Authors Note:
The following is a brief recounting of an experience that took place in the Spring of 2002, when I was a sophomore at the University of Hawaii-Hilo.
It was a beautiful evening on the Kona Coast of the Big Island. Not that the time of year mattered much, it's always beautiful and clear on the Kona side. There wasn't a cloud in the sky, and the stars lit up the sky as bright as a moonlit night anywhere else. The temperature was warm, and the air held the salty crispness that the nearby ocean provided.
We weren't about stargazing that night. My friend Jeremy and I had just attended an outdoor concert at the Old Kona Airport venue. There wasn't much around to give one the impression this was once an airport, just a bunch of wide open grassy space and a stage. The show was over, and we were making our way to the parking lot, and the few tall-boy's of beer in a cooler in the bed of my truck.
As we made the transition from the soft grass of the venue to the coarse and crushed basalt of the parking lot, something struck me as odd. There must have been a few thousand people making their way to parked vehicles, yet I spied not one police officer or even a rent-a-cop watching out as this mass exodus took place. Never once had I been to an event this large without there being some sort of visible security presence.
Here we were, two haolis, in a sea of locals, nearly all of them drunk and high. Immediately this sense of difference made the hair stand up on the back of my neck. Think whatever high spirited notions you want about the nature of our modern world, racism is still plenty prevalent in this world, and in this situation we were the minority amongst a highly resentful majority.
The word Haoli originated in the Hawaiian language to denote a foreigner, someone who was not of the Hawaiian people. It was merely a word used to signify someone who came from anywhere in the world besides the seven islands of black basalt that make up Hawaiian.
Over time, this word went through a wholesale change, and now is used to refer to any white person in the islands, regardless of where they were born or raised. Someone could have lived amongst very traditional Hawaiian people their entire lives, and would still be looked upon by many locals as a haoli. Through years of real and perceived injustices perpetrated by whites upon Hawaiians, a strong emotion of contempt has built behind the word, and now it can be delivered as a wholesale racial slur.
Local, on the other hand, has become a word to describe any non-white person, of any Pacific Islander heritage, living in Hawaii. It really doesn't have a racist undertone to it, aside from the fact that many use it as a means of being exclusionary towards whites and other non-Pacific Islanders.
As the uncomfortableness of our situation was really beginning to sink in, Jeremy tapped me on the shoulder and pointed. About a hundred yards down the row of cars we were walking, a ruckus was forming. Two rather large local men had started a shouting match in pidgin, a dialect of the islands made up of various words of English, Hawaiian, Portuguese, and other influences. Quickly it was becoming a shoving match, and a crowd had started to gather around them.
Jeremy and I stopped. I noticed that my truck was one row to the left of where we stood, about fifty yards nearer the building altercation. I pointed to the truck, and Jeremy nodded. We slipped over to the other row and started walking, mindful of the trouble that was increasing and every step we took which brought us nearer to it.
After a couple of steps we heard the massed crowd start screaming, the fight was now real. The two men were exchanging blows. I don't know if you've ever seen two men, neither over five feet, eight inches tall; and neither under three hundred and fifty pounds in weight fight, but it's something to behold.
The men stood toe to toe, each wearing the trademark footwear of Hawaii, slippahs: a pair of dollar-store plastic thong sandals. Not what I would chose for combat on the jagged volcanic gravel of this parking lot. They hurled hay-maker after hay-maker at one another, until one landed a good blow. The punch took forever to make its way to the mans face. So long, in fact, he could have, should have, written and notarized his last will and testament in the time it took for the blow that would destroy his face to arrive.
Blat! The noise surprised me. It wasn't what I had imagined the crushing of a man's nose and cheekbones would sound like. There was no crack as the bones split, no tear as the cartilage left its moorings, nor the sharp pow-noise associated with the movies. It was like a raw and wet steak being slapped against a counter top. A heavy, cold, and wet slap.
Instantly, the mans face was a bloody mess, and he staggered away from the blow. His poor choice in fighting shoes got caught on a rock, and he was down. The other man, not satisfied, immediately set upon him, his slippah-clad foot repeatedly kicking the man in the face. The crowd was not satisfied either, and the savage brutality that human beings keep locked away was released with a fury. Within seconds, this man was receiving savage kicks and punches from his fellow locals as he lay there defenseless. I don't imaging he remained conscious for very long, thankfully.
