Barry Ellis; Norma, Frances, & Eileen

Barry Ellis

          The expat haole teachers at what was then Inarajan High School were, of course, a hodgepodge of misfits, zealots, adventurers, surfers, and so forth. One fellow, however, stands out in my mind as being truly bizarre, a teacher of Spanish and English named Barry Ellis.

          Barry was a converted Catholic, which was helpful on Guam, where the Spanish-style Church is suffocatingly powerful, and a committed celibate, which — and I obtained this information from an impeccable source — even the Inarajan parish priest wasn’t.

          He told me that before he’d become a Catholic he’d been a, well, y’know, a nothing. Yes, I did know. He took it seriously. He became extraordinarily fond of me rather quickly, because he thought my witticisms witty, but then became aghast when I told one of my more blunt God jokes, and informed me that God could forgive any sin except blasphemy, and that no matter how much good I did for the rest of my life for penance, he knew that I was forever damned. That didn’t mean, however, that we couldn’t still be friends.

          He was largish, but not as tall as me, and softish-looking: kind of narrow in the shoulders and kind of wide at the hips. He had a chubby face and a naughty smile, and lived in a small apartment in a high-rise building in Guam’s urban centre of Tamuning, which was a bit of a commute to and from Inarajan.

          He knew Spanish from having lived in, of all places, Panama, and had tales to tell about his time there, mostly about personal relationships and status. He’d enjoyed being called Don Barry.

          He sometimes told me about his mother. She had, he told me, been unbearably dominant, possessive, controlling, and even abusive. I felt a connection with him right there.

          She’d made him wear hot clothes in the summer and to stand for long periods in one place when he’d been naughty. She’d also used food as a weapon, which may have been why he never, ever ate anything coloured green, getting his fresh-produce nourishment from fruits and vegetables of other colours. As horrid as she had apparently been, he’d still adored her, and had stayed with her, pampering her whims and submitting to her domination, well into his adulthood.

          Somehow, then, his commitment to celibacy wasn’t surprising. From what he told me I doubt if his mother would have approved of him at all if he’d chosen otherwise. Maybe, however, it was because he was both swishy as hell and believed the Church’s teaching that homosexuality is a most horrendous sin.

          He was also, unsurprisingly, a devoted fan of Liberace, and was devastated when he found out that his idol was dying from AIDS, which in the mid-1980s still Meant Only One Thing to most people. He couldn’t believe that Liberace could have been homosexual. It seemed impossible to him. Liberace, after all, had doted upon his mother!

          Although the kids at Inarajan had a way of torturing teachers who they thought deserved it, they tended to give Barry a fairly easy time of it, which I thought was strange, but nice. Maybe because he was so gentle and inoffensive and would have made too easy a target. I don’t know.

          I lost touch with Barry when I left Guam. I haven’t been able to find him on the internet. As with most of the haole teachers at Inarajan, he could be just about anywhere.

Norma, Frances, Eileen, & Inarajan Girls’ Basketball 1986

          I’d developed a liking for coaching basketball when I’d been at Wrenn in San Antonio, and had learnt enough about its technical aspects for it to fascinate me. I sorta considered it to be like choreographing a ballet with half of those dancing at any one time trying to disrupt what those under my direction were trying to do. I also enjoyed the challenge of putting a group of distinct individuals together into a cohesive team that utilised their individual skills communally.

          When I started teaching at Inarajan High School I pre-empted the school custodian, who had been coaching the girls’ team, as teachers had priority. Coaches on Guam received payment for the time and effort involved. In money. He kept the boys’ team. I managed to put together a team that at their best were remarkable, I thought, for a rural school on a remote island. Most of the girls bought into the system I tried to sculpt for their abilities, and at their best they played with devastating precision.

          That ‘at their best’ bit covers a lot of ground. They were, after all, adolescent girls deeply engrained in the fabric of their particular culture and their chosen places within it. We played our matches on Wednesdays and Fridays. We won most of our Wednesday games and, if I remember correctly, lost all of the Friday ones.

          Norma was the team leader. She was just medium height, but her strength, reflexes, mental speed, and aggression made her play much larger. When she ripped down a defensive rebound and took off on the dribble for a coast-to-coast it would have been a brave girl indeed to get in her way, and few did. She was lethal penetrating to the basket from the wing, and in additional to her bruising rebounding averaged about 30 points per game on Wednesdays.

