THE RAP
Ernest Brawley
REVIEWS
“A blockbuster novel...”
– Kirkus Review
“A first rate novel: tough, fastmoving… Don’t miss it.”
– Newsday
“THE RAP is the best novel I’ve tasted in many seasons.”
– Philadelphia Inquirer
“It is a bawdy, rowdy and powerful novel – a blockbuster.”
– Fort Worth Press
“I like to dig into a fat, juicy novel a couple of times a year and lose myself for
a string of nights. Here’s a good one, by a new author, that had me engrossed
for all its pages.”
– Saturday Review World
“An impressive first novel…what a colorful gallery of characters it has. Not to
mention enough twists of plots to keep almost everyone happy.”
– Publisher’s Weekly
“THERE ISN’T A PAGE OF THE RAP THAT WILL LET YOU OFF… IT IS INCREDIBLY CYNICAL, SARCASTIC, PROFANE AND BRUTAL…YOU CAN’T
TURN YOUR BACK ON IT. YOU CAN’T FORGET IT.”
– Chicago Tribune
New York | 2015 | Roots Digital Media
Copyright 1974 by Ernest Brawley
All rights reserved.
First ebook edition
To my mother and father
Moke, small, comely and brown, came out only at dark, like a nocturnal fish.
She loved night and black water and U.S. dollars. They were her lovers, and her prey.
She was their queen. Her eyes shone like diamonds. Alone among her race she defied
the sun, which held sway over all the wide Pacific, alone to her came sleek ambition and
a supreme distaste for napping under coconut palms at midday.
Alone among all the moneylovers and junkies of the world she knelt too at the
throne of the deep, sought gold at its source in watery darkness, undeceived by sunny
appearance.
At home on Oahu, after her 8 P.M.—3 A.M. job at the Prince Kuhio Grill, she had
nightly swum the Makapuu Straits, naked through the shoals of her gray brothers,
moon-basking sharks, naked through the inky waters, octopus waters, sparks of phosphorescence shooting out from her green-painted toenails. Far out to Manana she had
swum, to Rabbit Island and beyond, into the swift swirling Kaiwi Channel, the Molokai
Current, fearless, caressed, aroused, on and on into the throat of the blackness till she
felt it consume her, till she could hear the seaweed speak, the rumble of the submerged
volcano, the killer whales sounding, the music of a million pounds of pressure, the call
of the oceanic canyon without end, the thirty-eight-thousand footer: “Eh, Moke! Weah
you go, eh?”
Swimming back into shore, past the Coast Guard station and the Makapuu Lighthouse with its petty-strong beam of white that lost itself so quick, so pathetic in the
curve of the immense sea, she had known in every golden pore of her body, her sane
body, that the light would never have its way.
Not till she gave the word.
“Never, never, never!”
Daytime was for sleeping, for sleep without dreams and for digesting huge
predawn breakfasts of rice and poi and passion fruit and wheat bread toast. Here on
the West Coast it was the same. Only thing she had to give up was the poi. Here it was
fried rice and eggs and expensive canned pineapple juice and imported guavas at five
o’clock in the morning, sitting alone on her tatami floor, feet tucked up under her low
cable spool table. Silence, and listening to the work-bound traffic pick up on the freeway bridge that ran right over her roof. Resting up after work at the restaurant and a
long night’s run on her Honda 250 to the first clean water within her range, China Cove
(opaque, mud-ridden, but free till now of floating garbage and oil gunk). Relaxing after
her nighttime’s new regimen: the marathon swim to Iguana Rock and back, her black
rubber wet-suit carrying her high in the icy flow, her long hair heating up in the tight
rubber hood, eyes sealed and green behind hermetic goggles, blackfins kicking hard out
behind, knees locked, legs rigid, slow-popping bubbles boiling up behind. No sparks,
no fire in the night, no fish, no depth-diving whales, but still she was queen of the deep!
And if by chance she ever had to live through a light-time day, she would drag the
night along with her. Last P.M.’S eyeballs, pinned, beaned, amphetamined, round and
pitiless and wide, cached in very dark glasses, she would regard the waking workaday world through the perspective of time gone, a black hole in the day. And do it all
through the next night until the yellow-jacket sun-up tomorrow.
Moke ate slow, munching careful on her breakfast toast with bad teeth, teeth that
were white and bright as a toothpaste ad but rotten at the core, the result, she was convinced, of an almost proteinless childhood in a tropical rain forest above Honolulu, but
probably had more to do with the heroin, the smack she carefully put into her fit, her
outfit, her works, her cooker and eyedropper and point, and skin-popped four times
daily into the muscle tissue of her pretty brown buttocks.
