Island Books
Lost in Lahaina

By Elaine Masters

Lahaina's Front Street, now cutesied up into the kind of place tourists love, was funkier and grittier in the '70s when Maui was home to a flourishing counterculture and the pervasive narcotics commerce that usually went along with it. Advertiser library photo • April 20, 1972

Dinosaurs. Huge. Kings of their turf, but carrying a fatal flaw. McPherson uses dinosaurs as a metaphor for the drug dealers of Maui in the '70s and '80s. He vividly describes the life and lingo, the drops, loss of ambition, mental confusion, and ultimate death.

The first part of the book is hard to follow. Alvin, the viewpoint character, has not yet accepted the death of his hanai big brother, Mel. He speaks of him in the present tense while speaking of other characters in the past tense. I was pulled along through the morass by the fascinating characters, however, anxious to discover their fates.

There's Alvin, of course. Orphaned while still in school, he is taken under Mel's wing and is around, but not a part of, the drug commerce. (I question whether a drug dealer would risk this.) Throughout the book, Alvin is more an observer than a participant in life, a drifter. In spite of getting free handouts from Mel, Alvin never becomes addicted to cocaine. His addiction is sex.

Mel is clearly lined. He supplies cocaine to buddies who reciprocate with favors. A philosopher, he tells Alvin, "Life is full of choices, choices that most of the time we don't notice, because everything we say or do, every sound and every movement is a choice, and it leads from Point 'A' to Point 'B'. Sometimes, often in fact, we make the wrong choice and it leads us to the place we didn't want to go, Point 'C'."... and we can't go back and correct the mistake, but must go on to Point 'D'." Mel is respected and feared among the druggies — rumor has it that he killed a couple of people on a drug run to South America. But he loves Alvin like a little brother.

Curly is complicated. A musician at heart, a drug dealer early in life, he eventually goes straight, marries, settles down and runs a legitimate business. But he, too, goes the way of the dinosaurs.

Rex, a diver, is driven by sharks to the surface too quickly and lives crippled by the bends for years. The danger, the rush, the triumph of the black coral divers as they bring huge trees to the surface, eking out a subsistence while wrecking their bodies, all are part of this Lahaina scene.

And then there's Marie. She's as addicted to sex as is Alvin. Together they manage to dally away several years, hopping into beds and going nowhere with their lives. Marie has an additional problem. Unlike Alvin, she is addicted to cocaine. Between her two addictions, there's not much hope for her.

Although the characters are memorable, the book does have weaknesses. Told as a slice of life, it has no visible means of support: no major goal of the protagonist, no beginning, middle, nor end. Call me old-fashioned, but I do like a bit of story to my story.

The title itself is an enigma. McPherson, like a true poet, says he coined it from the cover photo. It evidently has no connection with the story itself.

That said, the book is enjoyable and gives insight into an extinct culture. McPherson told me he feels that those who have lived through a special time have an obligation to write it down. Old Lahaina neighborhoods are now destroyed and replaced with tourist kitsch. People who created the '70s drug culture are aging and dying off. Only by writing about that time will it be preserved.

Correction: The narrator of Michael McPherson's "Rivers of the Sun" is named Alvin. Due to a reviewer's error, an incorrect name was given in a previous version of this review.