The Death of the Kahiki

(An article JB wrote on 2000 about the last party at one of the nation’s most legendary Tiki bars…Happy Sunday Funday, Patreon Pals! 🖤)

I wasn't really looking for Bruce, but there he was, sitting in a tropical fan chair, fondling a wicked skull mug, looking like Sylvester the cat at a Tweety-bird memorial service.

By the time I found him, Bruce had been living at the Kahiki Supper Club in Columbus, Ohio, for five days. He had inspected every inch of the world's most outrageous Tiki bar, admiring the giant totem heads, chatting up the grass-skirt hula-girl waitresses, communing with the live macaw who lives behind the bar. This wouldn't be so strange--others have gone into a Pu Pu Tray Trance while sucking on their Kahiki swizzle sticks--but Bruce had flown 2,000 miles from his comfortable retro martini-culture digs in Oakland. Actually, about 400 of us were in the process of descending on the place, one guy from as far away as Australia, for what amounted to a New Orleans-style gospel funeral. The corpse, unfortunately, was the Kahiki Supper Club itself, soon to be knocked down and replaced by . . . a Walgreen's.

A chain drug store. So banal. So un-Tiki. Has John Waters been alerted?

"I came in early," said Bruce, who appears to have packed away a few Polynesian rib dinners in his day, "because I wanted to spend as much time here as possible."

"You've been eating all your meals here?" I ask him. "Even lunch?"

"Well, no, I haven't been able to get up early enough for lunch."

Bruce is famous in the world of junk-shop junkies, having pillaged thrift stores and garage sales from coast to coast in his quest to own the world's biggest collection of smiley faces. He has smiley-face mugs, clocks, jewelry, key chains, clothing, furniture, and "everything you can buy in a store for 14-year-old girls." But tonight he's pouting. He was billed as one of the featured guests at the closeout party for what is arguably the nation's most famous Polynesian restaurant, but his billing was "Bruce Woodbury: Famous Smiley-Face Collector."

"What about my Tiki collection?" he says in an offended voice. "They don't even mention it. It's like I'm not a real Tiki collector. Smiley-faces are not all that I do."

Bruce then proceeds to tell me all about his 400 Tiki mugs, including 160 which he allows other people to actually touch and drink out of. "I'm not saying I wouldn't be upset if one of those got broken. I would. But it wouldn't be the end of the world."

I have obviously entered the world of people who have no visible means of support and way too much time on their hands. In other words, my kinda party!

"The Kahiki," as it's known in Columbus, is more than an institution. As soon as I hit town, people are noticing my kaleidoscopic tie-dyed Hawaiian shirt and saying "Hey, are you heading for The Kahiki?" It's an automatic. It's a given. Columbus is not famous for many things, but the Kahiki is one of them. Located on a section of East Broad Street full of K-mart Supercenters and strip-mall barber shops, it looms up out of the tackiness like a cartoon Polynesian hut, huge and black and leaning into the wind, like a landlocked tropical ship out of Walt Disney's Night on Bald Mountain. The door is flanked by 20-foot Tiki gods with flames dancing out of their heads. Inside the ceilings are 80 feet high, and there are palm trees and full-size grass huts and an aquarium wall full of tropical fish and a machine that creates an occasional rainstorm. You don't know exactly where to go, or even where to look, but you'll most likely find yourself staring into the glowing red eyes of the giant blue Tiki god in the dark foyer. "Kahiki" has several meanings in the South Pacific. It means the reality of the present world, but it also means the place where all Polynesian tribesmen came from. In the version of Polynesia created in Columbus, it makes you think you're in some kind of fierce tribal chieftain's ceremonial acid-trip hut, and you don't know whether you're going to get killed or be ravished by naked island girls--and, more to the point, you don't care.

