The Professor, the Pool Guy, and the Paniolo

A young child with a mysterious blood disease. A widening gyre that mobilizes people from Hilo to Japan into a support team. A most unusual subplot involving the stock market and country music. Stay tuned to this true story as told in real time in these pages—because even we don’t know where it’s headed.

Orchestrated and conducted by Mark Panek. To read previous chapters, click here.

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Chapter 5 – The Twenty-Six Percent Solution

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The Pool Guy shows up the Wednesday after my Tokyo trip.

By that time, Noriko and I—and Kenken, too, in his own ten-year-old-speak—we’ve gotten pretty skilled at rifling off to people exactly what aplastic anemia even is.

A low “absolute neutrophil” count has left Kenken pretty much unprotected from infection, so anything like a flu getting passed around his sixth-grade classroom, a bad reaction to food, his compulsive need to touch touch touch the wrong item at Target—any of it can send him to the hospital for a weeks-long course of antibiotics.

Thankfully, his red cell count is just barely out of the normal range, so his energy level hasn’t been affected—so far. But his severely low platelet count means that Kenken’s blood will have a hard time coagulating, so a deep cut would mean a mad rush to the ER for an immediate blood transfusion. Deep enough—say, a compound fracture suffered on the baseball field—and you’d have to watch him bleed out right before your eyes.

 Is there a treatment?

 If it’s determined to be an auto-immune disorder (that is, if Kenken’s body is attacking its own marrow), they’ll put him in Kapi‘olani for a few months and suppress his immune system while we pray for the marrow to regenerate and hope he doesn’t die of some hospital infection in the meantime, like my Dad did when he went in for gall bladder surgery and never came out.

Otherwise, the only hope would be a bone marrow transplant, which requires some sort of DNA match that turns out to correlate almost exactly with… race… narrowing considerably the chances of a mixed-race kid like Kenken finding a perfect match. The invasive procedure is risky enough on its own (again, the body could easily view the new marrow as an invading disease and attack it) that no doctor even considers it without a platelet count of less than twenty, and even then only after a string of blood transfusions.

The reason these guys treat waiting itself as some sort of treatment, I read, is that you can expect something like 13% of these cases to “spontaneously improve”—somehow the body rallies against whatever toxin is causing the marrow’s failure to produce blood cells (that’s what bone marrow does, we learned: it makes blood cells), and the numbers just begin to rise on their own.

Still, like me getting the news on the phone in Tokyo, nobody can believe it when we tell them that all you can do is “monitor him.”

Wait. 

And wait. 

Some people have aplastic anemia for life, we learned, meaning that years from now, an older Kenken might be denied health insurance thanks to his preexisting condition. Worse: hard as it is to imagine Kenken in a fight, even like, ten or fifteen years from now, a single punch to the head in some drunken college bar brawl could give him a stroke, if not kill him on the spot. 

Plenty of other more likely but equally frightening scenarios are not difficult to imagine. In fact, they invade my thoughts about every three minutes throughout a typical day at work, where I’ve taken to leaving my phone out on the podium even during class, constantly wondering when it will alert me that, like, one of his classmates got him to fall for the old pull-out-the-chair-as-you’re-sitting-down trick, except Kenken cracked his head upon landing and is already in a helicopter headed for Kapi‘olani Hospital.

Noriko isn’t any better than me, confronted at work as she is for twelve straight hours with somebody else’s CBC blood reports, somebody else’s kid’s severe head injury, somebody else’s fill-in-the-blank. One day in the middle of one of those extra shifts she’d added to start piling whatever we could into savings in case of some extended move to… Seattle… Texas… Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia… she’s shocked to find herself full of anger, surprised to find herself wondering, for the very first time in her proud career as one of the most dedicated caring nurses you’ll ever meet, why on Earth she’s spending so much time and energy on a total stranger while her own son’s fate, should he bump heads with somebody during PE class, lay in the hands of… the DOE school nurse. 