          Fridays were a different story. Throughout the rest of the year, Norma would meet up with her friends on the beach on Friday after school and put away a couple of six-packs, and she saw no reason to change this just because she was supposed to play power forward at seven-thirty on Friday during basketball season.

          Norma with a belly full of beer was an entirely different basketball team. For one thing, she kept signalling me to sub her off so she could go pee. Often. Instead of her Wednesday-evening disciplined position play she’d be all over the court, colliding with her teammates and leaving big holes on defence. Her shooting wasn’t worth shit.

          Her natural aggression, however, spilled over the top; she kept trying to start fights. It became almost a ritual for the school principal to summon me into his office on Monday mornings, where I’d have to plead on behalf of the team not to kick her off – and the team always did line up solidly in her support. Of course, sometimes my pleas were to no avail and he’d force me to suspend her for the game the following Wednesday, such as after she’d got into the face of one of the nuns attending our game against Our Lady and called her a “fuckin bitch”.

          Frances, our starting centre, was the tallest girl on the team, a bit taller than me, even. I don’t think that she’d ever played basketball before, but she was intelligent and a quick learner. She pulled down even more rebounds than Norma and mastered everything I taught her about playing defence; she delighted in blocking several shots every game. She just didn’t want to handle the ball, which meant that she was quick with her outlet passes, but useful on offence strictly as a decoy and rebounder. One time one of her teammates actually threw her a pass. She threw it right back, shouting, “Don’t throw it to me!”

          Her problem with Fridays was her boyfriend, who wanted to go out with her on all weekend evenings and had no time for her to play basketball instead. Guam, after all, has a male-dominated, exaggeratedly macho culture, and Frances was indeed a fine-looking young woman.

          With Frances missing on most Fridays, Eileen had a chance to get in some court time. Eileen was somebody to whom I could relate, being far from a natural athlete and the possessor of a self-effacing personality, undoubtedly coloured somewhat by her being the team’s Fat Girl.

          Anyway, one Wednesday we went to play the number-one team on the island, JFK High, which is located in the most urbanised, multicultural part of Guam. The JFK girls came onto the court as if they’d won the game before it started, but my team came on like a typhoon with the high-pressure, trapping defence and breakaway offence we’d practiced. We ran out to big lead.

          Then, in the second half, our defensive aggression built us up some foul trouble, and one by one our starters began to foul out, letting JFK claw themselves back into the game, especially after Frances fouled out. Then, with about eight seconds left in the game they made a basket that put them in front for the first time – by one point.

          Norma, who somehow hadn’t fouled out, scooped up the ball and threw a half-court inbounds pass to one of the subs, who threw another half-court pass to Eileen, who made the winning basket with one second left. I don’t think I’ve ever seen more ecstatic happiness on a person’s face than on hers at that moment. It didn’t matter that she’d been there because she hadn’t made it back on defence the play before. Her reserve disappeared and she, leading her mates, shouted and sang nonstop on the long bus ride to the other end of the island.

          She’s a middle-aged woman now, probably a grandmother. I wonder if she ever reflects back on that moment and relives the joy. I think she might.

Dave & Sue Hendricks

Dave & Sue Hendricks

          Guam is, really, two islands joined together. This is so both geologically and socially. On maps it looks like a peanut with a narrow waist. From about this waist to the north Guam tends to be fairly flat, relatively sophisticated, urban, multicultural, and cosmopolitan. About half or more of the people in central and northern Guam are Filipino in origin, but there are still a goodly number of Chamorros there, as well as haoles, Japanese, Koreans, Taiwan Chinese, Vietnamese, and such other Micronesians as Trukese, Kosraeans, Yapese, and Belauans. This is where the commercial and government centres are, and where the tourism and military-service industries provide employment. The South is overwhelmingly hilly, rural, and Chamorro — about 90% or more. Inarajan is a village near the far southern tip of the island.

          When my wife Smoky and I first reported to Inarajan High School (now Inarajan Middle School), the principal directed us to the library, from whence Mary Ann Crisostomo, the library secretary, ran most of the school. As with most Pacific Island cultures, for Chamorros the extended family is everything, and Mary Ann was related to everybody a person around there needed to be related to. She also had the energy and intelligence and enthusiasm to use these connections to get things done. She loved being a macher, which is a Yiddish word but it applies here.

