The beach below our house.
With the 'Gap' store finished, Sanita and I started looking at lots for sale. The first day we had an American girl line up four spots for us to check out. The first she showed us was in a gully on a dirt road. That showing lasted about one minute. But the second lot was an acre on a hillside overlooking the ocean and the whole West coast as far as the eye could see to the South, including the scenic town of Rincon below it, a mile away. It was a breathtaking view from three hundred yards above sea level and only a five hundred yard walk down the hill to a little marina right below us, with beaches on both sides.
It also had perfect privacy, with no other houses on the opposite hillsides and trees blocking the view of our house from the few below, along the one small highway that weaved into Rincon. After a few minutes of standing in awe of this panorama, we took it on the spot, not even checking out the other two lots. The price was twenty three thousand, which we didn’t haggle over. We’d found our paradise with a postcard-perfect view, with the uninhabited island of Desecheo in the ocean ten miles out, decorating the blue waters, and the soft, soothing, barely audible sounds of waves in the distance.
The view from our property.
Willy at the marina beach right below our home.
Sunset at the beach.
Our lot was comprised of a steep slope of the hillside with a flat area at the bottom. Then the hill sloped down again. There were some twenty five large steps (cut in the rock) down to it from a small, winding road and a parking area at the top. The road continued to two other houses around the bend of the hill then stopped, so it rarely saw traffic. We had a Lemon tree, a Grapefruit tree, a few scraggly Oaks on each side of our property and one magnificent, huge Canipa tree with five large trunks in the middle of our flat. I built our house right next to it, our kitchen under it for shade and our shower was a small deck and showerhead attached to it. From there you could take in the whole, beautiful view, naked, no neighbors able to see us.
Canipas are excellent fruits, little green balls the size of a small plum. You peel off the thin green skin and underneath is a rosy fruit, very sweet and sour, and a large pit you spit out. It’s one of the richest fruits in vitamin ‘C’. Our tree was so large and visible on the hillside locals came to us when in season and filled pillowcase sized bags with them. Willy loved to pick and eat them, but we couldn’t consume one-tenth if we tried. The reason the tree grew so big was because the waterline to the old house was broken there and dripped constantly, probably for decades.
The termite house I tore down.
There was an old, ranch style house on the property behind the tree, with a cement bathroom. An old lady have lived there all her life and died five years earlier. I bought the lot from her forty-five year old son, Johnny. But the wood was so rotted with termites that my friend Addison and I tore it down in two days as soon as the papers were signed. We burned the wood as we dismantled it, in a bonfire, and soon it was gone. We left the still functional bathroom to use till the new house was built. I later gutted it for use as a storage room. It was solid cinderblock, safe and too hard to tear down.
Buying this property used up the last of my money. But I was making four hundred dollars a week from the Gap job and I took out a twenty thousand dollar loan from the Rincon coopertivo bank (with my land as collateral) to begin building a new house.
I started on a one room cottage with a surfer/carpenter friend I’d met, Richard. He was my age, muscular, a good carpenter with long, black hair below his shoulders. His looks and some of his manners reminded me strikingly of Steven Seagal, with slightly less beady eyes and less chin. In that respect he was even more handsome than Steven. He was a diehard stoner, with no apparent goals in life, except to have a good time each day, the stoner’s ‘Credo’. He was always shirtless and well tanned, and at this time extremely happy because he was madly in love with his eighteen year old girlfriend, Trish, a blond, stunningly sexy and hot. She’d come most days to bring him lunch, then sit on the hillside and watch him work.
They were always together and shared a cheap or perhaps free bungalow. I never asked, but it was so shabby it should have been free. They were often broke, or nearly so, as jobs in Rincon were rare and the locals would work for twenty dollars a day. But you got what you paid for. They were laborers only and unskilled in every sense. I paid him ten an hour, royal wages. You could survive in Rincon on almost nothing, as I found out myself five years later. So he loved this job and me and worked like an ox to keep it. We finished the one room cabin, the septic tank, bathroom, plumbing and electrical work, the deck kitchen and shower in three months, working together.
Trish often brought her friend along, another cute American, both cock-teasing teenagers and they knew it. Just to see the two of them sitting there in skimpy clothes or bathing suits was enough to make us work our best, to impress them, and the house progressed quickly. His girl could easily have been a model in the States, making lots of money and with hordes of boyfriends. But in this backwater she was just a poor girl living with a surf bum, in a hovel, totally ignorant of anything else.
