My Kind of Town
My Kind of Town
Wrong again
>> Queen's Medical Center
Nothing is quite so crushing to a man on the cusp of retirement as realizing that you've been wrong about so many things for your whole damn life. Looking back, Sheets Ah Sun had been wrong about all the big things that define a man's life.
He'd been wrong about his son Laird, who expressed his gratitude for the MBA from Stanford Business by turning down Sheets' offer to come home and run the Honolulu Soap Co., choosing instead to go to Afghanistan and teach Christianity and capitalism to the mujahadeen. It turned out that the one who was most like Sheets, the one most qualified to run the company he'd founded on dreams and sweat, was Lily. And she wasn't even his own flesh and blood.
And years before, when they were classmates at Pearl Kai Elementary, Sheets had been wrong about Bobo. Back then he was known as Clarence Martinez. Father was dead, mom was never around. They were in the fifth grade and Sheets didn't know the truth, that Clarence's mom was sleeping with sailors to pay for her cocaine habit, but with puberty just beginning to blow in his ear Sheets understood that she was a naughty lady. And he felt sorry for his friend. Just 11, Clarence was basically on his own.
And so Sheets asked his grandmother, who had been raised in the old Hawaiian way and cared for Sheets and his younger brother Mits while their parents worked sometimes 16 hours a day at their Skyline Market, if Clarence could come live with them. And she said yes. Just like that, took him in, hanai'd him, made him an Ah Sun.
When he moved in, Clarence brought a frayed toothbrush, his only change of clothes and an old ukulele. Surrounded with love and support, and with the benefit of three square meals a day, the boy blossomed. At the Ah Sun's Christmas party that first year he was coaxed into playing a song on his uke, and that's where he discovered the thrill of performing and having people applaud you for it, and ask for more. Within a few years, the papers were referring to him as "popular entertainer."
But there was a dark side, anger doing a slow boil just below the smile on his handsome face, and Clarence too often got into fights. It was Sheets who gave him his nickname, Bobo, after the great Bobo Olson. That's how Clarence Martinez became Bobo Ah Sun.
Sheets had been so wrong, because Bobo betrayed his friendship and brotherhood. That's why Sheets, who had given Bobo a new life, took that life away.
And he'd been wrong about that too.
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