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

in the family!" The Tartan Clad Princess of Wahoo Oahu.
"Mum and Pop was both whacko, schizoid. Inner workin's split in two like kindlin'. Well, one day, I sneak out of the mission school early and head home. Damn cops all over the place. An ambulance, people everywhere, neighbors running around, and Mum cryin' her brown eyes out somthin' fierce." The pause was long enough to get itself boinked and pregnant. "What happened then?" Mickey blurted out, louder than he expected. Doc reflected. "Well, see, pop was dead on the spot. Heart attack brought 'im down like an old bull elephant. The worst part? Here's the worst part. When he was lyin' there dyin' the 'mergency people was there to try to save 'im and they found him on the floor dressed in kilts and a deep purple bra! Seems he Was dancin' 'round the room in a grass skirt when he keeled over, stroked. Mum found 'im and knew he couldn't be seen like that so she stripped 'im bare, took of the kilts that she was wearing and switched 'em onto Pop so's he'd look proper when the authorities came. 'Cept she forgot to take off the damn bra!" He paused again. "Yep, could say, it was the grass skirt and bra, and not the kilts wot kilt 'im." Ha!
Mickey had to stifle a laugh out loud. The thought of a grass skirted Scotsman playing with his own bagpipes was too much. He smiled and kept it, the laugh that is, inside of him, and instead leaned back nestling into the vinyl to watch the buildings flash by and to enjoy the visual arcade of the bikini clad peepshow visible through the walkways between the hotels. It was a carnival of a beachful of catamarans and joyous heaving mountains of fleshy female cleavage. The portal to paradise was spreading its legs and opening wide, offering its soft wet treasure to him on a silver platter....and man, was he thirsty!
The sugar plum dreams were soon smashed and dashed like a piece of old melon. Doc's voice. "Seen any zombie movies, kid? Damn flesh eatin' bastids' anyway. Bringin' hell with 'em right from the grave. Hoowee! Hell, they even look like hell, eh?" Again the laugh that came from deep inside the bowels of the very earth itself erupting Vesuvian in the front seat.
Vampires! Zombies! Giant spiders! Monsters! Movie matinee monsters! Popcorn and people-eater monsters, all manner of monsters shot by his imagination. "Naw, not yet. Just been travelin', well wantin' to travel. Actually, this is my first trip. Not too sure of where I really want to go, or where I'll end up. It's all been pretty good so far though, considerin' I ain't been anywhere yet at all anyhow."
Doc looked in the rearview right at and his gaze bore right through Mickey. Doc's face took on an eerie look as it lit up brighter than high beams on a Plymouth Fury. "Zombies do put a fear in folks, don't they? Hells bells, they don't even know where they're goin' either. Just rise up from the grave, all hungry like and just want to have look-see for human food is all. A feast of flesh and it scare's the shit out of folks. Damndest thing those zombies, damndest thing ever you seen". Mickey absorbed the zestful zombie stories of living deads and undead dreads. "Lemme get this straight" he thought quietly to himself. "I run away from home, travel damn near 5,000 miles and end up in the backseat of Cab Nine From Outer Space with a voodoo/vampire/zombie worshipping cult high priest from the planet Glen/Glendora that had somehow ejaculated itself from an Ed Wood movie and ended up as a stain on the tiki-tacky wiki-waki Waikiki sheets and a taxi on the Honolulu streets!" How fuckin' cool is that?
Day dreams overpowered Mickey as he closed his eyes to see. He could hear, feel, haunted Haitian drums beating out a heated beat in the coal black dark of the night in the muddy middle of a dense Negro island forest. Great bonfires of ganja tossing illusory gifts of wafting smoke and colorful visions, in pagan offering to the stars held fast above them high in the sky. Pins. Painful millions of tiny pins piercing his own effigy. The voodoo doll of Mickey squirming to escape, but as in all dream sequences, he knows that is all but impossible.
Soon, he was transformed into one of the dreaded undead, denizen of the dark, doomed to walk the earth for all eternity, or longer. Longer than eternity? Shit! Dragging one foot in a hopeless cross between stop action and slo-mo. He would learn the tricks of the dream art of actually overtaking victims who could elude him at warp speed if they so choose, but, for whatever reason, chose not too.
The drums got louder, the smoke got thicker and he could hear the blackened voice of doom, hellfire and damnation growl from within. "They're coming for you Barbra, you fucking tramp! They're coming for you!" Goddamn it! Somehow, he ended up in a script, a scene right out of a goddamn B-movie! Barbara and the Zombie. The Voodoo hooker and the zombie pimp. Trampy Camp meets Campy Tramp!
