THE HALF NAKED NEIGHBOR

 

The Half Naked Neighbor

 

 

Neighbors and Parking

 

I live in a neighborhood that used to be very quiet and decent.   The neighbors did not make a lot of noise or disturb other neighbors.  People kept to themselves and I did not get to know any of them.

I live in the front apartment with a window facing the street.  I can see the other apartments and houses on the street and I can watch people walking their dogs and children playing nearby.

At first I thought I was finally free from the noisy neighborhood that we were in before my divorce and I could enjoy this new neighborhood with the feeling of peace and the newly found freedom from my marriage.  Neighbors in today’s times do not get acquainted or welcome new comers to the neighborhood.   They stay away, keep to themselves and never even say “Hi” when they see you walking by.

They are unfriendly and unkind and unwilling to show a friendly smile. I suppose that is the way it will be from now on. 

So, my story will show how people continue to act in the manners they portray themselves to be, and that is not the so-called “Love thy neighbor.”

As time went by I kept an eye on who was coming and going and moving in or out.

In the beginning of my living here in this cramped one bedroom apartment with my young son who was still in high school at the time I took time to drop him off at school early in the morning.  Thinking that I could park my car anywhere on our street, I parked in front of a big white house for only a few minutes after returning from dropping my son off at school  and when I came out of my apartment to get into my car to go to work I noticed a scribbled note on my windshield.   The note read “Do not park in front of our house; move your car because my wife parks here.”

Not only was the note there, but both of the owners of the house suddenly parked both of their cars one car in front and one car in the back totally trapping my car in so that I could not move my car at all.   Their cars were not there when I parked earlier so this was deliberate.

I was so angry I screamed at both of them and threatened to call the police.   I have never seen these people before and have never spoken to them at all before this.  The man yelled at me to move my car and I yelled back at him to move his truck and he refused and said his wife needed the spot, so I yelled at him and her words they didn’t like and she had the nerve to call my words not so Christiany and I yelled back, “what kind of Christian blocks someone’s car in so much as to trap them in so that they can’t even get out?”  These people have never even parked across the street nor did they have a garage or a driveway.   She never walked away from the front door to talk to me to my face and I called her chicken because she would not dare to face me. 

After my horn blowing and yelling for several minutes , he finally moved his truck and kept yelling at me as if it were my fault and I was the criminal.

I decided to park there anyway and every time I tried, he would automatically park his huge truck there just so I could not park.

So began the beginning of not wanting to know my neighbors.  I had to resort to parking down the block and across the street from my own apartment and yet, again, I found notes on my car telling me not to park in front of other people’s houses.  This was insane and illegal and harassment. 

I spoke with the police about it and they told me that it was harassment and I can press charges if I knew who put the notes on my car.

Well, the other times it happened I did not know who put the notes on my car.  The feeling I got from this was that of them being against me or people are outright mean and rude, selfish and very un-neighborly.

By the way, in the next few years, my son got his own car and we are allowed 1 parking spot in our carport at the apartment, so I park on the street everyday.  There is a parking rule that there is no parking between the hours of 2 AM and 4 AM in our city.

I have to prove to the police that I need a parking permit and they have to approve it and it cost $80.00 per year for me to park on my own street where I live and still struggle to find parking because of my “nice” neighbors.

I still feel the same and I stay away from all of my neighbors.  

I continue to get the feeling that I am not welcome in my own neighborhood even though I have lived here almost 20 years.

Parking is still a constant problem and I am getting older and nobody cares how much I struggle and how many times I drive around the block just to find a parking spot.  Most of the time I find one across the street or on the next block over and walk all the way back to my apartment with heavy bags of groceries and large baskets of laundry that I must wash at the laundry mat once a week.

The amount of time and all of the years I struggled through by keeping myself away from the neighbors I hoped to gain a sense of invisibility. 

I do not always keep my invisibility quiet; I sometimes say things out loud hoping to catch the attention of someone who actually cares about my struggling.

I also want them to know that I am a human being and I do exist and I do need to feel safe and welcome in my own neighborhood.  I do not feel safe or welcome to this day.

