Winner of the 2023 Maine Literary Award for Short Fiction, “Haole Boys” by Parker Blaney firmly roots readers in the O’ahu of his youth, with a story of friendship, identity and belonging. Blaney’s voice and his sharply-rendered setting will carry you all through to this triumphant, bittersweet conclusion.
A siren woke me. It started far down Ward Avenue, near the K-Mart, and came screeching past our apartment building. The sound reminded me of the party my parents had thrown last night, the blare of music, the shrieks of angry laughter. It felt dangerous, an emergency, as if injured people lay about the floor of our apartment. I could smell the kalua pig and poi, the sickly smell of mixed drinks and stale cigarettes.
Johnny stood in the hallway outside of my room.
“Johnny,” I said, getting out of bed.
He was peeking around the corner into the dining room and didn’t turn when I spoke to him. Sunbeams streamed through the sliding glass doors as our mother prepared breakfast in the small kitchen to the right. She didn’t notice us. Johnny’s face was balled up, his eyes filled with tears. He wore baggy PJs stenciled with brown bears and Donald Duck slippers on his feet. He’d been having nightmares since Boss, our haole father, had taken him a few weeks ago to see Boss’s Portuguese friend who owned a malasada stand nearby. The man’s pet macaw had bitten Johnny on the arm.
The kalua pig, ringed with empty opihi shells, was laid out on a platter in the middle of the dining table. The carcass had been ravaged, besides the pig’s smiling mouth. Party ribbons and balloons were taped to the walls.
Johnny crawled up into my lap at the breakfast counter. Mom, ignoring us, fixed oatmeal, her hair done up for last night’s indoor luau askew.
“I seen a red eye on the wall of my room,” Johnny whispered.
“I’ll make it go away,” I said so Nay couldn’t hear. The parrot had a blind red eye from the Portuguese man hitting him. That’s what Boss told Nay anyway.
Nay’d had enough of red eyes and crying four-year-olds. The boy should have been over it a week ago, she declared.
* * *
Toast was burning and smoke hung near the ceiling. The smoke detector started blaring and Nay jabbed at it with a broom until it flew apart, the battery bouncing off the breakfast counter.
Johnny whimpered and I hushed him and bounced him on my knee.
“Jesus H. Christ,” Boss said, wobbling out of a back bedroom. “Shut that thing up, will you?”
“Oh, quit complaining. I did already.”
Boss poured himself coffee, glaring at her. He had bags under his eyes and looked hung over. He’d flirted with the wives of the men who worked for him at the Pearl Naval Shipyard, which almost always caused a fight with Nay. Before the luau, he’d started early with his friend. I saw them drinking Primo beer and smoking pakalolo in front of the malasada stand. The macaw perched near the side of the stand and leaned out when anyone walked by on the sidewalk. Eugene—the name of Boss’s friend—scolded the bird like it was the worst child in the world.
Boss eyed Johnny and me staring at him. His right forearm had stitches where he’d put his fist through a door next to Nay’s head. “What’re you two looking at, eh?” he said.
Johnny’s body shuddered at the sound of our father’s voice.
“This coffee been sitting here two days?” Boss said.
“Sure, two weeks if you like,” Nay said. “Don’t be stupid. Sit down and eat.” She ignored everything but the oatmeal, not even looking up. Her night gown showed the outline of her thin body.
I let Johnny down reluctantly, patted him on the head and grabbed my school folder, which had a picture of a Hawaiian man diving off a cliff at Waimea Bay. The water looked black and ominous.
“Where you going?” Nay said. Her hair was jet-black and shiny, her brown skin smooth and youthful still.
“Where do I go five days a week?” I said, like she was the one that was stupid.
She muttered something in Tagalog and said, “Good, go ahead then, git.”
I waved to Johnny, but he didn’t wave back. A thumb filled his mouth.
Walking down the hall toward the elevator, I could hear Boss and Nay’s voices rising already, like two hot suns.
* * *
I walked past Thomas Square Park and came to the street corner with the malasada stand. Eugene was busy hawking custard and haupia sweet bread. He had no idea who I was. With his pug face and loose, graying mustache he greeted me in a child-like voice. Nearby, the blue and gold macaw clung to its stand. A Japanese woman shuffled by, and the bird leaned out and tried to bite her.
“Mattawan!” Eugene said. He threw a malasada at the bird. The man bowed respectfully to the woman, who shook her finger at him as she hurried away.
