The fleabag Hawaiian hotel I didn’t stay in

That time I went to Honolulu to research a novel

The Royal Grove in Honolulu. Image via Booking.com.

One of the perks of traveling solo is that you don’t have to wait long for a table. On a bright Monday morning in Honolulu, I had put my name on a list at a breakfast joint and, seconds later, got a text saying my table was ready. I sauntered past the families and friend groups waiting on benches outside and met the hostess, who led me to a seat at a counter. I settled in and ordered a loco moco.

A woman with brown skin and salt-and-pepper hair sat a couple of seats down and told me her name was Leilani. She asked me what I was having, and when I told her she said, “I’m sick of loco moco. I live here. My boyfriend eats it all the time.” She mused aloud about all the people who visit Hawaii and go gaga over loco moco, but then concluded: it’s the gravy.

Leilani asked me what I was doing in Waikiki and seemed a little bewildered when I told her I’d come alone. (People usually are when I tell them I’m traveling on my own.) When she said, “Welcome,” her voice sounded a little flat and I wondered if she really meant it. (I had recently seen the Twitter discourse that insisted I was a bad person simply for visiting Hawaii.) Then again, she was head of janitorial services at the Hard Rock Cafe in Waikiki, which has to be one hell of an exhausting job.

I mentioned something about visiting the Royal Grove Hotel because I’d seen a hula class advertised there, and she smiled as she gave me a sidelong glance. She said, “I’m not going to say anything.”

She didn’t have to. I’d read the reviews. At first glance, the cheap, mid-century Royal Grove looked like the perfect hotel for me, a perennial Mad Men obsessive and lover of ‘50s kitsch. But as I read the reviews, it became clear that it wasn’t going to be a good place to stay if I wanted a good night’s sleep. Past guests complained of carpets so dirty they turned white socks black, cockroaches peeking from shower drains, flaking paint, exposed wires, abandoned maid’s carts and billing snafus. To top it all off, folks said they lost sleep thanks to excessive noise from traffic, skateboards and beach drunks.

I checked newspaper archives to see whether there were any reports of the Royal Grove being a hotbed of illicit activity. I didn’t find any, but I did find this, which, I think, is pretty funny.

It seemed like the kind of place where you went to do illegal activities or stay if you didn’t mind sleeping through other people’s illegal activities. Because I’m an insomniac, I didn’t think I’d be able to sleep through any of it. So, I booked a different hotel instead, one with a 1960s brutalist design that was ugly but distinctive enough that I could easily spot it and get my bearings as I wandered around Waikiki.

On my second morning in Hawaii, I went down to the Royal Grove to check out the hula class I’d seen advertised online. The advertisement was wrong (shocker), but I did get a glimpse of the Royal Grove’s lobby. While Leilani’s reaction had confirmed its reputation as a fleabag, the Royal Grove is also a remarkably well-preserved example of mid-century design. The dusky pink walls, breeze block balconies, dark green terrazzo floor with inlaid mosaic seaturtles and wood-paneled check-in desk all looked like they’d been untouched since 1953. I hope it isn’t allowed to rot until someone orders a tear down, or worse, have its charm stripped away with an HGTV-style injection of gray paint, interior design’s answer to Botox.

It seemed like the perfect setting for a fictional bohemian couple traveling to Honolulu in 1957.

The real Royal Grove as a setting in fiction

I’d gone to Hawaii in the first place to research a novel I’d started about a troupe of fat dancers who perform at a sleazy bar. The novel is based on the real history of the Persian Palms, an infamous bust-out joint in the Gateway district, a storied skid row area of Minneapolis that fell victim to urban renewal in the early 1960s. The Persian Palms featured nightly acts, which included strippers; Divena the Aquatease, a performer who stripped in a tank filled with water; and the Beef Trust Chorus, a troupe of fat dancers.

In my manuscript, Maxine, the captain of the Beef Trust Chorus, and her husband, Teddy, take a trip to Hawaii. Teddy, a songwriter and jazz pianist, gets a residency at a Honolulu jazz club called the Zebra Room, another real but long-gone venue. After long nights of drinking and jamming, they recuperate in their room at the Royal Grove. It’s new, clean and full of the modernity that mid-century architecture promised with its clean lines and cheery patterned concrete squares.

Before my trip, I had Max and Teddy staying in the Royal Hawaiian — that’s the famous one, also pink, that you’d recognize right away if you’re a fan of Mad Men. It’s the one in the background when Don reads the copy of Dante’s Inferno that he’s borrowed from his affair partner.

There’s a bakery stand in the Royal Hawaiian. I bought a brioche there. But a stay there would bankrupt me, and I ultimately couldn’t see Max and Teddy staying there either. They belonged somewhere that was less swanky but still chic.

Write what you know?

I don’t subscribe to the idea that you have to set foot someplace before you can write about it. I don’t think there are, or should be, any prerequisites to writing anything you want to. But I still felt like I needed to get more of a feel for Waikiki than Google Maps could provide.

I spent five days taking in scenery, learning how the angle of the sun changed the color of the ocean. I walked on huge, blood-red blossoms that had fallen from trees and wondered what I would have seen if I’d come just a few days earlier. I took a cooking class and learned that poke used to be a snack folks passed around before it became the multi-ingredient, build-your-own bowl takeout option it is today. I ended up having kahlua pork three days in a row and went off pork for several days after that. I took a bus — a regular city bus — from Honolulu all the way to the North Shore and spent a day at Haleiwa, then took a regular city bus right back.

If I find a publisher for this book, it’s probably unlikely that I’ll earn back the money I spent researching it. But I’m glad I went. I just hope it doesn’t mean I’m an evil colonizer.

Historical fiction writing tip of the week