For the first 14 months of our Monterey move, The Norman Bates Motel was in our backyard and…..the Neighbors From Hell lived next door, smack on the other side of our driveway.

It started out OK; a mom, a dad and it looked like 3 teenaged girls.

We were busy moving in when the woman across the street stopped by…..but NOT to welcome us to the neighborhood only to tell us that the woman next door had recently bought a one-way ticket to the east coast to live with a man she’d met on an internet dating site.
Whadd’ya do with that one when you’re brand new in the neighborhood?
Smile and say, “oh that’s nice.”
or
“Well that bitch!”

I’d seen teenaged kids going in and out, didn’t know how many actually lived there but if that were true, I felt sad for them being abandoned by their mom so I stopped scrubbing long enough to make a pot of homemade lasagna and a batch of from-scratch brownies.

Had I been there when the mom left and known what we were about to encounter with those poor abandoned girls, I would have ENCOURAGED her to leave…..maybe even helped her pack!

I walked across our driveway, across their front yard and on to their porch.
I rang the bell balancing a pan of lasagna in one hand and the brownies in the other.
I could hear scrambling around inside, then the door opened a crack and two eyes peered out.
I introduced myself as the new neighbor and extended my offerings with a smile. The door opened wide enough for two skinny arms to latch on to the foil pans, I heard a quick “thanks” and the door slammed shut.
I stood there for a moment and wondered…what the heck?

Bartles and Jaymes our two Schnauzers, didn’t like anything about next door
I’ve always trusted their people instincts and their barking should have been a warning to me, a strong message…..I should have paid closer attention.

Shortly after my first strange encounter with the two eyes and skinny arms, I realized that the lasagna and brownies should have been baked with a curse…..maybe one bite turning them into gophers, like the ones that lived in holes all over everyones yards. Or even more appropriate, the pigs I could hear snorting one block over at the Fair Grounds

One of the first things we noticed was the in and out traffic, day and night.

It was summer so they weren’t in school but it seemed they didn’t sleep…..ever!

Our bedroom was on their side of the house and the noise all night long was horrible.

I baked a batch of cookies and back across the yard I went.
(Another missed curse opportunity.)
This time the door opened wide enough for me to see a young girl, maybe 15.
Had I been her mother, I would have sent her straight to the bathroom to wash off at least two inches of the caked on make-up, then demand she fix the hooker-lookin’ hair-do and lastly put some less revealing clothes on…..the black lacy bra underneath the light see-thru blouse must have been left behind by her mom.
But, I wasn’t there representing the Fashion Police and I was sure she wasn’t interested in my opinion of her circus face.
I asked her if they’d mind trying to keep it down a bit after say… 2 A.M. every morning?
Again, reaching arms, cookies in hand and a quick “OK.”

The next morning we had broken beer bottles covering our driveway…. our answer to asking them to quiet down.
I hoped at least one of them had an allergic reaction to the cookies.
It was almost an hour of clean-up work before we could even move our cars.

We figured there MUST be a dad who lived there, or did he run away too?
I saw him once as he was hopping on his Harley and headin’ out. And the way he was packed, it looked like he wasn’t comin’ back for a while.

We were the new neighbors and we didn’t want to start out on a bad note but, we needed to sleep.

One afternoon I wandered over to the house on the other side of the nighttime noise WITHOUT lasagna, brownies or cookies.
The woman who came to the door smiled with recognition when she saw me.
I’d waved to her earlier in the week when I was outside.
We exchanged names and then I asked her about the situation next door.
“Don’t they bother you? Are you able to sleep?”
“Yes, honey they bother me but they’re a rough crowd and they can be pretty nasty.”
“So, we just put up with it?”
“There’s not much we can do, honey.”

So we found we lived on a street with a bunch of uncontrollable stinkin’ rotten noisy teenagers, with an airport landing strip practically in our back yard and the smell of barn-yard floating through the windows from the county fair grounds on the next block.
We lived on Sensory Overload Street!

Night after night, cars and what felt like hundreds of kids in-and-out created unsleepable noise.

And, they really did crawl out of windows to sit on the roof, drink, yell and toss beer bottles down on our driveway.
They also threw their trash over the fence and onto our front yard…..fast food bags, cans, containers, wrappers…..always empty and being empty made the dogs hate them all the more.
They stood stiff and tall, ready to attack…..barked, growled, jumped and never stopped trying to get over that fence.
I think the smell of the food but the empty containers is what pissed them off the most.
The dudes…..greasy haired, scary, creepy, mean looking, dirt-bags swore at them and threw whatever they could find in the yard at our two little Schnauzers.
I wished just for five minutes they could turn into killer Doberman’s, able to jump the fence and even the score.

They were a bunch of nasty punks…..and they scared me.

I worried they’d hurt my dogs….maybe offer them poison food, kinda like I wished I could do to them.

I asked the woman across the street about them and she said they were out of control and there was nothing that could be done.

We decided to switch our bedroom to the other side of the house.
It was a much smaller room, but at least we wouldn’t hear the noise.
WRONG!
It barely made a difference.

The best we could do was leave the bedroom TV on all night.
It helped drown out some of the noise.
Sometimes we played New Age music to soothe our souls and enter the space of acceptance. We tried to visualize the day we didn’t live there anymore.
We also tried counting sheep, like the ones living on the next block, the ones we could smell.
We hoped it was a summer thing and it would calm down after school started so we bit the bullet and waited.