Eating her toast, mixing her rice and soya with her fingers, she often thought of
that valley without protein. Manoa, it was called, a valley surrounded on three sides by
towering volcanic cliffs covered with lush vegetation. Miles past the city, past the University of Hawaii campus, past the middle-class housing developments, at the very top
of the valley, there was a heavy rain forest, a Chinese graveyard, and three waterfalls
that plunged from the top of the northwestern cliffs, from the green blackrock spine
of the Koolau Range, the backbone of the island. In this rain forest, a place where the
sun never shone and the rain came three times daily with gale force winds that whirled
down from the peaks, bending even the banyan trees, rattling the bamboo, there lived a
few poor families, da kine, as they called themselves in Pidgin—”The Kind”— A mixed
Chinese-Hawaiian, Filipino-Portuguese potpourri, they scraped a living growing and
selling taro root, passion fruit, mangos, guavas, bananas, bamboo shoots, papayas, and
Manoa lettuce, a particularly succulent variety, to the wholesalers on River Street in
Honolulu. Others lived on welfare checks, or worked as houseboys, waitresses, maids
or musicians in the city. Most of them refused to work, however, and managed a meager living off the land. Moke grew up with her Tutu (Auntie) Cereza, a barefoot, obese,
happy-go-lucky, Primo-drinking lady renowned over the island of Oahu as one of the
last great Hawaiian slack-key guitarists and singers of the old school. Moke’s beloved
quarter-breed father had died of overeating at a Sunday pig fest when Moke was just a
little girl. And her mother, less loved, less white, almost Kanaka black, in fact, had followed him two years later of lost love and overdrink.
Tutu loved her little Moke more than anything, and would have died for her without a moment’s thought. Moke hated Tutu. She was so tacky black and fat and lazy.
Moke hated the Islands and her race, and loved them at the same time. And loved her
Tutu too, hating her, resenting her, and the lax Hawaiian way of taking all possessions
for granted, sharing everything. Moke was jealous, jealous of her own time, her own
money, her own place, her room, her things, her possessions. She held them dear. And
this was just the commodity which in Hawaii was cheapest, cheap as air and wind and
sunlight and salt sea. Moke felt like nothing belonged to her alone. Even the fruits on
the trees belonged to everyone in common. This she detested. This she resented and
grudged and ridiculed about Island living. Nothing was hers, and, by extension, Moke
felt almost as if nothing was her, either. Tutu would come and take anything of hers
without apologies. In an effort to create something of her own, that would belong only
to her, Moke once cultivated a little garden out in back, in an open space she cleared
between the flame trees. Just a little thing of ten or twelve, she spent a whole year getting it in shape. She carefully plowed up the black volcanic earth, dug her furrows to
drain the excess rain water, brought in the best fertilizers she could find, patiently
watched her plants grow and bloom and flourish, picking the bugs off the leaves one by
one. And when she had her garden growing high, ready for eating, or sale, or whatever
she chose to do with it, her Tutu dug it up, sold the taro and Manoa lettuce Moke had
cared for day and night for weeks, sold it down on River Street, took the money and
went on a drunken rampage on the Windward Side, out at Waimanalo with her relatives the Puhanuis, singing and playing her guitar at a Sunday pig party in the Hawaiian Homelands tract.
Moke had her own little corner of the shack where she secreted her sewing box
with her treasures. She hid money there, pennies she saved from baby-sitting and peddling the Sunday Advertiser. Tutu, whenever she wanted to get a six-pack of Primo,
would take it, every time, Moke’s precious things, her money and possessions. One day
Moke took her treasures out and hid them in the far back yard, under the monkeypod
tree. She dug a hole and put the box deep in the black earth. There she hid all the buttons, tacks, nails, thread, glass jewelry, cheap Montgomery Ward necklaces, earrings,
brooches, and pins that she stole whenever she got the chance. She was an utterly fearless thief, a kleptomaniac almost, and only rarely got caught. One day she dug up her
box and all her treasures were gone. Tutu swore she hadn’t taken them. Moke never
found out who did. “Maybe eet da deevil take eet,” Tutu said. Maybe she was right.
For from that moment on, Moke was out for herself alone and nobody else. The rest of
the world became fair game, the enemy, prey. She coldly exploited even her Tutu, and
cheerfully defrauded friends, relatives, and classmates, hiding her booty away, counting it by flashlight in the middle of the night, fingering it, holding it to her small shapely
breasts, trembling with desire. Her body, she knew from the first, was her dearest and
most precious and valuable commodity. No man touched her. No man even got near. It
was her treasure too, hidden from all eyes, cached in ankle-length muumuus, stashed,
waiting while its value rose, waiting.
