Uncle Moke

For years and years, the Maui Chapter of the Sons of Hawaii Motorcycle Club met every Sunday morning in Kahului, in front of an old tree that stood outside of Ah Fook’s Super Market.

When Ah Fook’s burned down, we still met under the same old tree each Sunday, but instead of saying “see you at Ah Fook’s,” we’d say, “see you at Burger King,” which was kitty corner to, and shared a parking lot with what was left of Ah Fook’s. Being that almost all of us were hung over, part of the Sunday ritual was to buy a breakfast bento from Ah Fook’s, but once it met its demise, only the really old-timers and the teetotalers settled for a Burger King breakfast. Those of us still feeling the effects of the night before suffered until our first stop, opting instead for a bit of the hair of the dog.

Our scheduled departure time from the old tree was officially 1O AM, with the early birds arriving just after 7 AM, and the rest of us trickling in for the next three hours. We hardly ever hit our 10 AM target, though, mostly because Henry “H” Akima was always chronically late, and no one was leaving without Henry.

On one level, Henry was a kitten, but there were excellent reasons why Henry was well known, and feared, in the backroom Honolulu gambling joints and on the rough and tumble commercial shipping docks. For my part, Henry was exactly one of only two males in my whole life for whom I did exactly as I was told, and I was for sure not leaving Ah Fook’s or Burger King until he showed up. This was not out of fear though, as I loved and respected Henry and he, me, and more than once he prevented me from following through on decisions that I would have regretted for the rest of my life.

The fact was, we all loved and respected Henry, and it just wouldn’t have been a great ride without him. So, we waited, which was okay anyway, because the extra time allowed for more visiting and kibbitzing—before we all thundered off for a ride around the island.

In my case, and I guess I can speak for everyone— the extra time meant getting to spend some precious minutes gabbing with Uncle Moke.

Moses “Moke” Kahiamoe Sr. was, I’d bet, the first to arrive by the tree each Sunday, but I wouldn’t know for sure because I was always one of the hung-over/overslepters (right alongside of Moke Jr.) who were lucky to arrive by 8:30. But I made sure to always arrive at least before 9:30 AM however great the pain in my head, because the time we spent as a gathering motorcycle club under the tree was almost as much fun as the ride itself.

Each arrival was met with a round of hugs, some hearty greetings, and more hugs. And just when we’d settle into pairs or small groups for a minute to admire each other’s bikes for the zillionth time someone new would ride up and the hugs and laughter would repeat itself. Routinely, there were between 30 and 40 of us on each Sunday ride, so you’d think we’d get tired of all that laughing and hugging but we never did.

Still, for me it all came down to this: as I climbed off my motorcycle I would catch a glimpse out of the corner of my eye of Moke Sr., Uncle Moke, just shy of running towards me, and as I turned to face him a GIANT smile would cross his face, and mine as well. When he reached me, he would shoot out his hand, and we would shake—with both of his brown, weathered hands enveloping mine. Then, he would formally greet me as though I were a long-lost best friend who he hadn’t seen in a year. He said the same exact thing each Sunday.

“MARK! SO GOOD TO SEE YOU,” he would exclaim.  “I NEVER SEE YOU LONG TIME—WHERE YOU BEEN?”

All of this, even though only a few hours before Uncle Moke and me—and most all our Sons of Hawaii Brothers, were together in some bar or another in Wailuku—raising hell like that Saturday Night was our last.

And with that greeting alone, my day, and even my week was joyously made. When I was young, I loved that old man with all my heart, and when I became an old man too, I loved him with all my heart even more.

—

Our rides were all pretty much the same, as we lived on an island with only so many interior roads, so the only real question we had to settle was, are we riding clockwise or counterclockwise. After the half-hour we spent on that, we’d spend part of the day, into the afternoon, riding around, with at least two stops to eat and drink—one beer per stop was our rule. I’ve heard it murmured that we were a beer drinking gang posing as a motorcycle club, but the fact is, we were equal parts avid eaters and passionate motorcyclists.

Often my niece Katie rode along with us and because I was so fat there was little room on my hotrod FXRS for a passenger so she always rode with her Uncle Moke. Another reason she rode with Moke was because Junior was forever challenging me to a sidebar drag race and I always took the bait—which I couldn't have with a teenager on the back.

