Hawaii

My second day in Hawaii, my Swiss boss shot a rooster through the neck. The rooster somehow persevered and now runs around the bed and breakfast with a pink arrow pierced through his tiny neck, right underneath his head. A fragile elderly couple from Michigan stood on their balcony as the rooster ran past, the white-haired wife covering her mouth, gagging. The man, wearing a safari hat, exclaimed, “Oh my! That’s incredibly inhumane!”

On the balcony across the way, my boss stood holding his crossbow and screaming, “Zese DAMN Vootsters! I cannot believe! Zat bastard!” As I walked onto the balcony, tiny Amanda, his seven-year-old daughter, was leaning over the edge whining, “Kill it, Daddy, you have to kill it!”

My boss was turning a light shade of red.

“I TRIED TO KILL IT ‘MANDA, OK? NOW I HAVE TO GO AND CATCH IT. AZ IF I DIDN’T HAVE ENOUGH TO DO TODAY, NOW I HAVE TO FIND AND KILL ZIS BLOODY BIRD.”

Every morning, I eat breakfast with my boss and co-workers outdoors on a beautiful balcony overlooking the wide expanse of jungle. My boss is Swiss and has a heavy accent: “Zis cheeze iz crumbly, you haf to prezz down hard to slise it,” or, “Look at ze gecko, he iz so cuewwwwte.”

Every morning, he has a shot of milk. He goes to the cupboard, takes the clear shot glass off the top shelf, fills it to the top with milk, and shoots it down.

“I’ll have a shot with you,” I offered one morning.

He just looked at me, wiping the milk from his upper lip.

That’s a no-no.

We have a no-no list that he shared with me the first day.

“Zis is ze no-no shelf,” he told me, pointing to a shelf in the fridge lined with Costco-brand beer. “You touch one of zese, and you leave.”

Yesterday at breakfast, my co-worker casually inquired about one day in the future making bacon for breakfast instead of what my boss likes to eat, which is toast with butter and slices of cheddar cheese.

His response was, “I used to love ze bacon.” His eyes looked wistful. And then: “But now I think it iz creepieee.”

I broke the silence that had fallen among all of us with, “I think bacon is creepy too.”

I still have yet to really bond with my boss over something. I came close one breakfast when we both realized we shared a common frustration over the complacency of Walmart employees.

“If everyone of thoze employees did NOT go to work, you know what their managerz would do?”

I nodded like a passionate churchgoer during a fiery preacher’s sermon.

He threw his hand up.

“Zey would shit zier pantz!”

So far, working at a bed and breakfast has been very exciting. It means you meet a new cast of characters every few days. In my two weeks, I’ve met five hairy men from Spain. A couple from Germany who only knew how to say, “The sun, it burned my skin bad,” in English. The sweet elderly couple from Michigan, who are most likely going to mention inhumane animal practices in their Yelp review. A lovely teacher from Australia. Another couple from Sweden who I discussed Ikea with.

“In America they found human feces in the meatballs, did you know? Is that just an American mishap? It has to be,” I told them.

And a father and son from Austria.

One morning, I was cleaning up after the guests’ breakfast when the son from Austria, who had to be in his thirties, asked me to take a picture of him and his dad. I clicked away as they posed on the deck, the bright blue sky and ocean in the distance.

“That’s a nice one,” I said, handing the camera back.

The father, who was wearing a shirt with a smiling pineapple on it, was bald and had a thin white beard. He looked at me.

“Now, you two,” he told me, motioning for me to stand next to his son.

His son passed the camera to his dad as I took my place awkwardly next to him. I smiled sadly.

Why?

I decided the picture would look better if we weren’t standing next to each other like London guards protecting The Queen, and right as I began to reach my arm around his shoulder, the dad snapped a picture.

The end result was the son smiling with his hands by his sides and me looking confused, my arm a blur, coming down onto his head like I was mid-strike.

He moved away, scared, and I offered a handshake.

As we shook hands, Dad snapping away on the camera, I thought about how, as I gain more life experience, I am constantly surprising myself.

Not in ways like: I cannot believe I climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro!

But in ways like: Wow! Why did you do that, Jenn? Are you a creep?

Me?

That can’t be.