When Moke graduated from the Kamehameha School, a private institution for
“children of native blood,” she was offered a scholarship at the University of Hawaii
(she’d won the state high school forensics championship for “The Black Dove,” a brilliant, original, ironic, and highly comic mock defense of the Vietnam peace movement).
She declined the offer, however. She had no interest in higher education, certain as she
was that she could educate herself a hell of a lot faster than the University of Hawaii,
and make a hell of a lot of money by the time she would have been graduating.
She lied about her age and got a job as a waitress at the Prince Kuhio Grill on Beretania Street, selling Primo and Asahi and Kirin beer, deep-fried shrimp, and spicy halfcooked vegetables with rice and sweet mahi mahi, making good tips, cultivating steady
customers, teasing and flirting, but holding herself aloof, playing hard to get, sucking
them in deeper and deeper, hauling in da ‘Merican dollah. She worked nights, stepping
unconcernedly over the giant rats that resided in the restaurant kitchen, hurrying to
sweep up her tips, hurrying to provide the smilingest, fastest service in the place. She
was always the last to leave, the ideal employee, riding the last city bus home, walking
the last mile through the rain forest and the Chinese graveyard (a graveyard of manycolored stones, red and blue and yellow, each one with a picture of the deceased forever
imprinted above the name), in the warm rain, in the darkness and the wind, all the way
home to her Tutu’s tin-roofed shack among the weather-bent Norfolk pine and monkeypod and banyan trees, listening for the sound of Cereza’s loved and hated goldenthroated slack-key guitar:
Oh she da wahini
Wi da hula hula heah
An da hula hula deah
An a hot of gold
Oh she da kine
All a time
Make da local boy bold . . .
Moke saved her money diligently through her teens, husbanding it secretly at the
Central Pacific Bank in the Moiliili Shopping Center. When she had enough she bought
a car, a classic, a good investment, an ancient Model A touring car in perfect condition,
and drove it with great pleasure, secret pleasure, every night around the narrow southwest end of the island past Diamond Head, along Maunalua Bay, the Hawaii Kai housing tract, the yacht basin, Koko Head, the National Guard Firing Range, Sandy Beach,
and Makapuu Point. All the way to the Windward Side, under the mountains of Koolaupoko. All the way to her nighttime cove. The desert island, Rabbit Island, just a gray
smudge in the heart of the blackness.
At times during the summer, when the waves came up to twenty feet riding the
south swell, and swimming or even wading became impossible, she lit cigarettes and
watched and listened till dawn, soaking through her muumuu, watching the mist rise,
the spray coming off the gigantic surf, breakers that rolled thundering in waves one after the other all the way from Tahiti and the Marquesas Islands, like her ancestors, only
to break up on the rocks of the fiftieth state.
In all the time in Hawaii she never had a man. Her lover was sublime, and found
only at late hours.
One day she stopped at the Central Pacific Bank, took a change of clothes and a
suitcase to work, asked the Japanese bossman for her pay, rode a taxi out the Moana
Loa Highway to the Honolulu International Airport, and by the time she would have
been getting off work, she was sitting in the garish fluorescent light of the Los Angeles
Air Terminal, feeling not at all unhappy or lost or foreign in her bright flower-patterned
muumuu, waiting for opportunity to come knocking. She had patience, enormous unending patience, the patience of a woman convinced she’ll never die. She believed in
her star, her destiny, her considerable talent for money. But mostly she believed in that
star, her dark dwarf star that did not shine.
A young GI she’d met on the plane, a boy just back from the Vietnam War, asked
her if she wouldn’t like to come out to Corona with him and stay with his family. She
accepted this turn of fate with great alacrity. And he was very sweet, and his family
liked her in spite of the fact that they’d never met “no Haywayans before,” and within a
fortnight they’d gotten her a job with a relative who ran a small roadside bar and grill at
Elsinore Lake. She phoned her Tutu and said she had a job and was doing fine and not
to worry. Tutu said:
“Eh! I geev you one yeah, Meez Prosperitee, den I come look. An you watch out da
Haole boys, eh?”
“Right, Tutu!” she said.
Mr. Holloway, the bar owner, an earnest Iowan, gave her a clean room upstairs.
She worked nights by choice.
