Tommy Bahamas
A meeting between Ekewaka and a genius. (That’s me!)
Image: Author, drunk on the way out!
We are enjoying a pre-meal drink at Tommy Bahamas. Jenny has a Mai Tai, and I have a beer. I have a beer because they don’t sell Macallan. Had I ordered my drink first, we would not be here now. So, I have a beer. Longboard.
The man behind the bar, in his forties, has that look of being born in Hawaii. Others serving drinks could have been more interesting. Not. Doubtless, the same thing occurred to him about me. His name is Ekewaka. (Equaka) Ekewaka asked me what I did.
Funny how often I’m asked that and seldom can ever come up with a clever enough answer to justify my position in life. He was impressed when I told him I was a genius and that while it didn’t carry much weight around the world, it was enough to carry me through hardship. He laughed, but it wasn’t rude; he quite enjoyed me.
I have of him his friendship for our stay.
Back in our hotel room, I think about things and accept that I am a complete misfit in the world. Yet I feel in tune with it, accept it, realizing that the world is a good place despite man’s attempts to convince us otherwise.
I can remember being in trouble at school for daydreaming. (How I wish my tutor had been Maria Rattray. The woman is remarkable.)
How were my tutors back then to know I was thinking about being a genius and that I would one day, make it my ambition to capture every heart? It’s still the same daydream I have. Sometimes, I can sit at the blank page and hear my tears falling down my face with frustration, as though not another word will appear. But then it all comes right again as if the sun came from behind a cloud, and the keys tap and clatter, and characters appear as if by magic.
Rain falls, leaves gather and fly about my ankles, rivulets of water run past my shoes, and suddenly, there is this person, a stranger on his way to being one of my best friends. I don’t know his name yet because I haven’t given him one or told him what adventure he is embarking on.
So, he waits on the page, gathering himself, impatiently shuffling his feet as if to say, ‘Com’on, this is my story; what next?’ I’m in complete control of him. Does he fall in love? Is there some unknown miracle waiting for him?
It doesn’t matter. It only matters that he gets written down. Will he live or die, and if he dies, will he have lived the life he wanted? What is this writing that stirs me so? From where and to whom do I owe this talent, this desire to create? Is there no one I can thank?
Somehow, when I try, I’m pushed into a greater urge. I will be taken away to become the great writer I want to be and write a great book. A great editor will appear in my sleep and tell me it’s time. I will go readily.
I recently wrote a love story about a teacher and a pupil inspired by Maria Rattray. My readers shamed me. Tim was just fourteen, as good as any man who lived, and the only difference was that Tim’s teacher was ten years older. The two, quite innocently, had gone together to the old lighthouse for a picnic. Had Tim been twenty-four and not fourteen, the story would have read so differently, yet here was a boy with all a man’s feelings and abilities.
The teacher, realizing her love for Tim, moves away, but the boy never forgets her, and when he reaches the age of twenty-four, he goes looking for her. He finds her grave in the next town’s cemetery. An old man tells him there was no reason for her death that he knew, but his old lady tells Tim she died of heartbreak.
There were no relatives at the funeral, and the teacher’s only wish was to be buried facing the lighthouse. When he got up from the grave to leave the cemetery, Tim watched a young woman walking through the gates to meet him. Who is to say what is possible?
I was cruelly upset by my reader’s resentment at the story of such a young man’s love for his teacher; I felt dirtied by the responses.
I wrote a story about a girl who wanted to dance. She was the daughter of a miner. Her father promised her that she would dance on the world stage one day. He worked with only that in mind, and as she grew older, he continued to save for her, but she always danced alone and on her father’s dreams. Her father was killed in a mining accident, and she left her sisters to live in Paris. She married, but before reaching the zenith of her dancing career, she was struck down with an immobilizing disease.
She went on to write music and choreography. It was her daughter who was finally to become a star. Dancing in a ballet about a girl who grew up in Paris with her father, a man who promised his daughter she would live in France and go boating on the Seine, and how she would learn to dance.
And so she did, with the Paris sun setting in her eyes.
I cannot say what is in my heart because the word of this feeling hasn’t yet been invented or spoken by a man to a woman. All 0of you know the woman I’m in love with. I’d want the world for her if it were good enough. I’d bring home the Pacific Basin if I thought she needed it.
I bring home none of these. I bring only myself.
I’m bigger than life itself because she makes me feel so. I’m the funniest clown because she laughs at me and makes me smile. I’d want to be a prince in her eyes, a knight who rides against the dark on a moonlit illuminated shore looking for a castle, but of course, I’m none of these. I’m a man who has her love land none of my imaginative powers will ever write down something more wonderful, complete, and magical than what I feel in my life for her.
So here I am, much more at ease and content than two hours ago because I knew I had to write something beautiful. Do you want to know what I wrote?
It came easily and changed my day; the word I wrote was ‘Jenny.’
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