Eugene gestured for me to come closer.
“The little nip bitch. Snotty, don’t you think?” He beckoned again. “I no bite, haole boy. Come. Come here.”
“I’m Filipino,” I said.
“You look haole brudda, white bread, but no worries, come closer. You walk by every day and no buy nothing.” He pursed his lips, pouting.
I inched forward. His eyebrows and beard were unkempt.
“See what I teach Mattawan,” he said. The bird had small eyes, one black, the other red and dead looking. “I teach him to say nice things to people. It’s good for business!” The bird tried to nibble his arm. “Hey, you! No!” He flicked the side of its head, his fingernail bouncing off its tiny skull with a thwack.
“Ouch!” Mattawan snarled in a falsetto voice. “Ouch!”
“I love you Honolulu,” said Eugene, coaxing it.
“I love you,” said the bird.
“No, no, Honolulu!”
“No, no, stupid!” it said, clicking its beak.
“Now you wait, haole boy. He smart,” Eugene said, looking at me anxiously. “Mattawan!” he shouted.
The bird came to attention and turned its head from side to side, looking at Eugene with the black eye.
I could smell Eugene’s stale breath.
“You tell this haole boy,” he said. “This is paradise.”
“No, no, stupid,” the bird said, and snagged one of Eugene’s earlobes.
“No, you! Say it. This is paradise!” He jerked his face away, which scrunched up red like a shriveled tomato.
“Paradise,” Mattawan said. “This is…stupid.”
“No!” the man shouted, pinging it on the side of the head again. The bird wobbled like a prizefighter, ducked and swayed, flapping its wings.
* * *
I fled down the sidewalk, Eugene hollering for me to come back. Barefoot, I stubbed my toe. “Ouch!” I said, hopping on one foot. Near the Bishop Museum the rays of the sun skimmed Beretania Street, bending the light. Someone screamed. I looked back through the crowd of people and Mattawan was attacking a woman. “No!” Eugene screeched. “No!”
I pressed my hands over my ears and ran.
A block away I slowed to a walk and closed my eyes and felt my way along until I came to Arakawas, an old Japanese store. Sometimes I bought li-hing-mui or sweet plum to bribe my tormentors, but not today. I reached the campus of my new school and looked around for the bully, a Samoan kid, or one of his friends.
Pajama Man razzed me in front of my eighth-grade homeroom. “What you lookin’ at, brah?” he said, as we waited for Mrs. Chum, the teacher, to appear and unlock the door.
“Not much,” I said. I wasn’t afraid of Pajama Man, just his friend Darrel Koa, the bully who beat me up sometimes. Darrel also beat up my friend Harvey Twiggs. Twiggs and I were hapa haoles, but I looked more haole than Filipino, while Twiggs looked more like a local boy, but he was mahu, which made it worse for him.
Pajama Man wore a baby blue and yellow striped outfit. “Fuckin’ haole.”
“Fuckin’ Papakolea boys,” I said. This was the name of the public housing project nearby where most of my classmates lived.
* * *
After home room I looked for Twiggs behind the music building, fifty yards from the main campus. Thick shrubs leaned against a hurricane fence concealed our hide-out from Vineyard Boulevard. Twiggs was sitting on concrete steps smoking a cigarette. A chain and lock barred the door he leaned against.
“Look at dat thing,” he said in a friendly voice.
“What?” I said.
He pointed at my big toe I’d stubbed on the sidewalk. It was bloody and a fly pestered it.
“That look like it hurt, brah.” Twiggs shook out a cigarette. His eyes were like a matinee idol’s, despite a purple bruise: deep and dark and dreamy. I took the cigarette and lit it. The sharp intake of smoke calmed me. Twiggs’s black eye was fading. He admired mine, touching it briefly. He was not wearing any shoes. A silky shirt of pink and white orchids flowed loosely over his chest and arms. He smelled like talcum powder and hair oil. A transistor radio turned low played music.
“…took the Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry, them good ole’ boys were drinkin’ whiskey and rye, singin’, this will be the day that I die…”
Twiggs sang along under his breath while he considered the air over Punchbowl Cemetery in the distance. The hot sun beat against the building. Cockroaches, their backs hunched in the crack between the door and the cement steps, scratched about whenever Twiggs moved. Exhaust from the passing traffic fouled the air. An ambulance or police car raced by occasionally, their lights flashing and sirens blaring.
