BIG KAHUNA.(Brief Article)

A kahuna is a master of Hawaiian esoteric practices. Recently, Mariko Gordon and Hugh Cosman engaged a kahuna to bless their house on Manhattan Avenue, between 105th and 106th Streets, which they were moving into after spending two years restoring it.

Gordon, a forty-year-old money manager, grew up in Hawaii. Not long ago, she began taking hula lessons. When she asked her teacher whether she knew of anyone who might bless the house, the teacher recommended Aupuni Iwi'ula, who lives in Seattle and comes to the city once a month to teach at the American Indian Community House, on lower Broadway. Iwi'ula is around fifty. He is tall and a bit heavy. He has long black hair, with a few strands of gray, which he draws back into a ponytail. His face is round, his nose is broad, and his complexion is the color of the Polynesians in Gauguin's paintings.

Iwi'ula visited the house for the first time a few months ago. While Cosman, who is fifty and has a metal workshop in Brooklyn, talked about plaster details and how he had repaired the dumbwaiter, Iwi'ula became aware of several immaterial presences. In an upstairs bedroom, he heard a machine making a noise like tak, tak, tak. In his mind's eye, he saw curtains of a heavy dark fabric drawn across the windows, and the windows themselves painted black. On the floor were sheets of paper on which were written "Manifesto . . ." When he told Cosman and Gordon what he had seen, they were surprised. They told him that the house had been occupied early in the last century by left-wing radicals, and that one room had held a printing press.

Downstairs in the kitchen, Iwi'ula saw, buried under the floor, a box containing a parchment document with writing on it that he couldn't make out; it didn't appear to be modern English. Although Cosman and Gordon's older son, Haden, who is nine, was very much in favor of excavating to search for the box, in case it also had money in it, Cosman said that tearing up the brand-new bamboo floors was out of the question. Observations such as the printing press and the metal box are what Iwi'ula calls "minor disturbances." "If there had been only minor disturbances," he said later, "I would have blessed the house then, and left." Elsewhere in the kitchen, though, he ran into a major disturbance. "In the corner by the door that leads outside, I saw a soldier," he said. "It really took me aback. He had a tricornered hat, and red ...