Honolulu Weekly

It happens every few months. The call from an exhausted-slash-pissed off reader who begs us to please do a story on their intolerable neighbors. Unfortunately, that’s a difficult story to pull off. After all, annoyance is subjective. And the story of neighbor Joe who does wacky things or neighbor Jane who’s as bitchy as Joe is wacky is a libel lawsuit waiting to happen. We can’t point those kinds of fingers. (Yeah, we’re sorry, too.) But the inquiries got us thinking: Maybe we could just let people vent about their bad neighbors and we would print their stories. That way, they could get it off their chests and we could tell the story everyone wants to read. So we did. Compiled here are a few true tales of not-so-good, but mostly funny (in hindsight, of course) neighbors.

–Kawehi Haug

Stories gathered by Keoki Kerr, Becky Maltby, Megan Rooney and Kawehi Haug

Somewhere in MakikiÖ

False alarmÖ or just alarming

Right after I moved in to my apartment at 1556 Pi’ikoi in Makiki, I had this nightmare neighbor who would put his face at my bedroom window in the middle of the night and yell ‘TSUNAMI!’ I would jump out of a sound sleep and scamper about looking for something. Then I would fully wake up. It would throw me into a panic. It happened three times within a five-month period, as I remember.

I never met the guy really. He would drink heavily and often fight with pizza delivery people. One night I heard him say very loudly, ‘I said pineapple, man JUST pineapple. Ham makes me blow chunkies, man!’ (He didn’t say chunks, he said chunkies.) ‘I should just blow the chunkies and give you this box back!’ Then a slam of the door echoed down the hallway. This was a very common occurrence, the slamming.

Many of the people in the building had run-ins with this guy. Mine finally came about a week before he finally moved out (he was asked to leave). He was dumping his garbage and I was down the hall to dump mine. He looked at me and started laughing. In a drunken slur, he pointed at me and said ‘Get off the island, man … you bring stink! I know you bring stink.’ Holding my trash in a tradewind only confirmed his railing.

He drove this massive pickup truck. One of those you would see in a demolition derby with wheels the size of sewer openings. Huge. The doors had to be at least three feet off the ground. His door would swing open and all five feet of him would jump to the pavement, with his stereo always playing Neil Diamond. What a character. ‘TSUNAMI!’ screamed through your open window in the middle of the night would be classified as a nightmare to me. Neil Diamond would be the close second.

Which one’s the bad neighbor again?

I was living in a walk-up apartment in Makiki. It must have been about 2:30 in the morning. I woke up because I could hear this woman, and she sounded like she was screaming from another apartment in the building. It was really loud and she was screaming ‘NO!’ and ‘Oww!’ It sounded horrible. It was really loud and echoing off the adjacent building. I didn’t know which apartment it was coming from, but I was really concerned that she was being injured. So I called 911, and about 10 minutes later there was a knock on the door, and there were two male cops out there from HPD. One of them said, ‘Were you the gentleman that called about the noise from the apartment?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I’m not sure which apartment it is, but the woman sounded like she was being injured or abused.’ Both the cops got a funny look on their faces, and seemed like they were trying not to laugh. The other cop said, ‘Well, uh, sir, we did, uh, we heard the noise too and we pulled up and knocked on the door and, uh, the lady was having, uh, you know like, re-la-tionsÖ.uhh, withÖherÖboyfriend.’ I was extremely embarrassed and apologized for calling them, but they laughed it off and said they just wanted to tell me she was OK.

Somewhere in Hawai’i KaiÖ

If you can’t please your neighbors, please yourself

Our neighbor used to masturbate in his dining room, in full view of our neighbors on the other side, since both their houses had plate-glass windows that faced each other. They were unable to eat their meals in their dining room until they built a 6-foot high wall to block their disgusting view!

Our family moved in to the other side of the masturbating neighbor. Our first month there, my dad ran outside to stop him from beating the son of our other neighbor across the street. Son: 19. Neighbor: near 40. Weapon used: baseball bat. Son had come out to tinker with his car, and the neighbor just started yelling and swearing at him, wielding a baseball bat, for literally no reason. Amazing that my dad, a 62-year-old man, weaponless, could break up the altercation before paramedics had to be called!

