How 'Genius' finds the strangest lodgings.

I lived in Puerto Rico for six years and completed close to sixty electrical buildouts of commercial stores. Only one was a disaster, not just for me but for every contractor involved. It was a large new mall in the town of Caguas, some thirty miles south of San Juan in the hills. Our company was awarded six store buildouts, the mall contained a hundred spaces. The problem was that the structure was behind schedule and a mistake, which could only happen in Puerto Rico, put it seriously behind schedule in late summer.

It was supposed to be ready for our men to begin the interiors of the stores by mid-July. For anyone who knows marketing, all stores depend on the golden season of Christmas which kicks off with Thanksgiving, the end of November. This is when every one of those new stores was supposed to open. It was in our signed contracts.

The structure was finished by late August and the Q-Deck roofing installed. The mall owners were required to build the demising walls between each store space. This involved thick, twenty-foot-high metal studs from floor to roof, two feet apart. They installed all these thousands of studs in a hurry and our spaces seemed ready to begin. I walked through the structure in late August and figured the fourteen weeks left were plenty of time to complete our mission.

But they hadn't yet poured the four inches of cement to finish the roof.

When they did, a week later the roof naturally sagged and sank about four inches, bowing every single stud in the building, just like a bow. Now each one had to be cut with a loud grinder twice, the four inches removed, and a patch put in to restore strength. This set us back two more weeks from beginning. Engineers in Puerto Rico are not the best.

What delayed us more was the cluster-fuck of one hundred contractors each trying to complete their stores on time and insufficient temporary power, which the mall was supposed to provide.   

A normal two or four thousand square foot store takes a good eight to ten weeks to complete. We sheetrock the walls, build the storerooms, bathrooms, drop ceilings, do the electrical and plumbing and A.C., and finally install the fixture packages, the slatwall and cash wraps and fixtures which all come from the States, as all chain stores want the same generic look, so you know which store you are in.

My crew of top-notch workers, who'd built many stores exactly like these, all lived near Rincon, three hours away. So, I rented a large house in Caguas with five bedrooms and filled it up with seven co-workers, one couple getting the den, another just the living room couch for his six weeks stay there.

It was a motley crew, but long hours of work, seven days a week and drugs and alcohol after work kept us well content, as the money was good.

One of my associates was named Addison, in charge of directing five or six workers to build a K-B toy store to specks. He knew every aspect of the trade, handling tools for many years and now, at forty, a foreman. He learned from the best in New Jersey and had been in Puerto Rico for seven. Unfortunately, he was now a complete crackhead, which is ridiculously cheap and everywhere available on the island. He was my good friend and one of the conditions of my bringing him in was that I manage his money and give him a daily allowance to spend so he wouldn't go overboard. But he soon found a crack whore and had her move in his room, where every night from seven till near dawn, they smoked and had sex, behind locked doors. 

Addison knew how to read prints better than anyone, from his New Jersey beginnings in the construction field, and with his smarts, which no degree of crack abuse seemed to diminish. I remember one day, about four weeks into this project, a ridiculous scene occurred. A group of five men in expensive suits, a delegation one might say, and so out of place it was striking, strolled up the hallway, everyone parting the way for them.

They stopped in front of the K.B. store and asked a worker in English to see Addison. He only spoke Spanish and had no reply. I was at the front of the next store and overheard them, introduced myself and told them I could bring him to them presently. Luckily, the box he slept in for a few hours every morning was in the back storeroom, out of sight. I went there and kicked it several times. It was only ten a.m., and he was in deep REM sleep. I pulled him out. He shook his head a few times and realized where he was.

His daily, unchanging attire for work these days was a white, tank top t-shirt and a green pair of jogging shorts, rarely washed, and sandals. On this occasion the tank top and sandals were left in the box, so he approached the delegation barefoot, in green shorts only. They didn’t seem to mind. They had an important question for him and somehow knew that he was the one person, out of the fifty contractors in the building, (half of them Americans with years of experience) that could best answer it. It was the mall owner and his architects and engineers, all men in their forties or fifties.

They unrolled their large set of prints on the hallway floor before him and everyone crouched down in a circle. I stood right behind them, transfixed by this interesting scene. One man pointed to three faint lines on the blueprint, in front of the K.B. store, with the tip of his gold pen. They were a millimeter or less apart, less than four inches if one applied the scale of the print to the mall. One marked the mall hallway, the tile line, and the other the storefront glass. They didn’t know what the third line meant and didn’t have available the architect who drew the prints, or it might even have been machine fabricated and even the architects didn’t know.

But Addison did and was quick to answer. The dashed middle line was the zone line, which the store contractor could transgress depending on the footing for the glass. The back line was the storefront glass, the outer edge of it. In some stores the glass went straight to the floor into a slim metal footing, in others there was a tiled, brick base a foot or two high. So, for each store, at the base there was some play. The mall floor tiles could be cut to accommodate these inches.

The drop ceiling grid allowed no such play. This answer satisfied everyone. They all stood up and shook his hand, five men in expensive suits and ties, and one scraggly, disheveled, half-awake drug addict in a two-dollar pair of shorts. But intelligence finds strange lodgings and one must go where it is to get it. This was just such a case. Decorum be damned. He reminded me of Diogenes the Cynic meeting Alexander the Great, or Alexander going out of his way to meet him, the whole army following behind.

Alexander was appraised of his fame but wondered how he attained it. He presented himself in his fine military armor and told Diogenes that he would be granted anything he asked for. Alexander had just conquered Greece and was in a generous mood.

Diogenes was sitting on the ground, in the dirt, in rags, leaning against a wall. But he’d been enjoying the lovely day and the warm sun. He listened to Alexander’s offer with due respect and after a moment of thought replied: “I do have one request to ask of you. Could you move a little to the side? I was sunning myself and you’re blocking it right now. Alexander smiled and not only stepped aside but promised him he would never be harmed. Then he walked away, ordering the city to be plundered, but this man left untouched.

Addison and I went out for beers early that day.