Love and Loathing in the islands

Adriana Bardolino

Description

Filled with love, art, history, romance, humor, and sex, this memoir shares the story of a woman maneuvering through the sexual revolution in the seventies, searching for love and Gauguin.
In this sequel to the memoir Confessions of a Hippie, author Adriana Bardolino struggles to make her art and work synonymous. She falls in
and out of love with masters of distance, while seeking true love. She still records her feelings and life events in journals, and she tucks precious
photos away in albums as unsolved mysteries.
Approaching thirty, Bardolino searches for something to replace the security of the old commune. She seeks therapy to unlock her self destructive habits. On a month’s vacation to Hawaii, she experiences an artistic rebirth and decides the island of Maui is where she belongs. A
tragic turn of events in her life thwarts her dream. She is tossed into an abyss of longing and regret. Filled with love, art, romance, humor, sex, and history, mostly on a tropical island, Love and Loathing in the Islands shares Bardolino’s story from 1975 to 1981 when she faced a crossroads in her life. Will Adriana find Gauguin and true love?

Sujets

• Relationships
• Women
• Hawái
• Literature
• Biography
• Memoir
• Relationship
• Hawaii
• Entertainment
• Poetry
• Art
• Autobiography
• History
• Sex
• Romance
• Love
• Hawaï

Informations

• Publié par: iUniverse
• Date de parution: 30 juin 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781663228239
• Langue: English

Extrait

Other Books by Adriana Bardo lino


Confessions of a Hippie, Always Searching for L ove

Love and Redemption in the Tropics, Missing Gaug uin


LOVE AND LOATHING IN THE ISLANDS
Searching for Gauguin



ADRIANA BARDOLINO






LOVE AND LOATHING IN THE ISLANDS
SEARCHING FOR GAUGUIN

Copyright © 2022 Adriana Bardolino.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.



iUniverse
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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

ISBN: 978-1-6632-2824-6 (sc)
ISBN: 978-1-6632-2823-9 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022908810

iUniverse rev. date: 01/18/2024


Some people fall in love with a person forever I fell in love with a p lace.



CONTENTS
Pre face
Chapter 1 I Left My Heart on Maui
Chapter 2 Bois F roid
Chapter 3 Alice in Wonder land
Chapter 4 Escape from Bab ylon
Chapter 5 Not an Ordinary Life
Chapter 6 Stormy Wea ther
Chapter 7 Birds of a Fea ther
Chapter 8 Monkey Busi ness
Chapter 9 Mango Br eath
Chapter 10 Girl on Fire
Chapter 11 Barking Dogs
Chapter 12 Hooked on You
Chapter 13 Poor Butte rfly
Chapter 14 Two Peas in a Pod
Chapter 15 Hot Blo oded
Chapter 16 Bad Case of Loving You
Chapter 17 Blush like You Mea n It
Chapter 18 Hair Makes the Man
Chapter 19 The Mad land
Chapter 20 Aloh a Oe


