Chapter 36

Harold awoke in Emily's arms about 1:30, the sun was high in the sky. The room was quite warm and Harold walked into the bathroom, got a drink of water from the faucet, and then returned to bed. Emily was very much asleep and he cuddled next to her for a while. He could hear his hunger pains and was sure they would awaken her. An hour later he realized they would not and decided that he had to do something. He rolled over, kissed her, and quite miraculously she awoke. They showered, he shaved, and they dressed in swim suits, and tee shirts. Harold's was a Mickey Mouse number, Emily's more subdued.

They walked down to the pool area and sat at a small table. The pool at the Westin Maui was beyond incredible. The hotel was actually three buildings set around an artificial lagoon. From the lobby there was a twenty foot water fall and what looks like a tropical rain forest. On closer inspection there was a path behind the waterfall like some kind of adult Tom Sawyer paradise. There were little paths with mini Japanese moon bridges over a babbling brook. Beautiful marble, onyx, and bronze statues were arranged throughout the forest. The brook was actually three streams that originated on the top of a little island. One formed the waterfall, and two little streams formed little rivulets with rapids. There were three pools at three different levels intermixed with ponds for giant carp. One of the pools had a rock lined cave leading to another pool. There was even a little restaurant on the island. It looked like a pool that Hugh Hefner would rent for an issue of Playboy. They would call it Women of the Westin Maui. You would never again be able to get a reservation again despite more than a thousand rooms. All the hormone bags in the world would have reserved it years in advance. Harold and Emily got a table with a little thatched parasol by the edge of one of the pools. They could watch the sun set and let their imaginations wander through the tropical garden.

The ocean and the island of Lanai were in the distance. The trade winds had gotten the surf to about 2 feet and it crashed in a white froth just off shore. A waiter came to their table and they both ordered a sandwich and a tropical drink. Harold was looking across the patio, when he noted a 20 foot tall bronze statue of a bowel movement in one of the fountains. He was hesitant to point it out to Emily. He had chosen this hotel, and had thought it was quite nice up to this point. Then he noted that the shapeless glob had some bumps along the top surface, and was spouting water. It had flippers and a tail. Oh, a humpback. He had forgotten, only for a moment, that they were in Bad Marine Mammal Art territory. Each winter, from November to December, the humpbacks leave the arctic feeding grounds, and swim to Maui to calve, get their pictures taken by all the local tour operators, and then mercifully in April they swim back to the arctic where it is too damn cold for an artist to draw, paint, or sculpt them. It is fortunate they are only in Maui for two months, or every person on earth would have to have a memento of the whales.

It used to be that the locals in Lahaina would slaughter the whales to make motor oil, perfume, corsets, and Japanese delicacies. Now, unfortunately, they photograph, tour, video, paint, sculpt, draw, knit, macramé, mold in injected plastic for key chains and knic knacks, and generally spread the image of the whale all over the map. The artists in Maui have a special combination of excess time, and excess TetraHydroCannibis in their art. They are able to see dolphins, whales, and every damn tropical fish in the Pacific Ocean, as well as a rainbow, rain forest, and the town of Lahaina in every picture. Some of the BMMA is supernatural, the infant and mother whale, along with the requisite dolphins, and all tropical fish in the Pacific, the sphinx, a planet, and the star ship enterprise, are pictured in front of a levitating pyramid. They are painted in hyper-clear, hyper-color, hyper-real, and are hyper-expensive. They are the kind of art that would be good on the cover of a magazine, a science fiction trash novel, or a tee shirt, but they are sold as $10,000 to $20,000 investment paintings. Yeah, it is going to be worth more someday. Right, when the dolphins rule the world, it will be worth more, just like the velvet Elvis painting. Now it is just Bad Marine Mammal Art. Harold and Emily were in the middle of it.

Just as Harold was about to explain why that object d'art was not a 20 foot tall bowel movement, a group of Willy Nelson impersonators walked out of the hotel and toward the restaurant. Harold was sure one was the musician himself. There was the long unkempt hair, the trademark bandanna, the casual clothes, but there were six of them all in a row. One had to be Willy, but which? As they passed Harold and Emily's table the last one sat down at the table with Harold and Emily. "You." He pointed one finger at Harold. "You look familiar. You some movie star." There was a long slow southern drawl to the voice, but nothing threatening in the question. No one in Maui has ever been threatening. It is impossible to have enough hostility to overcome the mellowing effects of Maui.