Today, as Dave’s pool service truck pulls down our street, I’m in the middle of explaining all this to Ryan, who’s still visibly traumatized about losing not just his home to the Leilani lava flow, but also the workshop where he crafted outrigger canoe paddles for a living. His eyes widen in horror as I go on, and, looking back, well—this may have been the very moment where Ryan stepped out of his own paralyzing grief and began making a plan to move on so we could finally earn a little income from our two-bedroom next door, where he and his wife and son are staying for free. Like all of us, he’s relieved to learn it’s not leukemia. But now he has a better idea exactly what it is, so after greeting Dave, he heads back next door, walking, it seems, a little taller and with a little more purpose. 

“Hi Uncle Dave!” Kenken calls out from the pool deck—the concrete pool deck, the finished concrete pool deck, coated with sealer. It’s fun to do little pirouettes on the slick surface when water beads up on it, which is what he’s decided to do for the Pool Guy.

Dave, of course, already heard the news last week while I was in Tokyo. Although we’ve known him for a bit over four years now, and even though he often sticks around for a beer after taking care of our pool—our house is his final Wednesday stop—I was still a little surprised when Noriko told me that when she broke the news about Kenken, Dave had immediately started tearing up.

Now his face is etched with real concern.

“Well, it’s not leukemia,” I tell him. 

As with Ryan, as with me up in Tokyo, you can see a wave of relief wash over him. Then he asks me what the doctors have in mind to fix it. 

“It’s complicated,” I say, realizing that I could have simply given him the run-down I’d just given Ryan, but am hoping that this week he has time not just for a beer, but maybe three or four.

See, there’s something about the Pool Guy that makes him the perfect listener. Maybe it’s his polite and reticent New Englander background, or the professionalism that had him just coming and going after servicing the pool some Wednesdays over the years if, say, he’d arrived while we were eating dinner.

Despite all we have in common—same age, both from the East Coast, Japanese wives and hapa kids (he has two), an interest in baseball (his Sawx, my Yanks)—I can’t exactly say we’re friends in the brother-brother sense I am with, like, Shane, who helped build the rental next-door, or Ryan, with whom I started a surprisingly successful country music band a couple of years earlier.

I’d met both those guys paddling for an outrigger canoe club, and crossed open-ocean channels with each of them. Dave, I’d gotten to know because he showed up on Wednesdays. 

Yet there he is, out there on the pool deck chatting away with Kenken, measuring the water’s chemistry with that little paper stick he brings every week, and from all the way in the kitchen I realize he could be saving Kenken’s life. Seriously. I taught Kenken to swim at age three and he took to it like his mom, a Junior Olympic swimmer for Japan back in her teens. Now he’s not allowed in the ocean for fear of a scratch getting attacked by some hungry flesh-eating parasite, or just an ear infection, and try asking Dave about water parks, hotel pools—you’ll never stick a toe in one again, whatever your absolute neutrophil count is.

Anybody can sweep a pool, but this is what we pay Dave for, and all of a sudden the stakes are through the roof, and could Kenken just stop spinning on that… sealed wet concrete? Look at him go, this kid who takes a while to warm up to any adult, look at him go on and on with Uncle Dave, who’s busy calculating the water’s levels on his phone, but at the same time, listening. 

This is the part, I realize, that made us friends: the listener part. A year earlier, in fact, long before Ryan moved in, Dave stuck around a couple of times long past dark to talk me off the ledge while we were in the middle of one of the more textbook landlord-tenant horror stories you’ll ever hear. (Try Googling

“Narcissistic Personality Disorder” and you’ll find a photo of the guy who preceeded Ryan next door.) I’d spell out for other friends long tales of all the guy’s manipulative maneuvering, but looking back, it was Dave’s calm, I guess, objective proprietor-client approach to our… sessions… that got me through that hellish time. 

Once he’s through with the pool, and I set out some haole pupus and crack open the beers, Dr. Dave does not disappoint. I just kind of unload on him, even more than I did with Ryan, every detail about that first morning getting the results, the actual diagnosis and what all that means, that we might have to move up to… Texas… sell everything… whatever it takes… and even then the total lack of control, the helpless feeling that even— 

—look at my son over there with our dog Louie, sticking his fingers in Louie’s mouth, Louie’s a frikken pit bull mix, he’s not actually going to bite Kenken, but what if he’s just been eating his own shit over there in the yard? 

