Candid: Billabong’s Pipe House Saved Me!

Poor and living in Waialua, Rory Parker's sanity was saved, briefly, by this dazzling rental…

Many years ago, when we lived on Oahu and my wife was in law school and we were still living hand to mouth, the in-laws came out for a visit.

The wife’s dad has some bucks, so they were staying at the Blue Wave House fronting Off the Wall. Despite its absurd price, it’s not actually a very nice place. The wide-angle realtor lens photos do a terrific job of hiding how cramped and poorly built the place is, with tiny rooms and cut corners, every knob and hinge about to fail due to the heavy stress of a constant flux of temporary residents.

A quick check also shows that it’s illegally used as a short-term rental. Wonder what would happen to its value if the County started enforcing rental laws?

But, anyway, at the time we were living in a shitty apartment on the bottom floor of a subdivided house in the worst area of Waialua. Our landlady’s meth-addict son had just got out of jail, was hanging around all day, and we were more than happy to sit on the patio of the Wave House and avoid going home.

I’ve got a ton of stories from that time, but one that sticks out the most was a dispute two of our neighbors had over the ownership of a pile of bricks. They lived across the street from each other and, apparently, years before, one guy had agreed to store the pile of bricks on his property temporarily. The owner’s house was being worked on and there wasn’t room for them.

Years passed, the bricks were never used, and one day the original owner decided he wanted them back. Bricks have some value, he’d found someone who wanted to buy them.

Only, the guy storing the bricks had decided they belonged to him, as they’d been stored in his yard for many years (I never found out how many). He was therefore entitled to some, if not all, of the proceeds of their sale.

The contentious nature of the dispute caused the deal to fall through, but sparked a neighbor feud which was in full swing during our residency.

“Fuck that guy, he’s a thief.”

“Don’t believe anything he says, he’s a liar.”

Back and forth, ever escalating, until the day we got to witness the joy of pure lunacy.

Throwing bricks is hard work, and I expected them to run out of steam quickly. Both men were well into their senior years, but had that wiry laborer strength that lasts forever and so managed, bolstered by fury, to go all day long. Cursing and sweating and throwing bricks at each other, occasionally taking a break, then returning to battle.

Some comment lit a fuse under the guy in possession of the bricks, and his rage induced logic dictated that the proper way of solving the matter was returning the bricks to their original owner. The delivery method being heaving them, one by one, across the street while spewing a constant stream of expletives.

It instantly changed the nature of the disagreement. Rather than realize he’d won, that not only was he getting his bricks back, they were being delivered via air mail to his door, the original owner took the stance, “How dare you throw a brick onto my property?”

So he started picking them up, and throwing them back.

Throwing bricks is hard work, and I expected them to run out of steam quickly. Both men were well into their senior years, but had that wiry laborer strength that lasts forever and so managed, bolstered by fury, to go all day long. Cursing and sweating and throwing bricks at each other, occasionally taking a break, then returning to battle.

Peace descended around sun down, with dozens, maybe hundreds, of bricks littering the road and their yards. A temporary detente, sure to reignite come morning.

Ownership was even more confusing than before. After all, if someone throws a brick at you, you could argue that it’s now your brick. They’ve given it to you, right? And so all day long they’d been transferring ownership back and forth, forever muddling their respective claims.

After midnight I heard noise from the road and went outside to investigate. Thanks to the ever forgiving nature of the ohana system numerous families on the street had at least one shit-bag criminal relative who would come and go. Keeping an eye on your stuff was a necessity, if you didn’t want it to end up flipped for some rocks down at Ali’i.

Our landlady’s son, and a few of his chronic compatriots, were busy scavenging the bricks and loading them into the bed of a tattered pickup truck. I made sure they saw me watching, checked that our car was locked tight and had nothing of value in it, and went back to sleep.

Around 8AM our neighbors returned to war, only to find their bricks were nowhere to be found.

“What did you do with my bricks?”

“Fuck you! What did you do with my bricks?”

I decided not to involve myself, let them puzzle out the mystery of the disappearing bricks on their own. Later that day our landlady’s son pulled up on a tricked out, obviously stolen, moped, and tucked it away in the side yard, hidden beneath a tarp, where it remained for the next few months.