September, October, November…it never stopped, night after night.
Where was the father and no wonder the mother left!
Didn’t they go to school?
Didn’t they EVER sleep?

After we realized this was life at the Norman Bates Motel, we decided as much as we didn’t want to….we needed to call the authorities.

We waited til they were in high gear one night and called the police.
They arrived within minutes.
We told them about the constant noise, the obviously unsupervised minors, the alcohol, and the shattered bottles on our driveway…..enough complaints and violations to send them to some Delinquent Camp in Utah.

The police were polite and seemed attentive to our problem.
They walked next door, were there for a few minutes, came back and said they told the kids to quiet down or go home.
Well, that must have scared them.
Certainly that was gonna whip them right into an acceptable behavior.

The next morning our driveway was bombarded with broken beer bottles.
We could hear the laughter.
We called them a few names that morning…..under our breath.

A week later we called the police again.
This time when they came to our door, they didn’t go next door.
They just kinda looked at us and said, “ya know, they’re just kids havin’ a good time, give ‘em a break.”!!!!!
Yep, that’s what they said!
Give THEM a break!!!!!

That was the moment we knew we were SCREWED!

Eventually the dad’s Harley was back in the drive-way.
One evening my husband saw him outside and took the opportunity to have a chat.
I watched from the kitchen window.
I saw a handshake.
I had complete confidence that my calm, common-sense husband would handle this with smiles and a short right-to-the-point, conversation…..and he did.

We stood in the kitchen and he repeated as close as he could remember, word-for-word how it went.
He gave Harley-Dad a run-down of the noise disturbance and broken-bottle messes
his demon teenagers and their dirt-bag friends created on a nightly basis.
Of course, “demon and dirt-bag” were not terms he used while speaking with him.
He said Harley-Dad seemed like a nice enough guy and sympathetic to our complaints.
But hearing that we notified the authorities made him kinda chuckle and then he explained that he went to school with the entire police force…they were all his buddies and on top of that, he worked for the City.

Another moment of realizing how seriously SCREWED we were!

Things quieted and calmed so he must have said something but, every week-end the Harley revved up, pulled away and the party animals appeared and forgot all about the quiet-down thing.

Our lease was for 12 months and rentals on the Monterey Peninsula were almost non-existant at the time so we just had to deal with it.
And sometimes, after a few glasses of wine, we even had fun with it.

One of my daughters, whose always been my side-kick and pal since she was just a sweet little girl, drove the 3-hour ride to Monterey almost every week-end.

We walked the water, shared secrets, grew as friends and we took in all the beauty along the way.
We ate at restaurants on Cannery Row and Fisherman’s Wharf.
It was an awesome time.

She knew about the neighbor problem, she’d witnessed it often.
She tried befriending the girls and asked them to kind of please tone it down in the middle of the night.
Her answer was more broken beer bottles on the driveway tossed from the roof. It was a game, crash bottles, score points.

Over the months, my husband tried a few times to reason with them but
they were just a bunch of wild, out of control, disrespectful dirt-bags…..creeps every one of them.
The boys were scary looking and seemed to enjoy glaring at us from across the grass.
We ignored them but my dogs knew they were bad news and barked a vicious bark every time they were near.

There were only 3 other houses on this street but evidentally they either were too frightened to do anything, had already done something and got the same response we did or maybe they were deaf.

The I-can’t-take-anymore happened one Saturday night when my daughter was spending the week-end with us.
It was 2 a.m.
I heard some terrible noises coming from next door, it was a girl, she was crying out.
I couldn’t understand what she was saying but something was wrong.
It was pitch black dark inside our house so I felt safe walking through to the kitchen to peer out the window and see if I could figure out what was going on.

My daughter and I bumped smack into each other in the dark living room on the way to the kitchen and scared the crap out of each other.
“Mom, something’s bad wrong over there. One of those girls is in trouble, you need to help her.”
“First let’s go look out the kitchen window,” I whispered.

We took each other’s hand and tip-toed quietly to the window, fearing if we made a noise, they’d hear us.
We stood behind the sink and did our best to survey the yard next door in the dark.
We saw nothing but the cries from the girl grew louder and louder.
“Mom, we’ve got to do something,” my daughter was almost in tears with concern.
The sounds….I’d heard them before….. everybody’s heard that horrible noise outside their windows on late on summer nights…..CATS!

Wait! A movie. It’s Harry Met Sally…..right next door.

We were hearing a teenager who’d watched too many movies and was doing her best impression of a Hollywood actress, well…..you know, the BIG “O.”
But she needed a few more acting lessons before her noise would convince her audience of a way-beyond-satisfied woman instead of a howling cat in heat.

Not for a moment did I believe what I was hearing was real.
That was stuff read in books and seen in movies and if there was any reality to it, there wasn’t enough time in a teenagers life to perfect it in a way that would create such a howl!

I convinced my daughter of what was going on…..however, we both agreed that well, just in case, we wanted a look at this guy in the morning and we laughed.

The performance went on for about 10 minutes, there was an intermission, and a repeat.

When the show was over, the two of us were sitting at the kitchen table sharing a coke and a bag of chips and we applauded.

That was it!

Our lease was over, we had no more obligation to stay and I was done!

Done with the noise, the beer bottles, the tossed garbage, the parked cars on the yards, the dirt-bag teen-agers, the roof climbing, the dirty looks, the lack of any kind of respect, my barking dogs and the 10 minute “happy endings.

Done!

TO BE CONTINUED…..