Twiggs and I were the only hapa-haoles attending Central Intermediate. We’d become friends soon after we started eighth grade in September. Sometimes we argued who looked more brown-skinned and not haole. Twiggs usually won the argument, although Darrel and Pajama Man also hated him because he liked boys–but I didn’t care. He was pretty, smooth, olive skin and full lips and almond shaped eyes. His pidgin English was not convincing, though. His Chinese mother was local but his white father, a master sergeant in the US army, was from California. They’d moved to the islands a few months before we did, and our family moved from Washington State, so we were both new kids in the school.
Twiggs puffed on his cigarette and made a popping sound with his lips when he drew the end of it away, the smoke rolling into the back of his open mouth like a curling wave. I sat down beside him and tried to make the same popping sound. When Twiggs leaned back against the metal door, I leaned back also. The blue sky spun overhead. The bell for classes rang a few times, but only at the last warning bell did I get up to leave.
“You coming?” I never saw him in the hallways. For a few weeks near the beginning of the school year I did, but not now.
“You go along. I’m right behind you.”
I shrugged and walked to the edge of our hideaway, checking to make sure the campus sidewalk was empty.
* * *
I walked home at the end of the day. Boss, still wearing his work shirt from the navy yard, was at the malasada stand with Eugene. His flabby arms gesticulated wildly as he told a story. A cigarette dangled from his mouth. Both of them squatted on their haunches, pint bottles on the sidewalk in front of them. I crossed the street so that they wouldn’t see me. I looked for Mattawan, but his perch was empty.
“Where’s the bird?” I said, startling both of them, as if I had pulled them out of a dream.
Eugene smiled. A strip of shadow bloomed under his raised right hand as he shaded his eyes. His teeth were small and even.
“He’s been arrested for assault,” Eugene said. He laughed and pulled on his bottle. Boss slapped the sidewalk and laughed too.
“What of it, boy? You go along and tell Nay I’ll be home in a while and I’ll want my dinner.”
I didn’t move.
“I think I know this boy. He yours?”
“I guess I have to claim him,” said Boss.
Eugene said, “The policeman handcuffed and hauled him away, little man. I’ve had enough of him.”
“And I’ve had enough of the two of you,” I said. I walked away and could hear them laughing.
* * *
The next day I met Twiggs on the back steps of the music building. The radio was playing the same song as yesterday, so that every day was a good day to die. He was smoking a non-filter, his bare legs splayed in front of him, as if he were reclining in comfort without a care in the world, though I knew this was an act. He was leaning against the same part of the door as always. He wore an untucked tattersall button-down.
I could hear other kids passing by the other side of the bushes. Before lunch, Darrel Koa heard from Pajama Man my insult about Papakolea boys, so he punched me in the face. Pajama Man and their friends had laughed.
“You got a lickin’ again?” Twiggs said. I searched his face and body for evidence of assault. I could see none, but his shirt fit loosely, and he wore baggy shorts. Our classmates sometimes struck blows where they would not be visible. We’d become experts sensing wounds even when they didn’t show.
“Sure, I let him smack me around a while,” I said. “I didn’t feel like gettin’ in it. He’s a lucky son-of-a-bitch.”
Twiggs said he’d heard that Darrel was sixteen.
“He looks twenty,” I said, and he did: set face in coffee skin, black mustache, snarling lips, nibble of goatee. A man, not a boy.
“He’s been teaching me island history.”
“Yeah?” Twiggs said skeptically.
“He says my white people and your white people stole his land and oppressed his people.”
“What about my Chinese part and your Filipino part?”
“He didn’t mention that,” I said, shrugging.
“Well, he should have.”
“I asked him in the name of personal history if he’d find another body to pound on for a while. Mine has no white spots left, only brown or red.”
“What did he say?”
“Fuckin’ haoles.”
“Maybe we should tell Darrel we want our skins to be browner, our hair as dark as his, but God has not made us that way.”
“I want dark skin and eyes and black hair no matter how God made us,” I said.
“What do you tell your parents about your black eye?”
“They don’t notice.”
Twiggs took another drag and blew out the smoke. “I don’t tell him anything,” he said. “And she’s too busy watching him. My old man expects me not to complain. He’d call me a fag if I did.”
