Dolphins and drag queens
Here's a story by my good friend and fellow ICBINC member Becca detailing her adventures working at a resort in Hawaii. I have another guest work story that I'm doing some editing on. Send me yours, maybe I'll put it up. To get to my job stories click here.
Dolphins and Drag Queens
(six months at a Hawaiian resort)
By Becca Costello
www.myspace.com/beccacostello
Ever since I’d gone backpacking on Kauai for two weeks in college, I had been determined to find a way to live in Hawaii permanently. No matter that my skin was the color of an ace bandage and the only island my ancestry could lay claim to was the United Kingdom. Somehow, I knew I was descended from tropical people and was destined to return to my Polynesian roots.
Through a series of letters and phone calls, I got a job in the kitchen of an oceanside resort on the Big Island. I carefully interrogated Daniel, the resort’s reservationist/activities director/human resources manager. I didn’t want to labor at any beachfront skyscraper with nightly hula shows where girls in plastic coconut bras and silver lamé “grass” skirts sang “Blue Hawaii” for mai-tai-sloshed honeymooners from Minnesota. I would only work for an establishment that truly shared my respect for the ancient heritage and traditions of the island chain I had once vacationed on for all of 11 days.
Daniel assured me that the resort was only one story tall, and was at least 20 miles from the nearest town (but just across the street from the beach). The resort did not exploit the native culture with cheap entertainment. The guests were there for healthy introspection, he said, a sort of yoga, if you will. “And,” he added, “we blow a conch shell every evening at dinner, to call the guests to the dining lanai.”
The conch shell sounded more Lord of the Flies than Islands of Aloha to me, but just the word “lanai” was enough to send me packing my bags. I booked a flight to Hawaii and Daniel promised to meet me at the Hilo airport.
When I arrived, Daniel wasn’t there. Michael, the resort’s owner picked me up in a sandy van with a turtle painted on the side. As we drove the 40 miles to the resort, Michael told me how Daniel had broken his heart and run off to the mainland with a guest; leaving him without a lover, friend, reservationist, activities director or human resources manager. He alternated between tearful remorse and sneering, “Who’s gonna love your fat, macadamia-eating ass now?” at the passing sugar cane fields.
I rarely saw Michael in the days after that, and when I did, he didn’t seem to remember me. He was always arm in arm with one guest or another, heading for the hot tubs. What I had thought was a quiet yoga center had turned out to be “Men’s Adventure Land!”
Every week, a new batch of hard-bodied gay men from the mainland would arrive at the resort, ready to partake in such masculine adventures as getting an even tan, dressing in drag for dinner and giving each other oral favors in the Jacuzzis. The resort had two hot tubs, which the staff was welcome to use “any time!”
Unfortunately, the tubs were usually too crowded with copulating men in the evenings to allow for much soaking and, fortunately, they were drained and cleaned every morning. This left only the hottest and brightest part of the afternoon for the staff to use the Jacuzzis. Mostly, we just went to the beach.
For the guests, the pinnacle of the week’s events was the Saturday night dance held in (what else?) the Rainbow Room. Once again, all the staff was invited to attend.
The first time, I got dressed up, (or rather, the Hawaii version of dressed up: a sarong and some coconut lip balm) and set out to cut a rug. We were forbidden amplified music in our cabins, so as not to disturb the sounds of the guests fucking each other, and I was dying for some tunes. Not to mention, I was single and ready to see about a little island romance.
At the dance, the DJ played three songs – Donna Summer, Diana Ross and Donna Summer – before breaking out that ol’ homosexual chestnut “It’s Raining Men.” The Weather Girls weren’t even to the first “Hallelujah!” before a man in the center of the dance floor ripped off his sarong and let his electric eel out of the reef. By the second chorus, 90% of the room was naked. Since 90% of the room were also gay men and the other 10% were straight women staffers like myself, I went back to my cabin and tried to make some more headway on James Michener’s Hawaii.
