I was driving from the North Shore to Honolulu, the gas light in my car blinking like a nervous eye. I was already running on fumes, pushing it hard, a knot of stupid urgency in my gut. I was late. I was always late for something.
The occasion was a woman, of course. It always is. An old ghost from my Bend, Oregon days named Kelly, in town on vacation with her boyfriend, a man who was soon to be her husband. She didn’t want me to pick her up, said we could keep it casual. I knew what that meant. It meant trouble. And I was driving right towards it with a goddamn empty gas tank.
To be honest, she’d been a great teacher back when I was newly divorced, fresh out of the cage and blinking in the sunlight. We were together and not together, on again, off again, for months. She taught me the new rules of the game. I even met her father once, a sad old bastard who, after a long, rambling speech, gave me his official “permission” to marry his daughter. It was the most awkward, pathetic piece of theater I’d ever been a part of.
We met at the Waikiki Brewery. I was already at the bar, two beers deep, watching the world go by. It had been years, but I knew her the second she walked in. She was poured into one of those bodysuits with nothing underneath, the kind that leaves nothing to the imagination and everything to regret. You could see the work she’d been putting in at the gym. She looked younger than I remembered, and she was dripping with a kind of raw, confident sexuality that a smart man runs from. I’ve never been a smart man.
She saddled up to the bar next to me, and just like that, the years between us just evaporated into the stale, air-conditioned room. The beers started coming. The casual, not-so-casual touching began, her hand on my arm, my leg against hers. A silent, old language we both still knew how to speak.
We talked about the old times, the old trips. Utah, Northern California, San Diego. The kids. We were just pulling out the ghosts of a life we once tried to build together, seeing if they still had a pulse. And I realized, sitting there, that I had spent a lot of goddamn time with this woman. We’d had a strong, raw, physical partnership. A beautiful, ugly thing.
And tonight, sitting there next to me, not a single goddamn word about her fiancé. His name was a ghost she had decided to leave at home.
She was giving me all the signals, running through the whole playbook with the skill of a seasoned professional. And I was just sitting there, soaking it all up like a sponge, knowing exactly where this road was headed.
After the fourth beer, when the buzz was good and warm and the truth started to feel a little less important, I suggested we go somewhere else for a bite. It wasn’t a question. It was just the next line in a script we both already knew by heart.
We ended up at the Chart House.
Food was never the point, of course. We weren’t there for the goddamn food.
The beer buzz, that soft, comfortable lie you tell yourself at the beginning of the night, was starting to fade. So I switched to whiskey. Doubles. On the rocks. Whiskey doesn’t tell you jokes; it just tells you the truth, and the truth is usually a sonofabitch.
Whiskey and I, we’re not friends. Never have been. It’s a tool, a goddamn key to a locked room in my own head where the old bastard lives. And sitting there across from her, the ghost of all our old times between us, I felt the need to go unlock that door.
She’d told me I’d changed. Said it like it was a goddamn compliment, like I’d finally been housebroken. But it landed like an insult, a quiet, smiling accusation that I’d gone soft, that I’d lost my teeth.
And there was no way in hell I was going home that night with just a pat on the back and a polite hug from this woman. Not after that.
So I took a few more hits of that whiskey. Not for the taste. But to wake up the bastard she thought was dead and gone. To get the goddamn stick out of my ass.
Four double whiskeys later, the ghost showed up. My old self. The sonofabitch I’d been trying to bury under years of quiet desperation.
We were back in my car. The air was thick with a history neither of us wanted to talk about. And the old act, the tired, familiar play of a man and a woman who used to be something, it started up all over again. A real goddamn tragedy, and we both knew all the lines by heart.
Somehow, the goddamn car, that piece of shit running on nothing but prayers and whatever gasoline vapor was left in the tank, it actually started. But I was on a mission now. A simple, stupid, one-track mission.
We ended up down by the Hilton Village. Parked the dying beast and took a walk on the beach, the sand cool under our feet. Then I suggested it, the only thing that made any sense in that moment.
“Let’s go skinny dipping in the lagoon.”
Without a word, we stripped down and jumped in.
