Mahu Men

  MAHU MEN

  Mysterious and Erotic Stories

  NEIL S. PLAKCY

  mlrpress

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright 2010 by Neil Plakcy

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  Published by

  MLR Press, LLC

  3052 Gaines Waterport Rd.

  Albion, NY 14411

  Visit ManLoveRomance Press, LLC on the Internet:

  www.mlrpress.com

  Cover Art by Deana Jamroz

  Editing by Kris Jacen

  Printed in the United States of America.

  ISBN# 978-1-60820-130-3

  First Edition 2010

  To Marc, as always – You are my true companion.

  Kimo has been helped along the way by many people, including Angela Faith Brown, Anthony Bidulka, Chris Kling, Cindy Chow, Dan Jaffe, Deborah Turrell Atkinson, Eliot Hess and Lois Whitman, Fred Searcy, Greg Herren, Jim Born, Jim Hall, Joe DeMarco, Joe Pittman, John Dufresne, John Spero, Les Standiford, Mike Jastrzebski, Neil Crabtree, Pat Brown, PJ Nunn, Shane Allison, Stacy Alesi, Steve Berman, Steve Greenberg, Richard Curtis, Jay Quinn, Vicki Hendricks, Ware Cornell, and Wayne Gunn.

  Some of these stories have been previously published:

  “Kelly Green” and “The Price of Salt” have been available through the Amazon Shorts Program. “The Sun God and the Boy He Loved” is also available through Amazon, under the title “All The Beautiful Boys.”

  “Christmas in Honolulu” took second place in a “Bad Santa” contest at Mysterical–E, and then was reprinted in By The Chimney With Care.

  “Island Ball” was originally printed in Fast Balls.

  The title of the story “The Price of Salt” is a small homage to Patricia Highsmith, who wrote a lesbian novel by that name.

  Introduction

  I Know What You Did

  Blowing It

  Christmas in Honolulu

  The Price of Salt

  Super–Size

  Online, Nobody Knows You’re A Dog

  The Cane Fields

  Sex in Salt Lake

  The Sun God and the Boy He Loved

  The Whole Ten Million

  A Rainy Day at Black Point

  The Second Detective

  False Assumptions

  Island Ball

  Mahu Men

  INTRODUCTION

  I first began writing about Honolulu homicide detective Kimo Kanapa‘aka in 1992, after my first visit to Hawai‘i. His first appearance, in very different form, was in a failed book called Death in Waikîkî –– a generic title for what was shaping up to be a generic book, about a beach boy private eye who was a former cop.

  Part of the credit for Kimo’s transformation into the man featured in these stories goes to James W. Hall, who was my MFA thesis advisor at Florida International University. I’d already graduated from FIU and was attending a workshop in Seaside, Florida, where Jim read 40 pages of Death in Waikîkî. When we sat down together to go over his comments, his first question was “How much of this have you written?”

  When I told him I’d written about 200 pages, his face fell. That’s never a good sign. “Why did Kimo leave the police force?” he asked.

  I was stumped. I’d made Kimo a former cop just because I thought a lot of private eyes had that background, and I had only the vaguest idea of why he’d left—an inability to work with authority. Jim told me that wasn’t good enough.

  Disappointed, I went back home and shelved the project. It wasn’t until a few years later, as I was going through my own coming out process, that I started thinking about a book in which a cop just experimenting with being gay found a body outside a gay bar, and that forced him to confront his sexuality.

  I realized that my cop could be Kimo, my Hawaiian private eye—but that I’d first have to write the book in which Kimo went through the controversy that arose after he found that body, and had to admit where he’d been.

  By the time I finished the revised Death in Waikîkî, Kimo told me that the character I’d created wasn’t the kind of guy who’d quit in the face of a challenge, and that as far as he was concerned, he was staying on the force.

  There was something about Kimo that continued to fascinate me, even after I’d finished the book. I wanted to know what happened to him. But I wasn’t willing to commit to writing another novel when there was no guarantee that the first book would be published. So I started writing short stories about him.