The lurch of the cab snapped its fingers and it was time to leave the world of daydreams far behind. The sails were hoisted high to catch the winds for Mickey’s return trip from Voodoo Island and blondes named Barbra, Question. "Doc, why's it you seem to know so much 'bout things? You know, people and all, movies and stuff like that?" Doc bared a huge laughing mouth full of pearlies. "Don' know boy, don' really know all that much, Kid. It's all about perception, you unnerstand? It's what you make other folks think they see or hear about you and what you have to say. Fer 'xample, "do you want to pass away the night, or do you want to pass away tonight?" Two diff'rent questions, two different answers, dependin' on the person’s frame of mind. Perception. Take this rearview mirror here. See, it says, "Objects In Mirror May Be Closer Than They Actually Appear". Doncha see? It's all smoke and mirrors with a leetle bit o' bullshit is all it is Kid. Smoke and Mirrors!" Mickey added "..and bullshit. Don't you forget the bullshit Doc." Doc took up the chorus, "Bullshit it is, Kid. Big-assed steamin' bowls of bullshit it is!" Mickey’s own personal taxi perception of things at that particular space, in that particular time, was that everything was right with the world. In fact, it couldn't get any better!
Docs cab slowed down, easing curbside. A behemoth yellow cruise ship berthing itself neatly next to a two story building stacked delightfully deli sandwich high with boxy little studio apartments, one on top o'tother. They seemed, at first glance anyway, to mimic a lost pueblo village of long ago Anasazi redmen. Dormant burial grounds laced with spirits, adobe ghosts, coyotes and peyote. Perception, he thought. Perception..and bullshit of course, don't mean shit, without the bullshit!
Exiting the cab, Mickey grabbed his bag and stuck his head through the taxi's window, a penitent parishioner fessin' up to a litany of immoral sins, some venial, some mortal to a penance pushing priest in a confessional. "How much I owe you, Doc?" Doc, amused and bemused at the query at the same time. "Damned if I don't rightly know, young friend. See, I was spendin' all that time jes' yakin' away, an' well, damned if I din't forget to set the meter. I'll tell ya what. Gimme a couple a bucks, and the rest owed to me in plain old fashioned karma, and we call it kosher, done. Allright with you Kid?" Mickey beamed and handed Doc a five. "Thanks Doc, thanks for everything." Doc gave his hand a friendly island shake, and handed Mickey a smudged "bidniz" card as he liked to call it, being as he was a Honolulu bidnez-man. "Here, keep this on ya. It's got my number and all, and if you need anything, jes' holler loud, like them old island drums you gonna hear at night comin' from Duke Kahanamoku's bar." Those haunted Haitian walkin' talkin' voodoo ganja Negro drums. Maybe those were the drums he heard earlier in his daydreams. The dreams of drums, the drums of dreams.
Doc pulled away and as the taxi shrunk to the size of a small yellow dot in the growing distance Mickey stood alone, more confident now, on the spirit world street in front of the "pueblo village". It was now his new world. He, Mickey, as Eric the Red, Viking explorer in search of Canadian coastlines to conquer. He smiled, grabbed his satchel and dashed up the steps to the door marked "Manager" and knocked.
These were no ordinary apartments either. Naw, these were clean and lean, and operated like a well oiled Pearl Harbor Machine. No bull, Halsey! A battleship, under the flag of a slightly built, attractive, mature Asian woman who went by the name of Mrs. Kuramoto, because, that was indeed her name, so why not, by all means shouldn't she go by it.
This Hannah of Hiroshima, would, like Doc Yucatan in months to come, play a pivotal role straight out of Hollywood central casting, leaving a long, lasting impression on this most impressionable of kids. Hell, the kid still believed in invisible pirates, pixie dust and Lost Boys.
The door opened and beheld an Asian goddess, an angel of mercy. Madame Butterfly Kuramoto appeared before Mickey as a beautifully, delicate carved bonsai vision framed in a soft aura. Mickey stopped dead in his tracks. His heart pounding fast, ready to rip from his chest. Puppy love and a teenage crush, just add water. The same force that made schoolboys fall like slaves to their knees, panting, in heat before certain teachers, rushed over him like a tsunami over breakers on the beach. She was porcelain and barbed wire. She was a lustful lover, teacher and mother at the same time. She was wo-man, he was womb-man. It was obviously Oedipus and his wonder dog Rex.
She sized up the young boy in a single slice of the knife and determined the best, the only course of action that she would take. Runaway kid, for sure, she surmised. She contemplated, commiserated and then communicated.
She would allow him to have a room but, (monster "but" coming here) but, on the condition that he pick up the phone and trans-Pacific pacify his parents with a call simply to let them know how far he had traveled and where he was. There was no quarter to be given, no room to squirm. He did the only thing he could do. He accepted the victory won by her divine kamikaze wind, laid down his arms and unconditionally surrendered to her terms.
The call was placed and parents and child connected by hardwire. Tears traveled down their faces, across the Continental Divide, the high plains, the mainland, all the way to the shores of the ocean then set sail bounding over the main and out again through the phone.
Mickey’s stutter returned with a personal vengeance this time detonated by rife and strife and tears. Soon, the mother and child reunion was one of unity, and semi-understanding so Mickey said his "good-byes" and handed the phone to Kamikaze Kuramoto as he exited the room to let the wimmen tawk!
Hushed tones. Muffled laughter. Conspiratorial infernal maternal instincts were manifesting themselves before him. Two to one. Fuck! "It's ok, Mickey. I gave them my address, and of course they have the phone number now so we can all keep in touch. Now, you're to look at this as though you were on a vacation