Packy Don Larew Rides Again

                                                         
      The Sunday morning slows attacked me in a massive shopping center on the island of Oahu. Attired in felt hat, boots, snap shirt, oval belt buckle and Wranglers, two days of R and R beyond wading in the frozen slop in an Idaho feedlot, I was six hours on the downhill side of a last call for double shots of Jim Beam with a beer back at the Waikiki Tiki Hut.
     In an effort to atone for Saturday night excess, I went into an Asian imports establishment and purchased a cobalt-blue tea pot rimmed in gold filigree, with four matching cups and an assortment of teas. This was the gentle path to serenity, to washing from my psyche twenty years of wasted days and wasted nights.
     The new treasure was on the top of a red Chevrolet rental car while I fumbled for the door key as a group of tourists dressed alike in white cotton shirts, dark pants, sensible shoes, fanny packs, and stubby-billed baseball caps surged around the curve of the spiral parking lot, all of them walking backward and producing a lightning storm of flash bulb pops.

     Their focal points were a black Buick cruiser that contained the Lord himself, Jack Lord, star of the Hawaii Five-O series who was taping a product placement of the Ala Moana Center while executing an exciting two-minute sequence where a tough homicide cop cruises through a shopping center parking lot.
    I witnessed the price of fame. Even as the crowd yelled his name and waved to him, Jack did not look happy in his stardom. Jack looked bored and sleepy and hung over, about as star-worthy as a bowl of poi. I don’t think he was acting. He looked like he also had boogied one too many times to ukulele tunes the night before.

      It took five minutes for the adoring procession to thin out enough for me to ease the car into the mess of traffic. As I was flipping the tranny into Drive, two young women emerged from the tribe of Hawaii Five-O groupies, pointed my way, and began to chant what I understood to be “Packy Don Larew.” 
     I was a hung-over hick from Idaho with no idea who this Packy Don Larew person was, but I supposed, because of my cowboy garb, I was being mistaken for some Roy Rogersesque hero of the Asian cinema and was all too willing to participate in the harmless masquerade, to squeeze out my own two minutes of fame by mustering my prettiest, “Aw shucks Folks, Thank you, but I really must ride into the sunset” smile, accented by a tip of the hat to my fan base as I nudged the car into the stream of satisfied shoppers. None of my fans were attempting to take my picture. They were just pointing my way and yelling, almost chanting, that name, “Packy Don Larew, Packy Don Larew.” 
    As the original Latinos were wont to say, "Sic transit gloria mundi."  I was a star of stage and screen right up until one of my fans almost impaled herself on the rental car’s hood ornament and I watched my cobalt-blue tea pot and four little cups tumble down the windshield, over the hood and into shards on the parking lot tarmac. Rather than being mistaken for a second-magnitude movie star, a group of English-as-second-or-third-language folks were informing me that, in my un-Zen state of post-party buckaroodom, I had left a package on the roof of the car.

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