Jeremy and I had been transfixed upon this brutal scene. So much so, that we had scarcely covered half the distance remaining to my vehicle. We looked at each other, more and more realizing the gravity of the situation, and the peril we might be in. We put our heads down and walked as fast as we could to get to our means of escape. This was not our fight, and didn't want to get caught up in it. These people could very likely turn their blood-lust towards the first different thing they saw, namely us.
The last few steps passed quickly. In no time we were on either side of the vehicle, and I took to fumbling with my keys.
Ba-woing!
It was the sound of something impacting sheet metal and the spring-like sound of said metal trying to return to its previous form. The sound was very nearly like the one children make when they take a sheet of construction paper into either hand and shake it vigorously. The strange noise was a lot closer to us than where the fight had been, the situation was getting worse.
I turned my head and looked. Just across the aisle, and up a few places, the fight had escalated into a seven on seven brawl around a Ford F350 with an obscene amount of lift and monster truck tires. It was a small-penis compensator anywhere in the world, and right here fourteen or so alcohol and drug fueled crazies were incorporating it into their scuffle. Heads were bouncing off of bumpers, body parts were being slammed in doors, it was straight out of a bad movie. This wasn't a movie, it was real-life theater and it was going on too close to me.
"Dude, get the truck unlocked now," Jeremy said in a low calm voice. "I don't want wanna be a stain in this parking lot when these locals finally tire out. Where the fuck are the cops?"
Pop, my key found its mark and released the door lock. I opened the door and reached over to let Jeremy in. He opened the door and had one leg inside...
"Hey haoli, you got one beef cuz?"
Our evasion was over, we had been discovered and we were being challenged. There is no talking one's way out of the situation here. It's flee or fight. In the world of fighting in Hawaii, numbers are paramount. There is no such thing as a fairly-matched fight, it's how many people you can bring on your side. I imagine it is some sort of cultural holdover from the not-so-distant past when the islands were ruled by feudal lords who engaged in clan warfare.
We would never survive the fight that was now finding us. We were grossly outnumbered, in a state that prohibits the public from carrying firearms, and there was no law enforcement in sight. Jeremy and I would become yet another conveniently overlooked statistic in the never-ending cycle of racism and hate in this nation.
Our salvation lie in twenty-five hundred dollars worth of steel, plastic, and rubber. It was now time to hope to hell my rickety 1987 Isuzu Pickup would judge that Jeremy and I were worthy of life, start and get us the far away from there. We would not be safe until we were out of this parking lot. Even if the door locks held, a few windows would be nothing for these men to break. Their fists were as big around as pineapples, and judging from the melee around the Ford, they must be pretty impervious to pain.
As Jeremy was planting his ass in the seat next to me, I was stepping on the clutch and putting the keys in the ignition. Turning this truck over was never a problem, but it took a little bit of feathering on the throttle to get the choke to disengage from the carburetor before she had enough steam to pull first gear.
Ruh-Ruh-Ruh-Vroom! The small four-cylinder came to life. A couple quick stabs on the throttle, and she was purring like the fourteen-year old kitten she was. I looked up into the rear view. I could see silhouettes. They weren't fighting each other anymore, they were moving in our direction, at a very brisk walk.
I couldn't make out distinct features, just outlines cast by the glow of vehicle headlights behind us. It was like the scene from some cheap zombie-apocalypse movie. Only, these were real human beings, and they really wanted to hurt me.
My right hand quickly found first gear. I revved the motor with my right foot, and dumped the clutch with my left. The little Isuzu's rear tires spun free in the black gravel, showering the men behind us, no doubt. I cranked the wheel right, and we were off down the aisle. I slowed and made the left turn to exit the parking lot. As we made it onto the driveway on our way out, Jeremy turned, opened the rear sliding-glass window and reached into the bed of the truck. He came back with two twenty-four once cans of Coors Light.
"Here man, I thought you might want this!"
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