I soon realized I wasn’t going to find a soulmate here, but hey! I was in Hawaii, wasn’t I? I lived across the street from the ocean! A warm ocean! I had made it!
As the months went by, I swam every day and grew thin and meditative and tanner than I’d thought possible. I floated on the sea and sat for hours studying the moon with a sincerity I would never have understood on the mainland. In the absence of any straight men or even television, many of my female co-workers became similarly enamoured with nature. No one more so than Erica, the dolphin lady.
The resort was a mile away from a black sand beach where a pack of dolphins swam by every morning at 7 a.m. sharp. Erica went out nearly every day to meet them. She told us she could communicate with them telepathically.
One night, she sat us all down in the break room and explained her method for becoming a dolphin’s psychic friend: You think of a picture, like you and the dolphin swimming together, she told us. You get it really clear in your mind’s eye and then you beam it out to the dolphin. If you do it right, the dolphin will come over to you.
I didn’t really understand, but I knew had to try it! I mean, when do you ever get a chance to swim with dolphins if you’re not one of those Make-A-Wish kids?
As soon as I had a morning off, I hustled down to the beach with my flippers and mask. It was already 7:10 a.m. I couldn’t see Erica or the dolphins, but I was afraid to miss them, so I dove in and began swimming straight out to sea.
I kept my head down as I swam and watched the sea floor grow more distant. When the bottom of the ocean was barely visible, I started getting nervous. I pulled my mask up and looked for dolphins on the horizon. Then I got really nervous.
As the waves opened and closed around my head at split-second intervals, I saw one gray fin in the water about 20 feet away from me. Every Jaws movie I had ever seen flooded into my consciousness. I was very far from shore, treading water like a piece of flailing human chum. I remembered Erica telling me that, if a fin bobbed up and down in the water, it was a dolphin, but if it stayed level, it was a shark. I tried to watch the fin, but the waves kept blocking my view and it was impossible to track its motion clearly.
I yanked my mask back over my face and tried to see underwater. To my shock, I noticed the bottom of the ocean was completely lost in an impenetrable blue haze. The tide was pulling me further out to sea.
Trying my best not to resemble a wounded seal, I started swimming back to shore and nearly ran into…a dolphin!
A bulbous-nosed, smiling, Flipper-like dolphin! Then there were two, three, five, eight – the whole pack had surrounded me. Instantly, my terror gave way to amazement. I had never been around a wild animal that wasn’t scared of me, that was as big as me, that was probably smarter than me. It was like Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I wanted to say hello, but my mouth was full of snorkel. I felt like I should at least give them the “Live Long and Prosper” sign.
I remembered Erica’s telepathy lesson and thought, “OK. I’m going to send them a picture. What do I want to tell the dolphins?”
They were looking at me, like they were waiting for me to do something worth their while. I wanted to communicate something smart, something warm, something that would forever end humanity’s isolation from the rest of the animal kingdom. All I could think of was the word, “Love.”
Love! Great! You can’t go wrong with love, except, how do I make a picture of love? What does love look like? A picture of Michael entertaining guests at the hot tubs popped into my head, but I cast it aside before the dolphins could catch it.
A heart, I thought. A heart is the symbol of love. I pictured a shiny, pink
Valentine heart for the dolphins, but then I realized that dolphins have a different language. They don’t know what a heart is. I might as well be sending them a Mercedes symbol or a semi-colon.
I started worrying. I’m not doing this right, I thought. What if I’m irritating them? Oh God, I am an interspecies annoyance.
Most of the dolphins had moved on at that point. I was getting tired treading water and I was still very far from the shore. Sadly, I waved at the remaining dolphins and started paddling inland.
One of the dolphins followed me. I smiled and swam back in his direction. He turned and swam away, but slowly, so I could keep up. When I turned back, he swam after me. It slowly dawned on me that we were playing tag. We went back and forth, each time getting a little closer to shore, until finally I knew I had only enough strength left to swim in. I waved again, laughing through my snorkel, and we swam our separate directions.
