The Tahiti Yacht Club Ball

On the road again and the feeling was intoxicating. I rented my small houses in inner Melbourne.  I had money in the bank. A fistful of traveler’s checks. My cameras. A documentary film proposal.  And a reel of film to show potential backers.  I felt ready for another adventure. I was flying away, escaping, rising into the clouds fortunate and relieved to be flying solo. 

Melbourne’s Tullamarine airport faded into the hazy distance and the blue Pacific Ocean glinted in the harsh Australian light as I headed for America.  I wondered when I might return. My plans were open ended, to travel to San Francisco, and then south to Los Angeles, keep traveling into Mexico and South America and then make my way back to New York City. Hopefully have a film project by then, 

It’s a long flight to America from the other side of the world, almost twenty-four hours and I decided to break the journey in the French protectorate of Tahiti. The French invaded in 1842 and hadn’t left French Polynesia when I landed at Tahiti’s Faa'a International Airport in November, 1976.

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Oh Tahiti, such a spoiled and beautiful creature.The French colonialists came and tourists with pockets full of money followed. Your women, beautiful vahine, dusky and hair flowing to your shoulders and skin like honey and eyes that dance and shine.  I smell pungent frangipani and tiare the national flower of the island, precious jewels resting in dazzling settings in shiny, dark, green foliage, blossoms tucked behind your ears. Hibiscus blooms are shining in the shadows. 

I take a cab into town. Vesper motor cycles sputter, women perch on pinion seats, zoom and swerve, lithe arms wrap around their drivers. Legs delicately displayed, knees clasped tight their modesty beguiling. The streets lined with small shops full of curios and beads strung on displays. The pluck and strum of ukuleles floats from bars and cafes, windows flung wide open and crowded buses push and bully their way through the traffic.

In the harbor I see expensive ocean-going yachts and in the distance, gray French warships. The military vessels remind me that Tahiti is where the French test nuclear bombs. Between 1966 and 1974, Tahiti was subjected to fallout from 41 atmospheric nuclear tests conducted 720 miles away at Moruroa Atoll and Fangataufa, in the Tuamotu archipelago. And then between 1975 and 1996 came 140 underground nuclear tests at the same sites.

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Herman Melville was imprisoned in Tahiti in 1842 and his experiences became the basis for his novel Omoo. Robert Louis Stevenson spent time in Papeete in 1888 and French artist, Paul Gauguin journeyed here in 1891 and stayed until his death.I was to visit the Musée Gauguin on the other side of the island one rainy afternoon. 

I drove my rented jeep, hood down, feeling the spiced air and the warm rain on my skin, marveling at the beauty. The buildings and hotels were not tall pretentious monoliths, but sat low, obscured by coconut trees as the government had legislated. Everything was green and wet, the undergrowth tumbling down to the roadside and the local people, self-contained and diffident, going about their business as I left the bustle of Papeete and headed into the countryside.   

Gauguin was frustrated by lack of recognition in France and financially destitute when he arrived on the island in the late eighteen hundreds. He sailed to the tropics to escape European civilization and "everything that is artificial and conventional". He made several attempts to find a tropical paradise where he might live on fish and fruit and paint in his increasingly primitive style. There were short stays in Martinique and before he found Tahiti he worked as a laborer on the Panama Canal.

His works of the period are full of quasi-religious symbolism and an eroticized view of the inhabitants of Polynesia. He assimilated with the natives and made love to the women, clashed often with the colonial authorities and the Catholic Church. He died of syphilis, his body weakened by alcohol and his dissipated life. It was 1903 and he was 54 years old. My father, in Melbourne, Australia was two years old. 

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I stay for two weeks in Tahiti. I take deck space on a tramp steamer with the natives and their chickens, to visit the islands of Raiatea and Huahina, eight hours steaming time from the capital. And in the distance I see the clouded peaks of Bora Bora and the sound track of  Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific and I feel like a shipwrecked sailor on Siddhartha’s journey, part of the flotsam and jetsam under coconut trees, tropic spender, runaways.

