Naked Portraits Pt. 01

Chapter 3

The Shunning

I didn't hear from Betty for a week and at first I thought nothing of it. Like me, she had a full graduate class schedule and on top of that she had her mother's endless political campaign events to attend. But as a week turned to two, it became apparent she was avoiding me. I called her cell numerous times but kept getting her voice message.

It's time to get to the bottom of this shit, I declared to myself, nice and angry. I skipped my early morning class and went to the school of business to wait for Betty to emerge from her morning class. But to my annoyance Betty wasn't in class today.

As I turned to go back to the art department to weigh my options, a girl marched right up to me and got right in my face.

"What's going on with you and Betty?" she demanded rudely.

I shrugged.

"I don't know," I told her, staring unblinking at her until she backed down. It was Kimberly Kato, a rich kid like Betty. She backed off to a more respectable distance.

"Everyone is saying that you and Hawk are sneaking around behind Betty's back." she explained haughtily. My jaw dropped at what Kimberly had just said. The chick raved on, "She called you her best friend! How could you do such a thing?"

I didn't much like Kimberly before this, but now I truly hated her guts. The chick has been trying to dethrone me as Betty's beat friend since the first grade. Kimberly's father made millions in Hawaii real estate and she felt that she, as Betty's social equal, was better suited to be the best friend. What irked me even more was that Betty's mother agreed with her 100%.

It was my turn to get up in her face and the girl shrunk back at my sudden advance and I ended up pinning her against a nearby cement column.

"Kimberly, I don't know what's going on with Betty and if you see her, tell her to answer her fucking phone!" I said, my face inches from hers. I was starting to get genuinely pissed with Betty's crazy behavior and was more than happy to project my anger onto Kimberly. I had beat this girl's ass twice in elementary school and was willing to do it again if need be. Perhaps the past beatings had come to mind because the girl slid away from the cement column and ran with her stupid pedigree tail between her legs.

Too edgy to sit in a class room, I blew the day off and headed to my private graduate art studio on the fourth floor of the art building. Painting proved futile and all I did was pace my tiny work space like a mad caged animal. After two pointless hours of fuming, pacing and not painting, I decided that it was close enough to noon to justify a beer at the Manoa Gardens, the only place on campus that served alcohol.

In the stairwell, I nearly ran down a fellow grad student named Paul Gleason. After a quick apology and craving company in my misery, I invited Paul out for a beer and even offered to pay. Paul was a small wiry guy of twenty-five from Brooklyn, New York. He always wore a Yankee baseball cap, was gruff, opinionated and confrontational, but I liked him anyway. Paul's combination of personality traits confounded the Japanese in me and I could only take him in small doses. As a Japanese person, you were allowed to be gruff, opinionated and confrontational but never all three at once and never, ever in public. But the true reason I kept Paul at a distance was that he had no artistic talent to speak of and I just didn't want to be the one to have to tell him. How he got accepted into the grad program is an ongoing scandal in the art department.

"It's only eleven thirty and I'm due at Hawaiian art history right about now," Paul said.

"You would rather go to Jenkins' Hawaiian art history class then drink free beer?" I asked dryly.

"Yeah, your right," he said, reason prevailing, and he followed me to the gardens.

Seated at an outside table under a green and white umbrella, pints of cold Sam Adam's dark in front of us, an odd mood settled on me. For some inexplicable reason, Betty's boyfriend's porn collection crept back into my head and just wouldn't leave. After the second beer, I asked Paul a blunt question.

"So what kind of porn do you like?" I held in a laugh as he sputtered. Apparently my question took him by surprise.

He wiped his mouth with a paper napkin and gave me a suspicions look.

"I ain't fallin' into this blatant feminist entrapment," he said. To prove his point, he mimed zipping his lips shut. He meant it too. I found this a little surprising for I would think that a guy like Paul would be happy to share his dirty thoughts with a pretty girl willing to listen. It took one more pint of Adams to get him to talk. Finally, he confessed that he got his porn off the net.

"Porn movies, VHS or DVD, are obsolete," he said. "It's all on the net now. Every possible fucked up thing that people can do to each other is right there just a click of the mouse away. I avoid the premium sites 'cause there's a shit load of free porn out there for the takin'." He shook a mildly drunken finger at me and continued. "The last thing that you wanna do is give your credit card number to an Internet porn site." With each swallow of beer, his tongue got looser. It seemed that he lived on the net 24-7. How did he get any work done, I wondered?