 

The New Woman Next Door

 

There is a house directly next door to my bedroom window.  I say this because this house is the closest to my apartment.

The first neighbor was a man who kept to himself and was not noticeable.  He did not live there long and it didn’t make any difference to me.

Soon after he moved out a woman moved in and she seemed to live alone.  At first she didn’t bother me or my son until she began watering her lawn late at night and the noise woke me up and so I had to say something. 

I decided on my own to approach her after 10 PM while she was standing in the front yard watering the lawn.  I explained that the sound of the watering was disturbing our sleep.   She retaliated by yelling at me and said she had the right to water any time she wanted to and wasn’t going to stop.

 

I asked her to stop again and she responded the same way, so after that I finally called the police to step in to stop her.

 

I came home from work one day and found eggs splattered all over my bedroom window.

 

I found egg shells on the ground directly under my window.   I did some detective work and noticed the angle of how the eggs landed on my window was at a slant which determined that the eggs were thrown from her driveway and not as far away as the sidewalk or the street.

 

Someone had to walk up her driveway to throw the eggs.  I also knew that is was not a Halloween prank because it was 3 days after Halloween and young teenagers or children were not around this neighborhood. 

 

I called the police about this incident too and they told me to stay away from her and added that it was best not to approach anybody at all, not even knock on doors and be a good neighbor just to say hello. 

 

Retaliation is a major factor these days since violence is more common than not and the fact that the police are not very helpful with anything, they believe threatening me with jail just for calling them is supposed to stop me from calling them.  That is exactly what they did and keep on doing.  I am not allowed to ask anybody to keep the noise down or knock on their door just to say hi. 

 

What kind of world are we really living in?

 

The woman lived by herself for a few years and later a man moved in with her.

 

They did not bother me throughout the remainder of the time they lived there.

 

The Bedroom Window

While we lived here I was able to open my bedroom window and let in fresh air and sunlight.   I could listen to the birds and the airplanes and the rustle of the trees when the wind blew.  I felt the breeze and felt alive and I could breathe the fresh air in the Fall and enjoy the extra daylight in the Summer and see the moon as it rose up in the East.  It was a nice feeling and a homey feeling. 

It was my window, my very own bedroom for me to enjoy my living in.  After all, I was divorced and finally in my very own apartment for the first time in my life.  I was happy to have this fresh new experience in my late adult life. 

 

Only soon would some mean half-naked man take all of that away from me. 

We had moved in around 2004 and life was ok except a few hiccups like the parking experience and the noisy neighbors.  Then in 2017 “he” moved in.

 

The Half-Naked Neighbor

In early 2017 my son and I were having financial struggles, but still able to manage the rent for this apartment.   I had a brother who lived up in Northern California so one day I decided to go up there to try to live with him and look for a job just to get away from the Los Angeles area.

In the meantime, my son found some roommates he could share the apartment with. 

While I was up North, I was having some difficulty finding work and the town was very small so jobs were scarce. 

That idea went down the drain so I decided to return home.  I was only gone a few months so everything was the same.

 

I was back in my bedroom, still looking for work and home everyday since I was unemployed.

 

I noticed the woman next door was still living there so I wasn’t worried about any changes.

 

About a month after my return, I saw what looked like a moving truck parked outside the house next door.

 

As I looked outside I was shocked to see that the man who had been living there had already moved out.

 

Within a day the woman was gone too.

 

This was strange.   They moved out in such a hurry.

 

Wow!  Before the week was over, there was a strange man moving in the house and there wasn’t even a for sale sign or a for rent sign.

 

He showed up out of nowhere.  “Did he kick her out?” I asked my son.   He was just as surprised as I was and wondered the same.

I was outside and heard the man talking to some people and he was introducing himself as the owner of the house and that he just moved back from Seattle.

He saw me and said his name was Mark and he was there to fix up the house for his parents.  I answered politely by introducing myself and welcoming him to the neighborhood.

 

Little did I know that that was a mistake.   But try to be a good neighbor.  Why bother?

 

I do know a few of the people in the apartment building that we live in so we were able to exchange information from time to time about what is going on and how things are in our lives.

