As they say, if you're perceptive enough and if you have a portfolio of life experience, you can see disaster approaching from a mile away.
Years ago, in the early 90s, this wreck of a woman, a local Filipino who lived in the Waipahu area, walked into the store where I once worked. It was six in the evening where everyone was transitioning from getting off of work to stopping at the supermarket to buy food for dinner. Somewhere in between there, people would stop at our locale to get some poke' and poi before heading home. I noticed her the second she walked in, she was dressed in a plaid skirt and business suit, and she stuck out among all the other local people who were dressed in their everyday clothes. She lingered for about forty-five minutes before she finally walked up to the counter. Jeff Wong worked the cash register that night. I half paid attention to the conversation. She asked for shoyu poke', poi, and ogo, to which Jeff obliged her. Then, I headed to the walk-in freezer to take a break. I'd been working from noon up until now, and I hadn't had my lunch yet. Mind you, my break took a whole hour. When I went back out to the sales counter, that woman was still there, talking Jeff up. Phone numbers were finally exchanged, and at the end of the night, she was in the parking lot, sitting on the hood of her Nissan, waiting for Jeff.That woman ended up twisting Jeff around two ways from Sunday. She had him so wrapped around her fingers that by the end of the month, he'd bought her a brand new car. In six months, she convinced him to buy a motorcycle specifically so that she could be seen riding it around town. By the end of the year, Jeff put down a deposit for a house at one of the newer upcoming developments in what became Waipio Gentry. Once that was all said and done, she moved her family in, but there ended up being no space in that new domicile for Jeff. He would never get to live in the home because she suddenly broke it off with him. Needless to say, Jeff was beyond furious, but this horrible woman had already pre-planned a restraining order. For the entire year that she ran him through the mill, she never once slept with him. She gave him kisses and hot make-out sessions but never once did she do the deed. At twenty-three years old, Jeff Wong committed suicide by hanging himself in the garage of the home he bought for Eliza Rosa.
~
Today, as I was leaving a venue that sorely needed a blessing, a homeless woman raced across the parking lot, asking me if I wouldn't mind blessing her before I went. She was short and dressed in a navy-styled dungaree shirt and jogging shorts. Her hair was colored salt and peppered and kept up in a bun covered with a baseball cap. Her voice was harsh and very rough. She told me that her life took a downward spiral some thirty-odd years ago and that she'd been homeless ever since. "Every day, I witness violence," she stated. "Fighting, rape, so many other terrible things. I need a blessing, please."
"Look at me," I said. She couldn't bring herself to raise her head because, as she intimated, she felt that she was not deserving to cast her eyes upon a person so holy. "Don't be foolish," I scolded her. "I'm no more holy than the next person."
I proceeded to speak the words that would lift her heart from the river of troubles in which she was drowning. Then, after the prayer, I walked away and went back to my car. "Thank you," she called from behind me.
"You're welcome, Rosa," I waved without even looking at her.
"You knew?" She bellowed.
"Yes," I kept walking.
"Then you knew Jeff's ghost has been haunting me this whole time?"
"Yes," I was almost to my car.
"Then, did the blessing even help?" She screeched.
I stopped and replied, "It helped Jeff,"
I only heard a cavernous scream, like someone was being dragged down a long dark tunnel.
photo credit Lee Jeffries
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