I don't even know where to begin. Do I start by telling you the story about the liveaboards across from us having what I am pretty sure was a drug-induced meltdown? Or do I save that one for later...
Well, first of all, there is this bizarre pattern with our neighbors' names being the same or similar to one another. Let me explain. Out of the ten men that we have met in our marina, eight of them are named Mike. Eight. Every time we meet a new man, Mike ends up being his name. I don't get it. Next we have Rich. Two of them. There are two different women named Becky. Then we have a JoAnn and a Susanne. And then there's us...Hanan and Allan. Maybe it is some sort of metaphor reflecting how we don't really fit in. We are also the youngest in this marina, by far.
We had JoAnn over for wine one night when we first moved in, because our boat's previous owner John told us she is a good neighbor to have around. JoAnn is probably in her 60s or 70s and lives alone, however was not shy to tell us she likes to prey on younger men. Like, much much younger men. Allan and I sort of shot looks at each other when she told us. She went on to tell us that she only hangs out with 20 and 30 something year olds , because "they make her feel young." No wonder she wanted to come over and hang out with us. We are the only people in the marina under 50 years old.
Once she had her second glass of wine, in came the gossip about the marina neighbors. Here is what we found out (mind you, we don't know anyone yet):
The man who is always walking the two small white dogs is a retired heart surgeon. Claus. She was sure to include her suspicion that something bad happened towards the end of his career causing him to "retire" abruptly and leave with bitterness and anger. She went on to say his two dogs run the show and that Claus lets them shit all over the place and he does not bother to clean it up. We asked about the other guy down the dock who won't ever say hi back when we walk by. She said he was electrocuted two times...interesting. She then went on to tell us about how one couple got into a huge fight last year and the guy took off with the boat while the woman was in the marina bathroom up top. He never told her he was leaving. No word. Just left out of the blue. All her belongings were on the boat with him when he left. She came back from the bathroom to find the slip empty. And of course, he wouldn't answer his phone, so she had to stay with a neighbor until he decided he was ready to come back. That is some serious crazy behavior right there. Thank God Allan would never be that immature. Ed, was a 95 year old man living on his boat with no family or friends, who apparently manipulates all the neighbors into "working for him." When it is sunny (almost always in San Diego), he sits on the top deck of his boat and basks in the heat, keeping guard of the area and waiting for people to pass so he can trap them to talk to him. Once he lures you in, 3 hours will have gone by before you know it, one story after the other. Then we learned that the man who looked like Albert Einstein, hair and all, lived with an older women who he supposedly cheated on with someone else one dock over. JoAnn seemed to love telling us all the juicy details. We kind of were taken back by all the personal things she was sharing about all these strangers. It was a lot to process and perhaps not the most welcoming information to learn about our new neighborhood.
Then we then got on the subject of the neighbors who lived right across from us. Daniella and Clayton. She was an African women from Zimbabwe, while he was a white guy, both probably in their 40s. The first time I saw Daniella, she was walking Clayton down the dock, seeing him off to work. I was walking up the dock to leave for work too and when she saw me walking behind them, she grabbed Clayton and kissed him really intensely, looking over his shoulder at me with the darkest serpent eyes I have ever seen--as if she was warning me to stay away. She never said hello or anything. Never introduced herself. I would see her around a lot in the summer, because as a teacher, I was off work. She seemed to not have a job and was always aimlessly roaming around the marina. I would see her in the bathroom or laundry room, wearing baggy sweats and oversized t-shirts and slippers. She would shuffle and drag her feet as she roamed, as if walking was too much work for her. She always looked hungover or like she was coming down off of something in the daytime, stumbling and moving extremely slow and lethargically. Even when I would smile and say hi, she barely acknowledged me. There was a deep vacancy in her eyes that gave me the chills. Little did I know what was yet to come.
It was maybe the second week of us living on the boat and while we waited for the new mattress to arrive in our aft cabin (bedroom), Allan and I slept in the V-berth (guest room towards the front of our boat shaped like a V). Ours was facing the dock, closest to Daniella and Clayton's boat, which means the bow of our boat was facing the bow of theirs, with just the dock in between us. We heard shrieking sounds around 11pm over our music, but at the time, we honestly thought it was just kids playing outside. I remember we even said to each other, "why are children even awake at this time? It is way too late for kids to be running around the docks." We continued listening to music and hanging out in the salon (living room)--it was not until we crawled into the V-berth for bed around midnight when we really were able to hear what was going on. It is hard to say if she had been yelling the entire time since those first shrieks and the sounds and if our music drowned her out, or if it just happened to be perfect timing of us hearing their fight as soon as we went into that room, but Daniella was screaming hysterically. Now, listen...I have lived in some shady areas in my time. I moved to another country by myself when I was twenty. I spent about 5 years living in shady neighborhoods of San Francisco since that is what I could afford, which also means I have encountered more crack-heads on the streets that I am comfortable with. I have been stalked on more than one account, I have witnessed homeless people having drug meltdowns before. I've been attacked by a drunk guy on the street who tried to follow me home, pinning me down and assaulting me in a dark stoop. Encounters like this were not that abnormal for the streets of San Francisco at night. Pretty much, it takes a lot to scare me at this point. But Daniella's screaming was by far the most insane I have ever heard. I don't even know how to explain how loud it was in words. You could hardly make out anything she was saying, but it sounded like she was slurring into a megaphone that was held directly up to my ear. And the screaming never stopped. It went on and on and on and on for what seemed like forever, and the strangest part was that there was never a voice on the other end. No one responded to her, no one tried to calm her down, she was just going ape shit crazy. I kept waiting for another voice to reason with her. "Was she alone? We wondered. Then could hear her stomping up and down the docks directly outside of our boat. She was aggressively pacing back and forth now. The only words we could make out were her threatening a man, saying she was going to put him in jail.
THEN we heard a huge splash. She fell into the water. She either fell off her boat or off the dock. I still do not understand how she could have fallen into the water, but then she started screaming "HELP ME OUT OF HERE NOW, GET ME OUT!!!!!" Still no other voice. Because it sounded like she was on some serious drugs, we got paranoid and started to worry if she would see our light on. Would she somehow be mad at us for witnessing her go nuts? I wondered if she would come up to our boat and try to engage with us. We turned the lights off and stayed quiet, listening intently of course. After stomping up and down the docks and screaming for another 15 mins, she finally climaxed. She began screaming "MAMA" over and over over and over and over with her arms up in the air (Allan peaked out of the porthole). I was waiting for other people to come out and try and restrain her. She started stomping out of the marina, all the while still screaming MAMA until her screams were abolished into the distance. I wish this was the end, but it is not. Until tomorrow...
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