We tried to do everything possible to be friendly with him: every barbeque we had we took him over a plate. We baked him banana muffins. We’d smile at him and wave. We’d say hello. We’d even bring his garbage can back in for him.

Turns out his wife (who was nice and functional!) was doing her medical residency in Oregon and he was bipolar and not taking his meds. He had inherited his home from his mother, who had passed away from cancer. He did not work. He locked himself in the house and watched TV and masturbated all day. Finally, his wife convinced him to sell the house and move to Oregon.

Somewhere in KailuaÖ

Shut the door, keep out the devil

We lived in an apartment building when we first moved to Kailua. A cheap apartment building. The units were so close together you could pretty much walk out your backdoor and right into your neighbors’ front door. The buildings were rickety and poorly constructed, but it was cheap. The cramped quarters meant that nothing was private. Everyone could hear everything from crying babies to fighting couples to, um, loving couples. We tenants knew more about each other than most people know about their closest friends. An elderly couple, who lived behind us, were the sweethearts of the building. Plates of mochi and manapua, bags of home-grown green beans and bananas, containers of guava jam would show up on our doorstep and we’d know it was them. They were the nice neighbors that made living in a mediocre place bearable. Meanwhile, there was this rumor spreading in the building that every time a door slammed, a gravelly voice would yell out: ‘Door slammer!’ No one knew who it was, but everyone said they’d heard it. We’d never heard such a thing, so we figured it was a building myth that was fun for the long-term tenants to perpetuate. Until one day when my wife was hanging the laundry and slammed the back door because her hands were full. Sure enough: ‘Door slammer!’ echoed off the outside walls. I laughed. I couldn’t help it. The sound of the gravelly, eerie voice that was obviously trying to sound menacing didn’t scare us. So we slammed the door again. ‘Door slammer!’ We had no idea where the voice was coming from, but every time we, or someone else, slammed a door, the ‘insult’ rang out. Then we noticed that the gifts from the sweet couple were less frequent. I though maybe something had happened to them until one day, instead of a basket of goodies on our front steps, there was a note that said simply: ‘Door slammer!’

We learned from our other neighbors that the sweet couple was sweet … until you slammed your first door.

Somewhere in KapahuluÖ

Don’t start something you can’t finish

Our neighbor across the street used to start fights with his housemates and then come running over to our house and ask us to call the police because ‘the guys are after him.’ This would happen at least once a week for a solid three or four months. At first we thought he was really being victimized until one day, our housemate saw the neighbor open the front door of his house, greet his housemate with a handshake and then hurl his college textbooks at the unsuspecting housemate. The book thrower proceeded to run down the stairs and crossed the street into our yard in a frenzied panic, telling us that ‘they were after him.’ And of course they were! He had just tossed 25 pounds of hardback book in ‘their’ face. We told him we couldn’t call this time–that he would have to make the call himself. And he did. About 20 minutes later, the cops were at our front door saying they got a call that someone in our house was beating him up. We worked it out and the guys across the street told him he had to move.

Somewhere in WaimanaloÖ

There’s no good singing out there after midnight

Our neighbor loves to drink and then bust out his guitar and play old Hawaiian and jazz standards until the sun comes up. Alone. It’s just him and his wobbly versions of ‘You Belong to Me’ and ‘Ho’omau.’ Every once in a while, his loneliness will get the best of him and he’ll move his chair until it’s about two feet from my bedroom window and he’ll belt out songs until my bedroom light turns onÖI’ll peek out, greet him (at 3:30 in the morning) and he’ll say, switching to grandpa mode: ‘It’s late, baby! How come you not sleeping? I sing for you and bumbai, you go sleep.’ I nod and say thanks, find a pair of earplugs and hope to God I can fall asleep.

Nightmare neighbors on the neighbor islands

Maybe there’s such a thing as too much aloha?

At least four times in the last year, our college-age neighbor in Pauoa has a half dozen of his friends over for a barbeque from 10pm to 4am in his driveway and carport, usually on a weeknight. These parties happen when his grandparents, with whom he lives, are out of town. And even worse, he’s our landlord’s relative, which is why we don’t want to make too much of a stink.