"What is this thing about cumming on a woman's face?" I asked, the drinking messing with my social filter.

I laughed as he spat beer on the ground and sputtered again.

"I'm not gonna answer a fuckin' question like that." He wiped his mouth then said primly, "If I had to pick a body part to ejaculate on, it would be breasts."

It was my turn to spit beer. Eventually, Paul drunkenly confessed how he found Asian girls endlessly fascinating since moving to the islands. In my drunken zeal, I turned to a page in the feminist handbook.

"When a white male lusts for women of other races we call that consuming the other."

"Ouch," Paul said with a grimace, "I knew this was a case of entrapment."

I laughed and thought of my recent lusting for California blond surfer dude Hawk.

"We all want to consume the other," I said.

I wasn't so drunk that I couldn't see that the conversation was getting too steamy so I ungracefully steered us to safer topics. After all the talk about sex and porn, I worried that Paul would be all over me like a polyester aloha shirt. But he kept a polite distance and his gentlemanly restraint made me like him all the more. Eventually, I extricated myself from Paul's company and decided my day was shot and took the bus home to my apartment in Waikiki.

On the ride home, a cloud of sadness descended on me. Nothing seemed more depressing then sitting around my apartment in the middle of the day, drunk and brooding about Betty. In desperate defiance, I got off the bus a few blocks before my stop to walk off the Sam Adams. A sign up ahead caught my eye; Pua'a Video. Pua'a was the Hawaiian word for pig.

"Pig Video," I said to myself with a drunken giggle. It surprise me that little video stores like this still existed in the age of Netflix and On-Demand cable. Perhaps a stack of mindless comedies would cheer me up, I thought as I pushed open the door of Pig Video.

A rock-n-roll song had just ended on the sound system, plunging the place into silence right at my entrance and, like a scene from an old time Western, everyone stopped what they were doing and looked at me. Once inside I saw how apt the name of the place was. Pua'a Video specialized in pornography. You couldn't tell from the outside though. Where they being tastefully discrete or purposely deceitful, I wondered? There were six men in the place, counting the guy at the counter. My first impulse was to flee but then a tiny sliver of curiosity egged me forward. I blamed it on the beer.

The Guess Who's 'American Woman' kicked in on the sound system and everyone went back to their business. The song seemed the perfect background music as I stepped deeper into the place and I couldn't help but bob my head to the forceful beat. No one stared at me directly but I could still feel their eyes on me nonetheless. Normally I would feel nervous at the unsolicited attention, especially in a place like this, but I had to admit I liked the unexpected feeling of power. I blamed that on the beer too.

These guys must be desperate for real female attention because I barely looked like a girl dressed as I was in baggy, paint smeared jeans and a blue, button-down work shirt. Then I remembered where I was. These guys wouldn't be here if they were getting the real thing. All the movies were DVDs, VHS a long dead dinosaur. A movie titled Black Santa's Coming to Town rested right next to Asian Sorority Girls In Heat. If there was any form of organization to the shelves, it eluded me. Stupidly, I wondered if there was a soft core section.

I amused myself with reading some of the clever titles playing off of real movie titles: Star Whores, Indiana Bones, The Cat-house of Doom and the topper so far, A Few Too Many Good Men: Gangbang Fantasies.

"May I help you?" came a voice behind me.

Mildly startled, I turned to face the guy from the counter. He was local, assuredly Japanese although his skin was a bit dark. Maybe he had a little Hawaiian or Filipino in him too. He had a full head of hair but most of it was gray. I guessed him at mid fifty but his face was very smooth, putting his actual age in doubt. I thought him quite attractive in that old fashioned Don Ho kind of way. Stupidly, I blushed because of my attraction, and also that I'd been caught wandering the shelves of a sleazy porn shop by such a handsome older man.

"Um, do you have anything for women?" I asked lamely just to say something.

"There is a lesbian section on aisle seven," he said.

"No! I don't mean that," I said. He smiled.

"Sorry, but this is not the kind of place for romance based erotica." He looked thoughtful for a second though. "Maybe I got something." I followed him to the front counter.