  I’d written three or four by the time I began working with a literary agent, who thought that the book’s title should be changed to something less generic. He suggested Mahu, a derogatory term for gay in Hawaiian, because it was an interesting and unique word, and I went along with him. Since then I’ve had a lot of opportunity to research that term, and I hope that by using it in my titles I’m helping to take the sting out of it and reclaim the power behind it.

  Once Mahu was represented, I thought it was sure to be published, and that my job was to write the next book, so that a publisher would see that Kimo was the kind of guy who could carry a mystery series. At the time, the big news out of Hawai‘i was the movement to legalize gay marriage, so I decided that would be the centerpiece of my new plot.

  That book began its life with the title Noho Mahu. In the Hawaiian language, the term for marriage has both male and female versions. Noho kâne means to marry a man; noho wahine means to marry a woman. So I coined my own phrase, noho mâhû. Eventually, though, I decided that was a little too obscure for a title, and I switched to Mahu Marriage.

  By 2002, both books were still unpublished, but it was looking like Haworth Press might buy Mahu, and I was energized to revisit Kimo and his world. Because of a quirk in the calendar for the college where I worked, I had nearly five weeks off at Christmas, between final exam week and the holidays, so I thought I’d write another Kimo story.

  I liked the idea that Kimo’s first assignment at his new department would be an undercover operation, where he’d revisit his surfing past on the North Shore. He wouldn’t be able to tell anyone that he’d returned to the force, though, to enable him to penetrate the surfer world there, and that put him in the interesting position of having to lie to friends and family, just as he’d begun telling the truth about his life.

  It was such an interesting idea, though, that it grew from a short story into a novel. Along the way, I began to understand more about what makes a story idea versus a novel idea. In a story, the action is confined to the characters involved in the plot—the victim, the suspects, and a bit of Kimo himself. In a novel, the plot begins to expand to involve Kimo’s family and friends, and the action grows too complicated for the short story format.

  So I was stuck with a third novel, Mahu Surfer, one which had to come between the two I’d written. Fortunately, the short time frame between Mahu and Mahu Surfer (about two weeks), and the location on the North Shore, meant that there wasn’t much I had to do with the third book to make sure that everything fit.

  There isn’t much room for Kimo’s sexual experimentation in the novels; they are primarily mysteries. So I began writing erotica about Kimo, too. I think that sex is an important part of Kimo’s growth as a character and as a gay man, and I enjoyed the chance to show him in a variety of different situations.

  I kept on writing these stories, publishing them in a variety of places, as Mahu and Mahu Surfer came out. I started thinking about a collection of these stories around the time that Alyson Books published the third book in the series, ren
amed Mahu Fire (because my editor didn’t think Mahu Marriage was a dangerous enough title for a mystery. I had a feeling that was because he’d never been married.)

  The first of the stories begins shortly after the events of Mahu Surfer, when Kimo has returned to Honolulu to full–time work as a homicide detective in Honolulu’s District One, which encompasses downtown Honolulu and a few of its suburbs. Because of his position as the department’s only openly gay detective, he occasionally gets the chance to range outside those boundaries.

  These early stories take him through about four or five months when he’s just beginning to get comfortable with his sexuality—encounters with the general public, as well as some sexual experimentation. Shortly after “The Cane Fields,” in which Kimo investigates the disappearance of a man who has been living with his life partner, he gets the chance for a partner of his own, in Mahu Fire.

  “The Sun God and the Boy He Loved” is the first story after Kimo and Mike meet. It grew out of a few days at the Key West Literary Seminar in 1997, which that year focused on “Literature in the Age of AIDS.” It was a fascinating event, and I heard one lecture about gay elements in Greek myth, particularly in the story of Apollo and Hyacinthus, a beautiful boy he loved who was killed by a discus thrown by Apollo.

