Urban myths abound in today’s society. We have all heard the ones about leaving a tooth in a glass of Diet Coke overnight and the tooth disappearing, the story about Walt Disney having his body cryogenically preserved, the baby alligators supposedly flushed down the toilet and due to the catastrophic amounts of chemicals in the sewer, growing to astronomical sizes, etc., etc. But there is an urban legend in Honolulu that defies common sense but I know that it happened; I was there and participated in the creation of this myth. Some sheriff deputies, Honolulu Police Department officers, and deputy prosecuting attorneys were witness to it.
Before reading this, be assured that I try my very best to keep my Irish temper under wraps, I do, but sometimes a person can be provoked beyond the realm of any self-control and sometimes even against a single, solitary iota of common sense. And in Chinatown, during lunch hour, anything that can happen does. Naked people, public defecation, and the smoking of ice pipes – it’s a free for all! I contributed but a small amount of time to what became an urban myth of downtown Honolulu.
During one lunch hour, I was seated in front of a sandwich shop on Alakea St. I was on the phone with my husband and we were having a heated discussion. After I disconnected (hung up on him), I noticed a sketchy-looking person sitting near the bus stop. He obviously had been listening in to my side of the phone conversation, and he proceeded to mock me. Mock me! I stared at him and then asked him if he was indeed addressing my person. He affirmed this and then added some particularly foul curse words. I stood up and threw out some of my own. He approached me, feeling in his pockets for something, who knows what. Now, I am only five feet tall, but I have this theory about Chihuahuas.
A big dog will usually back down from a fight with a Chihuahua. The larger dog knows instinctively that it would certainly be able to kill the small dog, but a Chihuahua doesn’t stop to think. It will fight to the death and while this will inevitably be the outcome, the Chihuahua will somehow, in a miniscule but nevertheless painful fashion, f— up the other dog in some way during the proceedings. So the small dog always goes into the battle with this plan in mind and the result is that most big dogs will think: it’s just not worth it.
During my verbal sparring with this person, he tried to grab my cellphone. I was too quick though. Then he grabbed my purse! No way, no way was he going to get my purse with all the hypoallergenic makeup (I am Irish, remember) in it. That shit is hard to find and also expensive. We fought silently over the purse; the strap sheared off but we battled on. I won. Empty-handed, the sketchy person fled, but not before passing sheriff deputies wrestled him down to the ground, then handed him over to HPD. The last time I saw him, he was up against a wall, curled down into a fetal position. When I complained to one of the HPD officers, he said that this person had been seen there quite often and suggested that today, maybe he had been “off his meds.” Off his meds! Well, I stated that maybe I hadn’t taken my Midol that morning either but that was still no excuse!
I visited the site not too long ago. The sandwich shop is gone but there is a plaque in the middle of the battle scene that warns about people loitering. The bus stop seating has been removed. Someone put a tiny statue of a Chihuahua in the grass. It is still there.
