Postcard from Honolulu
David was puzzled by the envelope he held in his hand. Like every other Friday morning, his desk was covered in the usual blizzard of faxes, letters, and phone messages from family doctors or psychiatrists referring their patients to the clinic. But this envelope drew his attention because it was the size of a greeting card, hand-addressed to DR. D. LIPMAN in block letters, and—he turned it over to check on the reverse side—it had no return address. Even more curious was a postmark with a palm tree on a beach.
Photo by Roberto Nickson on Unsplash
He tried to remember if he knew anyone in Hawaii. The last trip he had made there was on his honeymoon, two decades ago. He got lost in memories of palm trees, warm rumbling surf, and Katherine in, and out of, her bathing suit.
Things had been going better recently. That morning, she had unexpectedly pulled him into the shower. Afterward, as they dried each other, she looked up and whispered. “David, why don’t we get a dinner reservation this weekend? Just the two of us.”
In the middle of fond erotic memories, he heard Tony’s voice from next door. “Hey David, any interest in Wok n’ Roll for lunch?”
“Sure, give me a minute.” He looked the envelope over once more, shrugged, and placed it unopened next to the phone.
When he returned from lunch, after washing the sticky residue of lemon chicken from his fingers, he was distracted by a question from a student, and then by an irate psychiatrist complaining about her patient being marooned on the waiting list. Then, he dived head on into appointments. He left at six and forgot about the letter over the weekend.
At ten on Monday as he picked up the ringing phone, he saw the envelope propped up between the phone and printer. “Yes, what’s your patient’s name again?” He scribbled it on a notepad. “Thanks, I’ll get back to you later today.”
Curious, he retrieved his letter opener, slit the envelope open, and slipped out a toner-streaked photocopy of an obituary from the Honolulu Star Advertiser.
Gloria Gomez died in Honolulu July 10, 2002, age fifty-seven, of cervical cancer. Ms. Gomez moved to Hawaii twelve years ago and adopted the state into her heart, in particular the interests of sex workers and under-privileged Hawaiians. Ms. Gomez, known also by her professional name Sunny Sunday, gave as her previous occupation a “lifter of spirits and other body parts.” Upon her arrival in Hawaii, she gave up her old life, and started her second vocation, helping sex workers to start new lives. She began the Wish Foundation, her legacy with its one-stop source of health, employment, and educational services for women and men escaping the oldest profession. Ms. Gomez energetically advocated for sex workers, charmed the powerful, and profanely dismissed her critics. She left no family, but she gave thanks to the state agencies who supported Wish, and to her psychologist in Vancouver, Canada, Dr. David Lipman, who helped her “escape my personal purgatory” resulting from years of escort work.
David checked in the envelope to see if there was a note explaining who sent this. Nothing. He read it again, stared out the window at the heavy low-hanging clouds, and saw Sunny, all five feet, zero inches, towering stiletto heels, and apple-red cheeks matching her lipstick.
He called health records. “Hi, Heather, this is David Lipman. Do you have an old chart of mine…last name of Gomez, first name Gloria.” Fifteen minutes later, David walked next door to retrieve her file.
...
I couldn’t get myself out of the cramped apartment to slink down the dirty, stinky staircase. No clouds outside. You’d have thought Sunny Sunday would be happy with blue sky, but outside bad things happen, things so bad that…I can’t say it. But my lungs were gonna explode if I didn’t get air. So badly needed to see the new doctor, but so, so scared.
I remember that day, dug deep in depression, chest tied up so tight I couldn’t breathe. And I felt dirty all over from men grabbing me and staring at my nakedness. I could feel their fingers inside me. Years of selling myself left nothing but disgust, despite scrubbing with cleaning solution. I pounded my leg. What to do? I’d survived this long by street smarts, not school smarts, since I overstayed my visa and hid in the dark part of Canada.
I flew from my small village north of Manila when I was eighteen, eager to get away to a better life. My mom had ten kids and worked in the fields until she died. Didn’t want that for me.
I was sponsored by a family with two children who paid my ticket to come to Vancouver. Little Robert and Geoffrey were good boys, but their mom wasn’t around so I had a twenty-four-seven job. And there was their father, telling me, “You refuse, I’ll send your ass back to your village.”
After I ran away from the family, I found the only work available to me without a visa. I couch-surfed, one of six girls in a dirty one-bedroom apartment filled with cockroaches and bed bugs. We shared the bed by sleeping in shifts. At work, the girls protected each other by remembering license plates, smiling at the driver when he was leaving with our friend, “Surprise, you’re on candid camera.” All these precautions and still having to cover cuts and bruises with shovels of makeup.