          With Mary Ann in charge, we rapidly found a place to live and had a phone connected. Other new teachers we met who hadn’t had the benefits of Mary Ann’s assistance had to wait six weeks or more before Guam Telephone connected their phones. We only had to wait a day or two. Mary Ann found us a place to live in Ipan Talofofo, which is a stretch of the main north-south road in the southeast quarter of the island. We were right across the road from a little beach with a small coral reef.

          Our apartment was the upstairs part of a two-story duplex. The landlady, a devout, somewhat elderly woman named Cathy, lived downstairs. The tenants for some years before us there had been some Sisters, Cathy told us reverently, usually before complaining about how much noise we made walking around, and eight-month-old Ruth banging on things, and stuff. I guess nuns float. We put socks over the bottoms of the legs of the chairs we bought so as not to disturb her every time we pulled away from the table, but she remained unsatisfied.

          With Cathy becoming increasingly grouchy, we put out feelers through the school grapevine for another place. The family of one of Smoky’s students was moving out of a place back in the hills, so we made arrangements to move there. The place was in a California-looking subdivision called Baza Gardens (known locally as Bozo Gardens), near the hill village of Talofofo.

          The yard had a cyclone fence set in a low stone wall all around it, which we thought was a good idea, as Ruth was into the maximum-mobility-minimum-sense stage of development. We moved there on her first birthday, and within a week she was able to climb over the fence. The house was built of reinforced concrete, as were just about all houses built on Guam after some terrible typhoon in the 70s, and was a beastly hot place to sleep at night when the power was out and the air conditioner therefore didn’t run. The power would usually black out a couple dozen times a month.

          From the time we first moved into Baza Gardens we’d been curious about our neighbours one door down on Margarita Street. Wasting away. They were haoles about Smoky’s age with a boy and a girl in elementary school. They had people over often who would strum and sing hip music out on their back lanai. We figured they’d be friends once they got to know us and then we could hang out in the evenings drinking beer and watching the kids play and maybe getting high and singing along if we felt like it. And we were right. Soon after our second daughter Abbie was born our two little families cruised into the same lane.

          Dave was the musician. He had a day gig as a nurse. At the time he was at the operating room at Guam Memorial. Later he took on a more laid-back gig as a school nurse at Guam’s special-education school. He was about my size, but had a troublesome back. He was conventionally good-looking, with preppy-longish blonde hair and one of those droopy blonde moustaches that emphasise the upper teeth. He used his eyebrows when he talked in his smooth, somewhat sonorous voice and bland West Coast accent.

          He played on his lanai, and in gigs in local bars, in the rock & roll and bluegrass traditions. He played guitar and sax and mandolin and bass and sang with conviction. Years before, back in Seattle, he’d been a big fan of the Daily Flash, my late pal Don MacAllister’s band before he’d left for Hollywood and death. Not long before leaving Seattle Dave had actually seen the Rivingtons, creators of the original, sacred ‘Poppa-Oom-Mow-Mow’, playing at a roller rink. I was impressed. And he was of course a big fan of Linda Ronstadt, and Emmylou Harris and the Hot Band. We got on great. Once or twice I even got to sing the bottom part of ‘Poppa-Oom-Mow-Mow’ while Dave sang the top part. He seemed to be grooving in heaven one Xmas after Sue had given him a Rockman. He’d sat, transfixed, on the lanai, playing away on his guitar with a solid, if virtual, group, and sending barely any sound into the environment at all. The next major present was the soprano saxophone, which also sent him into another world for at least the first few weeks.

          Sue was a flight attendant with Continental Air Micronesia, the oldest one working for them at the time. The others called her ‘Grandma’. She was blonde, too, with longish, bushy hair, an engaging smile, and a face that showed how much she enjoyed playing in the sun. Continental was always messing with her because she was involved with the union and had taken a visible role in a strike some years before, but they couldn’t get rid of her. Still, she loved the life, and as far as I know she’s still flying. Otherwise, she was a passionate scuba diver and wind-surfer.

          Now, I was always eager — in my mind — to give wind-surfing a try, but I never did. Sue did take Smoky out once. Smoky told me that she encountered the predictable problems with coming about, as I believe turning around is called. The interesting part came after the lesson. There was some sort of incident, somebody almost collided with someone else, and they’d met these guys who were the crew to an obscenely expensive yacht that was moored for some reason in Apra Harbor, paused en route from somewhere fancy to somewhere else fancier.