His accent was local but he sounded like he may have spent time away from the islands. I found that local guys who were in the military sounded like that. As we walked to the front counter, it suddenly occurred to me that I was the only customer left in the store. Did my presence empty out the place? If it did, I was costing this guy money. Perhaps his offer of help might be his polite way of moving me along.

"Try this," he said. "It's still male oriented but it has a little more story and art to it." He handed me a DVD in an unadorned plastic holder. The title An Island Girl's Fantasy # 4 was written in red Sharpie on the disk itself.

"It's directed by Jade Tama."

"Tama is jade in Japanese," I said, smiling.

He smiled too.

"Her web site is doublejade.com. It's listed under the title. She's local, a Honolulu girl I hear."

"How much for a membership?" I asked, feeling bad for having chased away his customers.

"You have a Cinemagic membership?"

"Um, sure," I said. Everyone on Oahu had a Cinemagic Video membership. After Blockbuster, it was the largest movie rental chain in Hawaii.

"We're affiliated. Your Cinemagic card will work here too," he said. I handed him the card, he scanned the Jade movie, I paid cash and he put the DVD in a Cinemagic bag of all things. "We have a night drop but you can return it at to any Cinemagic store on the island."

I nodded and wondered if he was politely saying, Don't come back, you're bad for business. Either way, I smiled and left the shop with my porn movie.

The walk home cleared my head a little and I found myself in the mood to watch the movie. An hour or two of sleazy solitude sounded like fun, although I'm sure that the porn movie, like all porn movies made for men, will undoubtedly offend me. But my hopes of sleazy fun were dashed on the rocks when I discovered my roommate was home.

"You off today?" I asked the obvious.

"They're renovating my section at the hotel so they gave me a half day," Nora said. "You home early too?"

"Yeah, not a day for thinking," I said.

Nora eyed the Cinemagic bag in my hand.,

"Got some movies?"

"Yeah, art documentaries. Wanna see one?" I lied.

She made a face and shook her head.

"I just ordered Avatar On Demand. Wanna watch with me?"

"Naw, seen it twice already. I'm gonna go lay down and read." I left the living room and closed my door. With a heavy sigh of frustration I fell face down onto my bed. For a few seconds I considered playing the movie on my computer but immediately dumped that idea. My shitty computer drive had been acting up lately and I just couldn't bear watching a movie that froze every other second let alone a porn movie that froze every other second.

I rolled over and oozed onto the chair in front of my computer to check my email. Maybe Betty has ended my exile, I hoped. There was nothing from Betty, or anybody interesting for that matter. Then it occurred to me that, aside from Betty, I didn't know anybody interesting. A wave of depression with a sprinkling of anger washed over me. You seriously need a distraction. Then my eyes spied the web site on the DVD, doublejade.com.

So there I went.

The site was elegant and oddly tasteful. Stills of the very movie I got at Pua'a Video dominated the site. The stills were intriguing, creating a fresh wave of irritation at Nora's unintentional sabotage of my day. The male lead was a handsome blond hunk that automatically made me think of Hawk. Under the title of the movie was another link. I clicked on it just to see where it took me. It was an erotic short story site and a story titled Shelly's New Dance was the feature of the month. The author's name was Erica Lostindavoid. It took me a few seconds to decipher her last name as lost-in-the-void. You and me both sister, I thought. The title caught my fancy so I paid my three dollars for the download and started in reading:

Shelly's New Dance

by Erica Lostindavoid

Minnie turned the calculator so that Shelly could see the numbers on the little screen. The offensive amount of $462.78 showed in bright red.

"That much?" Shelly asked.

"I added it up four times," Minnie said flatly.

Shelly shoved the calculator to the center of the kitchen table with a flick of her wrist causing the thing to spin like a top. The number $462.78 appeared and disappeared, mocking her.

"How did we lose control of the household finances so badly?" Shelly asked miserably.

"That's just how short we are on the rent," Minnie said with equal misery. "I haven't calculated in utilities, food, school and personal expenses." Minnie sighed, pushed aside her long red hair, got up and plopped down boneless in one of the apartment's black lounge chairs, sweeping her long pretty legs onto the matching ottoman.