Yet she was in love with him. I’d be invited to their place after work and admire them on the worn, two seat couch across from me, from the other side of a coffee table where Richard rolled the joints and I poured drinks, the three of us chatting away on trivial subjects. Sometimes they’d hug and kiss as if I weren’t there, smoking pot non-stop now that they had money. I’d bring the bottle of rum and coke along to share with them. Whatever was left I’d always leave, as I knew they were poor. Richard probably spent half his wages on pot. They had no T.V. set, just a radio. With that and each other they had all the entertainment they needed, enviably happy and rich in that shack, far more than most of mankind, at least in the ninety-ninth percentile.
That’s why I loved every visit, beyond all the trivial talk we shared. Their affection for each other was so pure and simple, it was a sight to see, a pot-smoking, perfect couple. Sanita only stopped by for a few minutes. She never watched us build the house, or offer any help, only to drop Willy off for the afternoon when she had errands to run or was tired of minding him. She didn’t like Richard for his pot habit, and she considered his young girlfriend a fool for loving him. Her own ‘love lost’ at this time must have been envious of that pair, full of bile and spite. Once again, laying on the beach, sun tanning all day, and watching Willy play was her full time job. She did make dinners at home for us, but I always did the dishes.
Richard told me he had sex many times each night. She was insatiable, went at it wildly and loudly. He said she’d often have four to his one. But she was at her physical peak in that department. He felt like the luckiest guy on Earth. I’ve only heard two other Puerto Ricans say the same, Cecil, the talented framer who worked for us from the start, and Manuel, my age, Victor’s friend and recruited in as a foreman after Jaime was ousted, on a par with me, managing worksites. But I’ll get to his story later, as it happened later.
Cecil was young and handsome and smart, spoke perfect English, (about ten years younger than me), and had the rare fortune of marrying a beautiful, slim girl at eighteen who stayed slim and lovely after two children, a rarity there. He introduced me to her once, inviting me in as I dropped him off at their modest house in Rincon, her and their two rampaging toddlers. We were good friends by then, working three years together. And she was everything in looks he ever boasted about her. She reminded me of Cora.
Sex in Puerto Rico (besides baseball) is the national sport. I think it’s like that in all hot Latin American countries of Spanish or Portuguese conquest. It’s in their genes. In Puerto Rico this is amplified by an unrestricted overuse of hormones in raising chickens, the mainstay of their daily diet, their one constant staple, like potatoes to the Irish, served for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Girls grow large breasts and start menstruating by fourteen or fifteen. Many have their first babies still in their teens, education and high school be damned, housewives now and forever, by day in the kitchen, kids screaming in high-chairs, by night in bed, seductive, hoping to make another bambino. They start putting on weight after the first, fat by twenty, obese by twenty five.
Add to that the fact that they’re all strict Catholics and their one mission in life is to lure in a young, unwitting, horny man, betroth him and have baby after baby. One of my acquaintances in Rincon, Sheldon, a heroin addict, raised his son there, Shawn, a skinny kid I met several times. He was reeled in by a local nymph and having his third child with her by the age of eighteen, living in a shack. That’s one reason I was glad to get Willy off the island by the age of ten, besides the drug plague there. I would have taken him away myself if Sanita hadn’t. Very few of the white children who stayed didn’t get into one form of trouble or the other. Sammy and his sister Sophie were two exceptions, but they had excellent parents, Bamboo Joe and his teacher wife Laura, both close friends of mine.
Richard lasted two years with this girl. Some tourists must have whispered in her ear at twenty and she left for the U.S.A., where she belonged, never to return. He took to surfing all the more, (his other passion). I ran into him in 2004 at the Calypso bar, there for a week to sell my property. He looked just the same as before and was as broke as before, but happy to see me and drink all the beers I bought him. He was living in a larger shack now, which someone had given him outright, as termites were eating it. It was tucked in the hills with no views and near worthless. I sold my property within a week for sixty thousand to the first person who saw it. My house had been trashed because I’d let strangers live there for free while I was gone. It was emptied of valuables, the books I left behind, the ceiling fans, even the rejas bars on the windows. But the view was unchanged, perfect as ever and good for another thousand years. As soon as the Arizona man saw it, it was sold in an instant.
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