PREFACE
I never had a dream of being a starving artist in a tiny apartment in New York City. I was twenty-eight, and my goal was to make my art and work synonymous. I was also maneuvering my way through the second decade of the sexual revolution, which began in the sixties and continued into the seventies. After a few failed love affairs, I was looking for true love, hoping that such a thing really existed. I was seeking a relationship where my sense of “self” did not disappear into the mundane of everyday life. Along the way I realize I am addicted to romantic love, which I need like a drug to feel alive. I also discovered that even paradise has a loathsome underb elly.
A break in the harmony of my communal family, whom I had lived with during the late sixties and early seventies, forced me to search for a new home. We’d spent eight years traveling between New York and California until politics split our commune a part.
I experience renewed artistic inspiration in Hawaii and see a possible future path open before me. Romance is sparked when I meet a young artist, a New York transplant, who lives on the island. I fall in love with the island of Maui. I want to leave everything I know and everyone I love behind to pursue a life in Gauguin (in other words, art). Upon returning to the mainland after my vacation, I decide that Maui is where I want to live and vow to return to the island, until a tragic event thwarts my plan. When everything goes up in flames and turns to ashes, I seek therapy to release myself from a self-imposed bondage. My life begins to spin out of control like a roulette wheel, and I want to get off.
Upon leaving one’s friends and family there is always apprehension, but for some, the need for a change in one’s life, and well-being, supersedes everything else. We tend to romanticize our friends while apart, but when we are with them again, we are stuck in the character they see us as. My communal brothers and sisters, mentioned in my first book, Confessions of a Hippie: Always Searching for Love , remain an integral part of my story. Although I leave my hippie days behind, I maintain many of the spiritual beliefs, as well as the concept of free love (well, when it suit s me).
I meet some crazy characters along my tropical journey, each one adding richness and beauty to my life. I almost miss the disco era completely, having been a hippie during its peak craze, but I catch the tail end when I meet a tall intriguing stranger. My life in paradise becomes a novel, and explodes in beauty and passion. What could possibly go w rong?
There are a series of journals I kept during the late sixties and seventies that my memoir is largely based on. They include so much detail of my life and experiences. I entered my thoughts and feelings in those notebooks in an effort to unravel the mysteries of life. My thoughts and emotions flow out in poems, drawings, and watercolors on the pages. I describe in detail the carnival ride that becomes my journey. I find that life is indeed complicated and sometimes poses difficult choices. I recorded excerpts from books I’d read in an attempt to define an experience that paralleled my own, perhaps in a way I couldn’t express myself. I jotted down lyrics of songs to explain my feelings at a specific moment in time. Isn’t that the wonder of music? How it prompts us to remember, with graphic detail, a certain person or event in our l ives.
My memoir is written in the language and expressions my friends and I used at that time. I describe people the way I saw them and events the way I experienced them, which may not have been theirs. The names of the characters are all fictitious, as well as some of the places we inhabited. There are explicit sex scenes that were part of my story—well, they are part of life and love. Irish poet and playwright Oscar Wilde said, “Everything in the world is about sex, except sex. Sex is about p ower.”
Writing my memoir has tossed me back into my past, reacquainting me with people I loved and memories, as well as times of great loss. I’ve always found people I’d loved hard to put aside. I think that once we love someone and share our lives, there is no forgetting. Even after their physical presence is gone from us, they remain part of our being. I hope you will enjoy my story and even have a few laughs along the way. Perhaps you will find something of yourself in me. It was a crazy but wonderful time.
As the plane was circling the airport I stared out the window at a large mountain. I could see fires burning below as we descended through the clouds. The airport was much less constructed than I expected, with an open-air terminal surrounded by fields of sugar cane as far as the eye could see. For a moment I felt uncertainty. Walking onto the runway the trade winds were so strong they almost knocked me over. The palm trees were swaying wildly, and I could see a rainbow in the distance. Then the sweet smell of the air enveloped me with an intoxicating sense of freedom, and I felt a thrill. It was like entering he aven.


ONE I LEFT MY HEART ON MAUI
Millions upon millions of years ago, when the continents were already formed and the principal feature of the earth had been decided, there existed, then as now, one aspect of the world that dwarfed all others. It was a mighty ocean, resting uneasily to the east of the largest continent, a restless, ever-changing, gigantic body of water that would later be described as pac ific.
— James A. Michener, Ha waii

T here I was on a tiny island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. The island was Maui, part of the Hawaiian chain, one of the remotest places on earth. It was a beautiful spring day in 1975, and I was looking forward to a month’s vaca tion.
I walked up a dirt driveway to a small cottage in Haiku. It looked scanty compared to the Garden of Eden I had just left. I assumed someone was home because there were two cars in the driveway. I nervously knocked, wondering if I should have let my new friends leave me and drive away, but when I looked back, their jeep was already far down the road.
After a few minutes, a guy opened the door. I knew right away it was Loretta’s ex-boyfriend, because he was just as she’d described him. He looked like a Greek Adonis with dark, curly hair and dark skin and eyes.
He said, “Yeah. What can I do for you?”
“You’re Sammy, right? Samuel Co oper?”
“Yeah, that’ s me.”
“I’m Adriana, Adriana Bardolino. I’m Loretta Perino’s friend. Didn’t she tell you I was co ming?”
He glanced down at my backpack a little dumbfounded, maybe even a bit annoyed. “No, I haven’t talked to her in mo nths.”
I was at a loss for words and stood there pondering my opt ions.
“I guess you’d better come inside,” he said, taking my backpack and tossing it on the f loor.
His place was a one-room cottage, and I wondered where I would sleep. I noticed a woman standing in the kitchen area. She looked eerily like Loretta. She was cutting up avocados and toma toes.
She looked up and asked, “Are you hungry? I was just preparing l unch.”
“I haven’t eaten since breakfast, so lunch sounds good to me,” I rep lied.
Sammy said, “That’s my girlfriend, Rain.” He walked over to her, squeezed her around the waist, and gave her a peck on the c heek.
“So Loretta sent you here to find me, huh?” He shook his head, laughing. “How the hell is Loretta doing these days back in Broo klyn?”
“I came here directly from San Francisco, but I spoke to her a few weeks ago. She’s fine.