From the author’s, ACCOUNTS PAYABLE
For Bookkeepers and Bookwriters Only

The Good Old Waikiki Days

It was no coincidence that I had landed on the street flat broke again shortly after I was fired by the Kelley family’s Outrigger Hotel system for having had the audacity to actually demand the overtime pay promised to me by the general manager for getting its new hotel on Kuhio Avenue opened in time for the overbooked tour groups. I had hardly any savings to speak of; that was why I accepted the offer for overtime pay. As usual, my mother was watching out for me from heaven when I got into trouble for being so gullible: after sleeping in the park alongside the AlaWaiCanal for one night, I was rescued from abject destitution by a couple exiled from New Zealand’s tax system – Jim and Maryann. They put me up in a narrow room with a private entrance in the back of their Waikiki apartment.

I was certainly grateful for the lodging, although I almost died of unnatural causes after I moved in: I sprayed the room with Black Flag to rid it of cockroaches, laid down on the bed, and was nearly overcome by the fumes.  I staggered back to AlaWaiCanal and slept there another night while my room aired out. The memory of that narrow room includes, most of all, sweet Wendy, a tall, big-boned and barefooted blonde girl from the North Shore, whom I had met while playing my flute for the giraffes at Honolulu Zoo – she approached me because she was astonished to see them dancing gracefully in a circle as I played. Now Wendy liked to take showers at my place, but she refused to wash her feet when she got into bed. When I complained that her feet dirtied the sheets, she indignantly exclaimed, “It’s God’s dirt!” She also had a bad habit of forgetting our appointments. I soon learned that her forgetfulness was caused by a heroin habit even more important to her than God’s dirt: I gave her a choice between us and the drug; she refused go into rehabilitation, and I never saw her again.

Jim was a insurance agent and a Shaklee salesman; his mate Maryann was the accounting manager for B&G Sightseeing Hawaii, Inc., a travel agency, tour wholesaler and operator. On the day I moved in, Jim whipped up a Shaklee protein drink for me,  handed me a green Shaklee kit, and went over the pyramid scheme then in effect, pointing out that the scheme was perfectly legal because the high court had recently adjudged that it was not really a pyramid scheme because an actual product was involved in every transaction. After that many pyramid schemes adopted products; with a few exceptions such as Shaklee, the product really did not count. Shaklee people at least love their product: Jim’s closet was full of product. As for me, I did not make a single sales call, but I did write a short story entitled ‘The Product’, about a generic product designed to save the world from unemployment by making sales persons out of everyone in need of a job – nothing gets done in this world unless something is sold.

Jim was a generous, enthusiastic gentleman. He dressed handsomely, but was wont to splash himself with too much Brut cologne. He loved his Mazda almost as much as Maryann, claiming that a car was nothing less than a man’s freedom – he was delighted with the new-fangled rotary engine until it blew up. I think he hated only one thing in the whole world: the confiscatory tax rate on high incomes in New Zealand at the time – the authorities had apparently confiscated his property and wanted something besides. I liked Jim’s positive attitude. I have always admired people who bring home the bacon, but given my biblically induced prejudice against money-grubbing and systematic mendacity, I was not about to become a salesman myself. Nonetheless, I was not beyond counting the spoils in return for a small portion of the take. Wherefore I started my official double-entry bookkeeping career, as an accounts payable clerk at Maryann’s travel agency. Fortunately, I was already skilled with the ten-key adding machine and your basic spreadsheet.

In fact, I had become a well known whiz at doing hotel night transcripts – of course we did them manually in those days. I could balance a relatively large hotel transcript in three hours, which gave me plenty of time to goof off for the rest of the evening shift. I caught the husband of the managing partner of the Waikiki Surf grabbing cash out of the front desk drawer without leaving a withdrawal slip – after that, he took less money, always left a slip, and, glad that we didn’t tell his wife that he was the mysterious source of shortages, he bought pizzas every once in awhile. I did not participate in the hotel-system-wide theft everyone knew about. Theft was made easy because the accountants in the controller’s office did not bother to re-add every page of every transcript coming in from dozens of hotels, to see if the balances at the bottom were true – the fundamental duty of ancient Roman controllers was to make sure the numbers were added up twice. Some of the night clerks who handled the desk and the transcripts got into the habit of forcing the balances at the bottom of the third or fourth page every other evening after pilfering some cash out of the drawer. I’m sure it added up to a tidy sum over time, but I was not a thief, and, given the contempt management showed the dispensable-at-anytime staff in those days, I was not a rat fink either. I was sure the thieves would get busted some day, perhaps on the random addition checks.

