Chapter 8 Hawaii
EIGHT
HAWAII
I’VE LOST COUNT OF how many times my mother said to me, “It’s you and me against the world.
” That puts a lot of pressure on a child and has probably loaned me a certain level of codependency.
But more importantly, it has helped me develop the right safeguards against manipulation in this challenging business.
It’s a toughness that I want to teach my daughter, but I want all young women, especially in show business, or any business, to always know that they need you more than you need them.
My mom would say it to me when I’d go to auditions, and I still know it to be true: they need me more than I need them.
As Married… with Children came to its natural conclusion, I found myself desperate to leave Kelly Bundy behind. I couldn’t wait to take off the mask and be myself. I wanted to show the world, and myself, what I was capable of.
For the last two years of Married… I was wearing a wig because I had cut my hair short and dyed it a mix of black, cherry, and purple. I showed up with my new hairdo at a Fox event right before we were about to start filming the penultimate season.
“What’s happening here?” someone said, a look of shock and horror on their face.
“We’re getting a wig,” I said.
I’d had blond hair down to my butt for more or less a decade but now I didn’t care. There wasn’t much else they could say because it wasn’t as if I could suddenly grow my hair ten inches.
They needed me more than I needed them. It was me against the world, kid.
I’m grateful for Married…, grateful for the time I spent there, grateful for the lessons I learned, grateful for the family I had in Ed and Katey and David, but if I didn’t get that girl away from me, I didn’t know what I would do.
I needed to be me. But that doesn’t mean I made great decisions. Right after Married… ended, a script came across my desk for a little movie called Legally Blonde. I didn’t even audition or read for it or meet with anyone. I was done with the ditzy-blonde thing.
And to think, I could have had Reese Witherspoon Money?.
Instead, I needed to escape.
It all began with David Faustino, my brother on Married…
He had taken a vacation to Hawaii and returned with stars in his eyes.
The way he described it made it sound both magical and one million miles away, both things I desperately needed.
The friends David had made there—guys with names like Lawrence and Joji and Shaney Boy—sometimes flew to L.A.
to visit him, and he would introduce me to them.
I instantly fell in love with them as he had.
They had a kindness, and a sly wit about them, as though that magical outpost in the ocean freed their souls from the kinds of concerns we mainland-bound suckers never seem to escape.
Each time his friends returned to Hawaii, I would be desperate to see them again, to find a place where goodness and love prevailed.
I didn’t know what paradise was until I went there.
Given everything I’d been through, I wanted a paradise, and I found it in Maui, a place that would become my home away from home.
When Married… went on hiatus, or when I didn’t have a movie to shoot or a talk show to do, I would immediately fly there.
My friends in Hawaii filled my soul in ways I could never have imagined.
Those beautiful people opened up their community to me in a way no tourist usually gets to see.
Eventually, I found a place of my own where I could stay for a month at a time, and whenever I wasn’t working, that’s where you would find me.
The group of friends I made mostly worked at the luau, and I’d often show up just to watch them perform.
At one point during a show, a canoe glided across the water with a flame on it, and my friend Shalia came out of the water in a white dress, so sinuous and gorgeous.
I was captivated. Once the show was over, we’d sneak away to a nearby pineapple field to drink Bud Light and watch the skies, filled as they so often were with the most shooting stars you’ve ever seen, sparkling past our peripheral visions.
In those magical moments, these beautiful, kind, funny people became my family.
The fact that I was “Christina Applegate” didn’t matter to anyone, and certainly not to me.
It was on Maui that I got my nickname, or what I think of as my real name, those two syllables behind which my true soul resides.
I’d go by myself, or bring my mom or a best friend. I’d share the beauty and friends I’d found with them and let them see the islands in a way that they’d never otherwise get to see them. But mostly I went alone, unseen, unphotographed, healing, finding a peace that had eluded me so far in my life.
For a while I was hanging out with—you know what I mean (fucking)—a boy on Maui.
He was half Filipino, half Hawaiian, and had a sense of humor unlike anyone I knew on the mainland, and I worked in comedy.
Ours was an easy, pure relationship, the kind those islands, and my happiness and lack of complication while there, made possible.
Thursday, April 1, 1993
The clouds may tear upon my face
But the sun is in my soul
The boy’s fingertips have healed the wound
For now.
Still I am stale
Still I scramble
Not seeing what is right or wrong
… he lurks about my universe
Stabbing when I close my eyes
And spitting when I speak.
His hands are cold around my throat.
I cannot breathe.
I once brought an L.A. boyfriend to the islands, but my Hawaiian “lovah” wasn’t happy about it.
One time, we all headed to a club on Front Street—a club that has since burned down, to the agony of my heart and the hearts of so many on Maui—and while we all partied and danced, I was amused to see a woman walk past my L.A. boyfriend and playfully pinch his butt.
I was laughing, and my girlfriend, a beautiful nineteen-year-old Samoan woman, asked me what I found funny.
“Oh, nothing,” I said, pointing vaguely at the dance floor. “It’s just that chick, over there. She just pinched my boyfriend’s butt.”
Big mistake on my part. Without a word, my friend strode over to where the pincher was standing and hauled off and punched her, right in the face.
