulletin
with weekly summaries on Sunday.
He can be e-mailed at dchapman@midweek.com