The Party

by Rebecca Schoenkopf

We couldn’t possibly bring beer to the party, despite Diane’s oft-stated insistence that we should. We had to walk a mile down a road with an average 25 percent grade—and that maxes out at 45 percent. (Easily the world’s steepest; some place in Wales that claims the honor is a laughable and piddling 40 percent.) Now think about the western end of Kanaan, where signs warn trucks about the dangerous six percent they’re about to experience. Watch downhill speed, trucks! Watch it good!

Why, yes, we were headed into the Waipio Valley on the Big Island, and mama no longer gets to bitch about poorness, not now, not ever—not that I would anyway. You know I don’t like to complain!

So when Keoni at the Waipio visitor info center (“visitor info centers” are just stores that want to sell you tours and such) told us his auntie was having her a birthday party at the bottom of the valley, and that we should bring a gift and a card (he was very specific about the card) and meet his family and have some delicious home-caught pig, we all thought that was a marvelous idea. Diane was a little uncomfortable with it, but her husband wanted to go, and she was no match for my argument, which is this: I am objectively pro-party-crashing, and if people crashed my party, I would like it! See? It’s a good argument! But really there was no way we could bring beer.

Oh, Diane, must you always be so right?

We trudged to the bottom, knees locked tight against the strain of the downhill g-force and whatnot, and wandered the black sand beach at the mouth of the valley for a while, Diane and her husband, Peter, wondering if we shouldn’t have a little dip there, but it was all shitty and choppy and the wind was whipping sand onto my delicate (and finally golden) skin, and I was glad that all of us were so conscientious about each other’s wants (except Diane’s want to not necessarily crash the party) that one scrunched-up face and unenthusiastic mumble was enough to dissuade them from the plan. And on to the party we went.

The marvelous guide book Hawaii the Big Island Revealed had mentioned that about 50 people live in the Waipio Valley, and that they have sort of insane feuds and burn each other’s houses down, and the cops are all like, “Deal with it amongst yourselves,” because of scaredness. It had also mentioned that valley residents are among the least friendly in the Hawaiian Islands, mostly because stupid tourists are always streaming through their yards and such in order to get a gander at the two packs of wild horses that live there, and to see the twin waterfalls at the rearward cliffs, and to be in one of the lushest places on earth.

   

And so we left the beach and walked inland to the party, bottle of Bacardi Gold and card in hand, and found the birthday auntie, and did our best to be respectful and delightful party guests and make new friends. I did okay with some boys who looked my son’s age, but weren’t in school—they said they were older than that, and I suppose could have been as old as early-20s; moving to New York in the early ’90s ruined forever my once-uncanny ability to guess people’s ages, because once I moved there, I consistently guessed people seven years older than they were, which: ouch. Anyway, when I asked them what they were snacking on, they offered some, which is very good party manners. Yum, dried cuttlefish! And Paul and I had a nice conversation with a third-grader, and her dad was nice too, as he kept an eye on three or four kids under eight at the side of the river. On the river were a few tents set up for later, a bonfire set ready for your match, and a pickup truck pumping out Toby Keith’s “As Good as I Once Was”—a song that once drove my brother Cakeyboy and me into gasping and howling hysterics when we had no choice but to listen to either country, cumbia, or a weird stoned radio preacher on a drive down the under-signaled California coast, and the more three-way “rodeos” he sang about, the bigger our eyes got and the less able we were to control our own physical reactions until I’m surprised we didn’t crash and die right there, our wreckage marked with a sad cross on the side of the San Luis Obispo highway. Oh, Toby Keith! You’re so totally gross!

The birthday auntie was completely delighted to see us—she took Diane’s arm in hers and led her to the gigantic cooler of beer (actually, one of five), chat-chat-chatting the whole way, and we figured some people like to meet new people, and have something unexpected happen at their birthday party! But her old man, Don, was glowering, and when he asked me how we’d ended up at their party if we were from Los Angeles, I didn’t have a lie ready, and I smiled and said we’d stopped into the store, and Keoni had told us we should bring a present and come say hello to his auntie, and Don growled, “That stupid fucking idiot!” and turned his back and stomped off, and my boyfriend Paul and I looked at each other, oh dear!

Then the birthday auntie, who was very drunk, knocked over the bottle of beer Diane had put on a ledge, and so Diane went to get another one, and a mad wahine marched up to her and stuck her finger in her face and told her it wasn’t unlimited beer, and if we wanted to drink beer, we should have brought some, because we hadn’t shared with the party, and Diane explained that we’d brought a bottle of rum, but the mad wahine said that was a gift, now, wasn’t it, and not a contribution for everyone, and she had a point. Peter, Paul and I started to think maybe we shouldn’t overstay our welcome (we weren’t actually welcome anyway, duh), but by then Diane had gotten into a long, outgoing conversation with all the women over by the food (not the mad wahine, she was somewhere else), including an older haole who’d lived in the valley since ’82 and a beautiful young haole woman who works the taro fields when she doesn’t go down to Kona to work the coffee, and who’s going back to school in Washington state for her agriculture degree or masters, I’m not sure which. The food, by the way, had all been prepared by Don for his old lady’s party—giant mutant shrimp caught right in the stream, kalua pork roasted from pig hunted right in the valley, though I think the unctuous, perfect beef was probably killed elsewhere at least—and it was as wonderful and copious as you’d expect, and the ladies all watched us gimlet-eyed to make sure we took enough. Seriously, they were mad we didn’t eat more. Damn, mixed-messages!

And so at last we got gone, and started trudging up the freakish road, and then Keoni showed up and piled us in the back of his truck for the ride straight up the mountain, and laughed and told us that’s just Don’s thing: to be kind of a dick. He had three platters of food stowed on his front seat; he hadn’t even bothered to stay and eat. And we wondered if Keoni was fucking with his uncle—maybe!—which didn’t make nearly as much sense as our initial supposition, before we got to the party, that if we lived at the bottom of the valley, we’d totally have a barbecue every Saturday and tell our nephew to send strangers with presents. Really, our idea was way more awesome. But man we appreciated the ride.

Comments

Comments closed.