Mahu Surfer Read Online Free PDF

father, and moving up in the hierarchy at KVOL. Haoa, two years younger, had just gotten married and started his own landscaping business. Their success bought me freedom, and my parents agreed to let me take a year to surf. My father hired me on as a laborer and carpenter until the fall, letting me bank every penny I earned to fund my North Shore adventure, and I surfed every morning before work, rising in the pre-dawn darkness, and every evening. I left them in September, as the North Shore waves began to improve, and didn’t return until winter had passed and I had given up that dream.
     
    I tried to read but I couldn’t concentrate. I checked my gear again, waxed my short board, reorganized the books on my shelf, which I hadn’t read since high school and wasn’t likely to ever again. At eleven, I turned the lights out.
     
    I couldn’t sleep well, hyped up by the nervous energy of what the next day was to bring, but I did doze a little. I was grateful when light began seeping in my window and I heard the slap of the morning paper in the driveway. I pulled on a pair of board shorts, slippas and an old t-shirt that read, “Hug a Pineapple.” Before I opened the door, I looked outside for reporters lurking in the underbrush. Fortunately there were none.
     
    There was a breeze blowing up from Diamond Head, and I could smell just the faintest hint of salt water. Down the street, I heard the soft whoosh of someone’s sprinklers, a dog barking, a siren passing far below. A yellow and orange sun was just coming into view over Wilhelmina Rise, to the east, and there were thin wisps of cirrus clouds high in the atmosphere. I picked up the paper and went back inside.
     
    Opening it, I saw that I had reclaimed the headlines I’d been so glad to relinquish only a few days before.
     
    “ Gay Cop Resigns ,” they read. Someone, identified only as an “unnamed police source,” said that while gay men and lesbians had been successfully integrated into police forces around the country, there was no formal policy at the HPD prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, and that some officers might not feel comfortable serving with someone who was openly gay. Sampson himself was quoted as saying, “Mr. Kanapa’aka has gone through a very difficult time in his life, and the Honolulu Police Department wishes him only the best in whatever the world brings his way.”
     
    My father was up at first light, too, and while my mother slept in we read the paper and he made scrambled eggs and Spam for both of us. We Hawaiians take pride in the fact that we eat more Spam per person than any other group in the United States, something like five and a half cans per person per year. Hormel has even made a special limited edition hula girl can for us, available only in the islands.
     
    “At least you get to surf for a while,” my father said, as we sat down to eat.
     
    “I will,” I said. “Big waves coming soon.” It was October, and the best surf of the year was on its way to the North Shore, monster waves that attracted the best surfers from around the world.
     
    “You have to be careful,” my father said, between forkfuls of egg. “People will know who you are, and some of them won’t like you. You won’t have your badge or your gun to protect you.”
     
    “They never really protected me while I had them. The badge is just a way of convincing people to give you the information they know they should. And a gun doesn’t protect you; it’s a means of last resort. The only protection you really have is your own common sense.” I reached over and touched his shoulder. “Besides, if I get in any trouble, I still have that pistol you gave me.”
     
    When I left for the North Shore the first time, after returning home from California with a BA in English and no job prospects in sight, my father had given me a .9 millimeter Glock, one he’d had for years. It was more male bonding than out of any sense