Next thing I knew, we were all in the parking lot and this whole damn kerfuffle was ablaze, dust rising, fists flying, hair pulling—the whole nine yards.
At one point, there was a break in the action, and my friend came over to me. I must have looked completely horrified.
“What’s wrong?” she said, out of breath.
“Honey,” I said, “small problem. That wasn’t her. Wrong chick. You literally punched the wrong person.”
After a comic pause during which we both realized the ridiculous stupidity of what had just happened—and thankfully no one got seriously hurt—we burst out in hysterical laughter and ran to my car as fast as we could to get the hell out of there.
We’ve talked about that story a lot in the intervening years. My friend is older now—I hate how time does that—and she doesn’t love that story as much these days. She’s matured and doesn’t live in that world anymore.
And that boyfriend with the pinched ass? Didn’t last, of course, but hey, to quote my mother, “I never met a junkie I didn’t like.”
As much as I wanted it not to, real life still had a way of asserting itself on Maui.
April 18, 1995, Maui
It’s funny that the only time I feel inspired to write is when I am here.
The only time I can reflect… My mom has cancer.
She was diagnosed about 5 months ago. It’s only temporary, I know that.
I have to. She is going through chemotherapy now and it has been so hard on her and me.
But there is such a great lesson to be learned here about life.
Just how important it is to be happy. It sure isn’t easy to acquire.
I know that. I’m so disillusioned as to what it really is, though.
I think it might be the sense of now. As simple as that may seem.
Now isn’t so bad as long as you are truly in it.
Life is a gift. It’s unfortunate that we all take life so for granted.
My mom had breast cancer back in 1980, but this time, fifteen years later, it was ovarian.
I was pissed off that she had cancer a second time—your mother’s not supposed to have cancer; she’s not supposed to not be able to take care of you.
I resented it, in a way. I couldn’t take it.
I hated every second of it. She faced two years of chemo and ten surgeries, one of which removed half of her intestines.
She lost all her hair and became so fragile, immunocompromised, and sick. It was scary as fuck. I couldn’t bear to see her like that. It crushes me that my own child is going through this now, in her own way.
But my mom also saved a lot of women when she went through ovarian cancer, because initially the doctors couldn’t find the cancer in her ovaries, even though it was genetically marked to be ovarian cancer.
In recent years, researchers have discovered that ovarian cancer can start in the fallopian tubes, and I understand that my mom’s case was one that spurred on the research.
For many women, by the time cancer is found in the ovaries, it’s too late.
These days, women also have their fallopian tubes removed when they have a hysterectomy, eliminating the danger of cancer in the fallopian tubes remaining undetected.
My mom survived, but it was a dark time, for both of us. I found myself struggling with dangerous thoughts even on my island oasis.
And now the saddest. A beautiful girl named Jennifer Justice took her own life on Sunday.
Although I wasn’t extremely close to her, I’m affected all the same.
What really affects me is that I know how she felt.
All too often the thought of suicide crosses my mind.
Almost every day. I am so damn tired of this life sometimes, it’s scary.
At least I had Hawaii. Despite these spells of intense darkness, I was a happier, different person there, more myself than anywhere else.
I was nobody famous. I was nobody. I wasn’t only the survivor of my childhood.
I wasn’t only the woman who faced down a terrible boyfriend and found her freedom.
I wasn’t Kelly Bundy. I didn’t even have to be Christina Applegate.
April 4, 1996, 9:45 p.m.
Just arrived in Oahu. Sitting in back of a stranger’s truck on my way to swim with the dolphins. All is well in my kingdom. All is well.
PS. I rode underneath this blanket of stars tonight… I’m sleeping in a tent next to the crashing waves. It’s so dark out, heaven on earth, heaven on earth. Deep calls unto deep and deep answers deep.
March 19, 1995, Maui
Here I am in Maui—my home, my soul, myself.
I leave tomorrow. So sad. It’s beautiful out right now.
Just a few clouds that blanket the sun. The water like jewels, glistening, inviting.
Soon the sun will set off to the right of Lanai.
As it kisses the horizon I will see God.
I will feel as small but powerful as the Universe intends. Ineffable.
August 6, 1996
I swam with the dolphins yesterday for about five hours. It was amazing the way we communicated. I felt joyous open exposed radiant clear… Today I felt high. I was floating in a surreal fog of absolute. Submerged in the warmth of God and my own power.
I was a new person. Through my healing on those islands, a new person emerged. She surprised even me.
These days, very little of Front Street on Maui survives, gone in the terrible fires of 2023.
Every time I think of it my heart hurts.
Many of my friends lost their homes; many are still displaced.
This is made especially poignant as in recent months my hometown of Los Angeles has suffered catastrophic fires of its own.
We evacuated during the worst of the winter fires of 2025 from an abundance of caution, but so many friends lost their homes here, all their possessions, their histories.
My grief for Maui has only deepened in the past months, having faced similar losses here at home and seeing firsthand what people in Hawaii had to go through.
And my heart hurts for that time I spent in Hawaii for other reasons, too. After the terrible years with that abusive guy, I yearned for sanctuary, a place I could escape to, a place to heal.
I’m lucky I found it, out there at the very ends of the Pacific Ocean, the shooting stars jangling at the very edge of my sad eyes, somewhere out of sight.