Amazing Night Part 1
By
Philip Riley
At first night in Honolulu Nu’uanu Street .
“Nice hair,” I said. She scowled darkly like the huddled figure from Edward Munch’s woodcut “scream.” The scowl though seemed exaggerated, like a sidewalk caricature and I wanted to laugh. I couldn’t hold it in and my cheeks burst.
“What’s wrong with you?” She asked as she stared suspiciously at me.
“I’m fine.” I replied. Her liquid dark eyes glowed at me and I saw reflections of stars in them.
“Would you like to go eat pizza? I asked. What boldness was overtaking me, but it felt so much like bliss. She inspired at once bravado and surrender.
“Why would I want to do that?” she spit out caustically.
“You mean you won’t?” I pretended to pout. She examined my face with a sneer, like a surgeon looking for a disease. I smiled back like a drunkard in a Frans Hals painting.
We walked silently up Nuuanu toward Hotel Street . I had total faith in the journey with her. In spite of her angry looks there beat the blood of a common intuition. Approaching St. Marks Garage a whirling noise encompassed us. I looked up and saw a man hovering in a space ship about the size of an old Volkswagen Beetle surrounded by an ultramarine blue Rothko haze. He launched a beam of the blue light from a cardboard tube and cast all buildings, lamp posts, and traffic signs on Nu’uanu in a blue color. People walked in and out of doorways as if part of the Picasso blue period.
“How do you like this show?” Walter said as she sprouted a rat tailed Salvador Dali mustache that extended at least five inches long on each side of her cheeks.
“It’s an amazing night.” I said.
“You can’t argue with instincts” she said, adding, “We are having so much fun.”
Stopping at Hotel and Nuuanu she emptied her pockets of thick sticks of pastel colored chalk. We fell to our knees and began to draw on the street. We moved slowly like Tai chi movements, conscious of our bodies in space.
The man in his spaceship grinned down at us from above the three story brownstones that fronted Nu’uanu Street . He waved a long languid hand as theatrical as a Toulouse Lautrec poster. We waved back together in one movement and in slow motion. Then we returned to our drawing on the asphalt. We blocked the intersection timelessly and though the police station was only a block away, no police interrupted us. Cars honked a symphony around us as all their tones fell in place.
“It’s a regular Caravaggio,” said Walter as we stopped to survey our abstract chiaroscuro.
Then a man burst onto the scene with Rosarina’s pizzas in Mondrian patterned boxes
“I’ve got pizza.” He said with a wide elastic smile that curved around a banana shaped nose. He gingerly passed slices of pizza through the open car windows of the frustrated drivers who had been yelling and shaking their fists. They stopped yelling and ate loudly with faces contorted with the aggression of German expressionist’s paintings.
The pizza man stood contra posta in front of Walter, and with eyes alight said to her,
“My old friend Michelangelo painted love on my ceiling you know.” Walter dropped her chalk and they embraced him as tight as a Brancusci sculpture. Then the two disappeared. I was now alone on Nuuanu and I sat on the curb thinking like the statue by Rodin. The noise of the small spaceship vanished in the Kandinsky sky. (to be continued)
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