Real Living in Hawaii

kung hee fat choy

2008-02-02T07:08:00.000-08:00

Saturday, February 02, 2008
Kung Hee Fat Choy from Ghetto Paradise!!!

Well, this fine Chinese New Year I was stuck at “The Building” not only because it took 3 hours to make a 3 mile trip to the store for groceries but when I returned, someone’s local little crackhead friends were again attempting to force open the entrance door to one of our retired residents studios. We’ve been having lots of foot traffic the last couple of days (first of the month, people got to spend their welfare) and several folks who don’t live here have now been armed with gate keys by our friendly neighborhood drug dealers so the scum can come and go on demand.
On top of being the scary individuals who try to sneak thief their way into 70 plus year men’s rooms; these desperate and fearsome criminal masterminds like to wash their filthy selves in our communal showers, seeing that they lack their own facilities at A’ala Park. Another one of the reasons we haven’t had hot water for our own use in the last year. Why fix something to encourage a bunch of trespassing and burglary committing filth to break in even more often.
Well, we received a call from the Honolulu Police Department this morning regarding the past six months or more of complaints they’ve received from residents, or should I say not because of the constant stream of complaints from residents, as another precinct filed a criminal complaint against the building in a drug case, so now that someone besides the residents who actually live here has complained, they want to do something. Today the owners’ maintenance crew is supposed to be here we’ll see if anything goes down. Reason I’m writing this now? It was four in the morning when a tenant woke me up because he snapped a key off in his door lock.
I’ve done everything in this building from cleaning up after suicides that went undiscovered for a week, to changing light bulbs that addicts like to use for emergency ice pipes. I’ve decided to open my vault of pictures and let you see just what life’s like here at “The Building” so here goes.

This picture of is some of the flooding we suffered through last summer, when drains and pipes finally gave out on the third floor and I came home one evening at 11:00 P.M. to find a torrent of waterfalls down all three stairwells of our building. This particular night 10 units were flooded, and the upstairs bath and showers.
More flooding….
I’ve had rooms full of garbage from knee deep to over your heads, with cockroaches thicker than carpets that took weeks to clean out. 5 dead bodies in the last few years, and a mattress fire. Usually it’s nothing more than someone drunk or stoned into unconsciousness, with the water running in the room an inch deep, or a busted down door from a robbery. How bad does it get? I’ve had rooms where I took out 75 25 gallon garbage bags full of rotting food and trash, I’ve had rooms where I’ve taken out 200 bags, all from a single 8x12 room. People lived in these.
If I can dig up the cockroach pictures and the garbage ones I took for management, I’ll put them up. It’s five and I have to try and sleep as I haven’t been able to get anything done this weekend for University.

Ahead of the Curve: Today's Headlines in HNL

2008-01-27T22:45:00.000-08:00

Well, it's good to know when you're riding the top of the wave and not trying to catch the back. (little local humor, the kind of stuff our inane local columnists add in thinking it makes them sound like they come from here). Headline in the Sunday Honolulu Advertiser: "Tourism Slowdown Felt Across Isles"

I can't say I told you so.

Now, onto other things, this week barring any new breaking stories, we'll discuss "The Building" as part of my depiction of real living in HNL, I'll be putting up current, true stories about the slums we who make less than 50,000.00 a year are forced to put up with here in ghetto paradise.

See you tomorrow. Peace.

More Ghetto Paradise!!!

2008-01-26T18:53:00.000-08:00

All this week, folks have been serving up a never ending stream of regret and tears for poor Cyrus, a one and a half year old child who was thrown to his death from a 25foot overpass footbridge by a 25 year old mentally ill neighbor who was high on ice. The culprit, whose currently in jail charged with 2nd degree murder, was in the custody of his father, and elderly man, who lived near Cyrus' home. This outrage is made even more disgusting because the grandfather and the father were both home and supposed to be watching the boy at the time. The grandfather went and took a nap, and the father, the mother's boyfriend, was too busy fixing his car to pay attention to his child. The boy had already been found wandering the street that morning by police, unattended, and the cops took him back to his loving home and let the matter drop. A few hours later he was out on the sidewalk again and was murdered for it. By the way, the father and the mother? Both ice addicts with long records of problems and child protection services all over them, but no one protected Cyrus. Way to go HNL, another day in paradise!!!

