Exotica

Late Friday afternoon.  The house has been pressure washed.  I've hooked up the new color laser printer and run some tests, then made sheets of small images for transferring to my new notebook starting in January 2020.  I have a little time before I need to go back to mother's, so I pack up my new art materials and head for the cafe.  I order a cafe con leche, then sit down to begin.  I'm no good at it.  My effort is terribly jejune.  Not even adolescent.  I need the help and advice of a teenage girl.  By and large (to generalize) they have panache for such things.  Even my writing there is clumsier than usual.  But I work at it knowing that is the only way to improve.  

Then it is time to go.  I don't call my mother to ask what she wants for dinner.  She never knows.  She barely eats dinner now.  She snacks.  What I really want to do is go for sushi, but. . . .   What then?  Not pizza.  I decide on Mexican.  There is a little place up the street from my mother's house I've never tried that has been there forever.  When I get to her house, I ask her.  She shrugs.  I go.  I buy two dinners and three tacos.  It is WAY too much food, but that is my M.O.  I am back in a flash and lay the food out on the table.  Nothing is good.  Everything sucks.  I throw over half of it in the garbage.  

Selavy.  Just another Friday night with mom.  

I am anxious.  I have many concerns.  The house.  My health.  My mother's health.  But mostly I worry about my health and the draining away of whatever life I have left sitting on my mother's couch.  I want to drink the night away.  I am more than tempted.  I decide to take a Xanax, for I feel myself going.  I take it with one small sip of whiskey.  Fuck, that is good.  But no.  I sit on the couch and wait for the drug to relieve my death spiral.  

It takes awhile.  

I make a cup of good jasmine tea from the little pearled leaves.  I drink four cups over the next hour.  Some calm descends.  I turn to YouTube.  I go down a rabbit hole of Tiki culture.  Fascinating.  Totally fabricated, totally Hollywood.  A mishmash of "exotica" goes into creating the alternate reality that takes over the imagination of Americans after WWII.  I am taken to museums to look at masks from Polynesia, Melanesia, South America, Africa.  There are similarities.  The appeal is the "primitive" which is associated with a freedom of the libido.  I search for old films of Hawaiian dancers before the Hula was corrupted by Christian missionaries.  Couldn't find any.  But I am enamored of the cult of Tiki, especially because it is a fabrication that never existed but in the imagination.  It is an escape from actuality.  I want to escape actuality so very badly just now.  

We visit the famous old Tiki bars.  The drinks were invented by one man, Beachcomber Don.  He was Filipino.  The drinks were mostly rum drinks from the Caribbean with many added ingredients,  mostly sweet.  But lots of rum.  The Zombie.  The Mai Tai.  The Beachcomber.  The Singapore Sling.  The Pain Killer.  The Missionary's Downfall.  

Tiki was a perfect antidote to the life of the typical American businessman in the 1950s.  On Friday afternoon, he could drift away to an imaginary foreign land where barely clothed women brought him strong drinks and did a little dance.  

I'm a fool for make believe.  

I stuck with tea.  

When I had friends in Key West before the condos and cruise ships came, there was a place just outside of town where the locals went to eat but mostly drink called the Hukilau.  You would bring your own fish and they would cook it.  They made a drink called The Hurricane, and customers were limited to one.  No one knew exactly what was in it other than eight shots of rum, but reportedly (I never had one) you couldn't taste it for all the liqueurs that were included.  I used to dance the hula and sing the Hukilau song for many years.  

"Hukilau lau lau lau, do the Hukilau lau lau lau lau."

Something like that.  

One of the oldest and most famous Tiki bars left in the U.S. is in Ft. Lauderdale called the Mai-Kai (link).  When Dry January is over, and if my hillbilly cousin ever comes, I want to go there for a drink.  I'll call my Miami friend to come meet me.  

One of the most famous Tiki bars is at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco called The Tonga Room.  I've meant to go many times, but I never have.  If San Francisco ever recovers, I want to go.  I can't believe I never did.  

And so. . . that was my night--bad Mexican, Xanax, a tongue full of whiskey, and the history of Tiki.  

Tell me now--does life get any better than this?

I took another Xanax before bed, just to be sure.  And so, with the sound of Martin Deny and "Bali Hai" echoing in my ear and imagined scenes from "Adventures in Paradise" in my head. . . .