I was working though a case of the Sunday morning slows in a massive shopping center on the island of Oahu. I was attired in my usual, casual, drugstore cowpoke outfit of felt hat, Whites boots, snap shirt, dinner plate belt buckle and Wranglers, and was just two days of R and R beyond wading in the frozen slop on a feedlot job. I was also six hours on the downhill side of a last call double shot of Jim Beam with a beer back at the Wakiki Tiki Hut or Wannaleiu Inn, or some such dive.

I needed to atone for Saturday night excess, so I entered an Asian imports establishment and purchased a cobalt blue tea set, rimmed in gold filigree, with four enamel cups, and an assortment of oriental herbs. I was headed out on the gentle path to monkhood, to serenity, to washing from my psyche twenty years of wasted days and wasted nights.

I placed my new treasure on the top of a red Chevrolet rental car and was fumbling around with the door key when a group of tourists, dressed alike in white cotton shirts, dark pants, sensible shoes, fanny packs, and stubby-billed baseball caps, surged around the curve of the spiral parking lot, all of them walking backward and producing a lightning storm of flash bulb pops.

Their focal points were three motorized camera dollies aimed at a black Buick cruiser that contained the Lord himself, Jack Lord, star of the Hawaii Five-O series, who was taping a product placement of the Ala Moana Center while executing an exciting two-minute sequence wherein tough homicide cops cruise through a shopping center parking lot and look like they are looking for someone.

I stood there, leaning on the Chevy door and witnessed the price of fame. Even as the crowd yelled his name and waved to him, Jack did not look happy in his stardom. Jack looked bored and sleepy and hung over, about as star-worthy as a bowl of poi. I don’t think he was acting. He looked like he, too, had boogied one too many times to ukulele tunes the night before.

It took a good five minutes for the adoring procession to thin out enough for me to ease the car into the mess of traffic. As I was flipping the tranny into drive, two young women emerged from the tribe of Hawaii Five-O groupies, pointed my way, and began to chant what I understood to be “Packy Don Larew.”

I was a hungover hick from Idaho. I had no idea who this Packy Don Larew person was, but I supposed, because of my cowboy garb, that I was being mistaken for some Roy Rogeresque hero of the Asian cinema and was all too willing to participate in the harmless masquerade, to squeeze out my two minutes of fake fame.

I mustered my prettiest, “Aw shucks folks, thank you but I really must ride into the sunset” smile, accented by a tip of the hat to my fan base as I nudged the car into the stream of satisfied shoppers. I did notice that none of my fans were attempting to take my picture. They were just pointing my way and yelling, almost chanting, that name, “Packy Don Larew, Packy Don Larew.”

As the original Latinos were wont to say, “Sic transit gloria mundi.” I was a star of stage and screen right up until one of my adoring fans almost impaled herself on the rental car’s hood ornament and I jammed on the brakes then watched my cobalt blue teapot and four little tea cups tumble down the windshield, over the hood and into pieces on the parking lot tarmac.

I finally realized that rather than being mistaken for a second-magnitude movie star, I was being politely informed by a group of English-as-second-or-third-language folks that, in my absent-minded un-Zen state of post-party buckaroodom, I had left a package on the roof of the car.

It took another ten years before I quit drinking alcohol. The precipitating event for my abstinence was not a horrible car wreck or broken nose or paternity suit. It came when my pal, Hester the Jester, suggested that I should skip one Saturday night party just to see what it was like to wake up on Sunday morning actually feeling better than when I went to bed. It was great advice, and it stuck.

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J.D. Smith is an accomplished writer and jack-of-all-trades. He lives in Athena.