One Last Neighbor Nightmare

 

A while back, I told y’all a series of stories about the unusually high number of horrible neighbors I’ve had over the years.  I have one more.  It’s really not my story, this one actually belongs to Honeywine, but I have her permission to tell it.

A couple of years ago, Honeywine and I both lived in Louisiana, at Fort Polk.  She was newly married, and had just moved into military housing when her husband was shipped of to Iraq.  We had been friends for a few months, after meeting at a party where we were the odd ones out.  We got together every once in a while and just hung out and watched movies and stuff.  It was all good.

Then HoBag came along.  HoBag lived in the apartment underneath Honey’s.  She had a daughter who was 3 (if I remember right), and stayed home with her all day.  She was from Guam, or one of those other islands out in the Pacific.  She seemed nice enough, and before long, she was included in our “girls nights.”  There were times when she’d say something and I’d think, “what the hell is wrong with you?” and times when I felt that she was jealous of the friendship Honey and I had, but she was okay.  More and more, though, HoBag was around.  Her husband was deployed shortly after Honey’s was, and Honey felt like she had to look after HoBag and her young daughter. 

Not long after HoBag came along, my family and I moved to Georgia.  Honey and I still talked at least once a week, though.  Along with HoBag, Honey was able to meet more ladies through her Family Readiness Group (they help families during deployments…and as far as I can tell, give the wives something to do outside the house once a week).  Honey started to get out more, and she seemed to have a pretty good group of friends.  They all had young children, and since Honey loves kiddos, she didn’t mind watching the kids here and there.  As time went by, HoBag was depending on Honey to babysit.  A lot.  For long peroids of time.  This child was still in diapers, for crying out loud.  Honey decided she needed to distance herself from HoBag since she was being taken advantage of.  Once HoBag realized she couldn’t walk all over Honey, she turned completely against her, and also ruined all of the other fragile friendships she had made. 

It started as just little slights.  Everyone had a MySpace page, and some of them deleted her from their friends.  No big deal, but she felt like the high school girl tuba player who had become the target of the homecoming queen.  One of the girls in the group had not deleted her, though, and HoBag was using her page to get to Honey’s.  She and I had commented back and forth about the situation, and HoBag used it as fuel. 

Apparently, she spent all of her free time scheming about how to ruin Honey’s life.  First, she turned the other girls in the group against her.  Who knows how she did it, but it was done.  She would play her surround sound television set at all hours, knowing that Honey could hear it upstairs.  She would have the other girls over, knowing Honey would be hurt.  One afternoon, military police officers knocked on Honey’s door.  Now, if you are a military spouse, the scariest thing you can imagine is to see 2 men in uniform at your door, especially if your husband is in a war zone.  They were called for a noise complaint.  By HoBag.  She told them that Honey was playing her music really loud, even though the MP’s could hear that it was very low.  They told Honey just to make sure she kept it down, and left.

A week or two later, MP’s were at her door again.  This time, it was the middle of the night.  Honey was awoken to pounding on her door.  When she opened the door in her nightgown, they told her that her neighbor had called and said she was making all kinds of noise, banging on the floor, playing music really loud, etc.  She assured them that, no, she couldn’t have been because SHE WAS ASLEEP! 

Then, HoBag even came after me.  Me, who lived 700 miles away.  Bitch was crazy.  After the second MP incident, I was so angry and frustrated because I was so far away and Honey was down there dealing with this all alone.  Her husband was gone, and she didn’t know what HoBag was capable of.  So, in my frustration, I posted a blog on my MySpace page about what was going on.  The next day, one of HoBag’s friends (and Honey’s former friend) left a terrible comment, laced with f-bombs and other not-so-nice words, basically saying I didn’t know what I was talking about and should shut up.  I had never even met this person. 

After this, Honey pretty much stayed inside her apartment all the time.  It was scary.  She even got notified by the MP’s that HoBag came in and told them that Honey was harassing her online, and had brought in print outs from comments we had made on OUR pages about her.  To be honest, we never used her name, and we never said anything too bad or threatening or anything.  The MP’s knew she was a quack, but they couldn’t really do anything, so Honey just tried her best to avoid her. 

As soon as Honey’s hubby got home from Iraq, he was done with his active duty service, so they moved back out to the country and far away from HoBag.  She heard through the grapevine that HoBag moved to Washington state.  I think Honey learned a very valuable lesson about being friends with your neighbors.  Especially when your neighbor is a crazy psycho hose beast.