Like pilgrims to Papeete, the Tikiheads are arriving. There's Formica Dinette, lead singer in a retro go-go band from Athens, Georgia, looking like a 1950s poufy-haired glam queen and stuffing souvenirs into her purse long before the population at large decides to loot and pillage. There's Otto Von Stroheim, the only man alive who has modeled his own head after a Tiki mug--pate shaved clean as a billiard ball, sideburns snaking down his cheeks like the tails of two skinny park squirrels. Otto is selling copies of his celebrated fanzine Tiki News and dispensing wisdom about Exotica music. (If you haven't heard it, Exotica is an instrumental soft jazz kind of tribal elevator music, with bird calls thrown in, that you would normally expect to hear at a Maui luau.) There, brooding at the bar, is Sven Kirsten, wearing a bird's-egg-blue frock shirt and matching pants of a style once fashionable among Juarez mariachi bands. Sven is the self-described "urban archeologist" who wrote The Book of Tiki, 200 copies of which are currently held up by Italian customs and will not make it to The Kahiki in time for commerce. "The Kahiki is probably the second best Tiki restaurant in the country," he says with authority. "The first is the Mai Kai in Fort Lauderdale."

Suppressing a desire to chant "Lauderdale! Lauderdale!" and start the road trip, I plunk down my hundred bucks and make my way to the bar, then the buffet, then the bar, then the buffet, then the bar, at which time I meet Johnny Hazard, a gonzo spike-haired documentary filmmaker from London who tells me, "We don't really know this word Tiki in Europe, but yesterday we took the Tiki tour of Akron." He pronounced it "Ak-RON," like he'd discovered an obscure Fijian king by that name. "Perhaps you've heard of the Tiki McDonald's in Ak-Ron."

Indeed I have. Indeed, after three days immersion in the world of retro-Polynesian Tiki-bar mug-collecting palm-frond frippery, I think I can safely say that this is one of the strangest crowds alive. I would have sworn that Tiki was a gay thing--for some reason anything with fronds just screams cabana boys in hip-hugger Capri pants--but in fact there's a hearty heterosexuality floating through the room. When you order the "Mystery Drink" at the Kahiki, the bartender sounds the gong and a giant bowl of steaming cocktail goo is served by a gyrating scantily-clad wahine girl. You take it from her hands, like a blissed-out inhaler at an opium den, and then you drink it until memory loss occurs. Tiki bars come from the era of the two-fisted back-slapping man's-man era. They got popular around 1955--although Don the Beachcomber's and Trader Vic's go back to the thirties--and the whole Tiki thing peaked around 1965, so we're talking one solid decade of drinking Scorpions and Samoan Fogcutters without irony. Most of the people at the Kahiki-rama were infants in 1965, if they were alive at all, so what we're seeing is a kind of nostalgia for a version of South Seas innocence that was based on a California souvenir-shop version of what the South Seas were like for people who had read Kon-Tiki and South Pacific but had never actually been to the South Seas. (Are you following this?) In other words, I was trapped in an imitation New Guinea tribal meeting house full of fake waterfalls and fluorescent grottos with people who were toasting the authenticity of something that was based on fake anthropology to begin with.