I had flown hundreds of miles and braved naked, raining men and inter-species telepathy lessons looking for a connection as simple as “Tag! You’re it."
Dolphins and Drag Queens
(six months at a Hawaiian resort)
By Becca Costello
www.myspace.com/beccacostello
Ever since I’d gone backpacking on Kauai for two weeks in college, I had been determined to find a way to live in Hawaii permanently. No matter that my skin was the color of an ace bandage and the only island my ancestry could lay claim to was the United Kingdom. Somehow, I knew I was descended from tropical people and was destined to return to my Polynesian roots.
Through a series of letters and phone calls, I got a job in the kitchen of an oceanside resort on the Big Island. I carefully interrogated Daniel, the resort’s reservationist/activities director/human resources manager. I didn’t want to labor at any beachfront skyscraper with nightly hula shows where girls in plastic coconut bras and silver lamé “grass” skirts sang “Blue Hawaii” for mai-tai-sloshed honeymooners from Minnesota. I would only work for an establishment that truly shared my respect for the ancient heritage and traditions of the island chain I had once vacationed on for all of 11 days.
Daniel assured me that the resort was only one story tall, and was at least 20 miles from the nearest town (but just across the street from the beach). The resort did not exploit the native culture with cheap entertainment. The guests were there for healthy introspection, he said, a sort of yoga, if you will. “And,” he added, “we blow a conch shell every evening at dinner, to call the guests to the dining lanai.”
The conch shell sounded more Lord of the Flies than Islands of Aloha to me, but just the word “lanai” was enough to send me packing my bags. I booked a flight to Hawaii and Daniel promised to meet me at the Hilo airport.
When I arrived, Daniel wasn’t there. Michael, the resort’s owner picked me up in a sandy van with a turtle painted on the side. As we drove the 40 miles to the resort, Michael told me how Daniel had broken his heart and run off to the mainland with a guest; leaving him without a lover, friend, reservationist, activities director or human resources manager. He alternated between tearful remorse and sneering, “Who’s gonna love your fat, macadamia-eating ass now?” at the passing sugar cane fields.
I rarely saw Michael in the days after that, and when I did, he didn’t seem to remember me. He was always arm in arm with one guest or another, heading for the hot tubs. What I had thought was a quiet yoga center had turned out to be “Men’s Adventure Land!”
Every week, a new batch of hard-bodied gay men from the mainland would arrive at the resort, ready to partake in such masculine adventures as getting an even tan, dressing in drag for dinner and giving each other oral favors in the Jacuzzis. The resort had two hot tubs, which the staff was welcome to use “any time!”
Unfortunately, the tubs were usually too crowded with copulating men in the evenings to allow for much soaking and, fortunately, they were drained and cleaned every morning. This left only the hottest and brightest part of the afternoon for the staff to use the Jacuzzis. Mostly, we just went to the beach.
For the guests, the pinnacle of the week’s events was the Saturday night dance held in (what else?) the Rainbow Room. Once again, all the staff was invited to attend.
The first time, I got dressed up, (or rather, the Hawaii version of dressed up: a sarong and some coconut lip balm) and set out to cut a rug. We were forbidden amplified music in our cabins, so as not to disturb the sounds of the guests fucking each other, and I was dying for some tunes. Not to mention, I was single and ready to see about a little island romance.
At the dance, the DJ played three songs – Donna Summer, Diana Ross and Donna Summer – before breaking out that ol’ homosexual chestnut “It’s Raining Men.” The Weather Girls weren’t even to the first “Hallelujah!” before a man in the center of the dance floor ripped off his sarong and let his electric eel out of the reef. By the second chorus, 90% of the room was naked. Since 90% of the room were also gay men and the other 10% were straight women staffers like myself, I went back to my cabin and tried to make some more headway on James Michener’s Hawaii.
I soon realized I wasn’t going to find a soulmate here, but hey! I was in Hawaii, wasn’t I? I lived across the street from the ocean! A warm ocean! I had made it!
