I was a lucky kid in many ways, but I was especially fortunate in terms of family vacations. My brother and sister and I were able to make yearly trips to Disneyland and Carmel, one-off trips to places like Chicago and Las Vegas for my mom’s medical conferences, and a number of trips over the years with our grandma and cousins (and without our parents). These were always interesting vacations, as my grandma did the grandma thing and let us make most of the decisions while we were with her. This resulted in quite a few interesting moments, like the time my brother insisted he didn’t need sunscreen at the beach and then ended up with such a horrible sun burn that she considered taking him to the hospital.
One of the earliest of these trips with Grandma Hook (which she was always called despite absolutely detesting this name) was when I was in 9th grade and she took my sister and me to Hawaii. My grandma had an old friend who owned a condo on the island of Kauai, and she agreed to let us stay there for about a week over spring break. For some reason, Grandma Hook was under the impression that we would be doing some form of “roughing it,” so she brought a number of interesting items, like alarm clocks, in case we were without basic necessities. Exactly how alarm clocks would have helped if we had indeed been in some sort of primitive shack I have no idea, but, at least in her mind, she had come prepared.
We read the detailed instructions on how to arrive at our week-long abode and still managed to get lost on the first couple tries. It was late at night and I always had a horrible sense of direction, so relying on me as a navigator was definitely a bad decision. On one of our two wrong turns, we actually ended up driving the car right to the edge of the ocean and had to turn around on the sand. Eventually, we made it to the condominium complex and were advised by the instructions to watch out for the “killer bumps.” After the ordeal of finding the place, we were both on lookout for these perilous speed bumps and then died laughing when we realized that they were really just a couple tame little things that barely even disturbed our shitty rental car. We laughed at the “killer bumps” every single time we came in or out of the complex.
When we finally arrived and unlocked the door to the condo, it turned out to be a regular-ass, fully furnished, one-bedroom apartment. My grandma walked around it marveling at all the conveniences it contained. “There’s a couch and a TV!” “Look at the washer and dryer!” “A dishwasher!” I asked my grandma what she had been expecting, and she responded, “I had no idea what to expect, so I planned for the worst.” Hence the alarm clocks. My sister, meanwhile, wandered into the bathroom and happily declared, “There’s a CUP in the bathroom!” Apparently this was just as mind-blowing to her.
The condo itself was decent, but its back porch overlooked a gorgeous cliff down to the shore line. It was only about ten feet from the back porch to the edge of the cliff, which made it a beautiful place to relax but a terrifying place to keep an eye on my sister. About two weeks before leaving for Hawaii, my dad came to my sister and me as we were having breakfast before school and asked, “Did either one of you get up last night?” We both swore we hadn’t, and he told us that the night before, around 2 am, he had heard someone come down the stairs, turn on the light in the family room, then turn around and go back upstairs. We were all confused, but I had mostly forgotten about it until, a few days later, again over our shared breakfast, my sister leaned over to me and whispered, “I woke up in the toy room last night.” The toy room was an extra room across the hall from our bedrooms that was mostly empty besides some old toys and a couple of spare beds. I hesitated as I thought about this for a second, and then I pointed at her and exclaimed, “It was you! You’re sleep-walking!”
Having been made aware of this fun fact, I was sick with fear that she would sleepwalk right out of the condo and over the cliff, leaving me to explain to my parents why my nine year old sister was not on the plane back to Fresno. To try to prevent this tragedy, every night, I would set up a series of obstacles between our room and the door to the back patio. Suitcases were laid out, chairs scooted over, and noisy keys hung over the door knob so I would hopefully wake up if she decided to go for a nighttime stroll. Thankfully she never did, but I slept with one eye open the whole week.
