Shave Ice

By TOM STEVENS, For The Maui News
If coral divers had headstones, Ray, your epitaph would have to say that you Never Been To The Chamber. Your sheet was clean.

— Michael McPherson, “Black Coral”

The wind was just coming up when we reached Spreckelsville at midmorning Saturday. In the distance, patchy clouds scudded along the egg-blue horizon toward the slumbering shape of Molokai.

Parking behind a half-dozen other cars

and trucks, we walked across springy centipede grass to a gracious redwood beach house old enough to have survived the 1946 tsunami.

A dozen chairs had been set up on the polished stone patio facing a table display of books, photos and other memorabilia. In the center stood a framed black-and-white photo draped with Niihau-shell and fresh flower lei.

Beaming from the frame was a square-jawed, curly-haired man with keen dark eyes, a boxer’s nose and a roguish smile beneath a full mustache. In life, he had been Michael McPherson: poet, novelist, editor, publisher, all-night gambler, surfer, scholar and fearless truth teller. He passed away recently at his Big Island home.

Ours was a modest memorial, only about 15 strong. That’s partly because Michael moved away from Maui quite a few years ago. But it’s also because many who would have attended his memorial already had preceded him in death.

Black coral divers. Gamblers. Syndicate characters. Famous surfers, sugar heirs and party girls. Vice cops, hell-raisers and cocaine cowboys. The cast of characters who spun through Michael McPherson’s life and writing would have been equally at home with Damon Runyon, Earl Derr Biggers or Raymond Chandler.

Or, for that matter, with James Joyce. As I surveyed the poetry volumes, literary collections, the surfing memoir and the Lahaina novel on the tabletop, I remembered that Michael also had presented at a Joyce symposium in Dublin. He was the only contest surfer I knew who not only had read “Finnegan’s Wake,” but could explain it to you.

We took our seats as Michael’s longtime friend Cynthia Conrad gave an eloquent and moving eulogy. The voice of Kui Lee then sang “Ka Makani Ka‘ili Aloha,” and various guests offered their own McPherson recollections, many humorous.

As the stories tumbled out, I remembered a brilliant, funny, acerbic athlete and literary man nicknamed “The Reptile.” He drove a green El Camino laden with blocky cylinders of cement. For, in addition to his other talents, McPherson somewhere along the line had learned how to stress-test the various densities and hardnesses of concrete.

Dubbed the “Rep-mobile,” that green El Camino ferried him from Maui job sites to various smoky gambling haunts, including a Makawao Quonset hut fondly known to its denizens as The Reptile Lounge. When

not cement-testing or card-sharking, McPherson turned out exquisite poetry and edited

a handsome short fiction journal titled “Hapa.”

Our paths ran parallel for a time in the 1970s and early 1980s, when Michael would crush long home runs into the fog during pickup softball games at Keokea Park. The last time I surfed with him was at Fleming Beach on the west side, probably 25 years ago. Even then, he rode “old style” — tall and stately, as unself-consciously regal as the Waikiki beach boys of his poetry.

While that bygone Hawaii lived again vividly in his writing, it was never a picture-postcard Hawaii. Almost alone among his peers, Michael McPherson never “nestled” anything in “paradise.” His Hawaii was a real place, where violent crime, drugs and deracination are as ever-present as aloha and kokua. Real Hawaii stared Michael right in the eye, and he stared unflinchingly back.

These impressions and others ran through my mind as the memorial moved toward its aquatic conclusion. While Michael will be interred at sea properly off Waikiki this weekend, his Maui friends wanted to remember him in the ocean as well. Several paddled to a shallow reef offshore, formed a circle of surfboards, snapped the lei and released the flowers into the wind. Then each caught a wave for Michael and paddled back in.

The following day’s paper carried the obituary of another long-ago acquaintance, the builder and wave rider Wally Boskoff. I met Wally bodysurfing off the pavilion at Baldwin Beach Park back in the 1980s. He was the only silver-haired bodysurfer I knew in those days, and he was a warmhearted and affable role model to boot.

Michael McPherson passed away at 61; Wally Boskoff at 88. They leave the waves, and our hearts, emptier now.

• Tom Stevens is a freelance writer whose “Shave Ice” column appears every Wednesday. He can be reached at shaveice@maui.net.