          And they invited us all over to tour the yacht (I don’t know how thrilled they were that a husband showed up), and, yeah, it was big and fancy, but I wasn’t all that impressed. I don’t know why. Maybe because my step-father Howard’s cabin cruisers had seemed somehow ordinary to me when I went on them. What did impress me was the boat it was moored outside of, that we had to cross to get to the rich boy’s toy. It was a Korean fishing boat. The crew were on the aft deck as we crossed it. They were eating maguro (raw albacore tuna), as freshly caught as can be, with wasabi and Heinekens, and laughing and talking in Korean. They indicated with gestures that we were invited to their party, too. I had a bit of fish and it was about as good as anything I’ve ever eaten. And there was so much of it there, not just artsy little strips like in the sashimi palaces for Japanese tourists along the high-rise hotel row of Tumon Bay or in the urbanised village of Tamuning on Guam’s northwest coast.

          The Hendricks’s two elementary-school-age children, Crystal and Derek, were also blonde and good-looking. Ruth adored Crystal. Derek, about a year younger, was very much into boy stuff. Sue and Dave sent them to St John’s, Guam’s upmarket private school. St John’s is run by the Episcopalian Church on a Catholic island. Later they attended a smorgasbord of other island schools. Ruth developed a strong, almost idol-worshiping, attachment to Crystal.

          And the days rolled by. Sue would be gone for a while on her Hawaii route and Dave would cope with the job, bands, and kids. Then Sue would be back and it would be party time. Dave would meet me or Smoky back at the end of the hibiscus hedge that separated our back yards after the sun had gone down — what he called “attitude adjustment hour” — for a toke or two most evenings. Sue had to be more circumspect due to the airline’s drug-testing policy. Sue would take Smoky or both of us boonie stomping (what we in New Zealand call bush walks). Dave sculpted an acacia tree that grew like gang-busters in his front yard, and tidied up the jungle sloping steeply down behind his property toward a small river at the bottom of the gully. Kids played with water and giant soap bubbles. Much beer eased its way down throats in the tropical evening air, or in air-conditioned houses when the mosquitoes got too bad.

          From time to time members of their families would come out from Seattle or California, and with Sue’s employee discounts on Continental they visited family back in the states fairly frequently, too. Dave’s dad, Dan, often came out to Guam for extended periods over the Northern winter, and seemed to fit right into the scene. A beekeeper by trade, he eventually came to keep the hives for the University of Guam.

          Sue eventually moved from Continental, who were apparently a bunch of bastards to work for, to Air Micronesia, a subsidiary of Continental, where, as she put it, she got to travel around the islands of the western Pacific and get paid to do it.

          When Smoky received permission to apply for jobs in New Zealand she quit her gig at Inarajan, flew to Auckland — leaving the toddlers with me — and after a couple of weeks got a job offer from Otorohanga College, a small rural high school in the central part of the North Island. I spent the next two weeks making arrangements for moving our stuff, selling the car, closing down our various accounts, caring for the girls, and working, which I did up until about two days before leaving. Sue Hendricks, along with Crystal and Derek, helped me a bit with Ruth and Abbie, and organised a clean-up brigade for after we moved out.

          Our plane reservations to leave Guam were for the day before Ruth’s third birthday, and I arranged to have a party with a cake and so forth for her at her day-care place, the Infant Development Center. The party came off just fine, Sue showed up with Crystal and Derek in their Mitsubishi Chariot (needed to carry the wind-surfing rig) right on time to drive us to the airport directly from the IDC.

          We kept in touch for a dozen years or so. We got a yearly Xmas card with a family photo on it and a yearly this-is-all-the-neat-stuff-we’ve-done-this-year letter, first in hard copy and later via email. The kids grew up. Derek developed acting ambitions. Crystal turned out to be the musical one.

          In 2005 a scuba-diving website wrote about Sue and Dave: “They're aging west-coast beach bums, really, who took off for the tropics ‘back in the day’ and never came back. Now, they are taking the increased responsibility that goes with home-ownership and child rearing without growing up and becoming old at heart.” Sounds like not much had changed.

          We’ve reconnected on facebook. They still dive the ocean almost obsessively; Dave’s become a dive instructor. Dave still works as a nurse despite passing retirement age. Sue seems to have definitely retired from the air at last, but remains active in the union. Both have taken whole-heartedly to grand-parenting, as Crystal and Derek are both parents approaching – but not yet quite reaching – middle age.

          Dave, of course, is still gigging every chance he gets. Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow.