The Foxhead after expansion.
On the first morning back home I apathetically picked up our rag of a local paper, the ‘Niagara Falls Review’ and opened it to the small 'help wanted' section. There were maybe ten listings in a week, and almost all of them minimum wage curses like ‘hotel receptionist needed’ or ‘room cleaner’ matching the two jobs I found there before, twenty years earlier. This time I opened the paper to see, to my astonishment: ‘electricians needed’.
I doubt if there was one such listing for a professional tradesman above 'truck driver' in a year. The fact that I found it on the first day of my return seemed prophetic. It would be like scrounging through a garbage can in hopes of finding something valuable and coming across a gold necklace. Seconds later I was making the phone call.
The company was called “Geisler Electric”. It was the week between Christmas and New Year’s and no one must have been looking for a job that week, as I was the only one to show up in his office, meeting Geisler himself. He had so much work coming up he hired me instantly, hearing my experience, even though I had no Canadian electrical licence. I told him I’d address that matter the first weeks of January. He told me he could slip me in on job sites for a few weeks or months. It wasn’t a problem. He was old, ill, overweight and had a bottle of Scotch on his desk, half empty, my kind of guy. We talked a long time about all the exotic places I’d been working and all the types of work I’d done. I could tell he liked me. We shook hands. This could work out well, I thought as I left.
I started January the fourth in Grimsby, a cold, miserable site in a half-built industrial building, the roof not yet finished and snow drifting in across the floor, working with two other electricians a few years younger, but decent guys, I reckoned. The cold was brutal and made me think of the ninety degrees it was in P.R. right then. But two days later all that was fixed. I was transferred to his big job on the first day it started.
It was the same hotel I’d worked at as a night auditor twenty one years before, the ‘Foxhead’. It was owned by a mafia connected family in town, the Di Cienzos, and they had city approval to make it eight floors higher, which they wanted done and ready to receive guests by the start of tourist season in May. They chose Geisler because he did all their work, not with a bid but a handshake. They trusted him and paid him for the man-hours he submitted each week and a percent above, his profit. While this work was going on he built himself a new mansion, so it must have been hefty.
But he was still saving them money. He paid us between twelve and twenty dollars an hour. Union workers were making thirty at the time besides the benefits and pension package which raised it another ten. He was non-union and had maybe twenty regular employees, the largest non-union shop in town. For this job he’d need fifty electricians. They planned to complete a floor every three weeks and had unlimited money. The steel workers had been at it for months and the other trades were all lined up and ready to go. I was with two other electricians to start on the shell of the fifteenth floor, wrapped in plastic to keep most of the cold out, gas heaters blasting everywhere, the floor to the sixteenth level finished and poured. We were inside, and it was all conduit work, my specialty.
I paid a visit to the local electrical licensing bureau. It was staffed by a single young woman, very sweet, with nothing else to do but be helpful. She told me right off that I had to take the hard code test to get a license before I could work in Ontario. Talking in greater detail about this I mentioned I was a contractor in the States. Then she said excitedly that if I could prove this with a letter I could get a temporary one-year license. I asked her the exact details the letter needed to contain and called Victor that day. A company letterhead, dates, his phone number and signature affirming I’d been his electrical contractor for five years was all I needed. He express mailed it to her. Within two weeks I had my one-year temporary licence, loophole lucky. Victor was in my good graces again.
I was now legal, making new friends and doing very well on the job. Within a month he had twenty men working away but always needed more. He started hiring locals with fewer skills and our two foremen had several swiftly removed. Geisler still couldn’t keep up the rapid pace and one day a group of twelve Hamilton boys showed up and started working alongside us. They were very competent and besides watching each of us closely and getting to know us began asking some strange questions.
One afternoon at work an older man in his fifties came up to me and out of the blue asked me how to wire a small twelve volt transformer and two doorbell push buttons and the bell, using only four wires to make it all work. I pulled out my pencil and on a sheet rock wall drew it out for him. “Good” he says, “Now lets see you do it with three wires”. I drew that out too without hesitation. He pats me on the back and says: “very well done. You wouldn’t believe how many electricians can’t do this”. Soon it surfaced that these Hamilton men were union and that a vote was coming up in a few weeks to see if Geisler’s shop could be unionized. All the paperwork was put in and representatives from the government and the union would be there to watch the ballot boxes. All his employees from every site had one vote and if more than half voted union the deed was done.
The next two weeks were a flurry of canvassing. His ‘steadies’ would talk in my ear for hours about how bad that would be, that we’d be unemployed half the year. The union guys simply mentioned the benefits and pension and double the pay and work Canada-wide if one wished to travel. It wasn’t a hard choice for me.