Harold was not quite sure what to say. "No. My name is Harold MacAnish. I am from San Francisco."

"You were on television. You are that scientist guy. The guy who is going to populate Venus. Hey guys, come over here. This is Harold MacAnish the guy on TV." Soon there was a crowd around there table. Each had a question. The first was of course if they were going to ever take a humpback to Venus. Harold thought a dolphin, owing to size constraints, would be the first cetacean to embark on an interplanetary trip. About an hour later most of them had wandered off. The tallest one started telling Harold about himself. Emily had been trying to have a quiet lunch with her husband, and was a bit taken aback by the crowd they collected.

The tallest Willy Nelson imitator was an artist from Bend Oregon named Michael Mahalo who had been living on Maui for about six months. No one really lives on Maui, they just come from the mainland, rot for a year or two in paradise, run out of money, tire of working in restaurants, and then go home. This man was trying to start a business. "Harold, You see man, I don't want to go home. This is paradise man and I am going to stay. I started by painting Humpbacks but everybody's doing it man. Then I was sitting in a hot tub, and it came to me. Hot tub art. You've seen the golf art. Pretty green, little flag in the hole, lone golfer putting toward the hole. All the work up to this point has been putting shots. I could have advanced the genre by specializing on the tee off paintings but I just couldn't do it. So I started painting beautiful hot tubs. I had em with waterfalls, I had them with flowers, I had em with rainbows. Then I hit the supernatural themes, dolphins supporting a hot tub, hot tubs on pedestals with humpbacks overhead, hot tubs with Elvis in the backdrop in the clouds. I could never figure out whether it was good to have people in the tubs. Some customers wanted themselves in the tub. Others wanted people they would like to be in the tub - you know anorexic women and muscular men. Others wanted just men in the tub. It got too complicated. So then I started painting the bottom of people's hot tubs. The damn paint kept running and it is hard to hold your breath long enough. It got easier when I emptied the tub but it was a lot of work. I even started re-grouting the tubs and painting cetacean art in the grout like a fresco. It still faded and people would call for a touch up before a party. It was too much man. So now I need a new racket. So I see you and bingo I know what to do. Paintings of hot tubs on other planets. No ones doing it man, I'll corner the racket. Tell you guys what. Give me your address, I'll send you the first lithograph. You'll love it. Thanks, Man."

Harold and Emily were glad to be alone. They were just about to stand when Harold noticed the sunset. The sky turned orange and the clouds that hung over Lanai looked pink with orange and gray streaks as the sun penetrated the thinner layers. The clouds off Lanai looked like a large dollop of cool whip that was hooked on the southern slope of the volcano and blown by the trades to the north. Harold and Emily held hands as the sun slowly set. Harold ordered two more tropical drinks, you know the overpriced, low alcohol, type with the little umbrellas and the maraschino cherry stuck to a slice of pineapple by a little umbrella, and a pupu platter, with the can of sterno in the middle, and little tiki idol with sauces in bowels, and stuff for dipping. It was a meal that contained all four of the basic food groups: grease, salt, sugar, and alcohol.

As it became dark the propane tiki torches came on and the flames flickered in the trade winds. There was a light rain that fell around them but the parasol kept them dry. The wind got a little stronger and the flames of the tiki torch started to lick the thatched parasol. "Emily, is it suddenly warmer to you? My food tastes of mesquite." The thatched parasol was now completely ablaze. Several waiters who had obviously never dealt with this problem before tried to throw buckets of water from the pool onto the parasol. Half of the first bucket of sooty water fell onto Harold's lap. One bartender arrived with the seltzer dispenser to squirt on the fire. As they were dipping champagne buckets into the pool to get water to toss on the parasol, the commotion caused several of the other guests to get up and the melee resulted in several falling in the pool. Harold and Emily, being beneath the parasol, noted sooty water dripping on them initially but did not move. When the fire hose was finally turned on, Harold took the first stream in the chest. At this point, he stood up, pulled the parasol from its base and tossed it into the pool. The fire sizzled and was out. His waiter, who had been absent through the whole incident, arrived with the check neatly tucked in a small knaugahyde binder. Harold paid with a credit card and they strolled through the tropical rain forest lagoon towards their room.

Chapter 37

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