One night, Eli Orzessek woke up and looked out of the window. What he saw would spark a showdown between two sides of the Herne Bay fence.
Listen to the story as it was told at The Watercooler or read on.
At the time of this incident, I was living in my grandmother’s old house in Herne Bay for free. Yeah, I hear you – listen to this spoilt brat living in Herne Bay for free. But I can tell you this – I am nowhere near as spoilt a brat as my neighbour from down the road’s son.
It was 2011, a couple of weeks before the general election. I was just finishing up my final year at Elam. My flatmate and I are pretty boring so we watched a movie, fell asleep in the lounge and then went to bed early, despite it being a Saturday night.
My slumber was interrupted suddenly at around 2:45am. Half asleep, I didn’t get out of bed at first, but I could hear a scraping sound that sounded like rubbish bins being pulled up the driveway. After dozily taking way too long to establish that it wasn’t rubbish day, I got up and looked out my French doors.
There was nothing that could prepare for the devastation that I saw outside, in my very own front garden. A good half of our picket fence was now squashing most of the plants and the car that had flattened it had fled the scene.
There was a big party that night, just down the street. It was still going crazy and it was pretty obvious that’s where the car came from. We’re wandering around in a daze in our pyjamas and shit, trying to figure out what to do. I called the police, but they didn’t turn up. Then I just had to go back to bed and somehow sleep.
The next morning we went out and surveyed the damage and ended up meeting several neighbours, who’d wandered over to check out the fence hole. This guy who’s like the unofficial street captain says he knows whose party it is and they’re good people and will sort it out. It had been their son’s 21st and they were on Waiheke for the weekend.
Since it was my mum’s house, she called them and talked to the birthday boy’s mother, who seemed reluctant but agreed to pay for the insurance deductible when the police were mentioned. It all seemed like it was going to be resolved without trouble, so I started to relax and get over it.
The next day, I had to work at the library til 8pm and was feeling as chill as I possibly could considering what had happened. Then I got a text from my flatmate at about 7 – he’s talked to my folks, the husband won’t pay and he says we can’t prove the car came from his son’s party.
By the way, this charming chap turned out to be a prominent New Zealander – or rather, the brother of a prominent New Zealander. And like all Prominent New Zealanders, he gets permanent name suppression. His wife is also fairly prominent herself and between the two of them, they could easily afford to pay.
A neighbour walking past told us he saw a guy getting beaten up in our front garden, in the early hours of the morning. This was right outside my bedroom – how I slept through that, I have no idea.
When I get home, my flatmate tells me he spray-painted a piece of firewood to say THANKS NO. 31* and left it out for 20 minutes before chopping it up and burning it in the fire. I was pissed off as hell too, so I grabbed some chalk, like a true badass, and wrote “follow these tracks to find the culprit” next to the skid marks left from the crash. And I’ll have you know that they went right to my neighbour’s house.
So after all of that raging and creative sign making, we decided to go to the video store and get a movie to try and calm down. But when we got back, my elderly German father was waiting outside my house looking concerned.
“What’s this about a sign?” he said.
“Oh, uh, what sign? I don’t know anything about any signs.”
“The husband called… he said something a about a sign…?”
Then all of a sudden the devil himself pulled up in his car. He got out and started yelling at us, getting all up in our grills, trying to step over the fence hole. “You’ve crossed the line of stupidity,” he bellowed at us, over the hole.
“Get off my property you rich c**t!” I hollered back.
The closer I got to him, the more I could smell the booze on his breath. He was clearly drunk as hell and slurring his words as he shouted, “I’m a reasonable man,” over and over in my dad’s face. My dad replied, “Yes, I can see you are a very rich and powerful man who is used to getting his way”.
I wish I could say I was as composed, but mostly I just swore a lot. Then I got on the phone to the police to dob in his drink-driving ass. However, he realised what I was doing, so he jumped in his car and drove home.
At this point, my nextdoor neighbour arrived home and I told her what was going on. She sighed and informed me that our friend here had a drinking problem and his wife was leaving him because of it.
He returned without his car, ready for another round. He kept telling us how he was going to take everything from us, my family’s house, my flatmate’s classic car. I said, “You’re a fuckin drunk and that’s why your wife’s leaving you, eh,” and that seemed to shut him up nicely.
The police showed up this time, which was something. One cop seemed to side with him, the other with us. I guess it was probably a tactic to calm everyone down. I also live-tweeted the occasion and that was my downfall. The next day my neighbour dropped by to tell me he was suing me for defamation, mate. I consulted a lawyerly friend and decided to delete the tweets.
But then came the private investigator.
The private investigator arrived on the Wednesday. He said he was being paid to find out if the car had come from the party – and if this was proved, my neighbour would pay. He never proved anything, of course. But he did find out that everyone else on the street hated my neighbour too.
One old lawyer dude stopped at the fence-hole to chat and declared, “he’s a bully and a wanker and he doesn’t pick up his dog’s shit when he walks it.” Another neighbour told me it wasn’t the first time there had been an out of control party at this house – for the son’s 18th, the riot police turned up.
The whole thing felt like a bizarre episode of Neighbours At War but it severely traumatised me at the time. I couldn’t sleep properly for a long time and I became obsessed with trying to find the car.
In the end, my flatmate just put the fence back up by himself, because it was obvious they were never going to pay – but strangely, it was missing two pickets. A neighbour walking past – the elderly father of a movie star no less – told us he saw a guy getting beaten up in our front garden, in the early hours of the morning. This was right outside my bedroom – how I slept through that, I have no idea.
I think one of the culprits must have taken those pickets as some sort of sick trophy. But then a neighbour offered us some pickets she had lying around in her shed. They weren’t quite the same shape but my flatmate whittled them down to make them match – and the fence was good as new. Well, sort of. Two weeks later, the National Party won the general election of 2011 and the stress of the fence incident ruined my final Elam grad show.
The whole thing felt like a bizarre episode of Neighbours At War but it severely traumatised me at the time. I couldn’t sleep properly for a long time and I became obsessed with trying to find the car and filled notebooks with licence plate numbers. But it was also the most interaction I’ve had with my neighbours full stop in years, and I suddenly knew the names of nearly everyone on the street.
While my neighbour’s son and his rich p-dealer-looking mates attempted to intimidate us a bit more by doing burnouts with a truck outside our house and knocking my neighbour’s letterbox off our fence (thinking it was ours), they eventually moved to another street in the area about six months later.
As far as I know, my neighbour and his wife didn’t break up in the end – I like to think the craziness of this whole saga kept them together.
And that old lawyer still walks past every day and utters his favourite catchphrase: “Another day in paradise, eh boys. Another day in paradise”.
*Numbers have been changed.
This story was originally told at The Watercooler, a monthly storytelling night held at The Basement Theatre. If you have a story to tell email thewatercoolernz@gmail.com or hit them up on Twitter or Facebook.
Illustration: Lucy Han
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