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Friday, April 22, 2011

Aloha, My Lovely, Part 3: The Coconut Always Rings Twice

From the case files of Sam Stain, Private Eye, who's been hired by Donald Trump to go to Honolulu and bring back the President's placenta

Trump had booked me into the fancy-pants Waikiki wikiup that bore his name, the Trump International. It was where he’d put the two tough guys from Jersey, too, the ones he’d sent out here four weeks ago to dig up the dirt on Obama’s birth certificate. The Jersey boys had strung him along for a month, collecting some of that famous Trump cash, called twice a day to blow smoke up his pants about all the dynamite stuff they were dredging up on Obama and his big secret. Until one day they’d just stopped calling. Dropped off the face of the earth. They were most likely back in Jersey, laying low and bragging about how they put one over on The Donald. But Trump was sure something had happened to them, and that Obama’s socialist minions had something to do with that something. He’d hired me to find out what, and to bring back the President’s placenta. It was the only proof he’d accept that Obama was really born in the U.S.A.

I dropped my bags off at the Trump International and drove my rental heap over to the Department of Health. It was an avocado colored bunker off of Ala Moana Boulevard. It didn’t look like much, but I didn't let that throw me. This was the dump where the biggest long con ever pulled had been put over. We -- the American people -- were the suckers.

My shoes made loud clicks as I crossed the deserted lobby to the only person in the place, a little Hawaiian princess sitting behind a waist-high counter, filing her nails. Her nametag read “Lulu.”

“You know what I’m here for,” I said. “Show me the Obama file.”

Lulu stopped sharpening her claws and looked up at me, her eyes burning like a pair of hot coals in a lava bed. She handed me a laminated sheet with several views of the President’s Certification of Live Birth. They clearly showed the raised seal and document border, and a picture of the signature stamp on the certificate.

I tossed the piece of junk back in her lap. “Pshhh. The COLB. Doesn’t mean diddly squat. Any Barack, Hussein and Harry can get one of these for 10 bucks and a bag of Limbaugh Leapers in Times Square. I’m here for the big enchilada. The placenta.”

Lulu’s lava-hot eyes turned cold. “Placenta? What are you, nuts? There’s no placenta here.”

I scowled. I didn’t like being spoken to that way by someone who wasn’t a real American. Like The Donald, I have a good relationship with the blacks. But the Hawaiians? We weren’t exactly getting off on the right foot. “Okay,” I said, “then show me the Birth Certificate. The long-form.”

Lulu shook her head. “I’m sorry, sir, but the state Department of Health no longer issues copies of paper birth certificates. The department only issues certifications of live births, and that is the official birth certificate issued by the state of Hawaii. Legally and lingually, a COLB is a birth certificate. It’s a copy of an official record of a person’s date and place of birth and parentage. It’s what every American brings to the DMV to get a driver’s license, or to the Justice of the Peace to get married, or any other purpose for which a birth certificate is required.”

She had me there. “Okay, but this is just a copy. I want to see the original.”

Lulu rolled her eyes. “Sorry. Privacy laws bar us from disclosing an individual’s birth documentation without the person’s consent. That’s per the State Attorney General, David Louie.”

“Right,” I said. “So why won’t Barry Hussein Secretmuslim O’Bama give his consent, huh? Answer me that, Lulu. If that is your real name. What’s he hiding?”

“He can’t,” said Lulu. “It’s a Department of Health record and it can’t be released to anybody. Mr. Obama can come here and inspect the document himself, but that’s it.”

I’d had enough of her liberal mumbo jumbo. I leaned over the counter and grabbed her by her Polynesian armpits, hauled her over the counter and shook her like a rag doll.

“I want the truth!” I yelled. “Where’s the signature? And don’t give me that crap about it’s on the back because that’s just a stamp.”

“It’s on the back,” she said.

I slapped her hard across her cheek. “I said I want the truth!”

“It’s a stamp,” she said, not looking away.

This time I gave her the left, whacking her other cheek. “I said I want the truth!” I yelled again.

She was whimpering now, her voice a trilling songbird in distress. “It’s on the back.”

Slap!

“It’s a stamp.”

Slap!

“It’s a stamp on the back,” she blubbered.

I backhanded her and threw her against a glass bookcase. There was a lot of commotion, crashing and breaking of glass. Books and binders filled with documents fell all around her, piling up on the floor. State regulations, no doubt, designed to bar the flow of free enterprise and make life harder for business. Would the liberals never learn? It just hurt the economy -- made it harder for the job creators to hire. In the end they were just hurting themselves. She looked up at me, hot lava eyes filled with molten hate.

“The stamp is a signature. Understand? Or is it too difficult for you? In combination with the raised seal, it carries the weight of an original signature. Surely, as a billionaire businessman, your boss, Mr. Trump, must be aware of this. Or does he sign all your checks by hand, Mr. Stain? Why don’t you go back to the Hotel Trump International and ask them.”

What? I staggered back, my mouth agape. She knew my name. Knew it all, that Trump had sent me, where I was staying, everything. This conspiracy went deep. Deeper than anyone realized. Even The Donald.

Two of the half-naked hula boys came out of the shadows behind me and grabbed my arms. They were big, like sumo wrestlers, grass skirts covering their tropical climes. I struggled, but I was a chihuahua going up against a couple of King Kongs.

Lulu stood, wiping blood from her lip, and smiled, but it wasn’t a Kamanawanaleiya smile. It was the kind of smile her people had given Captain Cook, right before they stabbed him in the back about 57 times, dragged his body into the jungle and cooked it, ate his heart, chopped off his hands and filled them with salt, then scattered his bones around the island. The burning magma in Lulu’s eyes danced. “Good bye, Mister Stain,” she said. “I hope you enjoy your … vacation.”

She exploded into high-pitched, tittering laughter, so high it was almost beyond a human’s ability to hear, like the sound dolphins blow out of their nasal airsacs when they’re excited. Then just like that she stopped, and I heard one of the hula boys grunt behind me, just before something hard hit me on the back of the head. I went down like a cliff diver at Kaanapali Beach, but I didn’t stick the landing. I ended up on my back, looking up through a cloud of pain. One of the hula boys was holding a coconut. There was a thin white line running down the middle, where the coconut split when it hit my skull. Cool, white liquid dribbled out of the crack and landed on my forehead, drip, drip, drip. Milk and honey trickling down on me from the upper two percent. It was Reaganomics at work. Soon, like the economy of the 1980s, I would be back on my feet. There was just one problem: like Reagan in “King’s Row,” I couldn’t feel my feet.

“Where’s the rest of me?” I said, doing my best Gipper. “Mommy?”

It was bedtime for Bonzo. One of the Kongs leaned down and conked me again with the coconut, squishing it into my face. The numbness washed over me like high tide rolling over the shore, the roaring surf drowning out all sight and sound, except for Lulu’s voice. It was the last thing I heard before the waves crashed over me.

She said: “Take the haole a-hole to the volcano, like the others.”

And then the swell picked me up and carried me off, washing me out to sea.

TO BE CONTINUED

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