Before my narrative takes me to Florida I want to include a one night encounter with a woman that Gomez chanced to meet and brought over to my open kitchen deck late one night for a party of three. She was a stranger yet she played a role in the lives of my brother-in-law and other friends of mine without me ever hearing of her existence. But the truth came out like a series of epiphanies in that three hour long conversation at my small kitchen table, under the stars, the lights turned out, a bottle of rum and some lines between us, until the fuel ran out and Gomez took her to my loft bed.
But to introduce this character properly I have to recap the story of Dan, the would-be architect who invited Tom to the island and whom I met when asked to help finish a house he was managing, a few weeks before we left for Caguas.
Dan. freejpg.com.ar
What brought Tom to Puerto Rico, (everyone has to have some strange reason for ending up there) was that he had a contractor friend in Rincon with a fancy wood and stucco house to build, two stories, with a red brick tiled roof and a large open court in the middle, an atrium, and a balcony all around it on the second floor. It had a Roman look. I met Tom at the Calypso one night after someone pointed me out to him as an electrician. He came over, beer in hand, and after I told him how many stores I’d built he asked me to meet him there the next morning. That’s when I met Dan, the man in charge. We walked and talked through the interesting structure and in half an hour I had the job, to finish the electrical component.
This job only lasted two weeks for me, but that was enough time to seal my friendship with Tom and to meet the unique Paola. Tom and I started spending weekend afternoons at the Calypso. We really enjoyed each other’s stories and rich backgrounds. It was right after the other Tom, Buddy’s brother, had left the island. So I didn’t miss a beat. Paola never joined us there for more than a few minutes. She was always in a rush of unfathomable business. We didn’t even ask. I never saw their rented home but once as they were packing up and was never asked by Tom to visit after sunset. He was Paola’s after that, all to herself. I was surprised the one Saturday morning they showed up unexpectedly at my place, then the rush off to Sanita’s. That cemented our friendship. I invited them to Caguas without hesitation.
Dan, Tom’s boss, was a ‘Victor’ type, overweight, balding, a talker and sketcher with a drafting table in a small office. He would lure rich customers in with what they call ‘conceptual renderings’. He'd present his ideas in a half-dozen vague sketches till the client who wanted a dream house built saw something he liked, then they’d work from there, refining the picture with the client’s input, and when the house took final shape on paper and the client was happy with the estimated price, the check book appeared and construction began.
Dan managed all the money and kept the client happy with frequent walk-throughs, on a weekly basis, and constant talk of details. It was almost as if they were planning a wedding together. Dan had no structural knowledge but he’d taken courses in drafting and art. He must have read stacks of architectural design magazines, as he was full of ideas. He sketched views of the finished house from all angles, an artist’s rendering, slightly vague, with a few dimensions marked here and there, then hand these large drawings to Tom, to engineer and erect the structure, in other words, all the work beyond the words.
Lucky for Dan that Tom could build any house from ground up. Tom knew structural and foundation work and cement calculations, so he was the man to put the actual prices in Dan’s portfolio. You have to know that in Puerto Rico, no professional print or engineer’s stamp was needed on any building going up. You needed prints, but they were only glanced at by some desk clerk in one office. The one thing that was required was a fee to be paid, one percent of the total construction cost, right then and there, for a stamp on the print for construction to begin.
This money went into a fund for workman’s compensation. If any laborer or tradesman was injured during construction, this fund covered his relief, weekly checks till he could get back on his feet. When the construction was complete the same print was brought to another office and for another small fee the occupancy permit was issued, on the oath by a licensed electrician and the contractor that everything was in order and safe, just another example of Puerto Rican simplicity and sanity, as opposed to the miles of red tape and different offices here, supporting all sorts of people behind desks doing next to nothing. But they all have titles and diplomas and good salaries. I suppose the buildings here are a good one percent safer than there.
There was no document for a contractor on that island. That’s what allowed Jaime to become one. He didn’t even have a driver’s license or any other picture I.D. when he arrived, or when he left. That’s one reason why I had to get the liquor permit for the Calypso. Cindy had about as much I.D. as you could fit into a bikini, in other words, none. Victor had little better and ran a million dollar company for years. I could have taken his place and become a fully legal contractor. And as for the one electrical sign-off, requiring the license to be shown, I had a dozen friends with them who would gladly sign-off for me for twenty dollars and the ride there and a few beers afterwards. And for all the sixty stores I built, they gladly complied.