Now, the bleeding hearts are all saying they hope this "tragedy" (not crime) will bring the mother and boyfriend to turn their lives around. Who cares? These two ice heads need about 25 years of their own time in the gaol to learn how to act. Feel sorry for this bunch? You've got to be kidding, all of you punks who cry for these parents, go down to the graveyard and see how much living Cyrus gets to do. Fry these punks. This is just another example of how social services is at the mercy of bleeding hearts and coward politicians, who push the idea of keeping families together, when they don't have a working family to start with, nor parents who should be allowed to raise children.

Bottom line: Economics says leave the kids at home, it's cheaper to pass out welfare and wic and foodstamps than to intervene with these people. Cyrus was removed for awhile, but the state let him go home again, and he was killed for it. Then the same people who engineered his death sit around and say things like, "We'll never be able to say why Cyrus died." Bull hockey! The reason Cyrus died was because the community didn't do its job. The workers who tried to save Cyrus had their hands tied by the system and the police were too busy to take an infant toddler into protective custody. Now they say the parents will suffer enough and we should be kind to these two useless subhuman addict trash whose negligence and selfishness killed their own child.

Yeah right....

Welcome to Ghetto Paradise!

2008-01-25T13:44:00.000-08:00

In recent months, tourism, the golden goose of our existence has fallen by some 20%. Which begs the question, "With the dollar tanking worldwide, and foriegn currency from places like Japan, where the bulk of Hawaii's tourist come from, why aren't people coming?"

Why indeed.

Since the beginning of the new year, in the central Honolulu area and Waikiki tourist haven alone we've had the following: A man chased his wife down and drove a foot long knife through her heart, An ex boyfriend ramming his former girlfriends' vehicle off the road, trying to shoot her with a 12 gauge, and then when that failed, beating her to death in the street with the gun, as well as beating on man who attempted to stop him and putting him in the hospital, and threatening others who tried to stop him with the shotgun. The man has 60 plus criminal convictions, and a multitude of violent felony offenses. Another young man, from a foriegn country here in the Pacific, living in public housing and with several unserved warrants out for his arrest, stabbed a man to death at midnight because he and several others were out high and drinking on the street at a corner store and the guy shook his hand too hard. According to witnesses, there was no fight, the guy simply stabbed him and he ran for help to a guardshack at the housing project, collasped, and died. Last Tuesday, we had memorial for victims of violence at the State Capitol, that same night, I was standing at a bus stop in Pearl City, waiting for a bus to come back home from University when some young guy, about 18-20 attacked me, then hung around several minutes trying to hit me with a fence stake, even pulling a sapling tree out of the ground and charging me. He was high as a kite and yelling, wanting to scrap, he said. My gerber tactical knife made him think twice, and I used the time to call the local police. The police drove by us and refused to stop until the guy ran off. They then neither looked for the guy, nor filed a report of the incident. We drove by him down the street at a bus stop and they dropped me off at a bus stop on the same busline so I could go home. Would have been interesting if we'd crossed paths on the bus coming back to town huh?

So, the cops refused to arrest this guy, and would have been real helpful after I was laying on the ground with my brains busted out. So, I get the newsfeed that morning when I get up, and a sixty year old man was found at five that morning, unconscious with his mouth busted at a bus stop downtown. A later update said he was hospitalized.

Gee, I wonder if the cops regret not arresting the kid now.