The chairs and ottoman, along with the matching sofa, were part of the reason for the budget short fall. Shelly bought the furniture thinking that her college grant check was due in a week. To Shelly's horror, the grant was not waiting for her. The check would not clear until the end of the month because of some bureaucratic fuck up. Since Minnie had put in half the money for the new furniture, she was tapped too.

"What about your boyfriend?" Shelly asked. "He's an electrician. They make good money, don't they?"

"Was my boyfriend," Minnie answered. "I dumped him for that dancer in the play I'm in. Dancers make shit. Maybe you could return the furniture?" Minnie added sounding hopeful.

"They were floor models, as is, no returns," Shelly said, quoting the sales person from the furniture store in a mocking male baritone. "That's what made it a steal at $480.00."

"Your family?" Minnie asked gently, knowing how touchy Shelly was about the subject.

"My family," Shelly echoed with an ugly sigh. She slumped low in the kitchen chair, her eyes barely at table level. Her family had wanted her to live in the dorms claiming that she was too loose with money to live off campus. She had fought tooth and nail to get her way. Her parents only relented because she had moved in with Lisa Ochi, the daughter of a friend of her mother. Lisa Ochi was a fellow student and probably the most boring girl that Shelly had ever met but her apartment was in a choice location in the heart of Waikiki.

Two months into the semester though, Lisa met a guy from California, fell in love, got pregnant and ran off to the Mainland with him, all in that order, abandoning her lease and poor Shelly. Lisa's implosion had happened so quickly that Shelly hardly had the pleasure of living in exciting Waikiki. Knowing that her parents would put her in a dorm room in an instant, Shelly held off telling them about Lisa's collapse. The rent was paid for the month so Shelly figured she might as well enjoy the place while she had it.

A week before the end, Shelly threw a party at the apartment with a bunch of friends. At the party she met Minnie who, at the time, was a friend of a friend. Shelly learned that Minnie was on the overflow list for campus housing. She told Shelly that her school loan would pay up to $650.00 a month on her rent for the semester if she chose to live off campus. Shelly got excited and asked if Minnie would like to move in. And just like that, the pair became roommates and not long after that, friends. And as far as the landlord still knew, Lisa Ochi was still the leaseholder.

Minnie was Irish, tall at an even six feet with copper-red hair and a fantastic, voluptuous figure. She was a dance slash drama major and an absolute blast to live with. Most of the time she was demurring, soft and feminine, but if need be she could cuss like a sailor, spit like a baseball player and drink like a frat boy.

Shelly had never known anyone like Minnie and in many ways the women were opposite compliments. Shelly was a library science major, Japanese American with long straight black hair down to her shoulders, five four and slim with just the right amount of curve. Her breasts were on the small side but she was always confidant in their aesthetic quality. Her personality wasn't as outgoing as Minnie's, but by no means was she a social cripple and could cuss and spit if the need arose.

Coming back to the here and now, Shelly sighed. The gig was up and the dorms were looming in her future once again. In addition, her parents got to be right about her financial incompetence. She tightly squeezed her eyes shut in frustration. She loved her spacious Waikiki apartment with the pool downstairs and all the hot clubs just down the street with Waikiki beach only two blocks away. But most of all, she would miss living with Minnie.

"I know a way we can make $300.00 each in one night," Minnie said in a soft voice.

Shelly opened her eyes and looked at her friend with a glimmer of hope.

"How?"

"Stripping," Minnie said.

"Yeah, right," Shelly said, returning to despair.

"I'm serious," Minnie said.

Shelly squinted at Minnie. "Oh my god, you are serious."

"I've done it once before, just for kicks. It was easy and kind of fun."

"You're crazy! I'm not stripping at some club where some frat boys could see me! It would be all over campus!" Shelly said.

"It's not like that," Minnie said, "It would be a private gig like at a home or hotel room."

Shelly's jaw dropped open.

"Oh, that's so much better!" she said with double the sarcasm.

"Okay, go tell your parents that you're short on your rent," Minnie said. "And by the way, you should also tell them that the nice Japanese girl you moved in with got pregnant and ran off with a hippy to California a year ago and that you now live with a redheaded haole actress slash dancer, with the apartment's lease erroneously renewed under Lisa Ochi's name."