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.

Bill Safer

Bill Safer

          After two years at ET Wrenn Junior School, my wife and I took our baby daughter Ruth and the foetus that was to be our daughter Abbie and went to teach high school in the Guam public education system. We were assigned to positions at Inarajan High School, a rural school near the far southern tip of the island, with pupils who came mostly from Chamorro, or the local islander, families.

          Inarajan High School was a place where student academic motivation was a personal matter. Those who wanted to learn what we were teaching did; those who didn’t had no reason to. The way of life that evolved in the south of Guam over the centuries required little advanced literacy. The fruit of the reef, the coconut-palm, and the jungle were still available to those who knew how to take them; the Government provided jobs or assistance for the acquisition of more world-economy needs like pickup trucks and cigarettes and boom-boxes and beer; and the church and the extended families provided social structure and support.

          Guam’s original, indigenous name, ‘Guahan’, means ‘we have’.

          The school was on a hill looking down on a little village with a postcard church, the ocean extending endlessly beyond. It was a large, two-story, concrete structure with external hallways. We joked that the kids at Wrenn would have been throwing each other over the rails of the upstairs passageways. The gym had no walls, just pillars, on two and a half sides, presumably to let the trade winds cool those sweating within it.

          The kids at Inarajan were highly sceptical about haole (honky; anglo; pakeha) teachers in particular, and I don’t blame them. Not only were they accustomed to these statesiders showing up and trying to impose their own, foreign ways on them for maybe a year, maybe less, and then shooting through, but the imported teachers were also, to put it kindly, a motley bunch.

          The Chamorro teachers were, with one or two exceptions, fairly stable, well-adjusted people, educated on the mainland — or at least Hawaii — but absolutely comfortable within island culture. They were the local educational success stories, who had returned to their villages to try to help: they knew the score and had little enough to prove.

          There were also a few Filipino teachers, hired as scabs during a teachers’ strike a few years previously, apparently self-conscious about their Tagalog accents and doggedly ingratiating towards those in authority. I remember once, a month or so into the school year, when the Governor announced that he was coming to Inarajan H.S. to dedicate the new wing. It had been finished for more than a year, but it was an election year and his handlers had identified this as a primo photo op. They told us the day before and made it clear that we were to let our students out of class to be background scenery for the TV cameras. The Filipino teachers went home and came back the next day with huge platters of expensive and meticulously prepared fiesta food for the Governor’s reception — entirely without being asked.

          The stateside teachers were universally — as far as I could tell — bent in one way or the other. There were those who came to Guam for the surfing or scuba-diving or sail-boarding. There were the born-again, fundamentalist bible-thumpers who came to save the natives from the curse of Papist idolatry, Guam being well over 90% Catholic of the sixteenth-century Spanish variety. But most were uncategorisable one-of-a-kinds — adventurers and misfits who had used their teacher certifications as passports to exotic (but comfortable and relatively safe) lives.

          Clearly the most popular teacher in the school was Bill Safer, a tall, lean, loud lefty (just a touch to the left of his hero Fidel, and an admirer of the Soviet Union) with a flowing grey beard. Safer was a science teacher, but, as he put it, “Most of these kids don’t need to know this bullshit they teach as science; I teach revolution, comrade!”

          He had an endearing way of calling everyone “comrade”.

          What he did in the way of classroom teaching was show movies. He gave the kids a list of 25 or so things to do in the semester, if they wanted to, and let them give themselves their own grades.

          Sometime during the first week or so of the school year, I was sitting in the non-smoking teachers’ lounge when Safer came in to use the photocopier. All of us present were just joking around about something, and Safer responded to some comment by saying, “Yeah-yeah,” in a little singsong, the first ‘yeah’ being about three notes higher than the second. And it sounded familiar. I knew I’d known somebody else once who’d yeah-yeah’d the same way. In a few seconds it came to me and I just casually asked him, “Bill, did you ever know a guy named Yabo Yablonsky?” [See #24 in this series]

          Safer looked at me as if somebody had just stuffed an ice cube up his ass. Finally he said, “Yabo Yablonsky and I were on the same swimming team in Brooklyn in 1948!”

          I still had Yabo’s phone number and I urged Safer to call him, but he refused. All he would say was, “What would I say to him?” When I contacted Yabo and told him about running into Safer, he said pretty much the same thing.

          Safer had seen combat in the Korean War and had hated every second of it. “I shit my pants with fear more than once,” was what he had to say about his wartime adventures. He had, however, plenty to say about war in general, none of it complimentary.

          Inarajan High School had a Junior Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) programme with a proud tradition of winning close-order drill competitions, the team doing all kinds of fancy things with their dummy M-1s. I thought of them as the boys’ baton-twirler squad. Calling it an ‘officers’ training operation struck me as a cruel joke. The poor kids spent so much time drilling they were rarely in class, and most of them seemed headed for trouble meeting what were then the requirements to enlist in the Army as privates, let alone as officers.

          The teacher in charge of ROTC was an Army major. He used to march about the school in his officer’s dress uniform. It had large amounts of braid. I couldn’t help but salute him when we passed each other in the school’s covered outdoor corridors, and he’d salute me back. Once, unaware of the symbolism of what I was doing, I saluted him with my left hand. He announced loudly that he wasn’t going to return a left-handed salute.

