Buddy

My new best friend.

Looks like Dee. Sarah Silverman N.Y. Times.

So Buddy arrived and the three of us began work to finish the mansion, tool belts on, talking away and making great progress over the next weeks. The nature of the work was all intricate, so we couldn’t hire laborers to help out. For them it was fine finish work, lathes and compound miter saw cuts and complex angles on trim. For me it was equally complex, hunting down and correcting all the wiring mistakes and then finishing the rest. The new systems, the intercoms and computers and security were easy because they hadn’t been started, so I had no moron’s ridiculous errors to trace out and rectify.

Within a week Mickey found Buddy a place to stay. It was a small, unfinished house right below the short street up the hill to my place. He made some deal with a fairly rich American woman to finish this cottage in lieu of rent. It was another place ninety-five percent done. Puerto Ricans were notorious for this. We all did a few days work there, furnished it and Buddy moved in. It was a large one room wood house with kitchen and bath, a half block from the beach, on a large lot next to Captain Bill’s property. A week later Buddy had his girlfriend from New Jersey fly in and live there with him. I started visiting them for long hours almost every night.

Dee was a typical New Jersey woman with a black, beehive hairdo, (like something out of the early sixties) and a strong N.J. accent and attitude, Jewish to the core, the most out of place woman you could imagine in P.R., as there were few hair salons, fingernail parlors or deli’s, within twenty miles or anything she could recognize, no Starbucks or movie theaters or lounges. She never wore bathing suits or went to the beach. That might ruin her pale, white skin. She was tall, shapely, with the large nose but attractive, talkative on all minor feminine subjects in such details and lengths it amazed me. She could have stepped out from a picture in a fashion magazine from thirty years ago. She was definitely out of time and place.

Buddy loved her. She was his doll. The only thing that kept her in P.R. for six weeks was cocaine. Her large nose was not for nothing. Buddy asked me a few days after arrival where he might score some, as Mickey rarely indulged. I drove him to a small bar fifteen minutes away in Aguada. I had a deep knowledge of all the best sources there from driving Mike around two years earlier.

I new one sleazy bar where he could buy an ‘eight-ball’ for a hundred dollars, pure and uncut. They recognized me instantly as I stepped in after a year’s absence. Drug dealers have an amazing memory of faces. I suppose it’s part of the trade. I introduced him and all was set and done. A few days later Mickey found him a beat-up car to drive. After that, he visited the bar every night, for about two minutes.

But we became great friends. After work and dinner I’d drop by with a bottle of Bacardi. It was only a minute from my house by car. Soon Dee was there and they were fascinating company to me, unlike anybody else in Rincon, no one even close. He’d lay out huge lines on the glass coffee table between us, me on a chair across from them, he and Dee on a small couch, their unmade bed just a few feet away. I would snort one line to every four or five that they’d share every five minutes. But it got us all talking, intimately.

I remember one of the first nights this happened, as he sat with Dee arm in arm on that couch. I now felt perfectly comfortable with them and got a little carried away with the rum and many lines and went off on a two hour long speech on some early Roman characters out of Livy, Mucius Scaevola putting his hand into a fire till it melted to show his resolution against the tyrant before him, the two sets of triplets who decided the fate of Rome, how nobly they fought, the honor in those early men and women, their highest ideals.

Then a brief recap of Roman history to the dark ages, the waves of barbarian invasions, the gems of Latin literature lost and in the early Renaissance luckily regained, in the decaying pages of manuscripts found in mountaintop monasteries, searched out and rediscovered by the first new scholars of that era, like Poggio. I was eloquent and the sentences flowed continuous.

I remember how they looked and listened in awe the whole time, never interrupting. I’d never mentioned my university background to Buddy before. We were just construction workers admiring each other’s manual skills each day. But after that he looked at me and said something like: ‘Wow, where did that come from’? Dee was equally impressed. From that moment on we were closer friends.

It was just the three of us, every weekday night. I’d stay till about one a.m. then head home to bed and sleep. They’d still have grams of coke left and kept at it till near dawn. I’d show up for work with Mickey by eight but Buddy not until nine or ten and always burnt, doing half the work Mickey did. Over the weeks this caused a growing rift between them. Buddy was supposed to build a wrap around porch where he was staying but his progress was slow. Mickey had all the wood delivered and complained a week later that it was barely started. I took Willy with me the next weekend, (for Dee to play with) and we knocked off two-thirds of it in the next two days, me pounding on the door and then shaking him awake around noon, before Buddy’s evening alarm to score coke went off, when all work stopped.

We finished the mansion on time, the last week working ten hour days and I’m sure Mickey got a nice bonus for it. This eased tensions a few more weeks. Mickey scored two more house renovations and the three of us were supposed to be partners. But Buddy grew worse. The cheap, pure coke was too much for him. Mickey had one, huge screaming match with him one day when he pulled up at noon in front of the house we were remodelling, saying he didn’t deserve half his pay. I tried to intercede and defend Buddy, my new friend. Buddy slunk into his car and drove off, back to bed. Then Mickey turned on me, asking who’s side I was on.

