Beach Boy Forever

Sometimes you don’t have to grow up. Sometimes a man can be a boy forever.

A century’s worth of progress has rendered the streets of Waikiki cluttered and teeming, true enough. But just offshore, the arc of Mamala Bay and the pulse of the Pacific still converge and form a small wave as lovely and gentle as exists. And some of the men who ride these waves persist with a free-spirited, ocean-loving life like nowhere else: the Waikiki Beach boy.

Here, a youngster can aspire to surf and swim, to paddle the outriggers and sail the catamarans. Without drawing distinctions between living and working, he can rent out beach umbrellas and surfboards and Boogie boards and swim fins. He can show off in the water and strike poses on the sand and be called neither showoff nor poser. He can teach tourists to ride the surf. He can rub coconut butter onto a lonely back. Then, oh yes, he can romance the tourist ladies at the end of the day.

So it is 9 o’clock in the morning. Honolulu’s commute chokes the roadways and the New York Stock Exchange heads for its daily close. The first vacationers trickle out of their hotels onto the warming sand, globs of suntan lotion still visible here and there on a foot and behind an ear.

Rabbit Kekai saunters down with them. Wearing beach slippers, board-shorts and batwing sunglasses, he needs no sunscreen. He didn’t use it on the beach during the Great Depression. He wasn’t using it when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. He surely doesn’t need it now. His shoulders are the hue of strong coffee, his skin callused by the tropical sun, his wispy goatee sun-bleached the shade of pewter.

He is a small man with oversize hands and bandy legs. He has been a beach boy since Al Capone ruled the mobs and the Empire State Building was still unbuilt. That was 66 years ago. He has been a surfer even longer and walks with the easy gait of someone who has spent his life balancing. He is 78 now, and looks an athletic 55 until he takes off his sunglasses. Then his deep-set eyes reveal the watery squint of age.

The perpetual adolescents of the ocean--that’s what James Michener called them back in 1951: “Without these remarkable people the island would be nothing. With them, it is a carnival.”

Adding Magic to Hawaiian Holidays

Today among Waikiki’s 50 or so beach boys are the shiftless and the drifters, of course, but also those whose ways go back half a century before Michener, and even longer. These traditionalists endure and the others move on because the beach boy, native Hawaiian and non-, answers to the purest yearnings of capitalism.

Their charm and skills add magic to Hawaiian holidays, and the favor is returned with a tip, by which the beach boy prospers or not. Living on Waikiki is not hand to mouth as much as smile to mouth.

Kekai (pronounced keh-kai) scans the waves, still crowded with lingerers from surfing’s dawn patrol. He drops his backpack against the trunk of a palm tree and takes up his station at the yellow-painted 5-by-6-foot plywood shack with a pop-up roof. It is right next to the snack bar on the remaining wedge of public beach where there are no hotels between the road and the water. Offshore is that part of the Waikiki surf break known as Canoes.

This is a service economy, and the banners hanging on the shack read, straightforwardly, “Lessons” and “Surfboards,” rather than the name of the establishment, C&K; Beach Service.

Two generations of beach boys intersect as Rabbit Kekai greets Clyde Aikau, the 49-year-old beach boy who employs him and owns the shack. Powerfully built and cat-like in his movements, Aikau (pronounced eye-cow) arrived an hour and a half ago in a wrinkled delivery van that holds 50 rental surfboards.

Today, as most days, these two men will take turns giving $30 surfing lessons on old-fashioned Waikiki long boards.

In between, they will pause and unfold card chairs in the shade of a palm. They will share stories about life as watermen, about Waikiki and what endures of its celebrated aloha spirit. Oddly, not a single customer will understand that they have been touched by a pair of originals.

It is clear that the younger of these boys reveres the older. For purposes of introduction, Aikau calls him “Mr. Kekai.” Also apparent: The admiration extends to a third generation of beach boys on duty today at C&K.;

“Clyde Aikau is a legend to surfers like me,” says Ivan Moreira, a 20-year-old Brazilian. “He has ridden big stuff, really big stuff. He’s really famous in Brazil.”

Outside their own circle, though, the pair seem content, or resigned, to being just part of the local color. “Oh, really,” says the United Air Lines pilot when informed that he was just taught to ride the surf by a man whose history on Waikiki goes directly to the most famous beach boy of all, Duke Kahanamoku. “He sure doesn’t look that old.”