The evening shift was the greatest shift a young man who lived in Waikiki could have. I went to the beach before work, where I played my flute, read old books like The Faery Queen and The Hound From Heaven, and I traded puka shells and Venetian glass beads. After work, I drank beer and watched people grope each other in a cellar pizza pub on Lewers Street. Other than that, my endeavors were limited to stringing ojos de dios with different colored yarn – some of them were quite lovely – and to putting the make on a tourist girl every once in awhile. Sometimes, I almost forgot I even had a job; that is, until I demanded overtime pay, got fired, and could not pay my rent. Incidentally, I was not the only traitor who wanted time and a half after 40 hours: I overheard three security guards discussing the possibility of murdering Doc Kelley for not paying them overtime for the extra hours they had worked during the busy holiday season; I did not believe in murder, but they had my sympathies. As for me, I was bold enough to demand what I thought was coming to me simply because it had actually been promised to me as an inducement to get me to work the extra hours. Two of the security guards, incidentally, robbed the main hotel one night, severely injuring the manager in the elevator when he would not hand over the money bag as demanded.

I took up pinching pennies with a vengeance after I landed the travel agency job. The agency was owned by R.J. Ross, Sr., an engineer who started out selling soap and eventually retired from the space travel industry. He told me plenty of fascinating stories, like how Igor Sikorsky developed the rotating rotor blade for helicopters.  I hoarded as much of my pay as I could, which was not much; working in the travel industry was mostly for glamour and little money. I did well at the agency after I studied full-charge bookkeeping texts. I cashiered at the breakfast briefings of incoming tour groups, where optional activities were sold. I counted stacks and stacks of cash and traveler’s checks, and posted and balanced the ledgers and journals. I hung out with the escorts when I could in the evenings. In those days they got ten percent of all options sold, plus they got plenty of complimentary passes to tourist attractions, hence the Mai Tais and Hawaiian entertainment were free. After a sunset sail or a luau, there were casual get-togethers in hotel rooms; the peace pipe was invariably filled, usually with Kona Gold or Puna Butter, and passed around to all – everybody I knew inhaled deeply, including one young man who would become a famous politician. After the escorts discovered that I was trustworthy, meaning someone who would not rat them out, and that I cared about the company as such, they told me how they filched the money. That enabled me to systematically crackdown on the corruption, although that was not what it was considered to be by those inured to it. I become a sort a hero of sorts. The escorts made up for the difference with side deals, running their own little tours on the side and focusing more on tips, photo and pineapple money – alas for the escorts, as the travel business became more and more organized and disciplined over time: they were squeezed out of everything except tips and the little they managed to steal. After I left the firm to take a position in Kona as controller for Kona Construction Company, the escorts told me they were stealing plenty of money right out from under the nose of the new accountant, using the same old methods, as he had gotten rid of the systems I had installed – I wonder if he got a cut.

Only one escort tried to rip me off. One day I made the mistake of first counting the cash Stacy had brought into the agency office, leaving it stacked on my desk by my left elbow instead of putting it in the safe while I added up the customer receipt copies to make sure they matched the cash total. While I was thus occupied, Stacy slipped almost two grand from the money stacks into her purse. I locked the remainder in the safe. Of course it was short when I counted it again the next day to make the bank deposit. Gee, what happened? I was the only one who had the combination to the safe, and I knew I had not taken any money. So I called Stacy at her travel desk at the Gateway Hotel, and asked her to come into the office for the lie detector test because her money was short and I could not figure out who took it. Well, she said, I had given her a receipt for her cash. Yes, but someone had mysteriously managed to get their hands on it, I said, so everyone would have to take the test and be questioned by the police. Of course there was no involuntary lie detector test in store for her, as that procedure was expressly prohibited by law at the time, and I knew it. But she fell for the story: she called me back a half hour later, and said she could not figure out what had happened, but she had found almost two grand in the Gateway Hotel safe. How strange! How did it get in there? Well, the Lord works in mysterious ways.

Eileen, a proud Native Hawaiian, was the most regal escort we had in our bevy. Several years later I encountered her in Alaska. It was twenty below that day. She had moved to Anchorage and opened up a flower shop, specializing, of course, in Hawaiian flowers. She planned on organizing luaus. I encountered many Native Hawaiians in Alaska.

Sammy, a handsome Portuguese-Hawaiian man who played ukulele and slack key guitar and always had the best pakalolo, was everybody’s favorite escort. Sammy had gotten back from Vietnam via a mortician school in St. Louis. He thought he would be a great mortician because the odor of death did not bother him in Vietnam; his girlfriend in St. Louis dumped him, he got tired of the cadavers, and returned to Hawaii. Sammy was quite the ladies’ man at the travel agency. Tourist girls would literally fight over him.  We had to suspend him several times for compromising scenes. For instance, two women got into a fight over who was going to stay in his room in Maui – two day suspension; and woman on a teacher’s tour was spotted giving him head behind an airport baggage counter prior to departure – two day suspension. One afternoon, he seduced four women at the Outrigger East and dared to brag about it – no suspension, as we were jammed with tourists and could not spare him. That kind of action came as natural to Sammy as fighting. He was small in stature and like many other relatively short men had a chip on his shoulder to make up for it.  The KelleyHotel system used to overbook as a matter of policy because of the no-shows. But one season they all showed up. Sammy arrived at a hotel with a hundred or so tourists; the manager said the hotel was overbooked; Sammy knocked him down with one punch; no charges were brought for fear of publicity on the overbooking issue, but Sammy was suspended for three days.

