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My Kind of Town Don Chapman |
Santa Cruz connection
>>Kona
At the bar of the King Kamehameha Yacht Club, a Hawaiian gentleman with silver hair and goatee sat two empty stools to Cruz MacKenzie's right, ordered "Bud, bucket, rocks" in a flat rasp and ignored everyone.
But Cruz MacKenzie couldn't ignore him. He was somehow familiar, maybe from a previous visit to the yacht club.
Don the bartender had called him Mano, whispered he was the last person to see Daren Guy, the state's first million-dollar Lotto winner, alive. Mano poured half his beer into the glass, downed it in three totally focused gulps, refilled it and ordered another bottle.
As he had with Cruz, Don Dzuraski, the Honolulu attorney turned bartender, waited for Mano to get acquainted with his drink before speaking.
"Eh, Mano, meet a friend of mine, Cruz MacKenzie, you know, the columnist, from Honolulu?"
Mano turned and in a glance had him covered. "You da guy, huh?"
Cruz nodded. Having your picture in the paper on a regular basis makes it tough to sneak up on anybody.
"Cruz, this is Mano Kekai. He's the most akamai fisherman in Kona."
"Sheee-yit," Mano said, waving off the compliment and sucking on an ice cube. "One t'eeng I always wondered, though, brah. How you got Cruz for a first name?"
"Funny name for a haole, eh? It's after Santa Cruz -- California, not Mexico. It was significant to my parents. I suspect I was conceived on the beach."
"Beats the hell out of Boardwalk," snorted Don, who like a lot of Bay Area college kids spent spring break partying on the beach at Santa Cruz and the adjacent Boardwalk amusement park. "Boardwalk MacKenzie!"
"Or Giant Dipper," Mano said.
"You know Santa Cruz?!" Cruz exclaimed. The Giant Dipper is the roller coaster at the Boardwalk. Maybe you saw it in The Sting II. "Now I know why you look so familiar! From the Santa Cruz Surfing Hall of Fame! They got your picture up, right?!"
Mano winked, nodded, allowed himself a smile. On another day, Cruz would have asked him about the old days of the Honolulu-Santa Cruz Surf Connection. History, the last resort of a columnist, can be real interesting when nothing else is happening. But on this day Daren Guy was happening.
In perhaps the least graceful moment of his life, which is saying something, Don blurted in one breath while raising his grow-together eyebrows incrementally in uneven jerks with each syllable: "Mano, Cruz is over here working on Daren's story. Tell him, you know, about seeing him, that last night..."
For a moment, Don's eyebrows arched well up into his forehead like wrinkled passageways in an art deco mosque, then succumbed to gravity and tumbled back. You could almost hear the thud.
See the Columnists section for some past articles.
Don Chapman is editor of MidWeek. His serialized novel runs daily in the Star-Bulletin. He can be e-mailed at dchapman@midweek.com