The Brawlin' Broad and the Smokin' Blokes

Ok, so first the backstory with my life. On Wednesday this week, after work, I caught the bus to Waikiki to spend a day with Sydney and friends. Sydney's dad was awesome enough to use his points at the Marriott Hotel to check out a room for the week, so Sydney, Ali, Kaitlyn, Kylie, and Jessica have been there since Monday, with other people like me rotating in and out. Pretty cool, yeah? Anyways, got there on Wednesday, enjoyed an awesome meal at the Cheesecake Factory (birthday splurge; 3 of us have our birthdays next week- the 20, 21, and 23), played around in the hot tub at the hotel and learned the butterfly stroke from Ali in the pool (or, perhaps more accurately, laughed at ourselves attempting it) and then stayed up way too late watching a movie. Thursday was spent at the beach, where I tried surfing for the first time. Let's just say I need a lot more practice, lol. Anyway, I planned on going home that night so we went to the mall for dinner and I was just going to catch the bus from there. But... I got an invite to attend a show in Waikiki the following night, and I didn't really want to ride the bus, so... I ended up just staying. Had a good night at the mall, then went back and went to the hot tub with Jessica where we just talked for a while, before going back to watch a movie with everyone else. Well... they had all fallen asleep, so no movie. Still not ready for bed, we went out on the balcony to talk, but we witnessed an entire drama unfold on the street below for almost an hour. This is that story.

The Brawlin' Broad and the Smokin' Blokes
Jessica and I sat on the balcony, talking and enjoying the Thursday night life of Waikiki at 11:30 pm. From our lawn chairs seven floors up, we had a clear view of the beach just a block away on our right, the mountains a mile away on our left, and a little, unremarkable street corner below us. An ABC store still had its doors open wide as it catered to the last few tourists seeking a snack or a Hawaiian trinket. At first we paid little attention to any of this, and merely enjoyed our conversation.
Then our first character appeared on the scene.
This woman, whom we subsequently named Veronica, the Brawlin' Broad, was a sight to see, even from our height. Tall, black, loud, and wearing high heels and a dress not only too low on top but also too high on bottom, quickly caught our eye. It didn't take long for her to capture our rapt attention.
At first she seemed little different from all the other passerby as she waited around in front of the store, presumably for a ride. She loitered about, chatting on her phone... then something happened. We still have no idea why, but she started to get angry. Her phone conversation rose steadily in volume and her pacing grew more bullish. She began walking in and out of the store, her temperature rising along with her voice. Words began to become distinct, most of them unfit for publication. Within minutes she was worked up into a frenzy, though we couldn't tell if she was yelling at the phone or someone in the store. In retrospect, likely both.
By now Veronica had earned more than just our passing interest, though the situation still seemed relatively within the bounds of normal.
Enter the towel-lady. Veronica was creating quite a bit of noise, so it was not too surprising (though certainly amusing) when a woman appeared on a balcony across the street (about four floors up) to investigate. In true form, she was wearing nothing but a towel. Despite her unprepared appearance, she still proved capable of altering the story dramatically when she leaned over the railing towards Veronica and called in a rather horrid, screechy voice, "SHUT UP!"
Veronica was loud enough herself to not notice at first, but, after three or four repetitions of "SHUT UP!", she, like a poor-sighted but infuriated rhino, turned her full attention to the towel lady and unleashed her devastating anger. "Where you at? Where you at? I'll kill you! Come MAKE me shut up! I don't give a blankety blank blank blankety blank about your sleep, you blankety blank! I'll kill your whole blankety family! BLAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAANK!"
I was reminded of the quote from the beloved film, A Christmas Story, where the narrator says, "In the heat of battle, my father wove a tapestry of obscenity that as far as we know, is still hanging in space over Lake Michigan," though the words "my father" and "Lake Michigan" should be substituted with "The Brawlin' Broad" and "Waikiki Beach". I'll admit that up to this point in my life, I have always considered swearing to be a low and unimaginative form of expressing oneself. Veronica, however, proved me wrong- one can be extremely creative even with a vocabulary limited to five or six words. Who knew?
Well, towel-lady soon threw up her hands (or, more accurately, hand. One was already holding up her towel) in disgust and disappeared into her room. Jessica and I asked ourselves how long it would be until the cops showed up. Veronica, meanwhile, was on a rampage, verbally assaulting passerby, the ABC workers, and the no-longer present towel-lady. "You hear that? You hear what she say to me? What would you do! You'd whoop her blankety blank blank blank blank! Don't you look at me like that! What's yo problem? You got a problem with somethin'? Thas right, walk aWAY!"
A police car soon pulled up. Surprisingly, instead of fleeing or calming down, as I assumed she would do, she made a beeline for the man. "Officer, you know what they been sayin' to me? Uh huh, they..." At this point she began to drop in volume, and much of their conversation is lost to us. We could only watch and speculate. I was impressed with the officer's handling of the situation. He gave her exactly what she wanted- someone to listen to her story- and she calmed down. Still, another police car pulled up, then another, and then another... four in all. Volume began to go back up and I began to wonder how they could possibly arrest her without losing whatever shred of modesty she had left. An officer had already had to point out once that she had bounced out of her dress just from walking in a fit of agitation (thank goodness it was dark and she was far away); I couldn't imagine a full take-down.
