Hey, brah, you got da kine?

So about getting pounded in Ewa Beach, Hawaii (see below). My dad was stationed at Barber’s Point Naval Air Station in 1960, and he bought a house in a pretty little cul-de-sac barely a 15-minute bike rider from the beach.

But I went to school in Eva . At least I did for 9th grade. Eighth grade I endured on the naval base, where I took classes with all the other service brats. Note: One of my classmates was named Robert Boff, whom we called Biff.

Get it? Biff Boff. Hilarious.

Anyway, come 9th grade we dependents had to leave the base. And all the parents with money sent their kids to private school. The rest of us were left with … Eva.

I drove through Eva in 1995 while on my second honeymoon, and it looked pretty much the same – a little burg at the edge of sugar cane fields. Ewa Beach had become unrecognizable because of all the development . My old neighborhood, in fact, had become closed-up and dark, as if the residents were trying to keep the new world out.

But Eva? Not a whole lot of development there. And as we drove through, I remembered the first day my mother dropped me off for school: I might as well have stepped into another world.

And I had. Whereas the students at the Barber’s Point school had been almost exclusively white, Eva was an Asian polyglot . In my home-room of 30 students, maybe five were white. The others were of Chinese, Japanese, Hawaiian, Samoan, Filipino and various mixes of mostly Asian ethnicity.

So, just imagine, here’s a tall, skinny, inhibited kid, thrown into an environment in which not only did he stand out, not only did he fail continually to understand the cultural mores, but he couldn’t even understand the language .

For example, if someone asked – as might have happened that first day – “Whachoo lookin’ at?” it wasn’t wise to answer, “Nothing.” Because the very next question was, “Whachoo call me? You call me nothin’?” And the fight was on.

Here’s another: If someone from Hawaii says, “Hey, haole , you like beef?” he isn’t interested in how you want your steak cooked.

Now your goose, that’s another matter completely.

Below: Jack Lord never had to worry about getting pounded after school.

Photo by Warner Bros. Pictures