[LOBO]
I have a great job. It pays good, and the hours and people are fantastic.
But wow it can be stressful sometimes ... particularly when my boss calls off. On these days, millions of dollars annually in clients --representing accounts-- live or die by my ability to do what I do well.
I'm not exaggerating.
I came home and dragged some pillows and a blanket to the couch, gratefully collapsing in an exhausted heap; here it was barely six o'clock on a Friday night, and I was curling up with the television remote, whipped.
For those of us that didn't know this, please be warned: television sucks on a Friday night. Completely frazzled, somehow I mindlessly ended up sputtering out on some show on The Travel Channel about famous American haunted houses. And they do an amazingly bad fifteen-minute piece on sightings of Pelé, the Goddess of the Hawaiian Islands.
Why was it amazingly bad?
Because I've seen Her.
Personally.
I used to laugh at people who told ghost stories, chalking it up to vivid imaginations coupled with normal unexplained phenomena. That's how humans have dealt with stuff we don't understand for as long as we've been able to not understand stuff; we make it "magic".
But for summer vacation during my angelic High School years, my mother invited me to come out and visit Oahu for a month, and I would come back to the mainland United States forever changed.
After being there a week or so the magnificent splendor of the place just kind of petered out, and rampant teenage angst took over once more. With maybe twenty days or so left, I don't need a full-blown romance either: I need to get laid.
I ended up accepting an invitation to a club from a girl I didn't particularly find attractive. But she was witty, intelligent and sweet, and I was so horny I could've fucked a plate of sheet steel; if something "magical" didn't happen soon, we could've had another Pearl Harbor.
As male, my sexual gratification upon occasion is an issue of national security.
I considered myself as doing my patriotic duty.
So she's over twenty-one and stops to buy a six-pack of Budweiser, and we share them at the top of Mount Tantalus. And what is it about having sex under all those stars while looking out over city lights that makes it so erotic? I suspect it has something to do with the naked chick on the hood of her car with her legs wrapped around me, but I'm not 100% on that. Don't quote me.
Having "finished up", we were soon preparing to leave. I didn't want open beer cans in the car, so I'm perplexed as she gets genuinely pissed at me for throwing one of them over the cliff side. And believe it or not, she throws the cans in her otherwise immaculate car, and we drive down the mountain.
Now, to drive up and down Mount Tantalus is no small matter. The severely winding road limits you to very slow crawl, and if I remember correctly, it's about an hour each way. By the time we get to the bottom I have to pee, and ask her to pull over in a nearby parking lot. Figuring I would find a dumpster or something and get rid of the beer cans too, I grab them up and crush them, and slip off behind what appeared to be an abandoned warehouse or something.
But in back, it opens into a larger area behind it. In front of me is a cage of "monkey bars" and series of dilapidated swing sets, amazingly overgrown with weeds.
This is a school.
Well, I have to pee anyways. I'm not proud ... but judging from the lack of upkeep, I'm figuring the kids are on summer vacation too. I don't see trash receptacles of any kind, but I figure I've broken line of sight with the chick anyways; rationally, I discard the beer cans in the grass and unzip my fly in a dark corner of the building.
In the corner, there is a window on each side, and slightly behind me.
And from one, I start hearing murmurs in a language I don't understand.
A little louder, I hear another from the other window.
I think the thing that really freaked me out about it was the fact that they weren't talking to each other.
They were talking to me.
Stopping in mid-stream, I zipped up and fled in terror.
After picking up the beer cans.
Now Oahu isn't really that big. It's maybe fifty square miles, and you can cover it pretty thoroughly after a few years. So I'm staggered when "local" Hawaiians, having lived there all their lives, have never heard of the school.
It was as if the land had swallowed up every miniscule piece and memory of my tenuous evidence.
No one had ever heard of the place.
But what was really worse than that were the nightmares. My mother will verify this. For the first time in my life, I was suffering from what I would guess are considered "night terrors"; I would wake out sweating and out of breath, with no memory of the dream whatsoever. And after a week of shattered sleep, this was taking its toll. Ten days, and I'm edgy and worn out, and growing increasingly concerned that this was something that wasn't ever going to go away at all.
But I do remember the last dream.
I'm sitting in the center of a clearing in a thick jungle that recedes away only to return and close off the sky above me. And without a sound, a naked woman nimbly approaches. She stops, waist deep in thick woods, and stares at me in quiet serenity.
I remember feeling very sorry, and pleading for forgiveness. At some point I realize that below the obscuring foliage, she doesn't have human legs.
Without spectacle or fanfare, she leaves as quietly as she came.
And I slept like a baby.
The night before my flight home, my mom set up a big farewell shindig and invited all the friends I made over the past month. Laughing and joking, I end up relaying this story at my mom's request. And to her chagrin, I also added the previously undisclosed details of the dream.
Everyone at the next table gets noticeably quiet.
I look over, and it's a group of native Hawaiians just staring daggers at me.
"Fucking haole," one says finally, insulted. "You come here on vacation, and you see Pelé?"
But it was only a dream.
Right?
