her night bag. Finding it, she extracted crimson earplugs.
Yolo
Yolo? asked the desk clerk? That’s a name?
You betcha, said Yolo. And the other part of it is Day.
He thought, surely living in Hawaii with all these weird Hawaiian names for everything, including people, haoles should have no trouble with something as short and sweet as Yolo.
The guy was wearing one of those shirts every haole who goes to Hawaii buys at the airport. Red with white hibiscus flowers. His blond hair, very pale skin, and eyes just did not look Hawaiian. But Yolo decided not to be critical. He’d come to Hawaii on one of those cheap flights the average working artist can afford, and it had come with this hotel, which did sit, miraculously, right at the edge of the sea. It was ugly, the hotel, the same beige of office buildings in Washington, D.C., but sitting by the water his back would be to it.
He missed his old lady. He imagined her stoned out of her mind, hanging in a hammock in a jungle so far away he couldn’t even imagine it. Why do some people put themselves through it! he thought. Stumped by her persistence.
Up in his room, which faced the beach, he stripped. Throwing off his mainland clothes as if they were infested with lice. Instead of unpacking he simply dumped everything from his suitcase onto the floor. There in the pile was his new palm-green bathing suit. He put it on, facing the mirror that reflected the entire room, and grinned to see how trim and, well, cute he was. He had Frederick Douglass kind of hair, wiry and energetic, and looked a bit like him, because his ancestry was the same: His mother was mostly Anglo-Indian, his father mostly African. This mixture gave you really good skin, he thought, vainly admiring his own, and medium bushy hair that was actually manageable. His hair was long and, released from the braids he usually wore it in, hung nicely down his back. Some of the other mixtures could cause a couple of bad hair days. He smiled, looking for his suntan lotion. Not suntan. He always forgot. Sunblock. Horrible, that now humans had to block the rays of the sun. But hey, with his mixture, he got a whopping dose of natural sunblock, from his dad: Thank you, Mother Africa! While from his mom, not to leave out her European contributions, he got a nice reflective quality. He imagined the too strong sun rays bouncing off the mica of her white genes. All things considered, he didn’t expect to suffer from skin cancer.
His mind was like this. Running on a lot of the time about himself. He tried to hide this sometimes from Kate, but she only laughed. Most people are like that, she said. We are our most interesting subject. When we’re free to think about ourselves, not about the kids, not about the car, house, or payments on our various purchases, and not about our work, well, guess what? We natter on about ourselves.
They were both vain. And what do we have to be vain about? they sometimes asked themselves. We’re considered second- and third-class citizens of a country whose government never wanted us. Except as slaves. We understand by now the world will be blown to bits, doubtless by this same government, before people of color get their fair share. We can’t afford health insurance, nor will it even ever be applicable, the way things are going. Nobody but us wants to be Black. And yet, we’re vain.
We like our stubbornness, Yolo had offered.
Our contrariness, said Kate. We never want to do anything the way they do it. We think that of any two choices given they are likely to pick the most boring one.
We like being brown, Yolo said, nose-kissing her underarm. A choice they could have made easily except it frightened them. What did they do with the brown offspring they had? They sold them. What a message to send your kids, of whatever color.
And yet, “sold down the river,” his great-great-grandparents and their parents before them had somehow survived. Though how they’d managed to live without
Yolo
Yolo? asked the desk clerk? That’s a name?
You betcha, said Yolo. And the other part of it is Day.
He thought, surely living in Hawaii with all these weird Hawaiian names for everything, including people, haoles should have no trouble with something as short and sweet as Yolo.
The guy was wearing one of those shirts every haole who goes to Hawaii buys at the airport. Red with white hibiscus flowers. His blond hair, very pale skin, and eyes just did not look Hawaiian. But Yolo decided not to be critical. He’d come to Hawaii on one of those cheap flights the average working artist can afford, and it had come with this hotel, which did sit, miraculously, right at the edge of the sea. It was ugly, the hotel, the same beige of office buildings in Washington, D.C., but sitting by the water his back would be to it.
He missed his old lady. He imagined her stoned out of her mind, hanging in a hammock in a jungle so far away he couldn’t even imagine it. Why do some people put themselves through it! he thought. Stumped by her persistence.
Up in his room, which faced the beach, he stripped. Throwing off his mainland clothes as if they were infested with lice. Instead of unpacking he simply dumped everything from his suitcase onto the floor. There in the pile was his new palm-green bathing suit. He put it on, facing the mirror that reflected the entire room, and grinned to see how trim and, well, cute he was. He had Frederick Douglass kind of hair, wiry and energetic, and looked a bit like him, because his ancestry was the same: His mother was mostly Anglo-Indian, his father mostly African. This mixture gave you really good skin, he thought, vainly admiring his own, and medium bushy hair that was actually manageable. His hair was long and, released from the braids he usually wore it in, hung nicely down his back. Some of the other mixtures could cause a couple of bad hair days. He smiled, looking for his suntan lotion. Not suntan. He always forgot. Sunblock. Horrible, that now humans had to block the rays of the sun. But hey, with his mixture, he got a whopping dose of natural sunblock, from his dad: Thank you, Mother Africa! While from his mom, not to leave out her European contributions, he got a nice reflective quality. He imagined the too strong sun rays bouncing off the mica of her white genes. All things considered, he didn’t expect to suffer from skin cancer.
His mind was like this. Running on a lot of the time about himself. He tried to hide this sometimes from Kate, but she only laughed. Most people are like that, she said. We are our most interesting subject. When we’re free to think about ourselves, not about the kids, not about the car, house, or payments on our various purchases, and not about our work, well, guess what? We natter on about ourselves.
They were both vain. And what do we have to be vain about? they sometimes asked themselves. We’re considered second- and third-class citizens of a country whose government never wanted us. Except as slaves. We understand by now the world will be blown to bits, doubtless by this same government, before people of color get their fair share. We can’t afford health insurance, nor will it even ever be applicable, the way things are going. Nobody but us wants to be Black. And yet, we’re vain.
We like our stubbornness, Yolo had offered.
Our contrariness, said Kate. We never want to do anything the way they do it. We think that of any two choices given they are likely to pick the most boring one.
We like being brown, Yolo said, nose-kissing her underarm. A choice they could have made easily except it frightened them. What did they do with the brown offspring they had? They sold them. What a message to send your kids, of whatever color.
And yet, “sold down the river,” his great-great-grandparents and their parents before them had somehow survived. Though how they’d managed to live without
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