Howling in Honolulu

For Jan Kerouac

I am topless in the women’s beach bathroom, laundering the salt stained armpits of my only t-shirt with hand dispenser soap. I have not yet been sized up as a threat or harassed by a mob of concerned mothers. Perhaps my exposed tits are evidence I am in fact, female? I traded the rest of my clothes at Buffalo Exchange in Seattle where a hipster clerk offered thirty dollars for the last designer threads tethering my ass to the American dream. I now have enough space in my backpack for all the books I collected. My favourites include Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde, a signed copy of Wildby Cheryl Strayed, Meet Polkadot by Talcott Broadhead (for my daughter), The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson, and a collection of erotica called A Passion for Taschen encased in a golden box that opens to thighs in stockings, feet splayed on a dashboard – a familiar sight for me since picking up Raegan. At night, I fashion a pillow out of the worn paperbacks and dream of Kerouac bumming across states. I wonder if he ever robbed a gift shop for eleven keyrings just for the hell of it. No one suspects us thieves because we are white, we are beatniks, we are free. Sometimes we meditate to balance the karma. 

When you read On the Road, you tend to do mad things, like empty your bank account on flights to Hawaii only to realise it costs a hundred and fifty dollars for one useless night in the kind of motel you don’t want to leave after dark. Like the one a few months back near Graceland. Elvis was so busy singing about the ghetto in Chicago, he failed to notice the one on his mansion doorstep. A man followed me into the laundry room at night, dizzied with crystals (and not the ones you charge in a full moon). 

Get in my car, he slurred, blocking the doorway. 

I can’t, was all I could fathom to say.

Why? 

My husband is waiting for me in my room, I lied. 

You don’t have a husband.

I laughed it off with a careful giggle perfected through girlhood, the kind that lets men know you are not laughing atthem, rather, you are thanking them for their unwanted advances. A laugh that says, I am so flattered, please don’t kill me. 

I squeezed between the liminal space of the doorframe and his threat, escaping back to my room where my five-year-old daughter dreamt of worlds without monsters. He moved his truck up front and flooded our window with high beams. I hid behind the bed, watching Reggie’s peaceful sleep until the early hours when he finally drove away. By the time I went back to collect my laundry the next day, it was gone. 

I met Raegan a short time later in Dallas. We road tripped out west on a feeling of mutual adventure and general disregard for society. After a few hundred miles, she filled her poetry book with my vegan rage, addressing it to the governor of the town littered with dead deer. She knew we would never mail it, but she wrote it anyway, and that’s how I fell in love with her.

We made it all the way to Oahu before running out of money, but we are resourceful with Craigslist, and our bodies. This is how the three of us came to live in a rental car for only a hundred bucks a week, our lives regimented by the free parking schedule of Downtown Honolulu. We spend daytimes on the far side of Kapi’olani park watching native women practice their hula with rainbow valley backdrops. After eight in the evening, we set up car camp on the boardwalk of Kalakaua. I often wake as early as the surfers who come for their morning shred, like today. I needed a shit, but the beach toilets weren’t open yet, so I strolled over to the shore and watched for sharks, waiting for surfboards to bob like lemon wedges in a fishbowl of Bloody Mary.

I have given up cleaning my t-shirt and wear it like a scarecrow to dry in the late afternoon sun. Raegan offers me one of her t-shirts to wear instead, but hers are all from the women’s department, so when you do things like point at the upside-down moon, out your belly button pops. I like clothes that drown me like a dead girl in a lake, clothes like a body bag. Besides, I don’t want to wear a t-shirt that says Bitch Craft. 

Reggie collects flowers fallen from shower trees and offers them to tourists. Their smiles reward and encourage her to continue. A haole gives her a few dollars for one, so now I encourage her too. Social services would have her if they saw how we lived, but how many kids get to wake up to dolphins in their garden? She has been to more countries than every adult I have ever met. My baby is growing on the road; what is more beatnik than that?

Every seven days, I leave the girls with our humble possessions under the shade of a banyan tree and return to the dealership with footwells full of sand to swap for a new rental. I wait in an airless room stuffed with rich American tourists and pray for a car with a trunk big enough for Reggie to sleep in, backseats that pack down flat enough for my library pillow, and a front passenger seat spacious enough for Raegan and her makeshift sarong curtains. When the sunrise fills our cocoon, we are a music video through a nostalgic lens, an Instagram filter on vacation, a smoke machine with whore house lighting. 

My t-shirt dries like a parched lizard, a crisp and crunchy grave. We make our evening Wi-Fi run to Starbucks. We don’t buy coffee, but the baristas let us sit in the corner. I think they worry about Reggie, who is absorbed by Steven Universe on her tablet. Raegan is busy on Craigslist, this guy only wants to record the sound of us masturbating, two hundred bucks?

I don’t know, I say. Not after last time. 

She looks at me like we have a choice. But at least she’s femme. It’s harder for me to play that role when I don’t even know how I want her to touch me. 

Aloha. We walk down the strip and join a free hula class. The dancer says, each movement tells a story. She teaches my body to sing, my grandmother is my home, but my body knows my grandmother died without knowing I’m a dyke. My body has a story to tell. But if a woman Howls in a Greyhound Station, does anyone even give a fuck? 

I shot myself across the Western hemisphere to burn brighter than Kerouac’s roman candle. Do you see me? Do you feel me burning hotter than the bullet fired from William S Burroughs gun? The bullet he wedged into his wife’s skull. Our lives are drinking games down in Mexico. Pour a shot. Let’s toast to Kerouac who could fuck, and tramp, and write, and dream. Pour another for the museum built in his honor. I’ll drink the whole bottle, because when I play the outlaw hedonist, I’m just a tragic alcoholic like the junkie daughter he abandoned.

-Carson Wolfe

Carson Wolfe lives in Manchester, U.K. with their wife Fae, their two children, and Sappho the cat. You can find them at www.carsonwolfe.com