The whole time Dave’s… listening. I tell him about the restrictions: no sushi, no ocean, I don’t know what the hell to do about baseball, can’t bring myself to take him away from his boyz, but maybe tennis is safer, does your son’s tennis coach have any openings? 

“Noah just broke his arm,” he tells me. It’s pretty big news, but you know: Dave’s a listener. He has plenty to say but wants to hear you first. It turns out Noah, who’s a year younger than Kenken, took a spill on the tennis court and landed the wrong way. Compound fracture. White bone sticking right through the skin. You can tell Dave’s proud of his son for toughing it out, but the obvious now prevents him from getting too much into it: the same not-all-that-uncommon kid injury would have killed Kenken. Dead. 

So he changes the subject. Changes it. He slices off a hunk of bread. One of his clients bakes these wonderful baguettes with crunchy hard crusts you have to really saw through, and Dave’s brought a couple along. He starts getting back to… preexisting conditions… moving to Texas… taking unpaid medical leave from work. Suddenly Dave has that excited, urgent look he gets when there is… news… an interesting story about another client… how his Sawx acquired an important new player… his daughter Mia learned a song on the uke.

This time, the very same Pool Guy so reluctant to bet a friendly six-pack when our teams face each other—he starts talking about… ROI? 

“Return on investment,” he explains. 

Kenken’s now rummaging through the lettuce we planted next to the lanai last year, searching for Louie’s tennis ball. Dave goes on about inflation rates, and how keeping your money in a savings account reduces its purchasing power by ten percent over just three years, and how the money guys who got you into that 401(k) take fees whether the account grows or shrinks, and how you should aim for, I think I hear him say twenty six percent annually. Sure, I’m the listener now, but the locomotive running through my brain is roaring out: SLUGS LIVE IN THAT LETTUCE! RAT WORM DISEASE! 

Eventually I catch on that Dave is doing more than trying to change the subject—this money stuff is important to him. He’s actually been reading books about it, he tells me with a laugh. This is, in fact, his news of the day. 

“What do you get for your house?” He’s taking about the rental downslope we built when the vacant lot neighboring ours came up for sale a couple of years ago. The uncharacteristic money move made me feel like something of a financial player for the first time in my life. Bradda Shane talked me into building on it right away—and not just the little house, but a music studio we’d planned to build behind it much later. He coordinated the concrete slab, the framing, and the roofing, and offered plenty of advice as I worked with my own two hands to finish building it. Raised to feel like you have to call a professional to paint a house, I’m intensely proud of how I stepped way out of my comfort zones at both the bank and Home Depot, and now there it stands, ready to pay for itself. Except… 

“You mean after Ryan moves out?” I tell him. Having also served as my primary therapist with the Narcissistic Personality Disorder guy, Dave is well aware that three years past final county inspection, my “investment” has yet to produce a dime in income. 

Kenken’s finally found the tennis ball, covered in Louie’s slobber. I wish he at least had shoes on his bare feet. 

Dave pulls out his phone and starts tapping away on its calculator.

“What did you say you paid for it?” 

“Land was $110,000. Four percent loan. Septic and grading was like twenty grand. Concrete slabs, electric, plumbing. Not counting my hundreds of hours of labor, and not even counting the music studio, I’d say around $200,000 all-in.” I’m really proud of that number—insanely low for a brand-new home in Hawai‘i, even one as small as the one I built. With my own hands. “The tax assessment was two-eighty.” 

“If you rent it for $1,200 a month, this is your annual return on an investment of two hundred thousand.” 

The phone calculator, gray, orange, black, white numbers: 5.8%. 

Okay. Still better than the three percent Dave said you needed to keep up with… inflation. Once a month, someday, I’d open my mailbox and find a check. No overtime for Noriko. No extra classes. Over a thousand bucks. Month after month. 