Nevertheless, the officers proved wise and a policewoman soon sat down to talk with her in some 'girl-time' while the other police checked the premises and entered the store. Veronica calmed down and soon she and the officers were laughing together. It looked like a happy ending...
At this point, a gigantic tour bus started to pull of the tiny side-street and turn right, past the entire scene. Well, the bus was long, the corner was small, and three police cars were blocking the way. The bus pulled out, hesitated, then parked and came over to talk to the officers. We could see his waving arms and easily conjure up the meaning of his words as he pointed to his bus, the police cars, up the street, at the bus, the police cars... Since Veronica was mostly taken care of, the officers obliged and moved out of the way, though they stuck around. The bus driver got back in, pulled forward... and an enormous crunch split the night. The bus paused and everyone began to search rather frantically for the source of the noise. Only Jessica and I, from our bird's eye view, found it: the bus bumper was caught on a support cable for a pole holding up electrical wires.
Erroneously assuming the worst was over, the bus driver continued forward. CRUNCH. The bumper bent backwards. The power lines rocked back and forth. People on the street fled every which way. The police began to yell.
At the cost of a bumper, the bus pulled free. The bus driver exited to examine the damage with the officers and figure out what had happened. This crisis, too, seemed over, until traffic (stopped by the tour bus blocking the street) began to hank and protest in anger. Taxi drivers yelled, the bus driver yelled back, and the police tried to calm everything down. Within a few minutes the bus had pulled over, the road was open, and the overabundance of police officers wrote out a citation for the bus driver and continued to comfort Veronica. All was well. Soon, the bus left and Veronica began to wave goodbye to the police officers as they too went on their way.
Meanwhile, our final characters made their entrance. Two men, hereafter described as the smokin' blokes, had come to the corner to watch it all go down. They stood, watched, talked, and went through cigarette after cigarette. They saw the end of Veronica's first fit, the arrival of the police, and the bus incident. They watched the officers leave and observed her happy dance as they did. They stood by and smoked as she continued to wait for her ride, eventually sitting on a crate in a pile of goods including towels and inflatable rafts outside the ABC store, which by now was getting ready to close for the night. At long last, as their smoke wafted around the corner, they began to interact.
In typical fashion, Veronica started it. Talking to herself about who knows what, she suddenly went into a rant about the nastiness of cigarette smoke and forbade the blokes from coming anywhere near her. She was as gentle and tactful as always, so we were astonished when the blokes reacted to provoke her. One of them walk right in front of her, pretending to eye the store goods, then flicked a cigarette butt at her feet. Thirty minutes of good police work came undone in an instant. "What you doin' that for? You KNOW I told you how nasty that is, you little blankety blank!" This time, Veronica became angry much faster- the bloke, after all, was retorting, and she would have none of that. We couldn't hear much of what he said, but we could guess from her colorful replies. "I'll sit and where whatever I want! Oh? You could't afford me, blank! You come over here and MAKE me shut up! My daddy's a police officer; he taught me well and I'm ALWAYS packing! Got a charged tazer right now, blank! Thas right, try something!"
At this point, the blokes began to back away, even if they continued to make snide replies. What's more, the ABC store was closing and needed to pull Veronica's seat inside. She of course verbally abused the workers until a big Hawaiian guy came out and spoke her language: "GET THE BLANK OVER THERE!" She resisted, but she moved. Finally, to ice the cake, towel-lady reappeared. "SHUT UP!" she wailed. Veronica erupted. She was simply bursting at the seams in every way- popping out of her dress, boiling over with anger, and exploding with profanity. Everyone and everything in sight was seared with her words as they echoed through the man-made canyons of the city. Towel-lady came back out on her balcony with a phone and we began to count down the time until the police returned.
Then, for no apparent reason, a taxi pulled over. Veronica went over, opened the door, and blasted the man inside. "You hear what they're sayin' to me? Blank blank blank!" We watched in confusion as, after a minute, she disappeared inside and it pulled away. Perhaps she sensed that the police would not be so forgiving a second time around. Perhaps she had given up on her ride and called a taxi. We'll never know.
What we do know is this: after she left, the blokes laughed. Towel-lady stayed on the phone and tried to take down the taxi number (ok, maybe we don't know that, but we can suspect). The ABC guys locked their doors, then a bloke picked up a large, pink, inflatable raft abandoned on the side of the store. He took it to the window, where they gestured at the garbage can. He dutifully complied, stuffing it straight in to the undersized public bin. A minute later the cops arrived. The blokes left fast, moving in opposite directions. The towel-lady disappeared, finally able to get some sleep. The cops got out, looked around, then patrolled the area for the next thirty minutes.
It was 12:39 am, and the only remaining vestige of drama was the neon raft.