By the time I was brought to this house it was eighty percent finished. Tom had provided some conduits in the poured floors and walls, switch boxes and ceiling boxes, but with little electrical knowledge and no prints to go by he’d missed quite a few things. I knew plenty of tricks to fix mistakes with the least labor. My early Puerto Rican helpers in their incompetence taught me all those tricks by necessity, the best teacher.
In fact I was now an expert in repairs, as they made errors that expanded my idea of possible mistakes exponentially, undreamt of foul-ups, mind-boggling, stretching imagination to its limits. It was as if I were dropping acid again in college and had the most amazing visions. These surprises happened whenever I left my workers alone for three hours, and returned.
I’d come back to find such strange creations, using all the common electrical parts so backwards and crooked, upside down and wrong in new ways that I could write, ‘An Expanded Encyclopedia of Possible Errors’. When anything didn’t quite fit, because it was the wrong part for a panel, the wrong brand or not even an electrical component, their favorite tool was the hammer. A square peg in a round hole made a beautiful fit to most of them. They grew up without ‘Sesame Street’.
In Tom and Dan’s house I had simpler problems, a few missing runs, some boxes to expand for more switches, and a few pipes clogged with cement. So in a few weeks with a hammer-drill and a cement saw and one laborer to cut the shallow trenches and patch the holes, I had most things fixed.
In another two weeks, as the painters and tilers finished each room, I installed all the fancy lights and fans, dimmer switches, outdoor flood lights, even landscape lighting, as Dan and his client went shopping each day with my list of suggestions, part numbers and brands included.
When I turned it all on one evening and lit it up, section by section, they were delighted with my work and the look and glow of the whole place, especially the yard, as they’d bought half-grown trees and exotic plants, sparing no expense so they wouldn’t have to wait a year to enjoy the view.
They were standing on the back, flat roof with Tom and a view of everything. When they clapped like children the idea crossed my mind that they might both be gay. But near-future events proved that wrong. I’d tested everything beforehand when each light was installed, so I knew it would impress. It was a unique house and did have a rare charm.
Dan too had an eye for proportion and style. He promised to give me every future house he got. Too bad he didn’t get any, except for one week of work at a renovation in Fajardo. He’d designed and managed a number of expensive houses in the States on this same plan. I could tell by the smooth way he operated. I don’t know what brought him to Puerto Rico.
It might have been this client wanting a second vacation house, pleased with another Dan built him. But the island was his downfall, and a girl. He left it broke, like I and so many others. Tom was still there in two thousand four when I went back to sell my place. He was living in San Juan with his girlfriend, just scraping by. I spent a night in their modest apartment near the airport, drinking wine. They seemed happy. I strongly suspect they were.
They were the only couple, an American and Puerto Rican whom I know of that didn’t get divorced. The fact that Paola often bordered on insanity made their union the most likely to fail. But Tom was so easy going, so affable and compliant, and so broad-minded, and Paola so madly in love with him, his good looks, their union lasted. That she’d been a professional model and was a tall, gorgeous, red-head and a sex fiend also contributed no little part on Tom’s side.
I scratched my head at first meeting Dan and viewing his few pages. It was like the first page on any set of construction prints of a whole, huge building, the artist’s rendering of the finished structure, but nothing else, no pages following, no real architectural work with beam sizes and conduits and plumbing lines exactly drawn out, no blueprint. And for this he took a lion’s share of the profits. He would come by to look at our progress in the afternoons, sometimes with his client, like a couple strolling through an art gallery, viewing this and that and chatting away.
My first impression of him was that he was gay. Later I found out he kept a coke whore tucked in his apartment, a cute one at that, American, dark haired, light skinned, beautiful eyes, deep voiced, with a slightly wide bottom but with extremely large, shapely breasts, such a stunning feature that nothing else was noticed. He kept her as his secret prize the whole time the house was being built, until he ran low on money.