But now, trying to escape hooking, I was trapped in my tiny apartment for over two months. Desperate to see a shrink. I asked myself what’s the cleanest, safest way to the hospital? Where there’s extra oxygen if I can’t breathe? Where I don’t have to step in strange men’s filth? I had an idea.
...
The obituary next to his coffee mug, David reviewed Sunny’s file. He couldn’t think of her as Gloria, the name didn’t fit. He recalled the phone call two decades ago from the hospital emergency room in the acute care building next door. “Dr. Lipman, this is unusual, but you have a patient here in the ER. The paramedics want to take their ambulance and go.”
“One of my patients is suicidal?”
“No. Seems as if this is her first appointment. She came by ambulance…” The nurse lowered her voice. “The paramedics are perplexed, no medical emergency, no suicide risk. Said she couldn’t breathe, but her oxygen saturation was normal from the moment they assessed her.”
“This is my two o’clock appointment, Ms. Gomez?”
“Says her name is Sunny…Sunny Sunday.”
“Well, she’s in the wrong building. Send her over.”
“She refuses to go alone and the paramedics want to leave.”
“Okay, I’ll be right there.” David thought about the crowded ER. “How will I spot her?”
“Oh, you can’t miss her.” A chuckle followed by a click.
He walked into the ER past a lineup of double-parked ambulances under the covered drive through. IV bags sagged off gurneys lining hallways filled by a chorus of moaning misery. David’s nose always reacted to the sour scents of vomit and disinfectant. But that day, he was distracted by a lilting soprano voice rising to the ceiling lights.
When he walked to the admitting desk, a blonde nurse raised her eyebrows and nodded to her right.
David followed her gaze and saw lustrous black hair swept back from a dusky complexion and red lipstick. Five-inch leopard skin heels, skintight jeans, and a black bustier, with a mid-forties ring of flesh draping over the belt. She was comforting an elderly lady, evidently a stranger, rocking in pain. “Mrs. Jones, don’ worry, don’ be scared. Your daughter will come. Sure she’s parking the car now.” She patted the woman’s blue-veined arthritic hands.
“It hurts so horribly.”
“Mrs. Jones, let me rub your shoulder. The doctor will give you something soon.” She rose and started gently massaging the woman’s shoulders. “Would you like me to sing to you?”
David approached, reluctant to interrupt. “Ms. Gomez?”
She turned abruptly. Her eyes, framed in almonds of eyeliner, appraised him carefully. Seduction framed the lips, but desperation peeked from the pupils. After a moment, the corners of her lips turned up. “Doctor. So scared I couldn’t get here to see you. Thought I’d die.”
He recalled now what he whispered to himself all those years ago. “This is going to be a learning experience.”
...
Dr. David is a nice man. Respectful and funny. Didn’t tell him for the first few sessions of therapy what I did for a living. Hard for me to trust people. When I told him I worked as a hooker, he didn’t blink. Not like the usual doctor who thinks they’re going to catch the clap when you cough. After the second trip out to the hospital, when the paramedics told him I shouldn’t call an ambulance to take me to see a shrink, he laughed. “Gloria…” This was before I got him to call me Sunny. “You have your personal red and white limousine service.” He leaned close and whispered, “You and I are going to ditch the limo.”
He managed to get me to his office first by keeping me company on the bus, telling me stories about him and his wife taking their daughters to Disneyland, getting me to ride the bus two blocks, five blocks, even longer by myself. I was shaking but he told me, “Just breathe and look at me, not the rest of the people.”
I gasped, “Lungs don’t work, I’m going to die.”
He just smiled and told me “No Sunny, you’re going to keep breathing for many years, until I’m retired and in the nursing home. It’s just fear.” I gradually started to believe him. We held contests to see who could get dizzy first from hyper… hyperven…breathing fast, him or me. Told me he had a panic attack himself during a high stress time in his life. First time I didn’t feel alone since I came to Canada.
Dr. David works so hard for me, but he sometimes stares sadly out the window. The first time I noticed this was when I saw the picture of his family on the bookshelf and told him, “Dr. David, you have two cute girls and a beautiful wife.” When I mentioned how his wife could be a movie star, he looked at me—not in surprise—but what is that emotion? Like he’s carrying something really heavy on his shoulders.
I haven’t made it easy for Dr. David. One Friday afternoon, I wouldn’t go back to my apartment because I knew Behrouz the bum was waiting to force me to hook again. Nowhere to go, so I thought I’d get admitted to hospital if I “played the suicide card.” Behrouz couldn’t get in the hospital, could he?