That night, as things were coming to an ugly head, likely to explode, I headed over to Buddy’s to discuss the situation. I knew he was doing too much coke to be useful but I also knew that Mickey was using the both of us and taking the lion’s share of all profits. So I was on Buddy’s side, just trying to tell him to tone it down a little, so things could work out.

Then the phone rang around eight p.m. Buddy walked over to the kitchen, picked up, and the first thing he did was turn and tell me and Dee to hush up, immediately. We couldn’t hear any of the conversation, as he was speaking low with his hand cupped around his mouth. So we sat in silence like two children in a schoolroom, glancing at each other, wondering what was going on.

After thirty minutes of that conversation he hangs up and tells us, all excited, that we’re all flying into Newark in four days, pack your bags. He had a job, a big job to run in a great place, from a client with the deepest pockets, and he would be in total control of all aspects of construction.

Dee was so excited to go home she ran and hugged him, glad to get out of what she considered a hell hole. I had questions. He said this was an opportunity too great to pass up, that he’d recommended me to the skies and that I was expected to be on that flight. I’d have all the electrical, four or five months of work, a great place to stay, no expenses, twenty dollars an hour, pure cash. It was a rush job so we’d be working sixty hours a week, paid every Saturday in hundred dollar bills. There were no blueprints, and that’s why he needed me, someone who could design and build a whole system without plans, as he knew I could.

I listened and as I was trying to fathom all the implications of this radical move, with a puzzled look on my face, he added: “Rob, this is in Hoboken, right at the ferry terminal across from the World Trade Center. The building is a landmark site. He’s turning it into a high class lounge, all neon and plexiglass. It’s going to be famous. There are two rooms upstairs with a bathroom and shower. You have one of them, overlooking Manhattan. It’s all set up. You have to come with me”.

Ready as I was for new adventures and as things seemed to be melting down fast in Rincon, especially my relationship with Mickey, (my only source of income) I accepted. This was on a Friday night. We sat, did lines and discussed everything till late, all of us excited. I could settle all my home matters, pay a few bills in advance on Monday and take a four month leave of Will and Sanita. She could even watch the ‘casita’ for me, (that’s what we called it). I settled all this the next day and had her agree, (since I’d be missing my weekends with him) to let me have him for the Christmas break.

I’d fly him there, show him New York and then fly with him to Bill and Muriel’s for Christmas, as I’d have lots of money. I also told her that since work was scarce here, I wouldn’t be able to make child support unless I took this job. But with it I could send her a few more hundred. That was the clincher which settled her indecision. Her mind was like a wavering beam balance in her indecisive head, but this one sack of coin just thrown down upon one plate tipped the scale, and she instantly agreed that I should go.

But one thing irked me as I sat with Buddy and Dee that Saturday eve, after deciding to go. Dee had seen exactly nothing of Puerto Rico in the five weeks she’d been there, made no friends and hardly left the house, except for a few brief visits to the Calypso bar. The perfect, cove beaches just down the street she never even visited. She didn’t wear clogs, she wore high heels, and you’d never see those on a beach or Dee. Sand was anathema to her. It might ruin the fingernail polish, and certainly the skirt. A martini glass fit nicely into her hand, nothing so heavy as a cooler. She could view the beach from the patio.

I suggested we take a day trip to San Juan the next day, with Willy in tow, to visit the scenic old town, the castle and cannon emplacements over the famous harbor, the must see tourist spots. Buddy was ho-hum: “Why not just sit on the couch and snort coke all day long? We’d save on gas”. But Dee took light to the idea. She sat up straight on the couch and insisted we go. It was the only time I saw her show any enthusiasm for anything the whole time she’d been there. I think Buddy was even a little surprised at her reaction because he reluctantly agreed.

The next morning I was at their door at nine. Will was in the back seat of the Vitara, Dee beside him, Buddy with me in the front and off we went on the three hour drive, sneaking a few lines along the way at rest stops, which created a constant flow of talk. When we arrived we walked for miles, the Fort and parks and Old San Juan. We toured the Casino, then to the Metropol for dinner, the best restaurant on the island, which happened to be Cuban run and Cuban food, better than any Puerto Rican cuisine or restaurant, strange to figure.

Old San Juan.

But a Puerto Rican’s idea of both lunch and dinner was chicken and rice. I don’t know what happened on that island, but imagination in food and drink never took flight. Each culture has different priorities and follows divergent paths through history, some sadly stagnant, some dead ends, like Easter island.

I can’t really say which road the Puerto Rican culture took, except that it was narrow and laden with Catholicism and making babies for the women, and sex and baseball and cock fighting for the men. Perhaps they were so focused on these interests, innovation and change never reared its ugly head.

They were content with four choices of beers. Hard liquor was Bacardi, light or dark, the mixer always Coca-Cola. Only at the Calypso and a few tourist venues could you find more variety. We took in the culture of the whole island in one day, all we could see of it. Then we drove home, everyone happy, eager to board the plane.