They are not obnoxious in voice levels but our bedroom window is three feet from their driveway and the outdoor light on their house’s roof shines directly into our bedroom. So we get smoked out from the grill and then have a bright light streaming into the bedroom while they converse until the wee hours of the morning. My husband and I go to bed between 10pm and 11pm and when my husband leaves for work the next morning at 3:30am, they are still carrying on. Sometimes it’s two nights in a row and then nothing for several months.

We end up having to try to sleep in the living room on the pune’e but we can still smell the smoke and hear the conversations even in the living room. At least we don’t feel like we are in the grill itself, as we do in the bedroom!

We’ve called the cops to discuss our options but haven’t pursued anything because we don’t want to make enemies. We did write a letter about a year and a half ago complaining and never got a response. We contacted our landlord last year when the parties began, but they haven’t stopped.

Animal Farm

My young family moved from O’ahu to Maui several years ago. We instantly fell in love with the fresh weather and rolling countryside of Kula. Each day was perfection.†

After searching for a year and renting, we found an amazingly good deal for a two-plus acre small farm with three buildings on the sloping foothills of Haleakala. The view was 180 degrees. Kaho’olawe to the left across to the powerful and dramatic waves of Spreckelsville. The house was shaded by mature trees and we had a cozy Franklin stove for the cool winter mornings. We were 20 minutes from work on a lazy country road and the school bus came by in the morning for the children. Heaven.

The house needed gutting and repair, hence the nice price. We spent a year renovating, tearing out, refitting, updating and bringing to code all three buildings, the main house, a rental cottage and a garage with apartment. We planted a swimming pool and hot tub into the side of the mountain designed to look like a natural pond and finished our dream home.

I had met my next-door neighbors once or twice and heard them having fights, often. It was a family of three generations from the mainland East Coast.

One afternoon upon my return home from work, I walked in to my house and there across from my front door was a woman plastered across my kitchen sliding glass doors facing me in the signature crucifix position. She was bleeding from the face and hands and crying hysterically. I ran across the room and let her in. She said her husband beat her up and was threatening to kill her. She was drunk and disoriented. I found out that her newborn baby was still with her mother in law (in the same house). Since I knew the location of the women’s shelter from my work, we worked out a plan to snatch her baby and take them to the shelter. Mission accomplished.

Weeks later, I found the same woman in my bedroom one night. I had to lock the door behind her since several family members were following her swearing and threatening and pounding on my glass doors. I sat with her and we planned an escape for her and with that in place, she cooled off went back and then apparently left the family next door, with baby in tow, some days later.

Her boyfriend, still at the house, called me one day the following summer wanting me to send over my 11-year-old daughter for him to ‘play with.’ I could tell he was high.

Throughout the next years, we endured screaming drunken fights, cars coming and going buying and selling their ‘green harvest’ that grows well in Kula, and the occasional bullets whizzing by from rifles being shot randomly in drunken angry fits.† One would see from my deck from time to time, a new Mercedes or other high-end car being driven up to their flat space and loudly dismembered throughout the night with huge work lights while rap music played loudly. By sunrise, no more Mercedes!

The little shack they built to cook up meth was far enough away from my house so if it blew and it burned, we hopefully would be okay.

Since it was ‘the country’ we could not complain about the neighbor’s 22 fighting chickens that started crowing at 3:30am every morning. Each new crop of their piglets always drowned because the pigpen was at a low point in their yard and flooded during heavy rains. This resulted in having the sow mated, again. I am a city girl so I didn’t realize that it takes a week of torture and loud squealing and bellowing to mate pigs.

There were quiet times when one or more of the family members were in jail for different stretches leaving the country quiet and lovely once again.†

Why not call the police, you may ask? There must be a thick file in the Maui detective’s office from my calls, begging to be recognized. I was treated very much like that Kula lady who keeps bugging us with the neighbor-from-hell calls. The detectives were polite but unsympathetic. I asked them to please come over. I make great coffee. They could sit on my deck and watch the whole drama unfold. They were not interested. I wondered if one of my neighbors was a police informant. The grandson, already with multiple visits to MCC under his belt, reoffended, thereby violating parole and was sent back for a 10-year stretch. We saw him riding through the country in a new pickup a month later. He smiled and waved.

I still have the letter from the chief of police verbally patting me on the head and politely telling me to run along. I sold the house with a complete disclosure to the new owner who is still there, happily. Who knows, maybe it’s me?