Twiggs gazed at the leeward mountains in the distance. The peaks of the escarpments, their lower parts shrouded in mist, crowned Nuuanu Valley. Clouds cast shadows against the deep green. A sheet of rain over its cliffs fluttered like a giant wing. Nearer, two high-rise apartment buildings, nearly identical, each with small lanais, arched above us. Sometimes people watched us from the lanais, but most times they ignored us. Further to the west was Papakolea Heights with its public housing, where our classmates lived.
Twiggs’ lazy expression didn’t hide his fear. Not when you knew him.
Twiggs said, “You’d a’ killed him, you know.” His accent teetered between haole and pidgin, as if he couldn’t make up his mind which way to talk.
“Huh?”
“Darrel.”
At least I could understand what Twiggs was saying, when we talked haole. I could still only understand some of my teachers. Mrs. Chum, my homeroom teacher, had tried to talk haole to me one time earlier in the year, but the students teased her, so she stopped. Nay, born in Manila, already knew English when she met Boss in the Philippines. He’d been sent there by the navy on a temporary work assignment, so neither one of them were locals. Whenever I tried out my pidgin English on Darrel or Pajama Man, they laughed at me. I suppose I could understand how my imitating their language seemed like one more thing an outsider was taking from them.
It didn’t really matter because Twiggs and I had developed our own language, filled with silences and half-words. I had blundered into our hiding place, giving three Papakolea boys who were after me the slip at the beginning of the school year. This was where I first met Twiggs, unlike one another in some ways but united in our confusion.
That was just about the same time Darrel and Pajama Man began to extort Twiggs. They brought a kitten to school and threatened to kill it if Twiggs didn’t give them money. They figured mahus would care about things like that. A tear rolled down Twiggs’s cheek when he told me this. He stole money from his mother’s purse to pay them nearly every day, and whenever he couldn’t, they’d threaten him. He told me if his dad caught him stealing from his mother, he’d beat him senseless.
Then the cat was found dead on the front steps of the school. After that he spent a lot of time in the position he was now, curled against the same part of the metal door.
* * *
“Where do you live, anyway?” I said.
He pointed vaguely into the mountains. “You want to go there?”
“Now?” I said. I realized I’d never thought about where he lived, like this place behind the music building had made us alien to anything outside of it. I’d almost stopped imagining him someplace else—or me for that matter.
“Sure,” Twiggs said, flicking the cigarette away. “Why not?”
* * *
We ignored the policemen on Queen Anne Street as we walked the few blocks to Twiggs’ apartment, which I realized, after he pointed it out, I had been able to see from our hideout. Inside the lobby, we walked past a cement pond full of brightly colored carp and rode the elevator to the sixteenth floor. He unlocked the door to his apartment and showed me the lanai, which was perched high above the city and the nearby jungle.
Punchbowl Cemetery, bloated with crosses, was visible to the east. To the west near Hotel Street, old pagodas lay scattered among the concrete buildings. Nearby, the other twin high-rise was close enough we could see people moving about in the apartments. A light skinned man—not a haole but some mixture of blood like Twiggs and me—played a guitar and sang to a small girl on their lanai. The child laughed at the man, who made faces to amuse her.
Twiggs pointed out the figures scurrying about the campus of our school. We could also see our hiding place behind the music building, the metal door that Twiggs leaned against and the concrete steps. He disappeared and returned with two of his father’s Primo beers. We cracked them open and I soon had a buzz. We sat on wicker chairs and threw our feet on the railing and sparked cigarettes. Twiggs turned on a radio but the batteries were dead so the music wouldn’t play. I could feel a silence waiting to descend.
“Are you ever going to classes again?” I inquired.
“Not likely,” he said. Any pretense of pidgin English fell away. He spoke in a California surfer dialect, which was where he had really lived most of his life before coming to this place. He twisted his mouth and popped his jaws with another drag from his cigarette.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Just what I said.” He turned to look at me and arched his eyebrows.
The alcohol burned through my body, and I felt as if something were pushing me forward without any ground underneath my feet.
“I don’t do school anymore,” he said, lighting a stick of pakalolo and sucking the smoke into his lungs. He offered it over and I took a hit.
“Then why do you sit back of the music building all day?” I asked, blowing out the smoke.
“That’s pretty obvious. No Darrel or Pajama-Boy back there.”
“I guess.”
“You guess?” he chortled.
