The Atomic Hula by Mike Marino (novels in english txt) 📕

journey in Mickey’s life. He'd quit school, leave home, hit the road and at a tender age would embark on a hallucinatory journey of a decade of debauchery and drugs. A beach bum looking for the perfectomundo beach-bitch in Honolulu. LA sleaze and LSD. Haight Ashbury, sex drugs, rock n' roll, and Angels from Harley Hell, and finally the era of V-8's and Vietnam.
1959.
It was time for the final curtain, final bow, and as he looked up to the darkened sky, he had to smile. A sliver of a moon shared the billing with numerous, unnamed stars. Some yellow like our own sun, some red giants and some white hot. One little dot in space was blinking like a strobe light in the velvet night. It was brighter then the others, the stars. Then it dawned on him. It was his old friend Mars and the imaginary Martian lover he left behind.
He couldn't wait to go back...

THE ATOMIC HULA - 1963
Chapter One
November 1963.
"We're all just passing through life like a bullet ripping through JFK's head!"
DALLAS: JFK SHOT AND KILLED!
The trajectory of the spiraling conspiratorial bullet was propelled by the velocity and the ferocity of the decade, and managed to hit the bulls eye as it ripped through the head of the Irish-American bootlegger's son. Kennedy could probably envision his own death and smell the stench of a dead, rotting Camelot, but the newspaper headlines let the rest of us in on the secret with giant King Kongish black and white font ten urban stories taller than the bricks and mortar that comprised the school book depository building just off now, deadly Dealy Plaza. The nation mourned, Cronkite wept. The fuse of the Sixties had been lit.
Mickey stood draped in a cape of silence on that Honolulu street corner, staring at gaping bloody wounds that were now forming and would soon fester, blister, break open, in the American psyche. All caused by the hot lead headlines framed that November day in the sidewalk paper box. The deadline headline bared its fangs exposing the incisor hunger of the flesh eating newsprint. Then it dawned on him. "Hell, we're all just passing through life like a bullet through Kennedys head." The Prince of Camelot had his steed shot out from under him in that strange snake handling talking-in-tongues southern drawl-twang thang incest infested courtyard of bloody Remember-The-Alamo Texas. It was a memorable day. It was the day the grassy knoll exacted its toll.
November 1963.
Galaxies and light-years away, thousands of steel belted asphalt miles across southwest deserts, all leading to a dead end of sand on a west coasted ocean. It was the land of golden sand, silky and sexy beaches soft as the touch of a breast, alive with the activity of bohemians. It was the ukulele dance of Hawaii's happy hulas and hemp happy haiku hobos, and sands were hot, white hot and scorching under Mickey’s 15 year old feet even at this late time of the year. An inner black light flashed on and off, and on again, crackling the already frayed mental wires causing memory banks to spark to life, traveling back a few months to August of '63. A portrait of a time before he became a teenaged street beast feasting like an addict on meals of concrete morphine. A time before optimism, principles and innocent passions were forced to work the streets and pimped out like cheap five dollar whores hustling flesh and bodies on the streets in order to survive, to eat, to live, to continue dreaming.
The fantasy alleys composed of bricks and children's dreams were no longer safe for invisible, invincible pirates, cheap plastic cowboys and bendable rubber Indians. Now homeless, but not lost on the streets, Mickey viewed them as dark, dank walled-in avenues of crumbling brick, littered with broken bottles, shattered dreams, death pale skin and collapsed veins from too many nightmare junkie spikes of Neptunian narcotics.
He stood hypnotized on the street, mesmerized by the JFK headlines. Nostalgia inside was building already and turning to dreams of Michigan and what had been home for the past 15 years. In just a few more Michigan days, the forests and low hills of the Upper Peninsula would be on fire, ablaze with a visual symphony and beatific wildfire of deep reds of maples and the subtle yellows displayed by the shoreline birches. Magnificent Munising oranges guarding the hungry shoreline of Lake Superior, the Gitchigummee of Hiawatha would soon choke on chlorophyll and devour the green until spring released them from captivity. In the Straits of Mackinac where two giant great lakes meet in whitecap, wind tossed copulation, bone chilling winds would soon be charging in from the Arctic north, a gift from the Yukon, seemingly emanating from the loins of invisible and impossible gods sitting high on impeccable thrones. The howling winds would cut and slice through the region like the frozen blue flame of an out of control blowtorch through the thin human skin as they increased in intensity and mush-raced down full throttle from Henry's Hudson Bay in the far north, a land inhabited by incredible Inuit’s and naughty Nanooks.
The plaid sky paintings of the Great Lakes were hung with great care on the gallery wall to be savored by critics and the proletariat alike, soon vaporized and in a puff of smoke were replaced by the very Vishnu visions of his current reality. How had he ended up in this paradise of palms? Shoeless, homeless, more or less, yet more than less. Happy, dead broke and poor, yet richer than he had ever felt before. Both feelings converging as two rivers colliding at the same time. Nothing was making sense, and everything was out of place on the shelf. Books were upside down and the spines faded, torn and tattered. All the titles were jumbled letters and completely illegible, however, the pages were still intact and readable, but still not making any sense whatsoever.
1960.
Mickey's mother had gone and done the unthinkable. The first unthinkable was divorcing his dad in 1948, the year he was born, in a time when Harriet stood by Ozzie's side now matter what he did. Then, she had the audacity to fall in love again and decided to remarry. In Mickey's eyes, this was the crime of the century. Loeb and Leopold were good Samaritans by comparison. The marriage meant moving Mickey's life from the industrial riverfront Motown eastside comfort of the Italian garlic and pasta plenty of Three Mile Drive of old world Catholicism to the insidious, unknown and uncharted sea monster infested edge of the world lands west of Woodward Avenue.! The fucking suburbs!!