          Then Safer came up, louder than the Major. “I’ll salute you,” he barked. “When I was in the Army they told me to salute the uniform, not the man. But I’m saluting you because everyone deserves respect. I’m not saluting your uniform. The uniform sucks. It doesn’t deserve any respect at all.”

          Before coming to Guam some years before, the Safer family had been living in various parts of the Caribbean, their last location before Guam having been Guyana. They had known the people at Jonesville, the place famous for its mass suicide. Safer refused to believe they’d committed suicide (“Primo people, Richard! Beautiful people!”). He strongly suspected that they had all been murdered, probably by some agents of the U.S. government who had come with the congressman who got killed in the incident. “And,” he concluded, “they were just sharing, gentle people who were no threat to anybody.” I asked him why, if they were out in the jungle and no threat to anybody, anybody would want to kill them all. He conceded that that was a good question.

          Bill’s wife, Brenda, was closer to my age than Bill was. They had two boys in elementary school and a girl a year older than Ruth. The boys were named Adam and Pol. Adam was blonde; Pol was Micronesian. The girl, Amanda (whom Brenda called ‘demanda’), was also blonde and confidently bolshie, rather like her dad.

          Safer was fond of telling a story about how shortly after Adam was born, the doctor had offered to circumcise him. “‘I’ll circumcise your mother!’, I told him!,” he more or less shouted, and launched into a lecture on the evils of circumcision. When I pointed out to him that his father had had him circumcised, he said, “Ah, but he was ignorant, comrade, and I’m not.”

          One place where he did seem to have a bit of conflict and doubt was in the area of bringing up his kids. Although he despised Western Civilisation in general and the colonial mindset in particular, it bothered him that Adam was growing up like an island kid who felt no reason to learn school stuff. The second school year we were on Guam he and Brenda sent Adam to a church-run private school that emphasised academics. I can remember him hectoring the poor kid: “You’re there to learn the subjects! Ignore the bullshit religion they teach you!”

          An avid anti-colonialist, as one might expect, but living in a colonial environment, he spoke the Chamorro language as best he could. To my untutored ear, however, his Chamorro vocabulary seemed to be limited to a few idiomatic expressions and swear words, but he ladled contempt on the haoles on the island who didn’t even try.

          Safer was at the core of a beatnikish social circle, which meant the availability of what on Guam is called songi. They lived in what people on Guam call a boonie house in Merizo — called ‘Malessu’ by people speaking Chamorro —  a somewhat isolated village on the island’s far southwestern coast. It was a slapdash affair with a big, open lanai; I’m sure it was built before the typhoon-proofing requirements came into Guam’s building code. The feeling it gave me was of adjusting closely to nature rather than of dominating it. Its big lanai seemed to be almost always filled with people.

          Sugar cane grew between the house and the driveway, which was usually blocked by Safer’s sailboat when he wasn’t fishing. A huge mango tree between his garden and the next provided marvellous shade, a place from which to hang a swing, and an enormous number of mangos in season. Chamorros like their mangos green and hard and bitter, sliced up, salted, and soaked in a mix of rice vinegar, raw sugar, garlic, ginger, and super-hot boonie peppers. They don’t seem to like them sweet and ripe.

          The house was close to the neighbours as well as to nature. The smell when they were singeing the hair off a pig they’d just killed was a potent experience when we were downwind from them. Safer assured me that the sounds that came when they’d killed the pig before I got there had been truly horrible.

          Still, the inside part of the house was hot and damp and far from mosquito-free. It was a place where a person would sweat copiously when no breezes could be found. Some people said that Safer had a permanent case of body odour, but I didn’t notice.

          The only part of the house that was air-conditioned was the little room where Brenda kept her computer. In 1986 the computer age was just beginning, and just by being able to use one Brenda was able to bring in money. Brenda was also into homeopathic therapy, the first person I recall having met who was, although I wouldn’t be surprised if Alfredo Valentino had dabbled in it without mentioning it. It seemed like hogwash to me.

          Safer, however, smoked cigarettes (then quit, then started smoking again); he knew how to get the alcohol down and wasn’t above a bit of pride in how strong and healthy he was anyway. Guam’s climate and soil are not conducive to dairying, and at least in the mid-1980s all dairy products were imported in one form or another, mostly from Australia and New Zealand. When at last a milk-reconstituting plant on Guam started turning out full-cream milk he was in heaven. “This is real milk, comrade!” he gloated, a white moustache on his grey one. No wussy fear of saturated fats and cholesterol for him. I didn’t get the point.

          He had highly refined woodworking skills. I think he told me once that he’d worked as a carpenter building Hollywood movie sets after surviving the Korean War. Another teacher, named Mick Subbert, worked out some kind of deal with Safer to build a hardwood sailboat from scratch on Mick’s back lanai. It was a fascinating process to follow.

          When at last my wife got the job in New Zealand and I was preparing to leave, I was astounded by how much Brenda knew about New Zealand politics, which were then going through intense turmoil. I knew next to nothing then.

          We kept in communication on and off for a while after I left Guam. Then Safer retired and the family moved to Tinian, a somewhat smaller, less-developed, and less-populated island to the north of Guam, and we lost touch. An April, 2005 Google search revealed that Mrs. Brenda Safer coordinated this year’s Tinian Elementary School Poetry Contest.

          In about 2013 or 2014 Brenda joined facebook. She posts mostly items of interest on Tinian and solid leftwing articles.