Two naked old ghosts, embracing in the dark, with the romantic, indifferent lights of the city watching us. We started doing what comes naturally, what animals do in the warm, dark water when they’ve got nothing left to lose. It was a frantic, forty-minute truce with the past, a desperate attempt to feel something real in a world full of lies.
Then the real world started to creep back in. She got nervous about the time. It was getting late. She had a promise to keep, a leash to get back on. She had to get back to the fiancé.
We got out. My legs were wet, and I couldn’t get my goddamn pants on. A clumsy, pathetic struggle in the dark. So I just kept my underwear off, folded up the wet pants, and threw on my shirt, which covered most of the important parts. A real class act.
Her bodysuit, though? It fit her perfectly, wet or dry. She just slipped right back into her other life, no problem at all.
We hopped back in the car. I glanced at the dash. The gas needle was buried so far in the red it was probably scratching the paint off the other side. I’d pressed my luck all night, but reality was a hard, simple fact: there wasn’t a single goddamn gas station between the village and the Marriott where her keeper was waiting.
I drove her there, the engine sputtering on fumes and prayers. I went around the block once, just in case her man was out front, waiting to put a bullet in my head. Then I pulled up.
She leaned over and gave me a goodbye kiss. A real one. Juicy. “I missed you,” she whispered, and I saw a little tear well up in the corner of her eye. And then, just as I was starting to feel something, she slapped me, hard, across the face. A quick, sharp sting to remind me of the rules.
She got out of the car and walked away without looking back.
And damn, she looked good. A perfect, beautiful silhouette walking right through the front door of that fancy hotel and straight into the arms of her fiancé.
Leaving me there in the dark, with a stinging face and an empty goddamn tank.
The only gas station was across the channel bridge. I could see the big, yellow Shell sign, a beautiful, mocking beacon in the dark. A promise of salvation I knew I probably wouldn’t reach.
I could feel the engine sputtering, starving for gas as I started up the incline of the bridge. And then I saw them. The flashing lights, painting the whole goddamn sky in red and blue. The cops. They had a sobriety checkpoint set up right at the top. Of course they did. It was St. Paddy’s Day, amateur night, and they were out hunting for drunks like me.
As I was waiting in line, the car finally gave up. It coughed once, a pathetic little shudder, moved an inch, and then just died. Gave up the ghost right there. I was caught, dead in the water, a perfect specimen of a man who had run out of road and out of luck all at the same time.
A squad car pulled up behind me. A Korean officer gets out, all crisp uniform and authority, and shines that bright, accusatory light right in my face.
I gave him the story, the only one I had. “Car’s out of gas, officer. My apologies.”
I could see him looking past me, into the car. His eyes went down, then up again. He’d noticed the distinct lack of pants. He listened to me try to turn the engine over a few more times, the starter just clicking pathetically into the night. “You know,” he said, his voice completely deadpan, “I think you’re out of gas.”
“I know, I know,” I told him. And then, out of some deep, drunken well of pure stupidity, I asked the question that sealed my fate. “Can you guys give me a ride to the gas station? I fucked up.”
That was it. That was the moment his professional boredom turned into genuine interest. He’s looking down again, seeing that something is very, very wrong with this picture. And as he turns to say something to his partner, I see my chance.
I quickly grab my wet, sandy pants from the floor, lift my legs up, and try to shove them through the pant holes. It’s a clumsy, desperate ballet. To do it, I have to arch my ass up off the seat, a real work of art. And in the process, my wiener, my own sad, little, half-drunk soldier, pops out from under my shirt.
And that, of course, is the exact moment the officer turns back. His flashlight beam finds it, illuminates it, puts a goddamn spotlight on it for the whole world to see. A perfect, quiet moment of pure, uncut humiliation.
I saw it in his police report later. “I could see the penis in full view,” he wrote, “along with the balls.”
Eventually, they pulled me out of the car. Spotlights from three different directions, pinning me like a bug on a board. They asked me to do some tests. Walk a line. Touch my nose. All that bullshit.
“I don’t do tests,” I told them, my voice calm. “My knees hurt. I’m a war vet.” A lie, of course, but a good one.
“Well,” the Korean cop says, his voice flat, “if you’re not doing the tests, you have to blow.”