The burbs were bullshit filled little croissants of leviathan Levittown communities of conformity all served up by a topless waitress who in turn was remote controlled by anal probing Ed Woodian aliens from B-movie planets who dared to go where no man had gone before! This was exactly what Kevin McCarthy warned us about. An invasion of procto-pods from Outer Space, intent on filling empty human cavities with cotton balls and rubber gloves.
The suburbs lacked many things. For instance it was devoid of imaginary pirates to pillage and plunder with in imaginary alleys that could become Tortuga. The ranks of Audie Murphy were empty of brave and brazen generals to charge across backyards turned into Nazi battlefields. Worse yet, all the leather faced cowboys had savagely rounded up all the Indian nations and placed them on out of the way shelves, out of our way and onto out of the way red dirt Okie reservations where they now had the redmans right to sell cheap ass pottery and beaded blankets to passing tourists who could give a shit less about conditions in rundown redskin trailers that sat crookedly on rundown redskin lands.
The new school he was to attend, far from the nunified and priestifide old baroque St. Clare de Montefalco was now to be a public school instead. Mickey's teenaged angst years were about to become more pubic in nature as well. Testosterone testy, he got into fights constantly, mostly over girls, or sometimes for no reason at all. Arguments at home flared up too for no reason at all. His synapse was beginning to fray and couldn't be fixed until after the weekend because the minds inner electrician was out of town hunting for whitetail deer until Monday.
Fights. It didn't matter what day or night it was. Horrible hormonal Vikings were setting sail in his imagination on his envisioned North Sea to conquer and assimilate whole cultures and assault sealskin clad virgins, whose virtues were suspect, in faraway Greenland. Defeating first one army, then another, composed of one breasted fighting Amazons, then impregnating them as great and grand pyre fires stoked by the wood of their defeated bows and arrows shot flame and smoke high into the jungle skies.
Westside kids played tennis. Tennis fer crissakes, fucking tennis! They wore penny loafers of brown, worth a penny at most, and yes, they had names like Penney, and Muffy, and Eliabeth! Too many tennis courts, and not enough alleys for play. Blue collars faded to a starchy white as GM and Ford executives along with Dodge and AMC hurried about in a Fritz Lang blitz of anticipation of a Christmas bonus once a year. What's good for GM is good for the country.
Woodsided station wagons and barking border collies roamed the streets, and in the school, hell, it was all so different. The school halls were all highly "see your own reflection" polished to a high gloss Charlie-like sheen. Sweaters with letters and cheerleader skirts hiked up thigh high as the crowd yelled louder ..."Go Team Go, Lift Them Higher" to celebrate the Friday night gangbang taking place on the fields of pigskin honor across Middle America.
Suburbs were also afflicted with a mania known as Madras madness as the mindless minions dressed in cocky khakis created a canyon so grand, it was a social chasm too wide to breach for even the evilest of Kneivels. Mickey had come to crashing stop at a brick wall and to break through it, he came to a decision. Life and the 'burbs sucked. The time had arrived to toss it all in a trash can and leave school behind and go away from all that had been taken away anyway. Mickey had some savings stashed away, money saved from the past four years mowing meandering lawns in summer, shoveling shitloads of snow in the dead of winter. Raking leaves in the spring and other odd carwash jobs had filled in the money mandala. Now, it was time to jump the chasm and escape...and in August of '63 he did just that. No 2 minute warning. Nothing. He just packed his small gym bag, minus the jockstraps, went down to the Ben Franklin where they had a pay phone, called a cab to take him to Detroit Metro Airport. Demons of determination were driving him to go as far west, young man, as a young man, boy really, could go. Going. Going. Gone!
He checked in at the terminal and asked about the student standby fare he had heard about, after all, he used to be a student didn't he? After he completed the negotiation, of which there really was none, he forked over the necessary cash and got his one-way ticket to paradise...a paradise that in time would transform itself into a sexual sideshow complete and replete with hookers, trannies and street kids on the make trying to survive and make a buck anyway you could or were willing to do. A mental institution couldn't have electro-shocked any more severe, than the stark haiku hobo reality of life on the