It can!

“Where do young people like yourself go to drink and have fun?” the son asked me.

“There are a few places. There’s a place in town called The Frisky Seal,” I replied, and then frowned regretfully.

“The Frisky Seal?” the son said, smiling too big at the mention of the word “frisky.”

“Yes, locals have told me a lot of blood has been shed at The Frisky Seal,” I told him, explaining that it’s not a place to find a lover, but a place to be violent and barbaric.

I’m not sure he understood because his next question was:

“You will come with us to The Frisky Seal?”

“I’m spear fishing tonight,” I quickly said.

Which was kind of a lie.

My friend Jeremy was spear fishing tonight, while his girlfriend Alis and I drank beer and ate poke around a campfire on the beach.

My Austrian audience’s eyes grew wide.

“You stab them?” the son asked. “The fish?”

“Through the brain,” I told them.

A cloud covered the sun, casting a shadow over us.

In the distance, I saw the speared rooster run past.

The dad was looking slightly confused, and his son translated.

“She cannot come to The Frisky Seal with us because she is stabbing fish through the head.”

I smiled, absolutely delighted.

I then felt a presence from behind me and heard:

“Ze Frisky Seal iz more disgusting than ze guts of a fish!”

My boss entered the conversation and felt, at the mention of The Frisky Seal, the appropriateness to begin a long tale — an odyssey, if you will — about locals bashing each other’s heads in after a long night at Ze Frisky Seal.

The dad was looking completely lost but seemed to enjoy watching all of us, and the son now looked like he might lose his breakfast over the balcony.

As breakfast ended and the guests all dispersed to go about their day, my boss yelled:

“Amanda, time to feed ze chickens!”

Amanda was feeding jelly to a tiny gecko at the table from a spoon.

She may be the prettiest little girl in the world, and in response to her dad, she batted her big brown eyes and asked me:

“Want to feed the chickens with me?”

As we made our way down to the shed where the chicken feed is kept, Amanda leaned down and opened up a red cooler that was underneath the sink.

Inside the cooler Amanda had opened lay a lifeless chicken and one single egg.

Amanda put her hand on the chicken.

“It’s dead!”

I wanted to cry and scream, but Amanda was already doing that.

“This is my fault!” she was screaming, tears rolling down her face.

“No, Amanda, no, sweetie, this isn’t your fault,” I told her, kneeling down and wiping her tears.

“It is. I put the chicken in there last night because I wanted it to lay an egg and I… forgot about her.”

Oh shit, it is your fault.

“But you didn’t mean to kill it… right?”

Amanda and I sat next to the smothered chicken, both deflated and disappointed in ourselves.

“What is taking so long? Ze chickens are following me around!”

My boss appeared in the doorway.

“What iz up with you guyz?”

He looked from us to the cooler, and a deadly silence fell upon Amanda and me like a thick fog.

He looked into the cooler and said:

“Eeeee.”

Amanda wailed, and I stood up.

“Well, I have to go… to the bathroom…”

“Amanda! Did you do zis? Again! Chickenz need air to breath! Zese animals are not your play thingz! What have I told you? I’ve told you a million timezzz!!!!”

I was scratching my head in shock.

“How many chickens has she killed?”

I looked at sweet Amanda — her brown eyes, her bangs, her Hello Kitty shirt — she smothers livestock.

Amanda is everything I want to be in a woman.

Sweet, innocent, and unassuming, but a savage killer at heart.

As we dug a hole to bury the dead chicken, I can only imagine what all of us were thinking.

Amanda had killed her friend.

My boss was down an egg producer.

I was in between thoughts — so much violence so early in the morning. Watch where that egg goes because I am not accidentally eating that dead chicken’s last egg.

The interesting thing about seven-year-olds, something that they must share with serial killers, is once the corpse is buried and out of sight, all ill will is too.

Once the chicken was underground, Amanda was back at the breakfast table the next morning eating her victim’s last laid egg like tra-la-la, just another day on the farm.

“Are we going to go swimming today?” she asked.

My boss pushed his egg aside.

“I can’t eat zis today.”

I passed his egg down to Amanda, who happily shoved it into her mouth — shell and all.