 

Some had already met Mark and formed an opinion of him and it was not positive information.

 

I saw Mark outside of his house every day and he was usually half-naked.  He often only wore a pair of very short shorts and never wore a shirt.

 

He slowly began to fix up his house and he was often on the phone talking very loud to someone about repairing something. 

 

The other neighbors who lived next to him or across the street were getting acquainted with him as he told everyone he met that he was there to fix up the house for his parents.

 

My neighbors were getting the scoop on him as well.  They found out that he was a former policeman and a former fireman.  Strange that he was former of both occupations.

 

Why was he really here?  Why didn’t he work?

 

I guessed he didn’t work because he was home all the time.

 

It was none of my business but mysterious all the more. 

 

We heard him working day and night.  He did everything himself.   He began to get very noisy and bothersome.

 

Now he had several cars and a very long driveway that he could park all of them in.  He decided that he would park his pickup truck on the street and he took the front spot directly in front of my apartment. 

 

We thought he would change parking spots when he drove it sometimes but he never did.

 

He took that spot and would not give it up.  He exchanged the spot with his other cars sometimes and while he did not park there my son or I or another person would try to park there.  When we did this he deliberately parked his car in front of my son’s car and blocks him in so that he could not get it out at all. He parked in his driveway with the back of the car sticking out onto the street.  (Supposed to be illegal, but hey, cops didn’t care)  My son knocked on his door and asked him to move his car and he refused and threatened him and called my son a name that is not a name anyone would like to mention in today’s ugly world. 

 

My son had to carefully squeeze out of the parking spot so that he could go to work. At any rate he had to get out no matter what.

 

This caused us concern for our safety and we called the police about it and they would not do anything but ask him to move his car.  He reluctantly moved it later.

 

After talking to the neighbors I found out that he had pointed a gun at another neighbor and threatened that person for trespassing.   He put up a no trespassing sign on his lawn so now the police say that he can shoot anyone who comes onto his property uninvited.

 

He continues to park his truck in the same spot and added another car to his driveway and occasionally blasts his music from this other car, which is a convertible and he parks it directly next to my bedroom window.

 

 

 

 He stays up very late every night fixing something and talking outside on his phone next to my window.  This truly is unbelievable and annoying.  I have called the police on him several times and they refuse to do anything but ask him ever so politely to keep quiet and turn down the music. 

 

I told the police that I notice that he put up a camera and a light directly facing my window.  They said it is not illegal and I can put up a camera too.

 

That is not the point.  The point is that he is allowed to do this and he is spying on my privacy by doing this intentionally and getting away with it.  The light goes on several times most nights and shines very brightly into my window.

 

I am not allowed my privacy or my health or safety in my own home and now I am suffering without being able to open my window or open my blinds to look outside at all.

 

As long as he lives there I cannot live life in peace and healthy with fresh air and sunshine because he is allowed to destroy it.

 

I have to keep my window completely closed and blacked out.  I cannot enjoy my life the way I did before he came.

 

I am a prisoner in my own bedroom and the police let him do it.

 

He continues after 6 years to fix his house , dress half-naked , park wherever he chooses, threaten others and myself and my son, play his loud music and spy on me and shine his bright light into my blacked out window and talk very loudly on the phone outside his house constantly .  The man never shuts up nor has he ever worn a shirt with his skimpy little shorts.

 

I had brief conversations with 2 or 3 neighbors from across the street and they do not like him and tell me to stay away from him, he is a very bad man.

 

No joke, this man is nuts and needs to be locked up.  But according to the police he can do anything he pleases including dressing indecent everyday.

 

 

By the way, he even parked a NYFD fire truck in front of my apartment for about a year.  A real New York Fire Department truck actually from New York, sitting right here in California.  Maybe it was a 9-11 souvenir.   (JK)

 

Today he is still working on his yard in 2023 and he even planted two fire hydrants in his front yard and the rest of the yard is covered in black plastic.

 

To end, there is a large banner hanging from his porch that reads:  F’ Biden. 

 

Does this mean he is a nice half naked neighbor?

 

 

The End