Elsinore had once been a clear and beautiful lake but was lately drying up. All the
streams that once fed it had been dammed up to irrigate the nearby truck gardens.
Elsinore was usually, nowadays, just an enormous flat mud basin five miles long and
two miles wide. But the year Moke happened to work there was one of those extremely
wet seasons that hits southern California every decade or so.
It rained buckets every day all winter long. Moke was delighted. She never saw
the sun. She worked and saved her money, waiting for her star. And by February the
lake was brimming over with fresh muddy water from the mountains in the Cleveland
National Forest. She bought a rubber wet suit down in Riverside and nightly slithered
like a salamander down the bank. The incline was treacherous. The mud was deep and
sucked like quicksand. She crawled on her belly, froggy, through the rain and slush and
water, kicking her feet, treading lightly with her hands, dog-paddling it, the headlights
of cars on the highway shining out over the lake when they turned the curve, driving
her farther into the darkness and damp. Down and down she went, out to the deep
water, the chop, the waves, the stinging spray, the wind-driven rain. Kicking with her
blackfins. Nothing ahead. Seeing nothing. Striking out for the deep middle and then,
after the long exhausting swim, being alone in the brown black water of mid-lake, midvalley, with the clouds backed up and dropping torrents on the Santa Ana Range all
around her And then riding the wind back, riding the little breaking lake waves, over
the mud, the quicksand, dogging it up the bank, stripping her fins, walking barefoot
up the highway. Sometimes a car would catch her in its beams for an instant, and she
would see the driver’s eyes go blank with fear, behind his seal beams, and he would
rocket away into the night, disbelieving.
Up in her room she’d slap her whole body down and take a nice long hot shower
and then she’d cook up some rice and vegetables for her dawntime breakfast.
What did she do with her time? She never knew. Apart from cleaning her room
and reading paperback art books and random novels and air-mailed editions of the
Honolulu Advertiser, and going down to the Bank of America in Arlington every week
to salt away her check, all she did was work, eat, sleep, and swim. . . . And yet, she could
go days without doing any of those things, if she chose to . . . days that were lost and
unremembered. . . . Time, Moke always knew, was on her side. . . .
In May she gave notice to Mr. Holloway and wrote her Tutu she was coming home
for a visit on a June 2nd flight. She missed the valley, she said, and the climate, and the
sea. But the truth was that Tutu had confessed she was very ill, and Moke wanted to
make sure that she inherited (to the exclusion of hordes of other relatives) the family
house if Tutu passed away.
On the 1st of June Moke’s fellow waitresses talked her into the bright spring sunlight and gave her a going-away party out of doors. They drove to an abandoned farm
on the other side of the lake. It was a lovely ruin of a place, situated at the mouth of a
wide, deep canyon. The adobe walls of the house were covered with huckleberry and
gooseberry vines. The fallow fields had run to manzanita, horse chestnut, blue sage,
and chaparral. A big old canyon maple grew in the yard. After the picnic they went
picking the dead farmer’s household flowers that had gone wild in the yellow grass and
scrub oak: white jonquils, violets, pale yellow daffodils, wild red lilies, golden California
poppies. They found a stand of half-dead pomegranate trees and filled a plastic picnic
basket with their surprisingly sweet fruit. They had just sat down again, biting into the
pomegranates, fingering for the tasty seeds, when all the dogs at the beekeeper’s place
down the highway began to howl. They looked up and listened, and from way around
the other end of the lake they heard the mufferless roar of a gigantic Harley-Davidson
74 resounding off the pale placid waters of the lake. . . .
Wasco!
He thundered up in a melodramatic cloud of dust, on his way north from a dope
run over the Mexican border, spitting fire and smoke and exhaust fumes from the twin
pipes of his lacquered black and gold three-wheeled chopper, his giant chopped Hog
with the fat chrome rear wheels and the tiny bicycle front wheel leading far out ahead
on a fifty-inch fork. A small metallic plaque hanging from the wide stainless steel back
axle proclaimed the beast’s name: CHERRYETTE.
Wasco hoisted a thick leg over the tiny egg-shaped gasoline tank and grinned at
them where they lay on the hill, in the yellow hay, and his leering broken-toothed smile
sent the fear of Beelzebub into their quaking women’s hearts. Their mouths hung open.
Only their eyes moved, up and down his squat ugly body, his panting rumbling beast.
What did he wear? Moke remembered but she wasn’t sure whether the memory
held from that first moment. He never changed his clothes. Surely he was wearing what
he always wore: black engineer’s boots with sharp metal studs, a beer can opener hanging from the strap. Greasy, piss-stained, come-stained Levis with a red lightning rod
sewed down the seam from waist to ankle. A polished motorcycle drive chain for a belt.
