My Born Again National Sales Manager wasn’t too pleased when I asked for a week off. He’s already perturbed about needing to schedule my trips to accommodate my mother’s chemotherapy. But my sales are strong and it isn’t easy to find someone willing to fly at the drop of the hat to every godforsaken outpost in the country. So we negotiated cordially and finally came to terms. He allowed me four work days off, book-ending a weekend. He walked away satisfied, having denied me the full work week.

Six days, five nights. About six days, five nights too long, as it turns out.

I haven’t been able to breathe since the plane landed. The trade winds deserted Honolulu just in time for my arrival, highly unusual for the season, the hotel staff assures me, but in the meantime the city is wilting in high humidity. Even my Southern lungs, seasoned by a lifetime in the North Carolina Piedmont, are clogged by the tropical moisture. The fabled beach is more pebbles than white sand and no wider than a city sidewalk. I throw down a towel near the water. Japanese honeymooners trip over my legs, filtering the Hawaiian experience through their Sony lenses. They back away from the rambunctious service boys on leave from Guam and Okinawa. The soldiers, bellies all tight and ripped, goof off in the surf, throwing sucker punches and trying karate kicks, looking like perfect physical specimens cavorting in a beer commercial.

It’s too fucking hot to lie here and fry. The air is oppressive and smells like the freon leaking from a million air-conditioning units. Even at the water’s edge there’s no escaping the endless pianos, guitars, accordions, organs, harps, even mandolins, all playing the Hawaiian theme song, that incessant tune that goes…

Kuluha luha, kala halaki, kaluha luha…

Or something like that.

I’m exhausted by paradise, but my return ticket isn’t valid for four more days. I pick up my towel and head back to the room, deciding I need a nap though I’d slept until noon. I lie naked atop my bed, next to the open window, waiting for the trade winds to return. My room is damp and smells like coconut suntan lotion and sweat. I sweep a collection of plastic bags off the bed with my left foot. Souvenirs, they’re called, but it’s the same shit from Bangkok to Miami to Rome to Addis Ababa. Cheap key chains, snow globes, T-shirts, shot glasses. Well, maybe the plastic leis are indigenous. I bought this crap out of boredom, lured by the sweet air-conditioning of the Honolulu shopping arcades.

I’ll feel better if I eat. The choices at the hotel aren’t appealing: the Terrace Luau, Fine Italian Dining in the Main Dining Room, or the oceanfront Sea Shack. One of the restaurants listed in Fodor’s intrigues me.

Kiko’s Thai Cuisine

Authentic Thai Dishes at Reasonable Prices

Cocktails, piano bar, dancing.

“My home away from home in Honolulu.”-Jim Nabors

Gomer Pyle wouldn’t lie. Kiko’s is small-intimate, the guide calls it-with glossy photographs of smiling celebrities covering the walls. Movie stars, politicians, basketball and football and boxing legends, all posing with a genial Buddha I assume must be Kiko. He must have a great publicist because the limp noodles and rubber satay don’t explain why the high and mighty have graced his tables. The waiter brings another bottle of Singha beer. He says I must stay for the show. (As if I have anywhere else to go.) I fiddle with my satay sticks while the band sets up their instruments. A blond with a shellacked bouffant and a clipped full beard watches their every move from the bar. He plays with a cigarette and chews the tip of his thumb-nail, waiting to pounce at the slightest hint of a mistake, a fuckup. The instrumentalists finish setting up without incident and the drummer settles behind his instrument and looks towards the bar. He gets the thumbs up and hits the cymbals and the piano player leads off with the familiar intro to “Top of the World.”

The blond leaps to his feet and grabs the microphone by the throat. He shuffles to the music, a little sliding dance step. His hand gestures are only slightly more restrained than a drag queen’s. He’s good. He’s really good. He knows his audience and his patter walks the fine line of risqué-salty enough to titillate, gentle enough to be flirtatious, too innocuous to offend. He races through a repertoire of rock and roll standards. The band plays nothing earlier than the Beatles (except for a show-stopping “Johnny B. Goode”). The set list is heavy on saccharine ballads and disco anthems from the seventies.

I sit back and stare, appreciating it, if at all, only as pure tackiness. But the middle-aged vacationers from the mainland and Australia don’t know “irony” from “camp.” Their bellies are full of beer and wine and they just want to get up and shake their booties to KC and the Sunshine Band and ABBA and forget about corporate downsizing and rebellious kids and stubborn prostates. The blond plays directly to them, encouraging a shy, awkward couple to “get down.” A chubby fellow has a special request for the woman he’s about to ask to become his bride. She sits rapt and open-faced, believing for a few precious minutes that she is, in fact, “The Most Beautiful Girl.”

The song stirs the unpleasant, disoriented feeling that’s been stalking me since I said good-bye to my mother. It comes as a complete shock when, sitting alone at my table, I realize I am homesick. How can I be homesick? I don’t have a home. And why now? I travel every week for work. Maybe it’s that here, without sales calls to distract me, the loneliness of my nights seeps into the void of the long and empty days. The blond announces the next number. Neil Diamond! And I suddenly know what’s been eating at me, putting me out of sorts. How could I have forgotten? I was married on my birthday. It’s my anniversary too.

A bottle of Cracklin’ Rosie, then a second, what the hell, let’s open another. Nothing on earth can make my croaking voice sound musical; nothing, that is, except absolute, total unconditional love. Tonight is our first anniversary and I’m serenading Alice to make up for all the small disappointments of our twelve months of marital bliss. She’s in awe of my encyclopedic knowledge of rock-and-roll trivia and I’m showing off, choosing just the right records, singing and playing three-minute musical tributes to the conjugal unions of babes in the woods.

She doesn’t know I’m faking most of the lyrics of Buddy Holly’s “Well…All Right” and nearly all of Chuck Berry’s “You Never Can Tell.” She doesn’t mind that my guitar is out of tune and that I can’t keep up with the Crickets. And hey, let’s crack open another bottle of Rosie while we’re at it.

Alice tosses the salad and slices the bread and I keep the vino flowing. The table is set, the candles are lit, and the mood is right for me to tell her how grateful I am she has rescued me. But then I would have to tell her what it is she has saved me from. I’m not even sure myself. I tell myself it’s that long red snake in the cab of the tractor trailer. But I know that’s not really true, that all the snake did was make me run faster, make me more desperate to find a place to hide.

I’m twenty-five years old today, too young yet to know that someday this sanctuary will feel like a prison, that I’ll rattle the cage, that one day, before I’m even certain it’s what I really want, the door will unlock and I’ll be turned out. I think the unspeakable urges and desires have been banished forever by my perfect married life. I am a husband, her husband. She believes in my kisses, my lovemaking, my devotion, and if she believes, they must be real.

I make her happy. I know I do. I’m not sure that I want to know why. I don’t want to confirm what I suspect, that she loves me for the things I hate about myself, that she loves me because I am weak and soft and need protecting. She’s spent her life in the shadow of her overbearing father and her haughty older sisters, and the brash, the strong, and the self-reliant do not appeal to her. She wants someone to love like a puppy, someone who will lick her hand in gratitude when she scratches him under the chin. She is twenty-four years old, too young to understand the puppy is going to strain at its leash, snip at her ankles, and piss on her rugs.