Post #113722 by Sabu The Coconut Boy on Fri, Sep 10, 2004 7:59 PM

When I was a child in the 1960s, Tiki embodied everything that was mysterious and exotic and taboo and belonged to adulthood. I didn't necessarily try to understand or even want to understand it, but as we inevitably drove on a Sunday night past the the Islander's guttering torches on La Cienega Boulevard or some apartment building with a tall tiki-god floodlit from below, a chill would travel up my spine and my mind would duck under its covers to think about exotic places and the mysteries of adulthood that I might one day experience. My memories of Los Angeles at that time are so drenched in nostalgia for me, that they can often bring me to tears. Tikis seemed to be everywhere in those memories, tucked away in every neighborhood, tall stands of palm trees pointing them out like beacons.

I also remember being five years old and huddling against my dad in the Tiki Room at Disneyland when the lights went out and the lightning flashed and thunder and rain rolled against the windows, my eyes wide with those wonderful emotions of fear and delight mixed together.

I still get those same emotions today when I walk into a Sam's Seafood, or a Bahooka, or the Warehouse in Marina Del Rey, or any old relic from the Sixties that's dark and dusty and filled with waterfalls and exotic music and glass float lamps and carved primitive wooden effigies. I chill still runs up my spine and never really leaves until I walk out. Every meal in one of these places is a ritual of adulthood. Every drink is a ceremony.

To this feeling of awe and delight, a new, heartachingly-sweet, adult emotion called melancholy has been added. It comes because there are so few of these places left. Thinking back to the dozens of tiki temples that I saw all the time, never visited, and now never will - it's almost unbearable to me. Because of that, times with friends in an old tiki bar are exceptionally sweet. Conversations are heightened and savored, as are the drinks and food. Humuhumu's got it right - I'm totally relaxed, yet all my senses are keyed up. There's constantly that tingle on the back of my neck when in the midst of my enjoyment, I'm catching torch-lit tikis out of the corner of my eye.

My love for Tiki Archeology is part and parcel of same. Once, I travelled to an island in the Bahamas with some scientists to look for a species of giant iguana that was marked in all the textbooks as Extinct, and hadn't been seen since the early 1960s. On the last day of the trip, after driving for hours on remote, forgotten dirt roads, and hacking through dense jungle, we found the iguanas, and actually caught and photographed them. That feeling of excitement and satisfaction is the same feeling I get when I find a tiki apartment building that I never new existed, or an old tiki bar in my neighborhood that somehow escaped my scrutiny before. It's silly but it's true.

Sabu