But hey, that's what life is like here. Property crimes are so common and never punished to the point people no longer bother to report most of them, including car thefts. I and every single guy living in my building, (about 40 of us) who owns or have owned a vehicle have had them vandalized, broken into, or stolen. Every single vehicle, there are no exceptions. Alarms don't work, they break your window, the alarm goes off, they run away. Later, the come back and you no longer are able to set the alarm, your stuff's theirs. We have shared bath and shower facilities in our building, our security gates have been broken many times so that some crackhead or homeless guy or girl can break into our home and use the facilities. The fact that we have the two main shelters for homeless and our local park, Aala Park, has been given over to homeless, addicts, and hookers isn't enough for these folks, they have to break in to people's buildings and use their stuff. In my nieghbor's building, they break into the apartments to use the washers and dryers, and steal whatever they can get. We've had four apartments broken into recently, and have taken to chaining our busted security gates with bicycle locks and log chains and padlocks to keep the thieves out. Of course this means we have only one usable access door for our building, and if a fire should break out, we're screwed.

I've lived here for five years, in that time, I, a disabled ex veteran who lives on 635.00 bucks a month, have lost over 5,000.00 dollars to vandalism and theft. You can't chain a bicycle outside, if they can't steal it, they'll cut the cables, steal parts or just wreck it. You can't park a motorcycle outside, if they can't steal it, they'll steal the gas, (if they can't figure that out they'll just try to pry the tank open with screwdriver)though stealing gas from a motorcycle requires merely pulling the rubber tank valve tube off and turning the gas valve, they will stimply cut the wiring harness or slash the tires. Since the cops can't be bothered with property crime, my next door neighbor, an elderly retired man in his 80's has had his room broken into twice in as many months, once through the window, (yet he lives on the second floor) and once they simply crowbarred his door open. The first time they stole over 3,000.00 dollars off him, the last time they simply carried out whatever they could get. I reinforced his door and windows and so far no ones come back, we even managed to get the burgulars' fingerprints off the window glass, but we've had no action from the cops.

Despite the publicity, there's plenty of racism here in HNL. If you're not brown, you're automatically excluded here. If you are brown, you might be someone who just landed on a plane from L.A. or Texas, but you become "Local" on the other hand, if you're white and have ties here since King David Kalakaua, your a f******g haole. Recently, a local columnist at the Honolulu Star Bulletin, one Charles Memminger, wrote a Christmas piece mangling carols into such phrases as, "deck the halls with bowels of haoles" yet seemed indignant when white folks got upset. Instead of apologizing, he and his paper have since released a couple more columns, one, where Mr. Memminger wrote, "Haole is not a four letter word" where he told ignorant whites they were too stupid to know that "Haole" is not a derogatory word like the "N" word unless preceeded by an obscene antecedant. EX. "F*****G Haole". In the next column, the writer tried telling us such racist insults were okay, because, local comedians are famous for using race based humor here in Hawaii, and are still doing it. (Another reason the tourist won't come anymore?)

There is a recent incident backdropping this incident. An army man and his wife were driving in Waikiki last fall, when they became involved in a minor traffic accident with a "local" man and his son, the two viciously attacked the couple yelling racial slurs, including F******G Haoles! and others, yet when the case came to being settled, the courts wouldn't allow the crimes to fall under racist or hate crime legislation; after all, the victims were white. (why arent' tourist coming?)

Bank robbery has become an annual event for all major banks on the island. We average some two (2) or more bank robberies per month, year round. The most recent crook in question who was just caught and charged admitted to robbing 3 of 4 banks that were hit in the last two months.

We have another robber on the loose, or two presently, who are knocking over local corner marts and liquor stores. One is holding up shops in Waikiki with an automatic rifle, his last attack he fired several shots during the robbery. Another robber was just reported caught today, help up a local corner market here downtown, and a few days later, went back to buy something as a customer, whereupon the owner recognized him. The crook stabbed the owner, wounding him badly, but is now in custody.

So what's it like to live in Paradise?