As the months went by, I swam every day and grew thin and meditative and tanner than I’d thought possible. I floated on the sea and sat for hours studying the moon with a sincerity I would never have understood on the mainland. In the absence of any straight men or even television, many of my female co-workers became similarly enamoured with nature. No one more so than Erica, the dolphin lady.
The resort was a mile away from a black sand beach where a pack of dolphins swam by every morning at 7 a.m. sharp. Erica went out nearly every day to meet them. She told us she could communicate with them telepathically.
One night, she sat us all down in the break room and explained her method for becoming a dolphin’s psychic friend: You think of a picture, like you and the dolphin swimming together, she told us. You get it really clear in your mind’s eye and then you beam it out to the dolphin. If you do it right, the dolphin will come over to you.
I didn’t really understand, but I knew had to try it! I mean, when do you ever get a chance to swim with dolphins if you’re not one of those Make-A-Wish kids?
As soon as I had a morning off, I hustled down to the beach with my flippers and mask. It was already 7:10 a.m. I couldn’t see Erica or the dolphins, but I was afraid to miss them, so I dove in and began swimming straight out to sea.
I kept my head down as I swam and watched the sea floor grow more distant. When the bottom of the ocean was barely visible, I started getting nervous. I pulled my mask up and looked for dolphins on the horizon. Then I got really nervous.
As the waves opened and closed around my head at split-second intervals, I saw one gray fin in the water about 20 feet away from me. Every Jaws movie I had ever seen flooded into my consciousness. I was very far from shore, treading water like a piece of flailing human chum. I remembered Erica telling me that, if a fin bobbed up and down in the water, it was a dolphin, but if it stayed level, it was a shark. I tried to watch the fin, but the waves kept blocking my view and it was impossible to track its motion clearly.
I yanked my mask back over my face and tried to see underwater. To my shock, I noticed the bottom of the ocean was completely lost in an impenetrable blue haze. The tide was pulling me further out to sea.
Trying my best not to resemble a wounded seal, I started swimming back to shore and nearly ran into…a dolphin!
A bulbous-nosed, smiling, Flipper-like dolphin! Then there were two, three, five, eight – the whole pack had surrounded me. Instantly, my terror gave way to amazement. I had never been around a wild animal that wasn’t scared of me, that was as big as me, that was probably smarter than me. It was like Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I wanted to say hello, but my mouth was full of snorkel. I felt like I should at least give them the “Live Long and Prosper” sign.
I remembered Erica’s telepathy lesson and thought, “OK. I’m going to send them a picture. What do I want to tell the dolphins?”
They were looking at me, like they were waiting for me to do something worth their while. I wanted to communicate something smart, something warm, something that would forever end humanity’s isolation from the rest of the animal kingdom. All I could think of was the word, “Love.”
Love! Great! You can’t go wrong with love, except, how do I make a picture of love? What does love look like? A picture of Michael entertaining guests at the hot tubs popped into my head, but I cast it aside before the dolphins could catch it.
A heart, I thought. A heart is the symbol of love. I pictured a shiny, pink
Valentine heart for the dolphins, but then I realized that dolphins have a different language. They don’t know what a heart is. I might as well be sending them a Mercedes symbol or a semi-colon.
I started worrying. I’m not doing this right, I thought. What if I’m irritating them? Oh God, I am an interspecies annoyance.
Most of the dolphins had moved on at that point. I was getting tired treading water and I was still very far from the shore. Sadly, I waved at the remaining dolphins and started paddling inland.
One of the dolphins followed me. I smiled and swam back in his direction. He turned and swam away, but slowly, so I could keep up. When I turned back, he swam after me. It slowly dawned on me that we were playing tag. We went back and forth, each time getting a little closer to shore, until finally I knew I had only enough strength left to swim in. I waved again, laughing through my snorkel, and we swam our separate directions.
I had flown hundreds of miles and braved naked, raining men and inter-species telepathy lessons looking for a connection as simple as “Tag! You’re it."
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