Grandma Hook mostly let us play it by ear and follow wherever the days took us, but she had made a few concrete plans for us. The main one was an escapade involving a horseback ride to a little cove with a waterfall, a picnic lunch, and a horseback ride back. This sounds very picturesque and quaint, but it makes absolutely no sense for the three of us. My sister was a pretty go-with-the-flow kid but she most certainly wasn’t athletic; I preferred to chill by myself with my CD player and headphones; and my grandma was the kind who would have to go to bed at 4 pm after a rigorous encounter with the laundry. Why she thought this was a good idea I still don’t know, but we did it anyway. It actually went better than expected, aside from the fact that my horse had delusions of grandeur and kept trying to trot to the front of the group and take over as its leader. I am a huge chicken, so this did not sit well with me, and I resented my energetic horse and envied my sister’s lagging mare who brought up the rear. I don’t remember how my grandma fared, but I’m sure it must have been entertaining. We all limped back to our car afterward and barely left the condo the next day.
Remember how I said that Grandma Hook let us make all the decisions, to everyone’s detriment? That happened all over this trip. We would take daily walks down to the nearby store to pick up essentials and rent movies, and she always let us choose what we got. I was seriously into popular teen horror films at the time, so one night I picked out Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer. I had already seen them, but I’m sure neither my sister nor my grandma had. It never even occurred to me to pick something more appropriate, so we watched these teenagers fuck and slash the shit out of each other as a family. I don’t think it affected my sister at all, but after we had finished them both, my grandma simply stated, “I didn’t much care for those movies.” And that was that.
Also on this trip, my sister decided that she did not want to bathe. Since I was the older sister, keeping her somewhat in line fell to me, and I started hassling her about it. My grandma declared, “She’s on vacation. If she doesn’t want to take a bath, she doesn’t have to.” So she didn’t. I did eventually crack down and make her wash up after our horseback riding adventure, but other than that, she remained filthy for the whole trip. When my dad welcomed us home at the airport, he took one look at my sister and asked my grandma, “What did you do to my daughter? She looks like a refugee.” I made sure he knew it wasn’t my fault.
The most memorable part of this trip, though, and by a large margin, was its soundtrack. The island of Kauai truly is a marvel of natural beauty, but it didn’t have radio reception for shit. Maybe it was just that our rental car had a garbage radio, but we could get exactly zero stations to come in on it, so we had to resort to its tape deck. I had moved on to CDs by this point in my life, but my sister was using my old Walkman and had brought along a single tape, recorded off a local urban radio station in Fresno. There could have been any number of popular R&B and hip hop songs on this tape, but it somehow contained some strange, inappropriate numbers that we blasted the entire trip. The first song on it was “Around the World” by Daft Punk, which was actually rather interesting and completely tame. I’m sure it did nothing for Grandma Hook, but it was at least enjoyable and harmless. The next song was the “Rapper’s Delight” remix by Def Squad members Redman, Erick Sermon, and Keith Murray. We learned the lyrics to this one forward and backward, and at some point decided to start using the sign language alphabet to give it more meaning when Keith Murray rapped, “Well I’m the M-A-S, the T-E-R, a G to the double E.” The “double E” eventually became a synonym for grabbing ass, because repeatedly making the letter “E” in sign language looked like the motion required for squeezing buttocks.
The cherry on this cake, though – pun fully intended – was “Romeo and Juliet” by Sylk-E. Fyne. If you’re not familiar with this song, let me introduce you some of its lyrics: “It’s like Romeo and Juliet / hot sex on a platter just to get you wet / You’s about to get in something you will never regret / and this is gonna be the bomb this is what I bet / Yep.” And those are the OPENING WORDS of this gem of a song. The rapper goes on to insist that “always on my mind was a little bump and grind” and vows to “serve you up with an overdose of that bomb ass punanny.” And we listened to this on repeat every single day of the vacation. With my grandmother.
The playlist was rounded out by classics like “Gettin’ Jiggy Wit It” by Will Smith and “The Boy Is Mine” by Brandy and Monica, but I can barely remember hearing them. What I do remember, and vividly, is bumbling around that tropical paradise with my sleepwalking sister and my clueless grandma, with explicit rap lyrics as the musical accompaniment. That might be the purest definition of love I can think of.