Suddenly, my boss remembered something and stood up abruptly.

“I almost forgot! I bought yew chicken and more beanz!”

Here in Hawaii, I have access to what my boss calls the jungle kitchen.

It is an outdoor kitchen, fully equipped with everything you need, and guests are welcomed to prepare their meals there too.

It has a microwave, so I have everything I need, but my boss insists I dabble in the art of preparing food.

He saw me eating a cup of noodles I had purchased from the gas station down the road, and he was absolutely outraged.

“Cup of what?” he shrieked.

I sighed.

“NOODLES. They have all different flavors: beef, shrimp, chicken—”

He looked utterly disgusted.

“Beef flavor?”

I stood blinking at him.

“Yes.”

“But how are you going to take care of a man?”

Take care of a what?

I stood before him completely baffled, like he had just revealed something I had never thought about before and turned my whole reality upside down.

I was lost, imagining myself in a checkered apron, pouring hot water over a shrimp-flavored Cup of Noodles for an unlucky hungry man who had arrived home famished after a day of selling ad space.

My face mirrored my boss’s, and we stood in the kitchen looking like we were going to throw up on each other.

“Take zes beanz!” he finally said.

The can opener, since living in the outdoor jungle kitchen for years, had rusted and therefore posed a problem with the cans of black beans, until I used my new island problem-solving skills and stabbed the can open using a butcher knife.

A sweet older couple from New Zealand was eating their pasta dish at a nearby table, watching as I repeatedly stabbed a can of black beans open, dumped it in a bowl, and nuked it in the microwave.

As a rule of thumb, I try to avoid preparing my meals in the jungle kitchen when guests are present.

But sometimes you just get unlucky, and another sweet foreign couple must force you to question: Am I a monster?

One night, it was raining and I was wearing my rain gear, which was an oversized black rain jacket with a hood and my hiking boots.

I emerged from the darkness into the light, the added setting of a pitch-dark jungle in the pouring rain making my entrance that much more memorable to the adorable young French couple eating a five-course meal they cooked together in romantic Hawaii.

I removed my hood, revealing my sunburned face and wild, frizzy jungle hair.

As I made my way to the freezer, I pulled out a huge Ziploc bag of already cooked frozen chicken strips.

I piled several onto a pan and turned the oven on.

As I waited for my chicken to re-cook, I looked at the French couple.

They were holding hands while eating.

Ah, romantic Hawaii.

My heart soared for them.

Then something happened that I wasn’t expecting, something that has changed me forever.

As I was cooking my frozen chicken, a live chicken walked into the jungle kitchen and stood before me.

The chicken and I looked at one another, and I thought about how I was about to eat it.

I imagined myself taking the butcher knife and chopping its head off, plucking out all the feathers as they flew around the French couple — the woman who was now crying, her husband holding her, covering her eyes from the sight of me gnawing away, blood and feathers everywhere, the smell of death overwhelming the garlic in the French couple’s potatoes.

I wanted to kneel before the chicken and weep, do something to at least honor the sacrifice of its life for the continued survival of my own.

I now, on a much smaller scale, understand all movies where an abandoned man in the wild eats a bluebird — just takes a bite out of it after he strangles it to death.

If I didn’t eat, I would pass out, and the chicken was all I had.

I looked at the chicken, who was now wandering around the kitchen.

I’m sorry. I’m a monster, and I don’t care.

Me and the elephant man — he will be the man I care for.

I opened up the oven and pulled out the pan of sizzling hot chicken.

As I sliced it up on a plate, I thought of what song should be playing overhead, as if I was in a movie or reality television show.

“Almost Lover” by A Fine Frenzy came to mind first because of the lyric:

“The sweetest sadness in your eye,
Clever trick,
My back is turned on you.”

It’s a hauntingly beautiful song, perfect with the combination of the rainy setting, French lovers, and me and my chickens — both dead and alive — sharing a kitchen on a romantic island together.

Love and Death.

The French couple watched as I took my huge pile of dead chicken past the live chicken, all my existentialist crises solved.

We are all savage at heart.

Life is meaningless.

Survival of the fittest.

Whatever, who cares?

I disappeared back into the darkness, leaving the French lovers alone to ponder:

Where is she going?