Rincon again
Waiting for the call
Smoking crack together. Unsplash
Our Caguas household was my one redemptive pleasure to the miseries and daily frustrations of work in the most ill-planned and badly scheduled mall ever. My opinion of Puerto Ricans, even those in suits, was sinking to its lowest ebb. They didn’t even have the substation complete until two weeks before the well-advertised grand opening. So we couldn’t test or turn anything on before that. Half the contractors didn’t pull a neutral wire from that substation to their stores. They pulled three feeders instead of four.
I pulled four and told an engineer one day in the switch gear room they were breaking the rules. Their high voltage panels for lighting had no neutral. They were back-feeding the ground to make the lighting work. The neutral began in the transformer for the low voltage panel. He said he’d consult with his superiors. A few days later he came to my store to find me and said I was right, thanking me profusely for pointing it out. I don’t know if he made the other stores correct their fault. I suppose a few of them did. I had a higher reputation after that, just no money.
The last two weeks there Victor told us he’d settle up with each of us individually when it was over. Tom had left for Dan’s job in Fajardo. The three of us finished the last store working seventy hours a week. But with Paola gone peace was restored in the house. Frank was there till the end, his mind cleared and his disposition happy again. Addison and his girl had left a few days earlier, locking their door. His girl found them a place in some tenement. I paid him his slender savings from all those checks he gave me, several hundred dollars, and off they went. It was the last time I saw him in P.R. until I came back to sell my house in late two thousand and four.
At that time he was back in Rincon, looked just the same as I remembered him, and living off small construction jobs. The thought occurred to me that I’d aged much more than him in looks, which was curious, considering our lifestyles. I ran into him at the palapa above the Calypso one afternoon, drinking his one dollar beer. The beers thirty yards down the lane were a dollar fifty.
He was overjoyed to see me, all smiles, and insisted I see his place. He had a nice room to call his own in a fancy house he was slowly remodeling, the owner away, and even more surprising, a very pretty girlfriend there, twenty years his junior. But he still had his crack addiction. After he showed me his pad he toked up with her in front of me, in the middle of the day. He was always a ladies man, much like Jaime. I wondered if he’d corrupted this young American girl into the habit. It was hard to think not. She would be in a long line of qualifiers.
He called me in Canada a few years later, saying he had a patent and was going to make a lot of money and send me some. We talked pleasantly for a while but I thought it odd that he still felt guilt over Marcos breaking my jaw fifteen years earlier. Some people have very deep emotions they completely conceal for years. We never talked of it in the four years after it happened in P.R. I never heard from him after that one call.
Ten years later I heard he’d committed suicide, sick of his life, perhaps remorseful for all the girls he’d ruined and my incident. He did this in an unusual way, by just swimming out to sea one day, swimming straight out for hours until his arms failed, and with no strength left to return, truly a noble, novel, Roman way to go. By that I mean a sheer determination and focus on his goal, inner strength. Someone else from Rincon told me he slit his wrists. But I prefer the far more romantic version. He was quite the character.
I remember the day we moved out of the Caguas house. The owner, Jean’s friend, came by to check things out. She was both extremely nice and forgiving. Paola had made changes in the backyard with a shovel, I don’t know what, moving plants around, but she didn’t mind. When we pried open Addison’s door with a knife there were crack vials everywhere, hundreds of them in every nook and cranny. She’d met him and his girl, as she dropped in a few times in those months and was charmed by him and Frank and all of us, even Paola and Tom, never stepping beyond the living room, just asking to see if we needed anything.
When she saw that mess, just as I saw it for the first time, I was stunned, even more so when she said it was all okay, she’d clean it up. She understood the hardships of drug addicts. The other rooms were clean and presentable, about the same as the day she rented them to us normal human beings. We shook hands, all smiles, and Kim and Gomez and I drove to San Juan to collect our last pay, then to Rincon with only a few hundred dollars in our pockets for ten weeks of hard effort.
I collected five hundred while Kim and Gomez less than three. Victor had us sit outside and called us in his office one at a time. He threw me a sheet of fabricated figures which supposedly showed how much money he’d lost, then gave me half of what I was expecting for the last two weeks. This was early December and I remember calling him a Grinch and that we were through. He did the same with them, one at a time, insult then rip-off. On the long drive home I could only apologize for ever introducing them to such a thief.
But just to be driving away was a huge relief. Now I could concentrate on getting in touch with Sanita and Willy and plan my next move. I hadn’t heard from them in three months. But I had no answering machine and thought I might have missed a hundred calls in my absence. The next morning I drove to Betty’s place and then to Jaime’s at the Calypso. Each of them told me they had no word from her. Sanita was living with Mark somewhere near Orlando, that was all they knew. They were as upset as I was. She and my son had vanished.
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