I felt lost looking at him as the smoke took hold. I took another swig of beer and belched. Our eyes met and we grinned. Twiggs took a slug of beer and belched even louder. Then he shot forward like he would pitch himself over the railing.
“Hey!” I said.
He spat over the edge. I got to the railing in time to watch the gob break up and flutter to the ground.
He smirked and sat back down in the wicker chair. His face looked unnatural smiling. It looked more normal when it was calm and contained, staring into the distance.
“Don’t do that again, okay?”
“I was just fucking around.”
I tried to think of something neutral to change the subject, but I realized nothing was neutral about the last few months—not our classmates or our families. Neutral was a gear on a motorbike or a car, not some other machine running out of control.
He flicked the ash over the railing, held his finger a few seconds too long on the glowing head. He smiled again and gulped the last of his beer. “Ahhhhh,” he exclaimed, crushing the aluminum can. He got another two and I refused the one he held out to me. He shrugged and slumped down in his chair and took a long pull.
“Your father better not notice his beer gone,” I said. “He’ll kick your ass again and then Darrel will kick your ass and you won’t have any ass left.”
“My father… I could put a pig-head in the refrigerator and he’d slice off a piece and look for the mustard.”
“You ever seen a live pig? All I see are dead ones at parties.”
“Huh?”
“Nothing.”
“There’s all kinds of them in the jungle,” explained Twiggs. “You can see a dozen before lunchtime. The old Papakolea men come with jeeps and dogs and pull onto the heiau road down there. See?” He pointed and I got up and saw where he meant, near the base of the mountains. “Sometimes I see one of their dogs running along the highway all bloody and its tongue sticking out the side of its mouth, torn skin hanging from its ribs where it got stuck by a pig.”
I looked again but there wasn’t a dog in sight. It made me feel sad and disappointed.
“Not now, boy, early morning, or late in the day. That’s when you see them. It’s not easy seeing a dog like that.”
“I’d like to anyway,” I said. “I’ve never had a hunting dog. Nay is allergic to dander. Boss sometimes hunted wood ducks in Washington State, but nothing like pigs.”
Twiggs knocked off the end of the pinner and threw it over the edge. I resisted the impulse to get up and watch it hit the ground.
“We should go back to school,” I said.
“You got someone there waiting for you?”
“No, but maybe someone will miss us being gone.”
“They miss we’re not there,” Twiggs said, his voice rising.
“I guess,” I said.
Twiggs set his beer down and disappeared into the apartment. He emerged a few moments later holding a hunting rifle with a scope. It looked heavy in his hands, the metal black, as if it came from another world.
“My father hunts pigs with this,” he said. “He goes into those mountains like the Papakolea men, only he doesn’t use dogs to run them down. He uses his ‘God-made-instincts’ and comes dragging a pig out of the jungle with his bare hands not two minutes dead. Two hundred pounds and he doesn’t flinch at all, even when the pig cuts him. He’s got scars on his arms to prove it. And he weighs only one hundred forty-five pounds in his stocking feet.”
I wondered why in his stocking feet and Twiggs said that was how his father always described it.
Twiggs hoisted the rifle up and rested it on the railing and scrunched an eye shut and looked through the scope. “This is a 2x to 9x variable. On 9x, boy, you can see a fly licking its lips at a hundred yards.”
“I don’t think flies have lips,” I said.
Twiggs frowned at me. Then he looked back through the scope. He pointed it at the music building, at the metal door he always leaned against, and then swiveled it around the campus of our school. “My father never takes me hunting with him. We only go to shooting ranges on Hickam Base or Kahauloa. I can shoot better than him, you know.” Twiggs flicked the safety off, steadied on a target, dry fired it, worked the bolt action, steadied and fired again. The metallic sound of the pin-strike bounced off the wall of the apartment and raced back over the railing into open space.
“I don’t think they even have the kind of tongues that can lick lips…”
“There they are,” Twiggs said.
“Who?”
“Pajama Boy and Darrel. They’re sitting on the steps where they left the dead cat.”
“Oh.”
“Oh, is right.” He shifted the rifle away and aimed at the distant moon and fired at it a few times. “Rotten sons-of-bitches,” he said.
“Anyways,” I said, “I think flies are disgusting. Nay chases them around our apartment with a swatter like they’re radioactive devils. ‘Nasty, filthy little sons-of-bitches, die, motherfucker, die,’ she says.”
