I was nine years old when I took my first shot of hard liquor (at an older neighbor’s house). I was almost 12 the first time I got drunk (playing quarters in a hotel room in Hilo). A few days after turning 12 was the first time I puked because of too much alcohol (at the Sheraton Waikiki after roaming amongst the tourists at Royal Hawaiian Shopping Center). I was also 12 (it was a big year) the first time I saw cocaine being used at a high-school toga party I somehow got invited to (I skipped a few grades so all my friends were older). I didn’t try coke until much later when I was 22.
It was an in-service Monday at Kamehameha, which meant students at my school were off but teachers weren’t. I was home alone (my brother was in Catholic pre-school at OLPH, Our Lady of Perpetual Help). All of my neighborhood friends went to public school so they didn’t have the day off, and all of my school friends lived hours away by bus. I decided to play pinball at the bowling alley near my house. Some of the older kids on my block were cutting school and noticed me straggling. It was about 10 a.m. but they were already drunk and stoned.
“Kalan, come here.” It was Kawika, my friend Kamakiʻs older brother. He was 14 and already the coolest kid on the block. Long-haired surfer with a paper route, so he always had money. Everyone wanted to be his friend. All the girls were in love with him. At nine I knew the mechanics of sex, but not much else. Everyone knew Kawika was already doing it. Kawika had singled me out so, of course I went.
“How come you’re not in school?”.
“We’re off today. Some teacher thing. How come you’re not?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “Want to party?” He and I didnʻt speak pidgin by default like the others.
I wasn’t really sure what that meant, but it was Kawika. “Sure.”
Inside the living room there were four older boys, two of whom lived on my block, I didn’t recognize the other two. There was a wet, pungent smell that I didn’t recognize as marijuana at the time. On the coffee table was a bottle of vodka, an empty shot glass, and several Michelob beers in dark brown bottles with gold foil and a red logo. I recognized them because it was what my grandfather, my Papa, drank during the day (he drank salty dogs at night). The empty bottles had their foil peeled off and lay in piles on the table. Kawika handed me one of the brown bottles. I had taken sips from Papa’s as long as I could remember (usually to strong encouragement and laughter from the adults), but I had never had one of my own.
He poured the vodka into the shot glass and handed it to me. It looked like water. I recognized the smell from Tūtūʻs red-lettered, The Crow’s Nest glass at her house. It was liquid but instantly burned. I choked, but didnʻt spit it out. There were imagined flames wherever the liquid touched, all the way down and into my chest. My eyes watered. The boys were laughing, but Kawika nodded and smiled. I was in.
My point is certainly not to brag or glamorize, or even to categorize. The point is this, sitting in a psych ward 230 miles from where I was born, can in many ways be traced to that moment. Almost predictable in hindsight. Maybe inevitable. At the very least, there was a traceable connection of dots that might have been broken at countless points, through different, uncountable small decisions, good and bad, over more than half a typical lifetime of a mostly selfish and self-centered path of least resistance. A completely lucid memory of a horrible origin story.