“If you’d taken that two hundred grand and gotten an ROI of 26%,” he says, tapping away, “Here’s what you’d have in three years.” 

White on black: $400,000.00. 

I stare at it for a while. My first thought is to wonder if all those pool chemical fumes Dave sniffs in all day have been affecting his brain. I mean, who on Earth would even think 26% was even remotely possible? It sounded like Vegas or something. Some pyramid scheme.

But Dave has this excited insistent look on his face that tells me he couldn’t believe it either when he’d first come across it in one of these how-to-invest books he’s been reading.

I stare at the number some more, and try not to let the it trigger any memories of that NPD tenant of mine going to each neighbor, one by one, assassinating my character as part of a complex manipulative plan to— 

—the bone marrow biopsy: they sent us a bill for five thousand dollars… what would a transplant cost? And why the fuck is Noriko putting in shift after twelve-hour shift caring for somebody else while her own son— 

—medical leave-without-pay for me: fifty grand? A hundred? More? 

“So monthly that’s…”

Again the Pool Guy holds up his phone calculator. Over eleven thousand dollars. A month.

And here’s Dave, who’s been able to set up a pretty successful small business all on his own, without even having known much about pools back when he started—his reference to the rental house goes one final and obvious step. I see what he’s talking about. 

He’s talking about Kenken. Dr. Dave never changed the subject—he’s been talking about Kenken the whole time. 

Because if you can take your time and watch the YouTube videos and eventually build a house with your own two hands… if you can get a Ph.D., publish a couple of books, carve out a pretty good career as a… college professor… if you can learn to play the bass, start a country band, open up for… Willie K…

There are ways to actually get a 26% annual ROI on the money you work so hard to put away, Dave is saying. And if “the professionals” can figure that out—the very Bro-finance major frat boys neither of us could stand back in college—well, why can’t we?

$11,000. 

A preexisting condition. Should Kenken be denied basic insurance one day, it’s not a stretch to see something as simple as Noah’s broken arm leading to… financial ruin.

Meanwhile, here he comes: Kenken has spied the bread. He loves the bread Uncle Dave brings. Without a thought, he grabs the knife, my go-to knife, the hundred-dollar bread knife I use for meat and slicing tomatoes and yes, bread—it’s thick and serrated with perma-sharp teeth, stainless steel shark teeth. He’s sawing away on the hard crust gripped by his other hand just a sliver away from that kid-recklessly moving blade.

To Be Continued

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Father of Kensuke, husband of Noriko, Mark Panek has been living in and writing about these islands for three decades—two of those as a professor of creative writing at the University of Hawai‘i. His writing has been recognized with awards from Bamboo Ridge and the Hawai‘i Book Publisher’s Association. A 2013 winner of the Elliot Cades Award, Panek was also honored with two titles on Honolulu Magazine’s juried list of 50 Essential Hawai‘i Books: Hawai‘i and Big Happiness: The Life and Death of a Modern Hawaiian Warrior. He’s also the author of Gaijin Yokozuna: The Life of Chad Rowan.

Kensuke Panek is a writer living in Hilo.

Serial entrepreneur and first-time author Dave Gagne moved from Boston to Los Angeles to Paris, France before settling in Puna with his wife Niko fifteen years ago. Father of Noah and Mia, Dave owns and operates Pine Coast Pool Service, and recently founded an investment company with his brother Bill. 

Raised by legendary Parker Ranch Rough Rider Gordon Kalaniopio, first-time author Shane Kalaniopio spent a decade building homes for Waimea’s Quality Builders before taking a Hawai‘i County carpentry position in closer proximity to the 80-acre Kulani ranch he and his wife Pua are building to pass family traditions down to their son Kahiau and daughter Lihau. The couple has been recognized by the Puna Soil and Water District as the Outstanding Cooperator of 2018. 

The Professor, The Pool Guy, and The Paniolo will feature and alternate contributions from Panek, Gagne, Kalaniopio, and possibly others.

Image by A. Studio.