Broke and unemployed, and a one-way ticket to Florida, another adventure.

Renovation of the Orlando International Airport, 1998.

One morning, two weeks later, after one brief, unsatisfying phone call from her the week before and five minutes of talk with Will, then her taking the phone and saying they were in a rush and had to go somewhere, she hung up, and no other information. I was more upset than if she hadn’t called at all. That week I ran out of funds had to ask Betty twice for twenty dollars just to get through the day. Jaime gave us a small sixty dollar job at the Calypso, changing out all the broken neon light transformers and re-arranging the string lights. I was their only conduit on Sanita updates. She still wasn’t calling them. That night, with the sixty dollars in pocket, we decided to get especially drunk, with two full bottles of Bacardi between us and no future in sight.

I woke up feeling seriously ill. I had to have a drink. So I walked into town that morning at eight a.m., craving a beer. But right at the one liquor store the town electrician pulled up in his gray, beat-up truck. He was my age and we’d done a few small jobs together in Rincon. Both came out profitable. When I had another small house to rewire and as he was busy, I employed his brother, who was slow to a fault, almost a half-wit, living with his mama at thirty eight.

But this gained me the goodwill of his brother and gave him a little much needed pride. He was fit for only the most menial tasks, (there were some small trenches to be dug) yet I picked him up every morning and paid him six dollars an hour for the week-long job, complementing him for each task he finished and for the smallest things. I’d learned that habit with my first employees in San Juan. They’d do nine things wrong and one thing right and I’d walk in and slap them on the back, praising them to the skies for that one accomplishment, correcting everything else secretly after they left. That kept them coming back and trying to improve, which they did. I could have been a special ‘ed.’ teacher after those years.

That morning he was glad to see me. I told him I needed work, anywhere. He pulled out a card and handed it to me saying they need electricians desperately in Orlando. If I go to this office in San Juan they might hire me and fly me there. I had no idea how he was given this card as he hardly ever left Rincon. But I thanked him, bought my six pack of Heineken, popped one open and drank it while walking back up the hill to my house to find Craig still passed out.

We made the phone call that afternoon and we’re offered an interview in San Juan. My car was now broken and useless. We had little money but I had friends and a phone. A plumber I’d employed for many stores, Kelly, lived in Rincon and had a job in S.J. and was driving there tomorrow. By next afternoon we were sitting in this small office. The curly haired man behind the desk listened to my credentials with a look of disbelief, so I gave him Victor’s number and Victor, probably feeling some remorse for his shorting me so recently, praised me to the skies. Then the man asked us both take a quiz. “Fine”, I said, “I hope it’s a hard one”. It was a multiple choice quiz of twenty questions.

It was well designed, I must admit. The questions weren’t hard but such that any practised electrician would know right away, like the different colors of high and low voltage wiring, the names of different types of testers and fittings, ampacities of wire gauges, a few harder questions on wiring transformers, things any good electrician would know and a non-electrician would not.

We both completed the quiz in ten minutes. I had a perfect score and so did Gomez. He looked up at us as he finished grading then in awe, saying he never saw two perfect scores before. He told us eighty percent of the people who came into his office failed dismally, and the others who had less than three wrong were possibly cheaters, getting the answers from their friends who’d taken the same test the day before. So I challenged him to throw us some harder questions, (as these were too easy) about conduit fill, voltage drops and transformer sizes, spewing out numbers, convincing him we were the real thing.

As Americans we were already in a whole different ballpark. He made the call to Florida right in front of us, excited as we were, two excellent electricians, foreman grade. As a recruiter he was finally earning his pay. The deal was sealed. The company would fly us to Orlando, meet us at the airport, hand me the keys to a company van and drive us to a motel near the job site where they would advance us a week’s pay, enough to put us up and start work the next day, smooth sailing as they say. Kelly drove us home to collect our tools and clothes. Then back to San Juan the next day.

The flight was set for the day after, at seven a.m. Kelly told us he had no plans of getting up at three a.m. so we could make our flight. He was doing a store and driving in then home to Rincon to his wife and kids each evening. The best he could do was drop us off near the airport the day before. So we took it, put our two bags in a lock box at the airport and wandered around a long, idle, moneyless day. We had ten dollars between us, not even enough to sit at the street bar in Isla Verde to sip beers and watch the girls go by.

But we had our flight passes. That evening we walked to the slums to buy the cheapest bottle of rum, as the airport price was triple. We drank it in the terminal from a brown paper bag, feeling like tramps. After that anaesthesia I tried to sleep in a waiting area chair. There were no straight sets to lay down on. They all had metal arms. After a few hours of broken sleep, sore muscles and some nightmarish dreams under the neon lights, I woke Gomez (soundly sleeping and snoring on the floor) at six. We collected our bags and boarded the flight.

One ironic thing through this brief ebb of poverty, which felt very different at forty-four than it did at twenty-four, (being embarrassing for the first time) was that when I returned to Niagara Falls, to my mother’s empty apartment exactly two years later, there was a letter waiting for me from a small, local bank. It was a notice of an inactive account. I had fourteen hundred dollars in a checking account which I’d totally forgotten about. After ten years of inactivity they sent out a form letter asking politely if I was still alive. This envelope had been sitting on the desk in the spare bedroom for months.