The Duke reigned here during the first half of the century. If any question exists as to the standing of beach boys in local culture, one need look no further than the single civic statue that stands on Waikiki: a 10-foot bronze likeness of Kahanamoku, arms outstretched.

“Those were the salad days,” Kekai recalls, smiling to himself. “Life was free. You could live off coconuts and dates.”

At age 5, Kekai was standing on a surfboard. As a teen, he remembers running the 100-yard dash in under 10 seconds. (“Can’t catch the rabbit.”) If he needed to buy something, he would caddy at the golf course. (“A quarter made you king.”)

In the Shadow of Diamond Head

The center of the world was that stretch of Waikiki east of the hotels, toward Diamond Head. Locals called the surf break Publics.

“As a kid, Duke took me under his wing and taught me pretty well. Then, when I was 12, I began to compete with him in canoe races.”

Kekai smooths the sand in front of his chair with a beach slipper. His finger, thick as a sausage, traces the long-ago race course where he used the wind and currents and strategy he’d been taught. Kahanamoku’s team came in second. Rabbit was no longer an apprentice beach boy. Like a character in a Gunther Grass novel, he achieved boyhood and a boy he would stay.

“The Duke never lost. He told me, ‘Kid, you learned well. Damned kid.’ ”

Kekai raises his sunglasses and slaps his listener on the leg. Two women prance by in their bikinis. “Now those,” he says of his romantic times, “those were the salad days.”

Seventy percent of his time Kekai spends just like this in Waikiki. The retirement magazine Modern Maturity gets delivered to his apartment. He laughs. He leaves it unread on an old fogy’s doormat down the hall.

The remainder of his time he travels. He just returned from surfing in Australia. In Costa Rica, he is the star of his own annual surfing tournament, the Toes on the Nose Rabbit Kekai Longboard Classic. He visits his wife, who teaches in California. From his backpack he produces a copy of a Japanese surf magazine that features him on the cover. “I’m big in Japan,” he says.

Wherever he happens to be, Kekai prefers to face the ocean. It’s a crime, he says, that Duke’s statue was erected with his back to the sea. All beach boys need to behold the water.

“Why? When the waves are up, you won’t find us. We’re out surfing.”

The first Waikiki beach boy is thought to have appeared about 1901, when the Moana Hotel was constructed along a crushed-coral road far from the center of Honolulu, and the tourist era began.

Surfing and canoeing had been on the decline. Beach boys propelled a revival. Early visitors attributed mythical qualities to their feats.

”. . . Poised on the giddy summit, his feet buried in the churning foam, the salt smoke rising to his knees, and all the rest of him in the free air and flashing sunlight, and he is flying through the air--He is a Mercury--a brown Mercury. His heels are winged . . . .” So wrote Jack London after a 1907 visit to Waikiki.

Hollywood soon arrived on vacation, and beach boys were happy to give welcome. In turn, they became jesters in the celebrity courts. They ruled the surf by day and the thatch-roof clubs by night. Their ukulele music and falsettos were popularized nationwide. They set fashion trends. They picked up bit parts in the movies. They posed for postcards and glamour photographs and magazine covers, and were made soul mates of the wealthy who could afford the long trip across the Pacific.

They sold what cost them nothing, what came naturally from the beach and from the heart: the joy of freedom.

“Fun,” says Kekai, “comes with the franchise.”

In a warmly written and engaging history called “Waikiki Beachboy,” now in its third printing, former Honolulu newsman Grady Timmons concludes, “The beachboys provided the world with much needed comic relief (what characters! everyone said). They took anxious, overachieving executives and taught them how to relax. They took their children and taught them how to surf. They took women who were recently divorced and taught them how to laugh and love again.”

They had names like Chick and Sally, Whitey and Blue, Panama Dave and Dude.

“Rabbit is one of the few--probably the most famous--of those who are left,” Timmons says.

Gary Cooper and the Japanese

Here is Kekai’s guarantee: One hour in the water and you’ll stand and ride a wave. It worked with the likes of Gary Cooper and still succeeds.

