My Hippie Childhood

Every year I write a birthday blog about the previous year and whatever thoughts it evoked. December 17 came and went and try as I might, I couldn’t manage more than a few sentences before trashing them. “What to write?” I asked myself. Tonight I sat down meaning to write a blog about segregation, but in revisiting my childhood experiences with it, something else happened. I haven’t written about any of these things in a very long time and when I did, I didn’t share them as I didn’t want to put that kind of vibe out into the universe. I don’t know what’s changed but I think (now) I can do it right. As most people have no frame of reference, I have to err on the side of detail rich. So, come back with me to hippie communes in the tropics and my sordid, surreal upbringing. Humor me—I'm not going to edit this for fear I'll edit it. This is a fraction of my story, which is sordid and mostly unbelievable. As I cherry picked a few things, this only provides a glimpse of some of the mildest and most palatable parts of my story. I may have to wait for a couple people to die before I write the REAL tale.

I was a hippie kid who was bounced around a couple continents, mostly back and forth between Hawaii and California. When I was 5, I was living in a commune mauka (up mountain) of Kapa’a in a commune on a choice slice of real estate called Valley House. A river flowed through our property. The largest of the two waterfalls was used in Romancing the Stone, remember when they ducked behind it and hid out? I used to play in that waterfall. Remember the CGI dinosaurs and the visitor center in Jurassic Park? That was all my home. We had a lychee orchard, a bumper crop the year we moved in. Starfruit, two varieties of guavas, papaya, coconuts, berries and bananas (everyone had a stalk hanging on their porch) grew on our 81 acre hippie utopia. We made tea from the lemon grass. Delicious mint grew wild. Our kingdom was accessed by an old bridge. Straight, gay, white, black, Latino and a couple pacific islanders were free to practice whatever religion (or lack thereof) they pleased as long as they didn’t oppress anyone. You didn’t have to wear clothes if you didn’t want to. But we lived insular; camphor trees gifted years ago by the king of China and towering eucalyptus offered their intoxicating scents to the flora and fauna during and after a rain.

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Valley House was our second commune. Our first was the infamous Taylor Camp, Howard with the famous sister's former property. And there was a movie, the towering bamboo and plastic treehouse masterpiece my father helped build is featured. Our first home in Valley House was an old green plantation shack. I liked it because it was close to all the other kids. Valley House had a variety of older structures and outbuildings people made into home. Valley House had been the Spaulding Estate many years before. Story says that locals burned the mansion to the ground.  A plethora of outbuildings remained, some used for houses. My favorite was the “long house," a large, low-roofed structure with a concrete floor. The kids used ride bikes inside, round and round. I rode my Bigwheel in there until I outgrew it and gave it to a friend. 

The long house also served as a central club house for the legendary full-moon parties. In that part of the world there’s no pollution or competing lights—the full moon sometimes seemed as bright as the sun. We used sections of leaves from banana plants as plates for our vegetarian feasts. Flutes, drums, chanting, pot smoke, hashish and magic mushrooms. The kids would get drunk on keg beer and smoke some weed. Sometimes we took mushrooms if we went out and helped pick them. 

When Dad’s prize banjo and his baby blue electric guitar got stolen, he decided we were moving up the hill. At the previous commune we’d lived on the beach in a tree house made mostly of bamboo and plastic. This time I went with him to demolish some old plantation shacks. He used the materials to build our little house high on a hill above the big river. My room was a loft accessed by a wooden ladder. My parents had an elevated room built onto a tree that grew up through the house. It would sway when the wind kicked up. One of the walls was screen, the front of the house with 1920’s wood and pane windows. 

We had no electricity, piped in water or toilets. Water was “catchment,” meaning it fell out of the sky and caught in gutters from the roof, funneled into a tank. When I tell people I read books by kerosene lamp, I’m not joking. For pretty much the whole time I was there, an ongoing jam session of electric guitars, bass, drums, tambourine, microphone, banjo…all precariously wired to a cool Fender amp dad bought himself on mother’s birthday. How were they powered? We had a GENERATOR. Hot stuff. We only used it for jam sessions. I became quite the singer with my soulful little falsetto rasp. Someone said I sounded like Tina Turner. The menu was rock-n-roll and a little blues. One night I tripped over a frayed electric wire and got 2nd degree burns that turned into a staph infection. I still have scars. Oh, the toilet? We used an outhouse. 

I arrived at my first day of school (1^st grade, I skipped Kindergarten) with long blond hair past my shoulders, my bangs in beads to keep them out of my eyes. As soon as I was registered, I was sent to line up with the other kids in the courtyard. The whole school was lined up. And then I heard it. They were yelling something. Something about howling. Who was howling? Haole is a tricky word. The meaning depends on who says it and HOW they say it. If an old Hawaiian woman calls me “haole boy,” it’s probably just a definition. Said another way, it’s a filthy racial slur. The chants sounded like “halley, halley, halley.” At lunch someone knocked me to the floor, my head smacking against the concrete. One of the lunch ladies stood over me, pointing and laughing.  Over the course of the day learned I was hated by people who didn’t know me. I’d looked forward to going to school but by the end of the day I never wanted to go back. I learned “you’re not one of us and we hate you.” 