“Sure,” I said with a shrug. “I’ll try.”
He went to his car, came back with the little black box, and held it up to my mouth. I knew there was no way in hell I was going to pass. I was a goddamn distillery on two legs. So I gave it a little puff, a gentle little blow like I was trying to put out a birthday candle without spilling any wax.
The thing didn’t register. He pulled it out, his patience already wearing thin. “Look,” he said, talking to me like I was some kind of retard, “you gotta really blow hard.”
He put it in my mouth again. I gave it another half-assed blow. He’s getting irritated now. We did this dance four times, and by the end of it, he was a pissed-off, angry Korean man with a job to do.
“Either you do it,” he finally said, his voice tight, “or you’re going to jail and your vehicle is getting impounded.”
And I could see it then, in the hard little glint in his eyes as he manhandled me, as the cold steel of the cuffs bit into my wrists. It wasn’t just duty.
It was joy. A pure, simple, ugly joy. He was having the time of his goddamn life.
So I went to jail.
Luckily, I’d been on the phone with my Filipina girl, the one I’d been with for three years. I’d told her what was happening. She showed up at the station while I was getting booked, a small, worried ghost in that sterile, fluorescent hell. I heard the Korean cop’s partner say to her, “Oh, you must be the young lady he was with at the lagoon.” He regurgitated the whole damn story I’d told them, every embarrassing detail. A little man-to-man conversation, breaking the code, sharing it all with the woman. Another piece of shit in a uniform. I knew I’d have to dig myself out of that hole later.
At the station, the Korean cop was still all business, a real tin soldier. “If you don’t blow in this one,” he says, sliding a stack of papers across the counter, “you have to sign these, knowing you’re going to lose your license for a year.”
I looked at the papers. And every time I came to a line that said “Signature,” I wrote, “I am in fear of my life. I have asked for an attorney. I do not understand what I am signing.” I did that in four different places. A small, pathetic rebellion, but it was all I had left.
My little Filipina came and picked me up. I explained the lagoon story, told her it was just me, all by myself, a lonely man in the dark water. A lie, of course, but she accepted it as the truth. And in that moment, that’s all that mattered.
The next day, I had to go all the way out to Kapolei to get my car out of impound. A hundred bucks. Then I hired an attorney, another thousand-dollar deposit for the retainer. When we finally went to court, my lawyer and the prosecutor were standing in the corner, laughing their asses off. My lawyer comes back over to me, wiping a tear from his eye.
“My God,” he says, “that is a funny story.”
It was all there, in the police report, in black and white. The Korean cop had recommended me for indecent exposure. The official story of why I didn’t have any pants on. The clinical, detailed description of my penis and balls making their grand, unscheduled appearance in the beam of his flashlight. All the shenanigans. It made for a story so goddamn funny that even the judge, a man who’d probably seen it all, kind of giggled as he dismissed the whole damn case. The license suspension was dismissed, too.
The attorney, after he was done laughing with the prosecutor, he leaned in close across the table, his eyes shining with a kind of professional admiration.
“Listen,” he said, his voice a low conspiratorial whisper. “All that shit you wrote down on those papers, on the signature lines? ‘I am in fear of my life… I have asked for an attorney…'”
He shook his head, a real grin on his face now.
“That was absolutely fucking beautiful. Godlike. That is exactly what you’re supposed to do. You made it a clear-cut case that you didn’t want to sign, that you were under duress, that they ignored your request for a lawyer. And those dumb bastards made you sign it anyway.”
The way he was talking, you’d think I was some kind of goddamn folk hero, some jailhouse lawyer who’d outsmarted the whole system. He said if it had actually gone to a real trial, if it had cost me fifteen grand in legal fees, that one stupid, desperate, scribbled line of bullshit… that would have been the key item.
That would have been the thing that got me out.
The truth is, I would have blown double the legal limit. I was drunk off my ass. How I managed to hold it all together, I don’t know. Maybe I didn’t. That’s probably why I got arrested in the first place. That, and the small matter of soiling another man’s woman just an hour before.
But in the end, none of that mattered. The sheer, beautiful, pathetic comedy of it all is what saved me.