So now, speaking broken Japanese and using gestures, he puts a shy tourist through a lesson. Sixty percent of his business comes from Japan.

A 10-foot long-board is placed skeg down on the sand. The “Lesson” is made to lie down on the sticky wax on its surface. Over and over, he is coaxed into moving his knees forward and his hands back until all his weight is centered. Then stand, knees bent. That’s the secret. The Lesson practices until he seems to droop.

Kekai selects a board for himself, handling it with the casual ease a carpenter shows for a 2-by-4. The two paddle out, past the swimmers and wading children.

Somehow this Lesson vanishes into the crowd. Kekai mounts his board and rides a wave to shore, where he can climb up the beach and scan the lineup with binoculars.

There he is. Kekai trots back to the ocean and paddles out.

He will instruct five people today. When one Lesson tires halfway through, Kekai will hook a toe on the man’s surfboard and paddle both of them out to the next setup--never mind that the Lesson is 30 years younger.

“That’s OK,” he says.”I do this for a living. But I have to work out two hours now just to stay in shape. It used to take me only one.” Then, in case one has forgotten, he adds, “I’m way old now.”

Mostly, his encounters are fleetingly impersonal these days, but it wasn’t always so. Once he taught a man to surf. Years later, he taught the man’s son. And then the grandson. He instructed a woman to surf and she went on to win a contest. Then, he taught a woman who later beat her. Earlier this year, a wrinkled matron shuffled by the C&K; shack and struck up a conversation. She reminisced about a handsome Hawaiian who taught her to surf back before the war, in this case meaning World War II. Rabbit was his name, she recalled.

Whereupon Kekai stepped forward to reacquaint himself with bygones. According to those who watched, he accepted his hugs like a boy would from his grandmother.

He has, in nearly seven decades of beach watching, developed specialized perceptions. For instance, he can evaluate a bikini in a split-second for those appropriate to surfing and those apt to dislodge. He can momentarily break off a conversation in mid-sentence when his eye catches sight of a woman who has no companion. He accomplishes the favor of oiling her back without a word spoken, just as casually as you might open a door for someone whose arms are full of packages.

No wonder his surfboards and board-shorts and sunglasses come from sponsors. These manufacturers want to appeal to teenagers who think they’re invincible too.

Waikiki is not what it was, of course. The obituary of the good old days has been written many times over. Television personality Arthur Godfrey, a friend of the beach boys, told reporters in 1959 that he wanted to weep: “Waikiki’s become a Coney Island with palm trees.”

Since then, this kind of nostalgia has deepened. Many sophisticated travelers feel the place was spoiled when they no longer had it to themselves and has only gotten worse since. Perhaps you agree, but it should not be forgotten that Waikiki remains among the world’s great beaches and a sublime setting for people watching.

Yes, now and again you find a discarded diaper or wad of tissue in the water, bar patrons turn their back to the sunset and argue whether to tune the TV to hockey or basketball, and barkers line the sidewalks. But for those who come, today’s Waikiki offers one of those sanctuaries where pretensions of class, divisions of race and nationality, barriers of age and orientation, all languidly recede into a kind of polyglot carnival of the tropics.

On the chic and isolated resort beaches of the other islands, you are still judged by what you do and where it’s got you, not unlike home. Here, you’re not apt to be judged at all, except by how many days remain on your vacation. The option between a $735 Louis Vuitton fanny pack or six T-shirts for $19.95 awaits visitors on the same block. Young lovers still kiss with abandon, and leather-skinned retirees watch approvingly. Men from VFW posts wander hotel lobbies with the children of those they fought in the Pacific.

Naturally, beach boys have changed with the times.

There’s not much spontaneous ukulele music on Waikiki anymore. “Aloha” is more a slogan than a philosophy of welcome generosity. You may even find that the beach boy who rents you a snorkel at your hotel is fresh from Florida.

In fact, interlopers from Florida unintentionally transformed the Hawaii beach boy from what he was to what he is. Rabbit’s employer, Clyde Aikau, owner of C&K; Beach Boy Services, found himself in the vortex of that controversy.

For years he had been a beach boy in the old mold at the Hilton Hawaiian Village. Then he recalls his shock when hotel management announced that he and his easygoing boys were being replaced by a crew of earnest and presumably more manageable young men on contract from Florida. At the time, big hotels ran their public beachfronts as if they were private property and operated the beach boy concessions.