That fact was most evident at the end of each ride. I can’t remember there ever being a formal plan, but at some point, we would all ride into Wailuku and stop for the day at one of the two or three local joints that we frequented on our Sunday rides. When I say local, I mean way local, as in—on some back street in a very old non-descript building where I was almost always the only white guy in the place. No tourists. No rich California gated beachfront pseudo-plantation-house-mansion transplants… And no haoles. Except me. And Uli, the German guy who joined the club in our later years.

Then the weekly ritual would begin.

The owner would push a bunch of tables together and then we’d all sit down and each of us would throw a $20 into a stack on the table. After much greeting and good-natured joking, the owner would scoop up the money and within minutes plates of Hawaiian-centric pupus would arrive and not stop arriving. Every hour we would all throw another $20 on the table, which was required because in my entire life I have never seen a group of people who could even remotely touch the amount of food the Sons of Hawaii could consume after a Sunday ride around Maui.

The beer part- I have never been able to figure out the brand trends that we went through. The owners of the places that we hung out never bothered to take a beer order, because we all drank the same thing, and we kept drinking it for as long as our soirée lasted. When a beer was finished, another was dropped no questions asked, and when I first joined in 2000, we were a Coors/Coors Light bunch. Then one day, we became a Bud/Bud Light club. The last flavor was Heineken— suddenly “green bottles” swept Maui, and we went right along with it.

This is way more detail than necessary, I know, but the beauty of it was the gathering itself: it was a conversational concert of pidgin-laced orchestrally spoken poetry, and Uncle Moke was our conductor. I hardly said a word at these weekly get togethers, so enthralled was I at just sitting back and listening to this group of almost exclusively Hawaiian men, most of them in their 60’s and 70’s, as they blanketed the topics of the world as they knew it—which was entirely contained within the islands that comprised Maui County.

During those Sunday gatherings my learning curve about Maui, about Hawaii, about life…, rose up as straight as any sea-cliff found on the backside of Molokai.

The History of Hawaii going back dozens of generations, is preserved in chant, but the ongoing history of those old men came in a verse of their own—sometimes mystical, sometimes mundane, and most often tears-in-the-eyes hilarious. I always made sure that I was sitting directly across the table from Uncle Moke because he, above all of them, was a truly gifted Hawaiian Storyteller.

I can honestly say, without a shred of doubt, that other than a few times playing music in a recording studio or on stage with friends—that those were the best days of my life.

—

Uncle Moke and I co-hosted a couple of parties together. For one of them, we called it our birthday party even though our birthdays aren’t even close to each other, but we needed a theme of some kind, and we couldn’t think of anything else. Where to have our parties was easily decided, as Rachel and I lived for a time in a cockroach/centipede/rat-infested shack in Sprecklesville, but it was a hell-hole shack one block from the best sandy beach in the world, and it sat on three extremely private, completely walled in acres—which made it ideal for hosting a party that would feature a huge group of motorcycles—and all of the motorcycle clubs on Maui.

Having different clubs in one place with an endless supply of beer and real luau food wasn’t a problem because the unique thing about the Maui motorcycle scene is, everyone is related, so the party was little more than a giant, LOUD family reunion. The problem was, the property the shack sat on was, although chock full of wondrous tropical fruit trees, nonetheless Jurassic Park overgrown, and so it required a thorough cleanup before we could even start digging the emu.

I had an old lawn tractor, but Uncle Moke would have none of it and went about weed-whacking the entire three acres. He was a machine: he spent three days trimming, pruning, shearing, and chopping with me trying to keep up as best as I could, and when he was done (I can’t say “we,” because he ran circles around me) Jurassic Park was transformed into a PGA-level golf club.

Uncle Moke then hauled his backhoe over, dug a giant pit, filled it with lava rock and kiawe (somewhere in there a bunch of banana tree stumps were stacked on but I can’t remember the exact order), let the contents burn for some time until there only embers left, and then he and I loaded in a giant, well-dressed hog and a few wrapped turkeys—I think, on top of the banana stumps. After that he covered the pig with more wet burlap and re-covered the hole with dirt using his backhoe.