In one way I was glad I’d forgotten it. I might have wasted the money in P.R. on another, futile, home improvement. Or it could have made these latest transitions more comfortable. But the ‘Electro-Mechano Corporation’ came through for us and after taking us to their office and filling out many forms, we were settled by evening in a two bed motel room of decent appearance, our rent paid up for the week, on a busy commercial street in Orlando, with restaurants and bars and even a Mall within walking distance, a T.V. and microwave, the keys to a company van, directions to work the next day and a few hundred dollars in our pockets. And best of all, we were back in America, free from the poverty of Rincon and the backwater of P.R. This seemed like a deliverance. We’d finally returned to our home country, the land of opportunity. The temperature was just as sweltering but the air felt different, better, most likely a figment of my imagination.

The job involved a major renovation and expansion of the Orlando International Airport. They were transforming an underground parking lot, which stretched the whole length of one wing, into more passenger facilities, kiosks and ticket counters and baggage claims. The project had started just a few weeks before and they had over a hundred electricians on site and needed a few hundred more. That’s why they were so accommodating to us. Apparently Florida couldn’t supply the qualified manpower. The company was non-union, a common thing down there. Union shops were rare south of Georgia. If it had been a union job it would have been manned immediately by travelers, excellent workers from all over the States. But the pay grade would have been double, thirty dollars an hour instead of fifteen, with a benefit and pension package, while we had none. Once again, you get what you pay for, both in products and production. Many they hired were fired within a week and replaced. Fake resumes and no experience were commonplace there. But it did give the foremen and management an eye for real talent.

On my first day at work I met electricians from all over the state and a few from Georgia. It was all conduit work, my specialty, mostly underground and rigid, four inch. When the supervisor met me in the office the day before and found out I could handle the threaders and benders for such heavy stuff he was ecstatic. Not one in fifty so-called electricians could. Even Gomez had never worked industrial. But my year and a half in St. Croix with Vance was exclusively such heavy work. So I was in my element.

The project supervisor was a nice, soft spoken, intelligent type in his mid-thirties, sitting behind his desk in a trailer, with a trim beard and glasses and we hit it off perfectly. He was curious to hear about my background and listened carefully. I told him that I’d be glad to help install the rigid pipe in the substations. But I also told him my best skill was in conduit bending, thin wall E.M.T., exposed work, where parallel runs had to match perfectly or stand out like a sore thumb. Many of my stores in P.R. required exposed conduit and I learned the art to a tee.

He said they had another project in town and if I was willing to work weekends he’d like to try me out. The Universal Studios theme park was just being built and they had a large chunk of it. One building was the V.I.P. lounge. It had a black painted ceiling, some twelve feet high but all the conduit was silver, three quarter inch E.M.T. below it, showcased in a way, runs of ten and fifteen pipes all parallel and an inch apart, turning and weaving on ceiling racks in perfect formation, then branching off one by one to their separate destinations down the walls. He told me the supervisor there wasn’t satisfied with the work done so far but if I could improve it he’d loan me out. I immediately agreed.

It seemed like a dream job, both the weekend and the weekday job, but two aspects of work and life in Florida proved to be a disappointment, apparent to me within a week. The first was our lodgings, which I'll get to with my next instalment. The second was the foreman for the crew we were assigned. I can’t even imagine where they found him or why they put him in charge of fifteen men, except that the other foreman in charge of the underground crew was his best friend, (I could never imagine why) a competent person who could read prints and knew what he was doing.

Ours was a bulldog, and only that. He weighed close to four hundred pounds. He had a shaved head with an extremely ugly skull, covered with divots and lumps. His face had at least ten plainly visible scars, on his cheeks, forehead, eyebrows, neck and chin, a perfect cast actor for a Texas chain saw movie requiring no make-up, a face that must have scared the wits out of the small children he passed them on the streets. But worst of all he had the character to match.

Closest I could find to ‘bulldog’, but much uglier and fatter and scared. iStock.

The first thing he said to us as we got on the bus to our job site, (our parking lot being a mile away) the very first day was: “I’ve been in jail twenty three times on assault charges”. It was the same as saying: “I’m going to hit you. I’m a brute as ugly as I look and I don’t care”.

Once at work I realized something must have been mentioned about me because he singled me apart, took me to the pipe threader and said, rather gently: “this is your post”. All the other workers he screamed at, told them to get in the trenches and start gluing four inch P.V.C. pipe lengths together all day long, miles of them in ten foot lengths, while a few came to me with lists of lengths of rigid pipe to cut, thread and bend, as each pipe had to transition to metal before it could surface into a room.

So I was spared his ugly temper and presence but still profoundly disturbed that such a monster was put in charge. I took orders from the other foreman too as no one else seemed to know how to operate these machines. Every run had to have specific lengths above floor grade. He was polite as he handed me the lists of lengths he needed and I was busy all day, covered in cutting oil and metal shavings by day’s end, a messy job, but easy and undisturbed.

I was able to put a few hundred in the bank each week, had a vehicle and thought I would be able to visit Willy on a Sunday. This kept me working for the monster. I thought Will was near Orlando and I’d visit him.

But Will was gone. Sanita had broken with Mark and was living with Joan on the coast now, a refugee, two hundred miles away. I didn’t know anything about that, with no phone calls. I called her mother every weekend and she hadn’t heard anything. I suppose Sanita was too embarrassed to relate such news.

But it slowly dawned upon me that I was ruining my life for her, working hard for morons, (a very mismanaged project) and a screaming bulldog, left in total darkness as to my son’s whereabouts or fate, or where any whim in her changeling mind might steer the both of them.

I realized I had to take matters, my life , into my own hands, determine my fate. The bulldog taught me aggressiveness, rudeness when faced with another person's inactivity, callousness and a cold disregard for any supposed allegiance to anyone or any company. I was out to get my son back. It took many more months, but I did.

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