I kneeled down beside an old Hawaiian woman with nicotine stained teeth. As she took a long drag from a hand-rolled cigarette, her cheeks disappeared into two dime-sized sinkholes. I turned my ear towards her wrinkled lips, and she blew a beam of hot smoke deep into my ear canal. The pressure from her breath hit my infected ear drum like a hammer, but I clenched my teeth, held still and let her finish.
“That should help draw out the water,” she leaned back in her chair and flicked her ashes. “Now you gotta lean your head to the side and jump.” I tilted the pounding side of my face towards the pavement and jumped out of my flip-flops. For a week I had carried around a piece of the ocean behind my right ear drum. A souvenir I acquired while trying to impress a girl wearing a white bikini with green polka dots.
At first, the sloshing sound inside my head nearly drove me to banging my head against a hot rock. But then the pain of infection set in, and I became so desperate for relief that when a yellow-tooth woman said she knew how to fix it, I didn’t care if she jabbed the hot end of her cigarette into my ear. I just wanted the pain to stop.
I was twenty-five when I bought a one-way ticket to Hawaii’s Big Island. When the plane landed, I found my cell phone charger in the top pocket of my backpack busted into pieces. I flipped open my phone and went through my contact list, writing down the numbers that I wanted to remember. After the phone died, I wrapped it in a Ziploc bag, stuffed it into a sock and buried it deep inside my backpack.
In exchange for my labor, I was offered a free place to stay at a makeshift hostel that offered abandoned Volkswagen vans as rooms for rent. After a few days of fighting off mosquitoes and hauling razor sharp lava rocks across the hostel’s three acres, I packed my bag and waited for an opportunity to escape. When the owner drove me down to the beach so I could take my first shower, I quit the job the moment I saw the ocean. From then on, until I left the Island, I lived amongst the loose ranks of Hawaiians, hippies and hobos who never left the beach.
Each morning I rose with sun. Every night, I’d smooth out a place on the sand to sleep. During the daylight hours in between, I might go join the other beach people and listen to their lies. But most of the time I stayed off to myself, working up a sweat in the sunshine over a book and then cooling off in the ocean. When I tired of the scenery and needed a ride, I’d stand by the rode with my thumb out. If the first car didn’t stop, then usually the second or third one did. Then whoever picked me up would take me further than they intended to go, just for the sake of Aloha. Hawaii had a way of always leading me to where I needed to go.
Now, contrary to hobo belief, cigarette smoke does not draw water out of an infected ear. The morning that followed our smoky attempt, the entire side of my face was numb. I became worried that if I didn’t get real help soon death was imminent. Either by exhaustion or suicide. So, I caught a ride to the closest hospital and five minutes after walking into the emergency room, I was walking out with a written prescription for an antibiotic and a single pain pill bouncing around the bottom of an orange bottle.
Later that afternoon I woke up lying on a picnic table. Dried blood watered down with pus had stained the towel I had rolled for a pillow. The pain in my ear was gone, and so was my hearing. Just as the emergency room doctor had promised, my ear drum had ruptured.
I washed the dried crust out of my beard below a stenciled sign reading NON-POTABLE WATER. My mouth was dry, and my water bottle was empty. I had to fight off the desire to drink from the tainted faucet. I walked to the road and caught a ride with a guy who was heading to the other side of the Island. I decided then that I needed a vacation. So rather than getting out at the first place where I could refill my bottle, I watched miles of coastline pass before I asked him to drop me at the old hotel famous for its cheap rooms called the Manago.
For twenty dollars I got a single room with a shared bath. After my long hot shower was interrupted by a couple of knocks at the door, I went back to my room and sat on the edge of the single bed beside the open window. There was a party going on across the street and I could hear one voice above all the others. I couldn’t make out the exact words, but I could tell by his inflection and the laughter of those around him that he was telling one hell of a story. I had a story, but I was alone inside my empty room.
I took out my notebook and stared at the list of contacts that I had written down when I arrived. In blue ink there was a new addition. An email address of the girl who wore the white bikini with green polka dots. I walked to the lobby, sat down at the courtesy computer and sent her a message.
Two years later, she and I were standing barefooted on a beach in Alabama. As the sun went down over the Gulf of Mexico, we were married.