[Author’s Apology: I think that I have totally fucked up the correct construction of a Hawaiian emu. I’ve watched them dug by experts many times—the Kaupo Ranch paniolo, the Haleakala Ranch paniolo, Paul Lu’uwai from the Hawaiian Canoe Club, and Uncle Moke. I guess I’m too dyslexic to remember such things in the correct order. Or maybe there was too much beer involved.]

Anyway, and then—we sat under the giant mango tree by the emu, explicitly adhering to Hawaiian tradition the rest of the day, all night, and into the next morning, talking story and drinking beer as friends and family came and went. Around noon we showered up, Moke mixed up his most perfect, hand-picked pohole fern salad, and by 2 PM the bikes started rolling into the compound—sometimes a dozen at a time, until there were rows of gleaming motorcycles. At some point thereafter, we shut the gate, locked it, and partied.

Again I tried to keep up, but Uncle Moke was the most extraordinary birthday party host who seemed to float around the gathering as if he had wings. In between visiting he would dance and dance with any female he could grab (actually they all grabbed him). We had two bands, so the music went for hours and so did Uncle, stopping only for a quick shot or two of Honey Jack with my niece Katie.

He went all night like that, until the rest of us petered out and around sunrise his beloved (sober) Pua drove him back to Huelo. When I woke up around 11 AM, he was already in our kitchen cooking breakfast for the still huge group who felt it prudent to postpone the drive home.

All this while Uncle Moke was just shy of 80 years old.

My Uncle Moke, our Uncle Moke, pretty much anyone who has lived on the Island of Maui more than 30 years—our Uncle Moke passed away a few days into my Mississippi River motorcycle trip. I had spoken to him a week or so before I left—Junior had called me up, told me, “Dad is slowing down,” then handed his father the phone. Senior and I talked for several minutes but I could tell he had entered that special state of tired where no more needs to be said.

As we talked, in the background I could hear children’s laughter, and several upbeat, almost happy voices, which told me that he was deep into the Hawaiian version of hospice, where all the family gather with and around a loved one as the time nears, but isn’t quite there yet. This made me happy despite the tears that fell as I hung up the phone.

—

I don’t want to be overly sentimental or sappy. I was going to write about not going back to Maui for Uncle Moke’s funeral, and my reasons why I didn’t but maybe they are too personal, or maybe I’m still trying to figure it out myself while I make sense of the guilt that I feel inside. I did tell Junior that I could be back home in 48 hours, but he said I should continue my motorcycle trip and keep his dad in my thoughts.

That I did do, and many times these last two months, pretty much every day, I looked up while riding and carried on a conversation with Uncle Moke regarding all that we saw. Call me superstitious, but during my entire ride through Mississippi the Magnolia State was inundated with terrible, deadly storms and pop-up tornadoes that ghosted me the entire route but never hit me directly—I attribute my good luck to Uncle Moke looking after me the entire time.

Nonetheless, I have been going through the loss of Moke (I actually never called him Uncle Moke to his face—he was always just Moke to me, as is Junior) in my mind for many weeks now, trying to figure out what I could write to express my love for the old Brother to maybe no one but me, and also maybe to be able to get this jumble of thoughts out of my head. In the end, I guess I already wrote it.

In my last book I had this to say:

I truly hope that Moke lives to be well past 100. He brings joy and love like no other person I’ve ever met. He is my hero, the person I want to be exactly like. He and Henry Akima are the only people in my life that I obeyed and obey explicitly. I did what they told me, which is saying a lot, because anyone who has ever known me will, I believe, say that the one thing that I’ve never done is do as I’m told. Moke is a wondrous meteor who continues to streak, and I just can’t imagine Maui, or the world, without him.

I write only from my heart and by the seat of my pants. Other than in a general way I never know what I’m going to write when I sit down and start typing, and I have no idea where my gibberish will take me, or if it will have any meaning or value at all. But at least in this one case, as it relates to Uncle Moke, I had no idea how accurately prophetic the paragraph above would eventually be—because I truly am having a really hard time having him not around anymore.