I went home and learned my bridge was more than just a fairy tale, it was a border. Across it was the free zone, free of hate and oppression. Over the next few years, pretty much daily, they circled around me like a pack of jackals and beat the shit out of me. After begging dad for ages, I finally learned martial arts and busted a few noses. I’m pretty sure I sent one kid to the hospital. They left me alone. 

In the 1970’s Hawaii public school system I was 3/5 of a person. I was verbally and physically abused by faculty as well as other students. I’ll never forget the day I spoke out of turn and the teacher told me to go home. “Home” was miles up the highway. I was 6. Miraculously when I got to the road, mother was walking to town. I joined her and when we got there, she bought me rainbow sherbet. She never said anything to the school because she couldn’t. She was a hippie haole, no one would have listened. It was a different time. A couple times I’d just come down the hill instead of going to school and play with kids at the long house and then go back up the hill when it was time. As I was still little I hadn’t gotten as slick as I would in a year or 2. 

One of my favorite ways to relax was the Furo. This wasn’t one of the wimpy, wannabe Furos they’re building into houses. This was the real deal—an old wood box with a metal bottom over a fire with a wood pallet inside. You hopped in the box and your body weight would make the pallet sink. The water would be deliciously hot. 

The river was the heart of Valley House. It was moody. On nice days the river was calm but swift, a trickle over well-polished rocks in the shallows. I borrowed my friend Flash’s red surfboard and floated on it in the pool of the “Romancing the Stone” waterfall (of course years before the movie.) The banks were slippery mud and the water was cold and mossy green. I loved watching tadpoles develop in all their stages. There was a great rope swing the adults loved. During heavy rains the river raged a muddy red. There was a boulder the size and shape of a Volkswagen Bug just below the waterfall pool. After one major storm I went down to the river and it was gone. It was later found—way down river. When I was in 5^th grade, the special ed teacher in her yellow VW bug was washed out to see when she tried to cross a swollen creek. Hawaii isn’t sanitized for your protection.

The upper waterfall was shorter but very rocky. One night some locals threw one of our residents off the waterfall. Getting “beat up by the locals” was always a fear. 

The mosquitos and germs were epic. I always had bites. People got staph infections and parasites if they weren’t careful. They still do, it’s the tropics. As an adult, Hawaiian mosquitos don’t want me anymore. They can tell if you’ve been bitten a lot. They want fresh meat. Tourists always get chewed.

Kauai has the spookiest woods on earth. Die-hard atheists will come out of pitch-black overgrowth wondering what the fuck they’ve just experienced. Locals call it “chicken kine skin.” I tell people “there are things in the Hawaiian night you’ll never understand.” Heavy-duty spiritual, intense, mind-altering (besides the pot and shrooms) and live-changing. With all this, mother asked me to be home before dark. She didn’t really care where on the 81 acres I went. If it was after dark I was already in trouble and it would be difficult to find my way home. Borrowing a flashlight was awkward. Mud would squish between my toes. Occasionally I’d step on a toad and IT would squish between my toes. I remember one I flattened stayed in the trail for several days until one of the adults flung it over the hill for me. One time I ended up by the opening of our man-made cave. It was pitch black, I could have gotten lost in there. It’s amazing thinking of the potential dangers us kids faced.

During my first stint in school in the LA area, I thought something was wrong. It wasn’t that something happened…NOTHING happened. No jeers, no shoves in line, no flicks of the ear, no punches in the face out of nowhere. I’d become hyper vigilant but at Towers Elementary in Torrance, there was no reason. I was only teased there once, because I wasn’t wearing an undershirt one day and was told “ah-ha, Jeremy’s not wearing underwear.” Demographic? You guessed it, all upper middle-class white kids. My joy was short-lived and I was returned to hell a few months later. I found out my sweet teacher became a big lezzy and moved in with the principal for another school. Even though I’d already known lesbians, I thought that was very brave of her. 

We lived out in the woods in an off-grid cabin outside the desolate village of Naalehu, 2 hours from anywhere decent. My teacher Mrs Doi used to beat me with a boat oar. We lived in an enclave, albeit much smaller and not pretty like the one in Kauai. I made friends with a local (catch-all for non-Caucasian) boy named Alva. One day I went to his house and his father was with him outside. They threw rocks at me, “go home you fuckin’ haole!”

