WHITE-KNUCKLE ZEN A Thesis Presented to the Graduate Faculty of California State University, Hayward In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts in English By Jeffrey J. Syrop November, 1993 WHITE-KNUCKLE ZEN By Jeffrey J. Syrop Date: ii CONTENTS Mellow Maui 1 Three Fathers 84 One Mother 110 iii MELLOW MAUl Most of the waitresses at Maui's Hyatt Regency Pavilion restaurant couldn't see me, the new waiter; I was invisible to them. Mavis, the lovely hostess, could see me, but Kevin told me not to get too close to her, because she was local. Kevin was a handsome local waiter who talked like a haole, from doing a long stint in the military. He took it upon himself to be my advisor. But he couldn't help me with women, because he couldn't get any women, either. My problem at work was that I was too philosophical. I was always thinking about nuclear weapons and toxic waste, while my coworkers thought about sports cars, cocaine, surfing Maui's wonderful waves, and sex. When I'd pick up an order from the cooks, I might ask them: "Do you think there will always be war?" While passing a busy waitress, I might drop the question: "Is it right to let people in poor countries starve to death to stabilize the world's population?" I would ask my manager: "Is enlightenment possible for everyone?" 1 2 Sometimes, in a lighter vein, I'd ask all the waiters, waitresses, cooks, and the hostess to decide which character on Gilligan's Island they were. Everybody started calling me "Cosmo" because they thought I was spaced out and because I talked about cosmic things. Reagan had just been elected for the first time, and I thought I was living in some kind of dream world. How could people not be amazed and troubled? What was more strange was that out of the army of young, attractive, fairly-weII-educated waiters and waitresses at the Hyatt, only a few had voted, and then, for Reagan. I was reading Crime and Punishment, while my colleagues were reading High Times and Surfer magazine. Finally, out of pity, a young waitress who I thought was shallow but attractive asked me to a party at her house. I went, very self-conscious about how I dressed. The casual Maui look is not an easy look to achieve. One must not, by any means, cross over the line of looking like a tourist. I didn't fit in at all. Most of the people knew one another well. I was among the few who were clearly not welcome to go upstairs when the cocaine was being served. There was one woman at the Hyatt who did find me interesting. Lucretia was the most desirable of all the waitresses. She was statuesque yet lithe as a cat. Her hair was wild and reddish-blond, her complexion flushed and healthy. The keen features of her face radiated confidence and beauty. Her orange cotton Aloha uniform dress seemed to 3 have been thrown over her goddess body as an afterthought. You could see her beating boys at baseball or having sex with a billionaire. She could wait on ten tables without writing anything down, and she charmed the tourists by talking like a local--"You like more da kine?" (Would you like me to refill your coffee?)--even though she was a white girl who'd spent most of her life in an affluent neighborhood in Santa Cruz, California. She loved philosophy. And she loved having a man at work who would talk to her. I was the only waiter stupid enough to talk to her. Her boyfriend was a pure-blooded Hawaiian, Nathan, the best surfer on the island. His father had prospered by selling a small tract of beach-front property to Canadian developers, but Nathan hated the haoles taking over the island. Lucretia joked to me that Nathan's goal in life was to get a machine gun and kill a bunch of white people. He never worked, except to water his marijuana plants. He drove around Lahaina in an immaculate yellow Jeep with a picture of a demonic green dragon on the back of it. He never wore a shirt. His skin was very dark, and his muscles glistened. He beat Lucretia from time to time, she confided to me, and wouldn't allow her to have any male friends. How was that supposed to make me feel? I must be such a wimp that I don't count. Or else Lucretia and I are conspirators 4 having an intellectual tryst behind Nathan's back. Nathan was a non-philosopher. He ate philosophers for lunch. I'd only been on Maui for a few months. I moved there on a whim in the days when I was a young man traveling around. I had been working graveyard shift as a clerk at a depressing motel in L.A. and didn't really have anything going on when my uncle called me from Lahaina and told me what an idyllic life he had there. Uncle Glenn, my stepfather Leroy's brother, said he had a taxi he'd let me drive. The only thing I knew about Hawaii was that stupid music and tiki necklaces came from there and that the Japanese bombed it once. I had gotten stoned and missed most of high school, and the few junior college literature courses I'd taken had left me pretty ignorant about geography. until my plane got close enough to actually see Maui, I had thought it was a little island that you could walk across in about five minutes. Taxi business was slow, so I got a job as a busboy at the new Hyatt Regency Hotel. They spent millions of dollars building that place. There were lOOO-year-old Buddha statues everywhere and live peacocks walking around or running from tourists with cameras. A beautiful beach had been created from sand and palm trees brought in from another island, and there were water slides and three swimming pools right on the beach. The Hyatt had five restaurants. In Swan Court, the waiters had to wear tuxedo- 5 like uniforms created in Chicago by designers who didn't consider Maui's tropical weather. These sweaty waiters cleaned the mirrored glass table tops with squeegees after each party left. They could easily make $150 dollars a night in tips. Since I was inexperienced, I was hired at the bottom-of-the-line restaurant, The Pavilion. I got to wear a comfortable orange Aloha shirt with a Hyatt badge that said "Jerry." Even at the Pavilion, a side order of macadamia-nut pancakes cost five dollars, which was a hell of a lot of money for pancakes in those days. I was the busboy for a nice local waiter named Derek. He was polite and competent, but he had trouble talking to the customers. He'd never been to the mainland, and his pidgin English was just too different from the language of American and Canadian tourists. I was so bored lining up forks and knifes on napkins, filling salt shakers, and carrying heavy trays to the busing station, that I began having conversations with the diners. Derek didn't mind because he noticed his tips increasing. Soon, I was promoted to waiter even though I knew little about the job. On a hot Christmas Eve night shift when I was still new, I completely panicked when a planeload of New Yorkers arrived and filled the restaurant, including my whole section, all at once. It was horrifying when their tour guide led them in a mass chant of "Ah-Io-HAl" The other waiters and waitresses were used to it, but I freaked. 6 Suddenly I was swamped, and everybody was screaming at me. My manager, the customers, the other waitresses and waiters, and the cooks were all screaming. Everything was dim and in slow motion. It was like one of those dreams when you try to run but your feet won't move. I realized that the waiter whose section was next to mine was stealing my orders as soon as the cooks put them up. I'd bring an order to one person in a party of four, while the others at the table had to wait up to an hour for their food, which had been stolen, to be cooked again. Some people stormed out without paying. On one of my unpaid guest-checks, a customer had scrawled: "This is the worst service I've ever had in my life." Time stood still that night, and I almost sneaked out of the restaurant. Eventually, everybody left, and the restaurant quieted down. Nobody paid any attention to me. I found my time card on the giant wall of time cards, punched out, turned in my uniform, and rode my bicycle six miles home to Lahaina. The next day one of the cooks saved me. He taught me how to deal with my section as a whole rather than madly running around trying to deal with individual customers. The work got better, and I started enjoying it. I had full medical insurance, made a fair salary, and got about $70 dollars a night in tips on top of that. I began saving money for a round-trip plane ticket to visit my stepfather, 7 Leroy, who was teaching at a college in Thailand. I didn't know where exactly Thailand was, but Leroy's post cards made it seem interesting.