MY building, The Thom Building, located downtown across from Honolulu Community College Campus. We've had no hot water in the building for a year, our electric service is outdated and the tenants have no access to the circuit boxes, so if the power goes out on a holiday or weekend, because someone plugs in a hairdryer or a microwave, we do without power, sometimes as long as three or more days. Until the guy who runs the auto shop in the ground floor comes in and turns the power back on. Half our bathrooms are boarded up after our building flooded repeatedly for two straight weeks last May. Most of our plumbing doesn't work, we currently have one shower that works properly, cold water only in the building, and one upstairs that barely works and leaks water constantly as it cannot be shut off anymore. We have one toilet downstairs that still works out of 6, and two upstairs out of six. So, out of 12 toilets and six showers for forty or so residents, we now have 2 cold showers and 3 toilets for all the residents.
Most of the individual units are supposed to have their own wash basins, but many rooms have no running water at all. The laundry for our building has been locked off from residents and is now used by the building manager for a towel and washcloth washing business for hotels. Due to rising rents and water rates, our nieghborhood, which has over 10,000 residents, now has two laundrymats left, each over a quarter mile away in opposite directions. Island West, a large rental block here next to us, has over 400 individual studio units and closed its laundrymat last year. The only discount grocery in our nieghborhood closed last fall, leaving the closest grocery store over a half hour away. A local Kmart carries some groceries, or we could shop at Costco, except you have to pay 55.00 dollars for membership, and when you live in a single room studio without kitchen facilities and limited electric service, how are you going to cook and store meals?

Sounds different from the Hawaii you're sold? This is not some backwater community on the Leeward coasts, we're a quick half hour walk from China town, the State Capitol and Aloha Pier. Ala Moana and the entrance to Waikiki is only a 45 minute stroll away.

Cop response: don't make us laugh.

Making security rounds one night, I was attacked by a drunk guy with a half dozen previous arrests on his record. When the cops got here, they said the only way they would arrest this guy was if I was charged and arrested also, and I didn't hit him.

I had a man who didn't even live in the building chasing a resident through the halls one day in broad daylight with a butcher knife. They ran out of the building and up the street with the man screaming for his life. It took the cops four (4) hours to arrive. When they got here, they said, "Well they're gone now." and left.

I had several residents drinking and BBQing one weekend, and one of the guys tried to stab another with a screwdriver in the street outside. NO ONE was arrested.

I came home one evening and three (3) men were beating another man at the bus stop on Dillingham avenue. A security guard in the parking lot fronting the street refused to call the cops, "Not my parking lot." he said.

I was on South King Street, and a homeless guy, who I'd seen earlier in the day, fried out of his mind on ice and harrassing the ladies working at the 7-11, was pinning a 13-14 year old girl to the wall of a store and trying to rape her. I had to pull a knife to get him off her.

My friend "Bobby" was a kama aina kanaka, who was in his 70's and become poor and was put out on the street. He was on King Street last May when some oversized young punk beat him to death in order to steal a blanket. Yet enforcing vagrancy laws and getting these folks off the street never gets done. When he was caught, the guy says, "He looked white". No hate crime there.

University of Hawaii: Tuition raised 300 percent over eight years.

Groceries and gas: prices up as much as 400 percent of the last year.

Before you come here to live or visit, please consider: Why would I want to support this kind of governance?

Welcome

2008-01-25T13:16:00.000-08:00

As of today, I will be steadily filing in reqular reports on life here in Honolulu and around the islands. Just so everyone knows, here's my stats: I'm a 42 years old, white male, graduate school candidate finishing my senior year with the University of Hawaii. I've lived in downtown Honolulu for the last five years, and have traveled to a couple of our nieghbor islands for visits. I have been actively involved in community and political events, including working with a couple of local 501C's that help both mental health consumers and the homeless. I've been working as a building super for my landlord for the last 3 or 4 years, and have met with everyone from addicts to the Governor. So here we go. I got tired of the phony images of Hawaii the local tourist driven media puts out, and decided it was time the real story of living here got into print. I believed a lot of the hype about Hawaii when I moved here to go to university, having been involved in civil rights actions in Alabama and Georgia on the mainland, I thought I'd go somewhere where people tried to do things better...I was sadly mistaken.