To make life bearable, I read everything worthwhile in the school library. I was obsessed with Egyptology. I was dying to go to the mainland and see the King Tut exhibit. Despite hopping back and forth to the mainland on a regular basis, no one would take me. I read every Walter Farley “Black Stallion” series book at least twice, followed by Dickens, A Wrinkle in Time, Black Beauty…ad infinitum. The local kids didn’t understand why I’d read without being forced. Every night I’d fire up the kerosene lantern and read as long as I could. Many times I could have burned or asphyxiated myself making a blanket tent and putting the lantern under it. I always made sure I had enough books and cigarettes to keep me occupied. I was in 3^rd grade. I was proud of my French (out the mouth, up one nostril) inhale. How did I get cigarettes? I shoplifted them or stole them from adults. Did my mother know? Of course not.

Our house there was off-grid, better built than our previous ones. 2-story with bedrooms on the second floor, each half of the upstairs, each with a large balcony. We had a big front porch, the railing made of gangly Ohia branches. Our breakfast bar was an impressive slab of thick Koa wood, the front door a "dutch" variety, the top could open with the bottom closed. The living room had a huge picture window with a hammock dad bought in Peru strung up inside. The roof was almost A-Frame so I put the head of my bed against the low side of the roof. Rain showers were deafening on the un-insulated corrugated metal roof. I loved pressing my fingers to the roofing, feeling the huge raindrops pummeling it. Dad build the sink lower than standard so I could do dishes. He installed a wood burning Franklin stove and inexplicably started cooking beef stew every night. I never understood this, coming from the man who described eating meat as immoral and described its filth in graphic detail. This started a nightly ordeal which became easier when we got a dog. 

We lived far out, last bus stop and then a long walk. Like something out of a Huck Finn novel, I’d leave my house while it was still dark with a kerosene lantern (why not a flashlight? Batteries are expensive and die fast.) I word thick, high mud boots to get through that epic mud. One morning mom thought the clocks were wrong and made me get up too early. When I got to the bus stop it was still dark. I curled up on my raincoat (military issue). The bus arriving a couple hours later woke me. I’d always read on the bus, it was a long ride. 

One day we just packed up and moved into town. Civilization. We stopped in Kona and bought a COLOR TV on the way to our new house with ELECTRICITY, running water, paved roads and CABLE with THREE channels! Dad bought shiny cars. At last, a school with some haole kids. I had someone who would ride bikes and play with me. Unfortunately the school bus stop violence was worse than anywhere I’d ever lived. 

Dad bought me an orange 10-speed bike. I drummed up a business of mowing lawns and washing cars. I made about $50 a week, pretty impressive for a 10 year-old in the late 70's. Later dad bought me a really nice motocross bike and I got my first pair of professional roller skates. I used them at the open air roller rink at the old Kona Airport. 

When I was in 5^th grade I’d been ditching school regularly. I’d take a good book and a little pot and sit on top of a hill all day and then go home. When I went to school, I’d avoid the bus so I wouldn’t get beat up and walk or hitchhike the 2 ½ miles to Waimea Elementary School. Would you pick up an 11 year-old? A nun used to. She’d lecture me on the evils of hitchhiking but always gave me a ride. I tried to stay out of town because shopkeepers would call the police who would take me back to school. 

I’d been hanging out with my 15 year-old neighbor who had just gotten a license and a Datsun station wagon. For my 11^th birthday he gifted me a bottle of apricot brandy. We climbed a tree next to my house and drank the whole thing. This sort of thing wasn’t exactly uncommon. 

Years of hate and racism drove me inward; and my books and fortunately in the last year or two a few good friends. Outside school I was social and had plenty of fun, but inside school, not so much. So…they gave me tests because they thought something was wrong with me. Everything came back 12^th grade, 9^th month. All those years I’d been reading books, everything I could get my hands on. How did I find out? My teacher read my test scores out loud in front of the class. I wanted to die. They said I cheated “cause haoles are stupid.” At this time my school created a gifted studies program. It was there I wrote something that was published in an anthology of short stories. I’d educated myself better than the pitiful Hawaiian public school system could. In their defense, in 5^th and 6^th grade I had a really good teacher named Mrs. Alfiler. And my science teacher, Mrs Sakamoto with her long red toenails that hung over the end of her pumps. “I ain’t the puckin’ bitch you tink I am,” she yelled at Melissa, who I recently googled, finding her a lezzy on an oil rig, which made me happy. 

We left Hawaii and moved to a 100 acre farm in Missouri. Everyone was white and the bullying stopped. The only thing I can ever remember hearing there was a tobacco chewing boy on the bus, “you got a girl’s ass.” People were sweet and dirt poor. They thought we were rich because mom drove a Cadillac and we had vegetables in the winter. 

I didn’t set foot on Hawaii for another 21 years. As an adult, Hawaii was good to me. I was successful in business and didn’t experience the racism, maybe just some “good ol boy network.” In Hilo  I asked some bookish blonde haole kids like I was if the bullying still goes on and they told me it does. I used to beg mother to dye my hair black but she wouldn’t. Like that would have made a difference. 

I miss Hapuna Beach and would love to take a body board down there tomorrow. I want to pick guavas from the tree, eat fresh papayas and smell night blooming jasmine driving around Hilo at night. I guess it’s time commune with Pele.