T A B L E_T A L K Is Philadelphia the weirdness capital of America? Discuss the city of brotherly love in the Wanderlust area of Table Talk R E C E N T L Y Sex, death and beauty in South America By Melanie Goldman Week Two of the Camel Trophy (08/24/98) Oh when the gays come dancing in By Rebecca Bryant The physical -- and emotional -- revelations of Amsterdam's Gay Games V (08/21/98) The view from Japan By Dave McCombs It's the economy, not the morality (08/20/98) Everest controversy Weston DeWalt's latest response The co-author of "The Climb" responds to Jon Krakauer's most recent comments in Salon about the Everest tragedy of May 10, 1996 (08/20/98) The view from Europe Clinton's Achilles penis and other reactions (08/19/98) Browse the Wanderlust Feature archives		MY HAWAIIAN HONEYMOON | PAGE 1, 2 - - - - - - - - - - We waited around to hear Iz's music, since every Polynesian human on this island walks around reverently wearing Iz memorial T-shirts. When we finally heard it, it was hilarious -- the guy mostly rewrote patriotic island-specific lyrics to pre-existing top-40 schlock like John Denver's "Country Road" or blatantly plagiarized and rearranged '70s lite emoto-rock for the ukulele, but the Hawaiians have gone totally bonkers for him. They worship him. The live recording has girls screaming in throaty, sexual exuberance and men shouting with joy. Iz had fathered a daughter with his wife. Apparently, he was getting a lot of sex when he was still alive, regardless of the fact that he needed a respirator all the time because he was too fat to breathe by himself. There was a picture in the Honolulu Advertiser of Iz's wife diving in the water to "release his spirit," a Hawaiian ritual that takes place a year after the funeral. She looked like she weighed about 110. After seeing the size difference of the couple, you can't not think about the mechanics of it. Everybody's mind automatically digresses to the worst, most graphic assumptions. And if she loved him and was sleeping with him by some gymnastic means, why did she keep letting him eat Kailua pork? Nobody seems to ask these questions. Iz, we hardly knew ye. There are various concessions to tourism, the most annoying of which being one rental agency's pandering to the San Berdoo/investment banker-outlaw set and renting Harley Hogs to any dirt-headed miscreant stockbroker with $100 a day. The designated tourist sights -- big fenced-off waterfalls, etc. -- are all lovely in a Goddammit Lookit That Huge Splendid Nature Thing kind of way, but it was very interesting to get behind the scenes in a couple of places and see what kinds of people have fled their home states for the mollusk-paced lifestyle that Kauai has to offer. I found, in the flat gray industrial/sugar cane section of town, a long-legged cowgirl lady from the Midwest -- she would have been the purtiest gurl at the honky-tonk somewheres, but her nature was too mechanical and introspective to end up somebody's waitress. She didn't like to talk much but I managed to pry out of her that she had traveled to Kauai in the '70s and never left -- what she didn't say made me think she followed a man who wasn't around anymore. She is now the main computer surgeon on the island, who patiently cracked into uncharted and forbidden entrails in my laptop with a gleam in her eye like a cannibal prying open the inner caverns of some new obscure shellfish to find a useful poison, talking to all the infuriating little parts the whole time: "Come on, now. You know you want to open for me so this nice lady can meet her deadline, don't you," she'd coo to the horrible little bugs in my infernal machine, nice as the Tooth Fairy. This was island patience. In New York, any computer person would have either charged me $500 and taken three days or just given up entirely. She did the impossible -- re-bending a spring that had come loose on a place in my disk drive so buried and remote the licensed repair books don't even discuss it; even the experts are never supposed to go that deep. She charged me the minimum fee after blaring the thing with unbelievable attention for 40 minutes. It was the kind of quiet, unceasing and willful Zen spotlight of focus that you only see in the teensy knot-works of Belgian monks or imprisoned calligraphers. I insisted on giving her an extra $10. The same kind of patient, quality workmanship was evident in the surfboard place -- the surfer in my life wanted a new custom board, so we went right to the source and found the Hawaiian surfboard company with the best logo, located in another clot of sheetrocked cells in the flat white coral bed of the industrial zone. We found a furtive bunch of shapers scuttling in the halls of the place like polite moles -- shapers