  What an interesting metaphor, I thought, for a character who has been infected with the HIV virus by a lover. I used the names Paul and Hy for the characters—and Paul drives a van for a company called Sun Tours.

  Kimo and Mike are still together for the action of “The Whole Ten Million.” But Kimo is so well–known in the gay community that it’s tough for Mike, who prefers to remain closeted. Since this is the first meaningful relationship for both of them, they have intimacy issues, too, and they break up after dating for about six months.

  The break up sends Kimo into a spiral of sexual activity—as represented in the erotica here. During the year that follows, Kimo experiments with different kinds of sex, and solves a bunch of mysteries. The last story here, “Mahu Men” takes place a few months before the novel Mahu Vice, where Mike and Kimo are able to try again for a happy ending.

  There are a few more stories between “Mahu Men” and Mahu Vice, as well as some that take place after that novel, including one that explains what happened to Jimmy Ah Wong, the teenaged boy with the blond Mohawk who makes his first appearance in Mahu. But they’ll have to wait for another collection—along with more stories I hope to write about Kimo, as he and Mike, and the friends and family who surround and support them, continue their journey in the Aloha State.

  I’ve tried to be correct when it comes to the use of two pieces of punctuation in Hawaiian—the okina and the kahako. The okina is a backwards apostrophe, read as a glottal stop (a pause between two vowels.) The macron is a line over vowels which indicates more stress.

  The word mâhû, for example, is properly written with a kahako over the â and the û. In the book titles, though, I don’t use them, because my original publishers felt it would make the books harder to find through computerized searches. It’s my understanding that the word would be pronounced maaah–huuu in that way. Kimo’s last name, Kanapa‘aka, has an okina in it, indicating a pause between those two a’s, rather than eliding them together.

  I have tried my best to ensure that I’ve spelled Hawaiian words and names correctly, and apologize for any unintentional errors. I’ve learned a great deal about Hawai‘i through writing these books, and hope to keep doing so for a long time.

  I KNOW WHAT YOU DID

  Dark clouds were massing over Tantalus as I responded to the discovery of a murder victim at the Vybe, a gay club on University Avenue in the Mo‘ili‘ili neighborhood of Honolulu, near the Mânoa campus of the University of Hawai‘i. But it was sunny on the H1 highway, and I wasn’t worried that rain would damage the crime scene. Our island is composed of microclimates, and if you don’t like the weather where you are, just drive a few minutes away. It will change.

  What does not change is that people commit murders. I am a homicide detective, and that means there will always be a job for me. A few months before, after six years on the force, I came out of the closet, the first openly gay police detective in Honolulu. I’d been to the Vybe before, for the Sunday afternoon tea dance. My friend Gunter liked the Vybe’s outdoor patio area, which had a good dance floor, a couple of bars and a stage. If I hadn’t been on duty, I might have been at the club myself, dancing and having a good time.

  When I pulled up across from the club, I spoke to the first cop on the scene, a middle–aged Chinese guy named Frank Sit. We shook hands, and then he nodded toward the corpse. “911 got an anonymous call, reporting a man injured in the parking lot here.”

  Sit had already cordoned off the immediate area around the body, and called for backup to help us conduct a search. “Looks like a bashing,” he said. “Poor guy was coming out of the bar, and somebody came along and started whaling on him.”

  I kneeled down to examine the body. He was a haole, or white male, in his early thirties, lying face down on the ground. He had been beaten extensively around the head and upper body. Head wounds are often big bleeders, and this case was no exception. Blood had pooled around the man’s head, running in a single stream down toward the curb. His skull had been fractured, but there was no brain matter exposed, a small favor for which I was grateful.

  I took a couple of pictures with my digital camera, memorializing the scene and the way the body had been found. Then I stepped aside to let the medical examiner’s guys do their work.

  Four uniforms showed up to help search the immediate area for the weapon. “Look for any kind of blunt object, or anything that looks like blood drippings. We can get the crime scene techs to spray with luminol if we can’t find anything else.”