Drawing a Line in the Sand

“It was a real emotional thing--they’re going to fire me and I’ve been on the beach all my life. It just wasn’t right. This is Hawaii. I’m Hawaiian. I know the reefs and the water. I said to myself, ‘I’m going to make a stand,’ ” Aikau said.

With five surfboards, he opened an illegal beach shack in front of the Hilton. Day by day, week by week, he hung on as a squatter, taking advantage of late-blooming island sensibilities about native rights. He had given up law school and the globe-trotting surf circuit for this life, and his family name was well known in Oahu. Aikau’s great-grandfather’s great-grandfather had been hewahewa, the high priest to Hawaii’s last king. Who dare throw this boy off his beach?

As it turned out, no one. He won official sanction to stay. The shack remains today. But as the dust settled, Honolulu politicians smelled opportunity. Beach boys were working on public property, so where’s the cut for the public treasury? Just this year, the city put three concessions up for bid to supplement those controlled by hotels. Aikau won one for his second yellow plywood shack at the opposite end of Waikiki.

Rather than resist further change, Aikau sought more. He organized a contingent of beach boys to advocate new work standards, such as drug tests, splitting the brotherhood right down the middle. He insisted upon regular work schedules for his beach boys. No goofing off either, except during breaks. Then it’s OK to surf.

Today, his bushy hair bleached copper and his face creased from the years, he looks back on one era and ahead to another with more or less equal enthusiasm. In his youth, he sometimes courted four tourist girls at the same time--positioning their beach towels strategically behind surfboards, the beach shack and palm trees so that they couldn’t see each other. He sold frond hats and, when he had enough money, he locked up and went surfing.

“You could make $200 or $5. You could party hard and not bother showing up the next day.” He pauses and laughs, “God, I was something--I was the kind of guy I wouldn’t hire today.”

Now he is married--yes, he met the woman on the beach--and has a son. He has diversified andbrought out a line of surf wear for the Japanese market. He carries a cell phone in the wax pocket of his board-shorts. Beach boys tease and call him the CEO.

But they know something else about Aikau. His family name is fixed in the enduring legends of the islands. On the other side of the island from Waikiki, along the North Shore, on Nov. 19, 1967, the sea cliffs quivered as Waimea Bay began to break with enormous waves. This was the Big Wednesday of lore. An unknown local surfer named Eddie Aikau, Clyde’s brother, stormed into the water--and he stayed out even when the fantastic surf grew to 40 feet. He stole the show with one thundering, impossible ride after another.

His audacity on that day is one of those historical touchstones that every Hawaii surfer has heard a hundred times. Bumper stickers celebrating fearlessness can still be seen on the island, reading, “Eddie would go.” He went on to become the first lifeguard at Waimea and was credited with a succession of bold rescues.

Then Eddie was lost at sea in 1978, when a group of Hawaiians set out to re-create a historic blue-water passage in a traditional voyaging canoe. Heavy seas damaged and threatened to sink the craft, and Eddie tried to paddle a surfboard across miles of open ocean to get help. The others were rescued and survived; Eddie was never found.

In his honor, one of the great surfing contests in the world was organized, the Eddie Aikau. It is held in winter but only on those rare years when Waimea breaks 20 feet or larger--waves the size of apartment buildings crashing down on a shallow reef with the intensity and physical chaos of carpet bombing.

These days he would never mention the occurrence, and certainly not to the half-dozen Lessons he leads into the water at Waikiki each day, but Clyde won the first Eddie Aikau back in 1986, surfing like a demon in 25-foot waves for the honor of his family. Jack London might have spied wings on his feet.

“The beach will always be part of my life,” Aikau says reflectively, as the sun dips and throws long shadows off Diamond Head. He loads surfboards in his van while the last of the tourists shake out their beach mats. Scavengers begin their ritual combing of the beach with metal detectors, looking for nickels, engagement rings and Rolex watches.

“The ocean is a very healing place--and somehow, everybody gets connected back to Waikiki. So many of the famous surfers started right here.”

Times special correspondent Susan Essoyan and researcher Anna M. Virtue contributed to this story.