So after a year in Los Angeles, it just seemed to be coming to an end. Not that I wasn’t loving it there but it just seemed to be ‘a sign’ as our merry band of players started to dissipate. Then I heard on the radio (we listened to that in 1982) an advert for ‘The Hawaiian Express’, a daily flight from LAX to Honolulu and back. Gonna be cheap. And for the first however-many to book, it was stupid-cheap. $99 return. Irresistible. So irresistible as to be impossible to get through on the phone. You only had 3 days to get that price and they had, I think, one phone that they just left off the hook.

But I went to a bar in Santa Monica with Steve, the hit-man(?), one night. And indeed did we drink. And went afterwards to sober up in a diner, those wonderfully indispensable American places of comfort, coffee and refuge for the chronically drunk and hungry at 2 in the morning. And sitting in the Denny’s that night were two really gorgeous girls. Not just, like, ‘gorgeous’ gorgeous, but California gorgeous that bespeaks $250 haircuts and the nails and the clothes and the gloss… everything. “So what do you do?” I enquired of one, or perhaps both. The reply came: “I’ve just finished UCLA, Business Studies, and started an airline”. As you do in California. What you do is get an idea, say… cheap flights to Hawaii, then daddy buys you a second hand (from Al Italia) Boeing 747 and you fly to Honolulu and back every day. I was sobering up with Ms Hawaiian Express. Holy shit. So the next day I called, on HER number, and booked my flight. Booked for my mate Paul too. Not because I’m naturally generous and lovely but because he has a sister who lives in Maui.

I went a few days early because I wanted to see Waikiki beach. Hawaii 5-0, surf’s up, dude, the whole thing. I HAD to see Waikiki. It was only once I arrived there I realised why Paul passed up the opportunity. Its a man-made beach dumped in a shit-hole of sleaze and military-on-leave. So its easier to get a hooker than a taxi and there are far more drug dealers on the streets than burger bars. But heh, I survived my days there, hooked up with Paul at the airport and over we went to Maui. Which is as wonderfully, gorgeously Hawaiian as Honolulu isn’t. Spent a wonderful two weeks there, playing tennis, eating steaks (not particularly Hawaiian, I know but man’s gotta eat), driving jeeps up volcanoes and just hanging on black sand beaches (volcanic; odd but quite wonderful).

One night as we parked the car there was this really loud… ‘noise’. Deep, throaty, sharp. Then again. And again. We, very slowly, walked towards the source by the bushes and there was a frog. The size of a dinner plate, but rounder, more like a football. Biggest fucking frog I’ve ever seen. Had no idea frogs could even reach such a size. My mind immediately went to ‘what is going to eat HIM’. I’m not scared of frogs. I’m scared of their predators. Cos that’s life. And dinner. And then I learned that there are no snakes on Hawaii. None. Because if there were they’d be as big as houses.

And then I went back to LA, obvs, its the only place you could fly on that airline, to tidy things up before I left for good. And to finally learn the secret of Joey and Steve.

Happy Wednesday

A xxxx