A filthy sleeveless Levi jacket open at the front, showing the rank red hair on his massive dust-encrusted chest.
Four pseudo-military patches decorated the jacket: the three smaller ones read 69,
1 %er, and 13, and a big one that ran from shoulder to shoulder, a considerable distance, in the shape of a death’s head, proclaimed his membership in the:
MOTOPSYCHO
M.C.
NEW SONORA
. . . And Mercurochromed red hair, shoulder length, lank and dirty. A black leather
headband with silver diamond-shaped studs. A long forked beard dyed indigo blue. A
single earring in his pierced left ear. A clip-on nose ring that hid his cruel moustache.
Their lipsticked barmaids’ mouths hung open long after the dust cleared and the
huge throbbing motor died, stayed awake and wide, until he dropped to the ground,
startlingly light on his feet, and said with a vague and almost languorous wave of his
heavily muscled arm:
“Hey, babies! Which way to the Santa Ana Freeway?”
And Moke knew in her Hawaiian heart, her self-serving money-loving mystic’s
soul, in that single instant, that she’d finally met her master, her prince, her bad-ass
dad, whom she would always know in her belly by his secret Kanaka name, a name
never to be divulged to nobody, not even him, not at least until several days later when,
working over his fiery red pubic hair, she catapulted off him ass-backwards to the ceiling and screamed it till the rafters rung and shuddered and shattered the roof, impelling it outward to the great night sky: HALEAKALA! . . . Snorting blowing metal-melting volcano born at the bottom of the sea . . .
And within an hour she was on her way north with him to New Sonora.
And never again did she have to swim. Not at least until Wasco was locked up in
state prison.
And that very afternoon, cruising at an unstoppable sixty-five miles an hour out of
L.A. on the speed-cop-infested Ventura Freeway, she had dared ask him his secret:
“Eh, Haole, wha da numbah means, eh?” she shouted into the wind.
“Never ask a Motopsycho his number, woman,” he growled back at her through his
flying blue beard, “else he’ll get yours . . .”
And it was only much later, after she knew him better, and his sinister friends, that
she broke his cipher. It was obvious when you got to know him:
69 is sixty-nine
1% is the one per cent of the baddest
13 is the thirteenth letter of the alphabet, “M,”
signifying:
Murder
Money
Mayhem
. . . to which later, in a sentimental moment, she appended:
Moke
. . . and even later, in a more reflective mood, after reading the Bible Interpretation
section of the magazine Awake, reduced in its entirety to:
Moloch
And on June the 2nd Tutu Cereza sat out on the modernistic open terrace of the
Honolulu International Airport for nine hours and nine minutes (magical time limit set
by her primitive faith in certain local Kanaka lore), in wind and hot Kona rain, awaiting
the known and preordained nonarrival of her lost Moke.
Within a month a series of want ads began appearing in the personal sections of
the Berkeley Barb, the L. A. Free Press, the New Sonora Oracle, and other West Coast
underground newspapers: SOMEBODY KNOW WHEREABOUTS MISS PROSPERITY
PUHANUI TODD MIXED HAWAIIAN 20 YEAR PHONE CEREZA PUHANUI COLLECT HONOLULU 9887286.
Tutu finally got wind of Moke through a two-faced friend who ran into her in the
street and went back to the Islands and told. Tutu wrote a letter begging her to come
back. But by then Moke had herself a smack cutting-room operation and a fifteendollar-a-day habit at wholesale prices and was salting away $1,000 a week and she had
her daddy-man and he was the only dude with a ready supply of everything her heart
desired. She wasn’t going to answer Tutu, but Wasco insisted on writing her himself:
“Dear Tutu I am Wasco G. Weed Mokes new friend now you dont mess with us auntie
I will send her home to you a couple a times a year.”
Tutu wrote back thanking him “for to consider bereave of old wahini.”
A year later when Moke was eight months along with Flo, Wasco’s greatest error
(conceived by rectal fluke . . . but that’s another story), Wasco sent Moke to Hawaii on a
Continental Airlines 747 with a full piece of smack, an ounce of five-cut heroin, packed
into a Sheik prophylactic and stuffed to the cervix up her vagina.
. . . an all away cross da watah I wonner tru high if da kine rubbah bust if it go
like da suppositree an how long it take an what it feel like to die fuck to death wi da
kine smack up da cunt. . . .
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