A Rogue's Yarn

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A ROGUE’S YARN

John Finch is an aging surfer who dwells undetected in the basement of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Waikiki. He has a dark secret, an obsession, and a following.
From under an ancient banyan tree he preaches to homeless denizens of Kapiolani Park on the subject of rope, its serpentine structure -- which he likens to breaking waves and the DNA molecule -- and its vengeful role in world history, as well as his own. He suspects he’s being watched by Dog the Bounty Hunter, and possibly Five-O.
A vacationing Tahitian girl disappears.
Finch thinks he might have been a professor at one time, a classmate of Bill Clinton and Christopher Hitchens at Oxford in the late ’60s. He was at the pub the night Clinton did NOT inhale smoke from a fat joint of smoldering Cannabis sativa.
A pretty tourist from Texas goes missing.
Finch insists that a careful reading of “Rumpelstiltskin” and “Sleeping Beauty” reveals the malevolent intentions of plants. “It was in the afternoon of the Sixth Day, that the ‘meek,’ in the form of vegetable fibers, set out to inherit The Garden by supplying us with enough rope to hang ourselves.”
What happened to the blond-haired Danish chick?
He warns his substance-addled adherents that oil is nothing more than the ooze of old plants still intent on supplying us with the rope whose end is finally in sight.
Helen Takamora did not deserve such a fate.
Finch is greatly influenced in his beliefs by a man he channels from the 19th century, one Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward, the disreputable inventor of the Wardian Case, a portable terrarium used by British botanists to steal plants useful to the Empire. Or, was the case the plants’ idea?
Has anyone seen the young coed from the University of Hawaii? What a shame.
All is well, relatively speaking, until Finch falls in love with Leilani, a lovely hula dancer with secrets of her own.