Tiki Memories

[€uroMeinke]

I was born in 1962, growing up in that time everyone had a friend whose dad had managed to convince wife and family to convert their backyards into a little slice of suburban Polynesian. My friend was Brain, and his seemingly well off family went all out in their backyard. Shaded by a bamboo and thatch structure, with surfaces decorated with course rope netting anchored with blue-green glass balls, it provided the perfect setting for a backyard luau, a lava rock fountain making the tropical grotto complete.

At the time Hawaii was still an exotic dream vacation getaway, my friend Brian’s parents had been there, giving them the legitimacy to create this environment as a near-authentic re-creation of the island paradise as anyone could hope for in Orange County circa 1972. All their parties were of course now Luaus. Mai Tais and other fruity tropical drinks flowed freely to the sounds of Don Ho and Martin Denny. Brian though, was often excluded from these hedonistic indulgences, after all despite their brush with the exotic they had reputations to protect as respectable and outstanding members of their community. Brian’s mom was a teacher, and you just didn’t include children in such activities.

None-the-less we’d stop by Brian’s after school – before his parents came home. We’d hangout in the back yard, play with the water in the fountain, and explore all the places in the house Brian was normally forbidden to go. We weren’t interested in the liquor – yet, rather we were drawn to the bottom drawer, of his dad’s dresser. Here, his father attempted to hide his subscription to Playboy magazine. Naturally we marveled at the images of naked women but were equally amazed that these things contained stories by Ray Bradbury and Roald Dahl. Brian would attempt to steal the better issues from the trash, but we made sure to put the current issues back exactly as we found them to keep Brain from getting into trouble.

As we got older, and (we thought) more sophisticated. We felt sorry for Brian being stuck with parents who were clearly more comical than sophisticated; that Tiki façade of paradise, hiding the mundane dissatisfaction of their ordinary lives. Boredom had slowly replaced that moment of excitement when they once stood on the shore of a Hawaiian beach and thought that together they would need nothing else.

In the end, it all fell apart, as it often does. Brian rejecting the escapism of the backyard Polynesia for a more visceral and internal escape through drugs and addiction. His parents selling their house of 20 years, scrapping the bamboo, and selling the lava rock fountain in a yard sale for five dollars, to make the place more presentable.

Yet as bad as it ended, I can vividly recall that exotic backyard, and how cool it looked as a 10-year old boy who saw it as a slice of Disneyland’s Tiki Room made real. Now as I visit the new wave tiki bars and events, I revel in their carefree silliness, the imaginary south-sea paradise forever sought and never to be found. And I think of Brian, whose parents once made their own attempt at paradise, and likewise probably reveled in the silliness, and the hope that they could somehow make it real.