  They walked off, and I looked toward the small crowd of men in short shorts and tank tops who clustered just beyond the crime scene tape, speaking in low tones to each other. Most of them were in their early twenties, probably students at UH.

  It was just after six, and the tropical sun was turning the sky orange as it began its descent over Sand Island and the Ke‘ehi Lagoon. The air was heavy with humidity, exhaust from the highway, and the faint scent of plumeria blossoms coming from a discarded lei on the ground nearby.

  “My name is Kimo Kanapa‘aka, and I’m a homicide detective,” I said, to the crowd at large. “I assure you I’m going to do everything possible to find out what happened here this evening.” I pulled out my pad and pen. “Any of you know the victim?”

  A muscular guy in his late thirties, with a brush cut and combat boots, said, “I danced with him but I never got his name.”

  A slim Japanese guy said, “His name was Jimmy. He was here every Sunday.”

  I worked my way through the crowd, one by one. No one could recall any incidents involving the victim, no one claimed to know him well, and nobody remembered seeing him leave. The crowd had been sparse at the tea dance, and the rest of the businesses in the area were closed on Sunday evening, so no one had seen anything outside.

  By then, the medical examiner was finished with the body, and I pulled on a pair of plastic gloves and knelt down. I carefully turned the body over. The victim was wearing a silver chain with a St. Christopher’s medal on it, and a couple of silver rings. One of them was in the shape of a snake, wrapping around his right index finger. I found his wallet in his front pocket and extracted it.

  There was $18 still in it, along with his identification: James Fremantle, 31, a Waikîkî resident. So his assault wasn’t a robbery, which lent more credence to the idea of a gay bashing. Since I had come out, I’d started paying closer attention to crimes against gay men and lesbians, and I’d noted that gay bashings were on the rise—just a few days before, a couple of teenagers from Aiea had been caught in Waikîkî, punching a gay man who they said had made advances toward them, and that was by no means an isolated incident.

  I stood up and told the ME’s team that they could t
ake the body away. Then I walked inside the Vybe. It was decorated in Pan–Asian neon, all paper umbrellas, earthenware ashtrays embossed with ideographs, and electric signs like those in Tokyo’s Ginza.

  The bartender, a blonde woman with a bouffant, told me Fremantle was a regular, and that afternoon she had served him a couple of Cosmopolitans. Her name was Peg, and she’d been working at the tea dance since opening. Fremantle wasn’t one of the first to arrive, but she knew he’d been there at least two hours.

  Within about fifteen minutes, I’d spoken to anyone who had anything to contribute, and I walked back outside. Sit called me over; he had found a bloody baseball bat in a dumpster down the alley from the club.

  The bat was brand–new, and though I couldn’t see any fingerprints, there were several smudges in the blood consistent with a perpetrator who used plastic gloves. “Something here doesn’t seem right,” I said to Frank. “The new bat, the gloves. That sounds like premeditation.”

  “Bashing’s an impulse crime, in my experience,” he said.

  “Mine, too.” Usually a bunch of guys got liquored up and went out looking for trouble. Sometimes they found prostitutes, and sometimes they got into traffic accidents or other minor scrapes. And sometimes they found some innocent gay guy, by himself or with a friend, and they used their fists and whatever debris they found handy. Buying a new baseball bat and a pair of gloves didn’t fit.

  I spread some newspapers on the floor of my truck and gingerly placed the bat there. The last thing you want to do with something that’s wet and bloody is put it into a plastic bag and seal it up, particularly in a hot, humid climate like ours. You do that, and very soon you get bacterial growth that wipes out any DNA evidence.

  Then Sit and I walked the parking lot, looking at the position of the building, the cars, the street light. “At this point, I don’t want to assume that Fremantle was the victim,” I said. “We don’t know if the killer targeted him, or he was just at the wrong place at the wrong time.”