Sammy fell in love with a yakuza gentleman’s geisha on the BigIsland; he found her in bed with another woman and was so upset that he jumped off the lanai. Fortunately the apartment was on the second floor and he was lucky: he was not badly injured. But the doctor kept him in the mental ward a week and put him on psychotropic drugs – when he got out he was using pakalolo to overcome the nausea. A few weeks later he fell in love with a redhead; they were engaged to be married on Halloween, but the engagement did not work out for some strange reason. The last time I saw Sammy, many years later, he had gotten paunchy and gray. He was happily married but was still hanging out in hotel lounges with his local friends, playing ukulele, eyeing the tourist girls. 

I took Maryann’s job as controller at the travel agency when she and Jim suddenly left town. By then I had found a cheap kitchenette in the Jungle – Waikiki’s remaining one- and two-story, single-wall apartment houses. Rick, an old friend of mine from the West Side, also lived in the Jungle. He had kicked around Europe illegally for awhile after his discharge; like many illegal immigrants of keen intelligence and artistically talent, he had become quite inventive with very little to go on. He eked out a living with a few magic markers and T-shirts when not bartending.  In Manhattan, he encased butterfly wings in plastic disks; sales were brisk. Thankfully for us starvelings, by the time he got to Hawaii he knew how to feed quite a few people on scant dollars whenever we were unemployed or between miserable paychecks. For example, a few cans of condensed soup, a couple packages of saimin, and several big cans of Fosters Lager – it was cheap then – kept us fat, dumb, and happy. That is, after we took a hit off his magic seven-foot-long bamboo pipe – the smoke got to the mean end of the stick all at once, and literally knocked a grown man down with a real “hit.” The tuna and black olive sandwiches were also out of sight. But the homemade yogurt mixed with ketchup was awful – yogurt had just become the in thing, something that had reportedly made mountain people live way past a hundred.  Of course we drank like fish because beer was more important than food. Sometimes a little alcohol was a terrible thing for Rick, since he was part Native American and part Revolutionary American and his biology simply could not handle it.  One morning I found him on his knees in his kitchen with his head in the oven; I thought he was trying to exit the world, but he had passed out in the wee hours while putting a slice of pizza in the oven. And he broke an arm when he was putting the star on the Christmas tree – he had gotten too merry and he fell off the ladder onto the tree. He was even luckier than the rest of us to have survived the Jungle. Rick and I learned quite a bit from each other; for example: I learned that pet rabbits are better kept in cages instead running around loose in the apartment; he learned that a man can learn to love a gorilla if he lives with her long enough.

I eventually married Pat’s beautiful sister. Pat was an easy going fellow, an escort at the travel agency. Like my friend Rick, sometimes Pat could not handle more than two drinks in a row before going off the deep end. And that was a good thing because he loved to shoot pool and to keep doubling up every game; since he was bound to pass out on the pool table, sometimes in the middle of taking a shot, his opponent could not lose. Pat lived in his Volkswagen camper, which he parked on Level 3 of the Waikiki Holiday Inn – he brought a lot of tour groups into the hotel, so got away with living in the parking lot, rent free. Pat got into the Krishna thing for a couple of weeks and refused to kill cockroaches until he woke up one night and his camper was full of them. And it was a good thing he got rid of the roaches; else he would not have many guests, like his girlfriend from Canada. One day after work, Pat and Sammy and I decided to conduct an experiment with LSD: we cut a piece of blotter acid into three parts; we each had our portion in our palms and had counted to three to drop together; but a wind came up just as we moved palms to mouths, and Pat was the only one whose hit had not blown away and who had swallowed his share – Sammy and I looked around but our little pieces of blotter were forever lost. We bid Pat farewell and went home. He went into the lounge, where he embarked on a magical mystery tour with a Canadian tourist that led to a wonderful evening in his mobile abode on Level 3. Imagine that for your first trip. Or imagine tripping on a NorthShore beach at midnight when the big boomers came in. Mind you, we were not acid heads, just weekend Hippies, more or less.

Well, I was lonely in those days. Relationships with tourists were on and off as they were always leaving next Wednesday. I followed one gal to the Mainland, but I got cold feet in San Francisco and came back to sunny Waikiki, where I was immediately rolled for my life savings - $250 cash money. She was disappointed when I said I had changed my mind. Rene, who got me instead, might say she was lucky; I would not beg to differ with her, for what good would that possibly do? Perhaps more on that later….