being the rare breed of zombie who spends all his time carving specialized, mathematical surfboards out of "blanks," seven-foot blocks of raw foam. Fins are then added and the boards are fiberglassed. After you visit the place, the smell of polyester resins clings to the inside of your nose for hours, and you begin to realize why all of the glassers who work there, who are frosted ghostly white with dangerous toxic particulates, who work all day long in unventilated little upstairs rooms with no face masks, all seem to have that wall-eyed acid-trip too-high-to-walk stagger and keep giggling for no reason. At the surf break in front of our condo, there are fretfully perfect klatches of privileged 14-year-old beach girls, on that summer stretch of enchanted adolescence between eighth grade and freshman year, and they are all tall and blond and have bronzed six-pack stomach muscles from surfing every day -- surfing really well, and being really adorable at it, squeaking and doing silly dances while executing effortless technical moves that they learned to do in the ocean when they were 7. Jesus, I keep thinking, looking at them. Why wasn't that my life? I felt like a rodent dislocating itself in a glue trap most of my adolescence, unless I was on drugs. Why were the only water sports I was exposed to at the age of 16 the ones those big leather guys down at the Stud used to do to each other in the specially built men's room trough? They all sit, these baby bikini queens, happily telling jokes, looking comfortable in their glistening, sun-kissed pelts and emanating well-adjustedness -- then they go kick ass together on their surfboards. They don't drink or swear or smoke weed or even seem to care about boys very much. They seem to get along beautifully with one another, with none of the vicious, back-biting clique ruthlessness of the teenage hags I used to know. There is nothing tortured or mean or ugly about them at all. They are molded of pure sunlight; rainbows arcing in caramel-colored limbs. Surely they can barely spell their own mono-syllabic nicknames. Surely they are all idiots. I've been trying to boogieboard over on the east shore in Wailua -- a thumbnail-shaped beach near the main road where the shore break looks fluffy and playful, where children screech and hop like seagulls happily in the froth, riding on foam animal heads and other floating accouterments. I have been trying to learn the ways of ocean fun on this "beginners" beach, which for days running dragged me from the boogieboard, elbowed me underwater with a loud sneer and held me down by the neck while spraying great vengeful jets of liquid salt into every tender hole in my head. I would stand up once the wave had finished punishing me -- the water is only three feet deep at the shore break -- and I'd drag the boogieboard back to shore and start crying. "Awww, everybody gets juked," says my surfer husband, for whose sake I have heartbreakingly gone back and back into the water, only to be savagely beaten to tears. But Kauai is beautiful. It is infused with aloha spirit. It also loves the daylights out of Jesus, which is another reason they love Iz -- Iz loved him a big fat plate of Jesus. Little mall girls who aren't walking around in Iz shirts walk around in powder-blue tank tops with the initials "W.W.J.D.?" Which is actually a clothing brand, the initials standing for "What Would Jesus Do?" Spend a good amount of time on Kauai, and you can find areas and reserves of potential you never thought you had. Yesterday, for example, I got on the boogieboard again at the beach near the Sheraton in Poipu, expecting to be dummy-slugged and semi-drowned as usual. Imperceptibly, however, on some kind of instinctive animal level, my body had learned a few things about how not to stack face-first into the reef anymore, and I actually caught a really long ride -- I was positioned just right: I paddled for the wave, which was standing up tall and green and just beginning to go white on top, and I got into it and I slid down the fucker at about 70 miles an hour, and my hair wasn't in my face and the boogieboard didn't slide out from under my chest and ditch me, and I started careening for the sand expecting to pearl-dive and go flailingly under at any second, but instead, in a way seemingly pre-organized like the water slide we tried to sneak into at the Hyatt, the wave, like a big, safe, flat hand, just slid me unblemished all the way up to the dry part of the shore and sweetly rolled away. I started laughing my head off. The husband started laughing, too, relieved that I hadn't been deathed. Big pink tourists under umbrellas started laughing too. It was a moment. SALON | Aug. 25, 1998 Cintra Wilson is a regular contributor to Salon.