“Your mother has a dirty mouth,” Twiggs said, deciding on his next target, giving another click. He pulled a bullet from the pocket of his shorts.
“Yeah, but only when she’s chasing flies. Other times she wouldn’t swear if the worst thing in the world happened.”
“Well, why not?” Twiggs sounded angry.
“That’s how my father describes it. That’s when he calls her the bitch-angel, thinking she’s better than him when he spends time at the malasada stand with that devil Eugene.”
Twiggs worked the bolt action again, slipped in the round and twisted the bolt into place. The air around us came alive, as if Twiggs had turned on a switch to the energy of the world. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “It doesn’t matter.”
“But it does matter. It does,” I said, almost yelling now. “That’s how Boss describes his rants against her when he’s drunk, how he’s guilty so he has a go at her,” I watched the end of the barrel crawl over the buildings, the metal door, Pajama Boy and Darrel and our other classmates. The starting, the hesitating, the slow meandering like the rifle contained its own brain and sought its own target, its own relief.
“Oh,” Twiggs said. “Shut up now, okay?”
“Sure,” I said, but I had no intention of being quiet any longer. I could feel the rage building inside of me, the hurt, that frightened small animal wanting to bust out. I waited for the sound of the gunshot to roll off the side of the building and spread outwards, a ripple of air to bounce along the concrete columns and the Japanese pagodas in the distance.
The man with the guitar had stopped playing and was looking at us and the little girl was crying.
Twiggs pulled the trigger and dark smoke, pierced by an orange flame, shot out of the end of the barrel. The recoil sent him flying backwards. He lay on the floor of the lanai laughing wildly, glassy eyes rimming over. My ears rang; a tinny, metallic sound buzzed inside my head from the gunshot. Despite the ringing, I could hear distant sirens. I went to the edge and looked down, excited by the sound of their wailing. I realized I was the emergency this time. Twiggs was the emergency, and we were dangerous.
* * *
Twiggs ran first. I followed closely behind after I saw blue lights racing toward us on Queen Anne Street below. We didn’t bother with the elevator. We ran down the staircase two steps at a time the entire sixteen floors and out a back door. A few strides and we were in the jungle. We could see them running after us, the doors of their cars left open. We worked down the hill through secondary streets, came to the fence surrounding the athletic fields of our school. We scaled the wire and dropped down and ran across the grass. The kids stopped their PE flag football game to gape at us. Someone yelled, “fucking mahus!” as we ran past. Another yelled, “fucking Haoles!” to which they all laughed. We crossed the footbridge that went over the motorway. I imagined I could still hear the rifle shot rolling away into Nuuanu Valley.
We reached the back of the music building without anyone stopping us. I stood looking up at Twiggs’s lanai. People were looking down at us, the little girl and the guitar player and an old man with white hair. Near the metal door we inspected each other for damage, for wounds hidden beneath our clothes.
Twiggs gestured with his head; his expression was composed and serene again, despite being out of breath.
“I wish I had a beer to celebrate,” he said.
We touched the surface of the door with our trembling fingers, felt the sharp metal slag, but within this the neat roundness of the hole.
“Bingo,” said Twiggs.
“Bull’s-eye,” I said, impressed.
Twiggs sat down in his old place and put his back to the door where the bullet would have gone through the center of his chest. He stared into the air over Punchbowl Cemetery. Another wing of rain broke free of the clouds and hovered against the foot of the mountains, pulsing with life. I sat beside him and rested against my side of the door. The wailing of sirens stopped. Our classmates chattered at the entrance of our hideaway. Twiggs flipped on the transistor radio as we heard people coming through the bushes for us. We stood just before they arrived and kissed each other on the mouth. Then we raised our arms, leaned our heads back, and thrust out our chests.
Parker grew up in Oahu, Hawaii and has been looking for an excuse to move back there from the snow and cold of Maine for about a hundred years. To all his buddies he grew up with on the islands that informed this story, love you guys: Joel, Willie, Holly and Jane. His fiction and non-fiction have appeared in The Common, The Coachella Review, and CONSEQUENCE magazine, among others. His personal essay, “Detox,” won the State of Maine’s 2021 Short Nonfiction Literary Award. “Haole Boys,” won the State of Maine’s 2023 Short Fiction Literary Award. A former baseball pitcher with the Bulldogs of Gonzaga University, he has an MFA from Bennington College and is a practicing psychotherapist in Waterboro, Maine.