What a difference two miles makes! Waikiki’s main shopping drag, Kalakaua Avenue, is in the top ten of money making retail streets in the world. Tourists always go there, then venture outwards. Downtown is shocking for its poverty and in-your-face homelessness. Nowadays homelessness is in your face everywhere on Oahu, but I think the tourist officials do their best to keep it out of Waikiki. Downtown, you can stumble upon people shooting up (ice, heroin, or a combo) and smoking crack right out in public. The users may or may not turn their backs to passers-by. Drugs are more easily available downtown although they are most certainly present in Waikiki, but the dealers are in apartments or hotels and not as much on the street. Prostitution downtown is a major funding source for the illegal drug trade. The girls are addicted in town. That was not usually the case in Waikiki when street prostitution was a visible presence. Waikiki tricks and providers were transient and moneyed and also includes pimps. Downtown was for the locals. These were the people who formed the community of providers and tricks and the regulars who all knew each other.
Waikiki
Waikiki Prostitutes
On the “town” side of Oahu there were two main places to pick up hookers on the street, Waikiki and downtown. Waikiki women were rumored to always have black pimps lurking in the background (I have sen this). They targeted wealthy Japanese tourists and charged no less than $200. These women were not locals, they were black or white for the most part and in Hawaii it is rare to have a group comprised of just blacks and whites. They pretended they were from Hawaii to appeal to tourist guys looking to sample local flavor. Instead they came from out of state and the two-four weeks spent in Waikiki was one of the stops on the nationwide hooker “circuit.” They looked great but their service never lived up to the packaging . They were not drug addicts because they had to give their money to their pimps. The cops had run them off high end real estate Kalakaua Avenue and had to stay one block off the ocean on Kukui Street, and only at night. Today you never see these women with the glass heels and the traditional hooker style of dress anymore. There are no more easily recognizable working girls on Kuhio Avenue in Waikiki anymore. I never see women in platform heels with fake fish appearing to swim within the clear footwear, standing a few inches behind a military guys while they take money out of an atm. I don’t know where they all went.
What’s Left of Hidden Secret Street Sex Town Side of Oahu
Reminds me of how Trump’s friend Rudy Giuliani was mayor of New York (which is when I lived in Manhattan as a young adult). Giuliani got all the visible crime off the streets of Manhattan and turned Times Square into a Disney Zone (Mickey Mouse is actually a presence in what used to be transvestite central.) Not that there were trannies in Waikiki, they had a section of downtown Honolulu, a street called Merchant Street where mahus worked. The mahus aren’t on Merchant Street anymore, the out of state high dollar streetwalkers aren’t on Kuhio Street. The only street sex business is still on Kukui Street in Downtown Honolulu, but it is no longer 24 hours, no longer brisk and profitable. The few guys that come around do so by night and they have a choice of a few scraggly homeless and addicted women outnumbered by equally scraggly homeless and addicted men who are dressed like women.
Do I have a point? I don’t know. Just giving you a visual.
Downtown
Downtown or simply, “Town” was the length of Kukui Street, from Pali Safeway on one side and the community center on Kukui and A’ala Street on the other side. Women were all ages and races. I have seen a coupe of women who were seniors, like 60’s and 70’s, and the combination of white, black, Polynesian, Japanese, Chinese, Samoan–ok I’m tired, you get the idea–that combination was typical of the many brown skinned people whose heritage isn’t a word but a list of ethnicities. Addiction is the common thread because addiction does not discriminate. I was not the only educated person. Addiction is one of the few things that does not discriminate . It appears that anyone who is exposed to a drug is as likely to get addicted as anyone else who is exposed to a drug. Pimps weren’t downtown because downtown the women were giving all of their money to the dope. They already had pimps, in a manner of speaking.
Addiction Based Economics
the economy was addiction driven you would find people who are more desperate and therefore less likely to have another option for making money, more willing to do anything, and to do anything for a much smaller amount of money. Downtown had a reputation, among guys I have talked to, for better service (in other words, they were more likely to get what they want) and Waikiki women were thought to be overpriced for the more limited range of services they offered. Downtown women wanted to get their money fast and get to the dealer so it was likely that you could find a girl who’d jump in your car and do the deed real quick on the side of the road that was, it was hoped, semi-private. As was typical of people seeking drugs, the open air sex market downtown truly was open 24-7. A woman could walk out onto Kukui Street and any time of the day or night pick up a guy looking to pay her for her time. She could be back in place, or more likely, looking for the dope man, within 15 minutes. A woman was fortunate to find someone who would pay $100, she was generally happy with $60, but it was hard to turn down $20 when guys knew someone else would do it for that price. Women spotted their “regulars,” guys who liked them and frequently saw them because they had all levels of relationships with these frequent fliers, when the regulars drove around the loop of Kukui Street to Vineyard Street. No homeless woman could keep a phone because her stuff was always stolen when she was asleep, usually by the person she trusted to watch her stuff so telephone numbers were generally useless and the online dating scene went untapped by homeless drug addicts because they had no reliable internet access. Downtown Women were usually homeless and usually looked homeless. They could get stuck downtown for years. Waikiki women were usually much better looking, took better care of themselves, were young, and the faces were always changing as the young working girls travelled to other “ho strolls” around the country.
How Much Time Did He Want To Spend?
Waikiki women had someone to answer to so they had to get back to that person. One of the things that surprised me was how very many guys were lonely. They were often, but not always, older and they wanted a woman to keep them company. They bought her dope, allowed her to use dope at his place, to sleep, to shower. A woman would stay with him for as long as that gravy train was running. It seemed like every woman had a guy who wanted her company. It was also common for a guy to date most of the better looking woman downtown for quick sessions in the car, or for longer periods of time. When a guy ran out of money for dope, the woman was out of there, even if he wanted her to stay. I have seen many men driving around “the back street” forlornly looking for a woman he wanted to be with. I remember one old man sadly telling me “I just couldn’t keep up.” Her habit outpaced his income. I didn’t know where she was and was never comfortable leading a man who might do God-knows-what to an unsuspecting working girl. I never got the impression that guys formed relationships with Waikiki girls because time didn’t permit. I could be wrong in this case. However, as for the rest of the details in this writing, I am quite certain I wrote the truth.
Hawaii Street Life-a Trusted Insider Tells All 