There is a young French couple on the beach. She is lovely looking and her voice is like music. He is just beautiful; slim, tanned with curling hair to his shoulders. They’ve worked at Club Med, around the world, but now they’ve dropped out and live in this small shack near the sea. We talk for a while in fractured English and then I leave. It’s a bit strange to just leave like this because nobody else is here – just us - and it’s rare in this French colony to find people who speak English.  But I reckon they’ve come to get away  and I don’t want to destroy their privacy. I return to Papeete to prepare for the last leg of my journey to America.

I was in love with Tahiti and wondered if I should leave at all. Life was so easy here. Sitting at outdoor cafés in the cool of early morning, sipping café au lait and breaking freshly baked crusty French bread slathered with creamy butter. Watching the locals, their floral patterned sarongs and colored shirts, hair shinning like Raven’s wings moving slowly quietly smiling.  At dusk near the wharf, eating  ceviché, the briny taste of fresh raw fish marinated in lime juice with hot spices, sipping Hinano beer.  One evening I met a local journalist interested in my film and he invited me to show it on the local television station. And then he invited me to the local yacht club’s annual ball.

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I remember it was the last day before the leg to San Francisco. I attending a church service at the London Missionary Society. The L M S were in the vanguard, the point of the spear of colonialism. The dreadful paradox of it all did not escape me but I loved the old familiar Christian hymns. I’d sung the same songs at morning assembly and sitting in the midst, struck by the simple unity and harmony vibrating deep in my heart,  a strong chord somewhere deep inside,  I began to weep. It was grief,  like weeping with a woman you love, weeping because you’re leaving but still loving her and going away regardless. As I did with my wife Libby.  A fruitless weeping that makes you feel no better at all – just terribly sad.

The women’s choir seemed from another time and place, dressed in flowing white cassocks with small black hats perched atop their flowing black hair. No longer were they the beauteous, idealized goddesses I’d seen on the beaches, in the bars and on the streets.  There was an innocence and transparent splendor in their simple harmonies that warmed my soul.  I wished I had their belief and trust but could not find it in my dark heart. My sweet and bitter tears flowed and I shuddered with gratitude to feel and connect with their simple faith. The music penetrated my very essence. After the service I went outside into the bright sunlight, smelt the clean fresh air and walked back to my hotel feeling uplifted and sublime.

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I was staying in a hotel straight out of a Graham Greene novel. The paint was peeling, the windows were shuttered, the fragrance of sweet frangipani drifting in the air and the overhead fans slowly circling. It was my last night and the night of the yacht club ball. 

As I jumped into my rented jeep I heard the strum of ukuleles flowing from a bar across the street. The windows and doors were flung wide open and soft yellow light spilled out onto the sidewalk. I could see the patrons inside, tall, beautiful Tahitians, dressed stylishly, sitting on stools, legs crossed or standing talking and sipping their drinks.  As I entered the bar that night they turned as one like a flock of birds, smiled and invited me in.

I was in a kind of paradise, sipping strong liquor, surrounded by exotic creatures who might easily have slipped off a Gauguin canvas. I could have stayed all night but had my appointment at the yacht club ball.   I invited two of my friends to join me,  now well primed for the party and we clambered into the jeep.

The yacht club ball was in full swing and the champagne was flowing when we finally arrived.  We sat and  I recall the furtive glances and smirks at the table. As the party wound down that night, I held my partner closer and kissed her hard mouth without reservation.  She was tall and languorous in my arms and I felt an urgent need to return to the hotel.  It was late and the streets deserted as we left, we were drunk and aroused and we rubbed against the dew-laden shrubs and decorous bushes that lined the entrance as we swayed down the narrow path to my room.

I shut the door behind us and reached as she threw her head back in supplication,  my hand found her crotch.  But what was this? I felt the swelling of her sex and suddenly realized this was no vahine, no woman, this was a Tahitian transvestite. “Il a homme,” I exclaimed in excitement and shock. But alas, is was too late for discrimination, fools walk in where angels fear to tread.

As dawn broke my two companions left leaving me with head thumping and a kind of virginity broken. I smiled at my naiveté and a kind or elation. I had walked on the wild side in paradise, not knowing, now knowing.  I would  pay the price.