The vote took place in the lobby of the Foxhead and the union votes won by a slender margin, fifty three to fifty one. I met the B.A. (business administrator) of our 303 chapter a few days later in his office. He had a file on all of us. He said to me: “you pass your license exam and your in. Everyone likes you and says you do excellent work”. Some of my fellow workers he wouldn’t let in. It was up to his discretion. Past police convictions, known drug use or just poor work or work ethics and you weren’t in. About forty percent didn’t make the cut. The union boasted the highest standards and quality workmanship to deserve their high price tag. That’s why the Hamilton boys were so observant. They were rating us the whole time.
A week after the vote, with my plans to get my licence, join the union, and move back to Niagara Falls permanently settled, I received a call from Victor begging me to help him out for three months. The work at the Foxhead was ending and his offer was too generous to refuse. He would pay the plane tickets, supply me a car and his old San Juan apartment, six hundred a week cash, to finish the electrical build-out of a mini storage he was building as his own business, (obviously using the money he’d stolen from our first company). He’d hired other electricians to start it and Manny to run the job but they had so many problems nothing went right and they couldn’t the fix major problems, like the electrical supply to the buildings. He’d fired them and needed me.
So I accepted his offer, (all my new companions at the Foxhead envious of a Caribbean job) and called Jean in Rincon for a helper. I could pay her ten an hour and she’d have her own room and go back to Rincon on weekends. Our first task was to redo the power supply to the three structures from the street. The previous electricians, (Manny’s finds) had run a three-inch conduit underground from the pole to the main building, a hundred yards away, but put so many sharp 90 degree bends in the run, (about ten) that no wires could possibly be pulled through it. And now it was paved over, the buildings built, no power to them, and no solution. That’s when they were fired and I received the call, flew in and started work.
After a few days clearing the conduit with a compressor of all the mud and water in it, (as they were so stupid as to leave the upright ends open for six months) and trying to get a rope through with no success, I found out from Manny about the snake-like route it took and the many bends in it. It was unfixable. My next task was to start from scratch, which I did and with ten of Victor’s laborers working full time. I had an overhead rack and the feeder wires pulled to the electrical room destination in a week. The buildings were powered up and the lights came on, to everyone’s relief.
The next two months were pleasant work for Jean and I, running low-voltage wires to each door of some two hundred units, so that a computer system in Victor’s office would automatically lock the door to each space when the renter’s fees weren’t paid up, so he’d have no access to his possessions until he paid up. Victor especially liked this expensive and innovative accessory as it gave him god-like control over all tenants. No one could cheat him out of money due, slip out on the rent, every landlord’s worry. And the possessions inside became his after a six month default, a salivating prospect.
Sanita agreed to send Will to me in P.R. a few weeks before I was done there. He could stay with his grandmother Betty, (delighted to have him) in her nice rental house outside Rincon and play with his old friends. I’d see him on weekends. I stayed there too. My house was now too dirty for us. Someone had stolen my bedroom ceiling fan. My books were still there. I took another suitcase of them home with me, not knowing when I’d return. In retrospect I should have removed them all. But someone introduced me to a young, newly married couple, (I knew the boy) and I told them they could live there for free, hoping they’d maintain the place and stay a long time. The power and water were paid up for a year and the house was fine for them, much better than living with parents, as they were poor, a homeless couple’s dream. But the lad was too young to fix up the few things it needed, and they left it after a few months.
By then the Rincon I first knew was vastly changed. Jaime was already back in the States, in Texas with Barbara again. He was ailing and had had enough of Cindy’s crazy fits at the Calypso. She ran the kitchen and gift shop while he managed the bar, ordered all the stock liquor, kept the accounts and spent long hours behind it, servicing the customers. But they clashed, or rather she clashed with his easy going manners, his giving away so many drinks for free to the regulars, because she was half crazy, money mad, and heated arguments were her daily routine. I saw it coming before I left as I’d visit every few days when in Rincon. He confided in me and his mother and no one else.
Sometimes it was a twenty year old bartendress he’d hire, too cute for Cindy's paranoia, just right for him to stare at all day. This would prick her seething brain. It wouldn’t erupt for weeks and even though the girl did a good job and attracted customers with her looks, Cindy would watch from the kitchen with narrow eyes, like a hawk, to find the slightest flaw in her, or make up one, then pounce upon both, demanding Jaime fire her immediately. He went through dozens of helpers, most of the pretty girls in Rincon. But finally he grew sick of Cindy’s madness. He walked away, though he rightly considered the establishment half his.
In many ways it was, for all the time and effort he put into it, even some money. Cindy could never have pulled it off on her own. He rebuilt the bar and kitchen when they first got the deed, put a new roof on the terrace, built the gift shop with his own tools and hands, renovated everything, until his back injury about a year later put a stop to that. He talked me into renewing the liquor license for the first years. But he left penniless, as most everybody left P.R., broke and broken.