Which is, of course, what we love about it. My new friend Bruce, for example, longs for a time when the nuclear fifties family grilled thick barbecue steaks and mixed pastel cocktails on the patio. On a big night out, you headed for some place like the Kahiki where Dad ordered a Headhunter (the Kahiki's signature drink, served in a brown mug in the shape of a Tiki head that resembles what Louis Armstrong would look like if you caved in his face and plucked out his eyes) and Mom ordered something with an umbrella, a mint sprig, and enough fruit juice to disguise the fact that she was getting plastered and would soon be doing long division with her thighs. The Kahiki opened in 1962 and had lines around the block full of would-be Hugh Hefner hipster types. Many of the grass-skirted Asian waitress babes moved over from The Grass Shack, a less elaborate restaurant that had hired the Japanese wives of returning GI's after World War II. That place burned to the ground in the fifties, leaving a Tiki void in central Ohio, and so the Kahiki quickly became the place for wedding parties, anniversaries, graduation blowouts, bachelor parties, and every other rite of passage. There's something about walking into a thatched hut with a rum drink in your hand that makes you just sort of go haywire and do things that you probably shouldn't talk about on email later. The current owner, Michael Tsao, got hold of the Kahiki in 1987 after learning the Polynesian restaurant business as a manager at the famous Trader Vic's at the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Beverly Hills. You can tell by his extensive drink list, which includes Trader Vic's standards like the Scorpion, the Mai Tai, the Navy Grog and the Zombie, but still shows ingenuity with local favorites like the Smoking Eruption (it actually erupts like a volcano, thanks to the strategic use of dry ice), the Vicious Virgin, the Backscratcher (mango juice and rum) and the Coconut Kiss (deadly combo of gin, coconut milk and liqueurs).

The problem with the whole Tiki thing is the music. For this most elaborate of all Tiki celebrations, they had three Polynesian bands--the Kahiki house band, a manic ukulele impresario named King Kukulele, and the nine-piece Don Tiki, who arrived from Honolulu by way of Bosnia (!) to make their American mainland debut. They kicked off the set with "Quiet Village," the anthem of Tiki, a 1959 Top Five hit by Martin Denny that stirs the rum-addled loins of Tikiheads everywhere. But Exotica music, no matter how many bird calls and percussion sounds you load it up with, is ultimately one step removed from Muzak, so as the night wears on you descend into a hazy easy-listening funk, only occasionally relieved when the band shifts gears and . . . plays "Quiet Village" again! I counted four reprises of "Quiet Village," and each time the crowd would react like a room full of drowsy hounds, lifting one ear and reaching for another Volcano Meatball. Michael Tsao took the microphone at one point and crowed about all the press the Kahiki was getting, promising to open the new improved Kahiki in some kind of downtown renewal district the city of Columbus is pushing. The Tikiheads think of Tsao as an enigmatic close-to-the-vest kind of guy who might or might not have the best interests of Polynesian artifice at heart. After all, in the nineties he branched out into the Chinese frozen-food business, selling his egg rolls and pu-pus to 7-Eleven, Kroger, and Wal-Mart. He then claimed that the Kahiki was falling apart, the plumbing was rotten, and eventually he would have to tear it down. Walgreen's showed up and a $2.2 million deal was concluded. The question is: will he rebuild, or will he take the money and hula?

This is the morose discussion we're having when Don Tiki quits playing at 12:50 a.m.--25 minutes early! Apparently this much Exotica music had induced involuntary snoring in several members of the band. At any rate, we all stood around, taking in the fabulous temple of excess for one last time. Bruce was about to cry. Formica Dinette continued to steal ceramic mugs and other assorted gewgaws right up until the last minute, and then finally we started drifting off one by one to our cool fifties lodgings.

My own hotel was the downtown Westin Southern, empty save for a tuxedoed guy and a woman in a bridal gown, peering toward the door as I walk in. The slightly inebriated groom says "Would you mind taking our picture?" Then, as I position them by the giant floral arrangement in the lobby and start to snap the happy couple, he suddenly says, "Aren't you Joe Bob Briggs?"

I admit that I am.

"Did you come into town for The Kahiki?"

That tie-dyed Hawaiian shirt gives me away every time.

"I heard that they're going to close it," he says, ignoring his new bride.

"It's closed. It's finished. I just came from there."

"I can't believe that!" He looks at his wife. "They closed the Kahiki!"

"That's terrible!" she says.

"Smile," I say. I snap the picture and they maintain the smile for the required half-second. Afterwards they're bummed.

"They closed the Kahiki," she repeats.

The wedding night, I sensed, just wouldn't be the same now.

"He says he's going to reopen downtown!" I say. But it's too late. The elevator door has already closed. The Kahiki is as dead as the fifties.