Later, Dr. David told me if I wanted help, there were better ways to ask for it. This is one of a whole bunch of sayings I picked up from him, like “memories don’t kill you” and “a good life is a struggle, but it’s still a good life.” That Friday night, Dr. David stood someone up at the airport—I heard him answer the phone and say he was sorry—when he got me to admit the real problem.
He shook his head, sadness in his eyes. “Ah, Sunny, why didn’t you tell me?” When I told him I couldn’t go back to my apartment because of the bum, he drove me home. When we walked up the stairs, Behrouz was leaning against the wall outside, picking his fingernails, a baseball bat leaning against the wall. Dr. David stared at the bum, not sadly, but what is the emotion that sets a man’s jaw like stone? He crooked a come-to-me-finger at my pimp, leaned close, and whispered. Behrouz turned white, looked like he wet his pants in public, and ran down the stairs. Dr. David yelled, “Remember who I know and what I said.”
...
Sipping espresso over the file, David slowly turned the pages, shaking his head, and chuckling at memories of Sunny. It had been a roller coaster of a year, thirteen months in fact, so long ago. First, he got her mobile enough to get around, then he taught her she could make herself panic and reduce her fear in the process. Then there were her nightmares, largely populated by perverted men, and cutting her ties with old friends who tried to suck her back into doing “one last trick.” And, of course, he had to convince her she could do something else for a living, make a difference outside of satisfying the itch behind men’s zippers.
Whereas he had filed down her fears into manageable chunks and built her confidence to expand her life, Sunny had opened his eyes. There were dangers he had never imagined, deviants in respectable disguise. What was that politician’s name he had discretely avoided writing in the file?
...
Dr. David got me to write stories about my customers, the scary ones that reappear in my nightmares, ghosts who follow me on the streets. The violent ones and the men who make you feel small. The purpose of writing these stories, which he got me to read aloud, was—how did he say it—“take technicolour horror movies and turn them to boring black and white.” It worked. The cruel memories vanished like fog in the sunshine, leaving only the pathetic parts to toss away in disgust like a used tissue. And he taught me to know the other men. The kind ones, there were some of those, lonely and downtrodden enough to hire a hooker to get pretend love. And the men who practice hypo
…hypo…well, I can’t pronounce it, but the sort of superior people who say one thing in public but are perverts in private. He taught me I was better than them.
One day—lots of sessions in—he nodded, “tell me a story, Sunny.” That was my time to talk about hooking, so we could peel away more of my bad memories. That day I was watching the noon news before I went to Dr. David and saw one of my clients on the TV. He was being interviewed in front of a church about sex education in schools. He was against it, said it would dirty kids’ minds.
So, I told Dr. David about this old customer who I saw on TV. His jaw dropped. Dr. David is nice but so…what’s that word…innocent, thinks everyone is good.
“Sunny, do you really mean—”
“Yeah, he was a regular.”
Dr. David leaned back and nodded with a big frown on his face.
“Knew the corner I worked. Drove by a couple of times a month.”
“Sunny, did you know who he was?”
“He used a different first name and no last name. No surprise, in my business everyone—pimps, girls, customers—all use fake names, all of us hiding our dirt from others.”
“When you found out, did—”
“First time I realized he was so religious and a big man, I did something not very nice. To test him. I asked him to talk dirty to me when we did it to see if he would, all holier than the rest of us…and he did, he came harder and more. Played with him for a few dates until I was ashamed of myself, encouraging him like this. I told him I knew who he was one night when he dropped me at my corner.”
“What then?”
“Eyes got so big. He drove off fast. Never seen him since, except on the news.”
“You could have reported him, caused him political damage.”
“Dr. David, I don’t hurt people.”
He smiled. “I know that, Sunny.”
That was Dr. David, patient and always expecting the best of me, encouraging me to be brave and improve.
...
David turned to the last page in the file. Stapled to a sheet of progress note paper was a postcard with palm trees.
Dr. David, remember when I couldn’t leave my apartment except by the red and white limo? And when I was terrified, when I saw scary shadows all around me? You told me I could ditch the limo. Now I can fly on an airplane. I am safe and finding a new life in Honolulu. Thanks for everything. Sunny.
He placed the obituary beneath the postcard.
This is a very touching and revealing story of sex workers lives. I recall you had written a small bit about Sunny Sunday before...though this is in more detail. I liked the way took turns with the narrator and also the past & present. Nicely done!