The San Juan gift shop.
Our main job was to cover both side of the store for some forty feet back with what they call ‘slat-wall’ that glossy, white wood with horizontal black strips cut into it eight inches apart, into which you insert and slide all sorts of metal hangers and cover the wall with clothes or hats or handbags and easily rearrange them from top to bottom. We had a lot of work to fir out the old walls with strips of wood to make them straight. They were crooked, crumbling bare cement or mortar when we started. Everything had been ripped out long ago. That’s why the floor was dirt. To fasten wood to these surfaces we had to use ‘Hilti’ guns which shot long nails through the wood and into the cement using gunpowder blank bullets. Half of them wouldn’t stick as the mortar was so old it just crumbled around the nail. So we had to fire thousands in, a few inches apart to get the slats to stick. This created a dust storm which we breathed all day.
We made progress but it took its toll. By the time Johnny went home we had the walls finished and the ceiling sheet-rocked, nice clean new surfaces. But Irving fell ill, coughing all night, like some terrible cold, in fits so violent at times it woke us up and we worried for his health. The place was so old and moldy we figured he caught some lung infection. It lasted a week. Some days he couldn’t work. We’d send him out to sit on the park benches for fresh air, to stare at the tourists for hours. He didn’t mind that.
Tom and I fared better, enjoying the work and the progress we made each day. The owner though was a scrooge, always shocked at the prices of the materials we had to buy. The first three weeks he paid us our four hundred a week. But the large material bills kept coming in. We had enough to finish the store by then, piled up in the back, but the owner said he was now cash strapped and that he’d have to pay us our wages when the job was done. This was at the end of week four and Tom threw a fit. He had no contract on paper and was owed too much to quit. He threatened to rip out all the work done and leave. This brought the owner around to a stingy compromise. He said the project was costing more than expected, that he was near broke but could pay us daily, survival wages, twenty dollars a day and Tom forty, (to feed Paola) claiming he had more money coming in a few weeks, (from Africa by boat, I conjectured aloud). We reluctantly accepted.
These were the last of my bohemian days and I enjoyed them. I’d just paid Sanita another four hundred for child support and my monthly coopertivo instalment on the loan from them, two fifty a month. My money from the first three weeks was spent. I had a bank account in Hoboken but in no way was I going to deplete it for my hard work in scenic San Juan. That was all too ironic and reminiscent of the past years there, the financially wasted years. Old town was beautiful and I strolled through it alone each evening, admiring the fine houses and government buildings and parks.
There was one area that everyone told my to avoid as supremely dangerous, called ‘La Perla’. I’d even heard about this reputation in Rincon. Any white person would have his throat slit for sure there. Even the police didn’t dare go. It was supposedly cartel controlled. But it was close by, a narrow strip of land, the only one at waterfront level. The rest of the city sat on a plateau. This strip was a ghetto where rumor had it that all the drugs came in by boat, at night. It was so close to our store I decided to see for myself. There was a single, steep set of stairs leading down to it. From above, the houses looked like shacks and it was ill lit but that didn’t stop me from descending into what everyone called ‘Hell’. I wanted to buy a bag of coke that night, the first since I’d been back, the first in a year. I strolled down an ancient, long, cobblestone staircase.
I wasn’t fearless but I knew Puerto Rican people were the friendliest in the world and they never had a grudge against white people, so unlike the blacks on St. Croix. Only in the high central hills, on the little, winding roads that I crossed a few times, stopping and stepping into some dark hole of a bar where no one spoke English, did I ever feel the slightest sense of unease around me, in glances and sullen looks as if I were in the wrong place. But even there I was served my cold Heineken, drank it and left unmolested.
In the reputed ‘worst’ and certainly the largest project in all the island, at the end of Isla Verde right next to where San Juan proper began, Jaime and I would often drive in, in my brand new Vitara. It was the closest on our way home, the most convenient stop. Addison took us there the first time and seemed to know a lot of people by their first names. He introduced us to a street dealer named ‘Basilio’. He was delighted to meet us, honored in a way. Every time after that, when I drove into the heart of this complex, alone or with Frank or whoever was with me, I’d ask for Basilio and most often someone would run off and get him. He was so proud of us requesting him that one time he insisted that Jaime and I park and visit his apartment, which we did for ten minutes, to meet his wife. He was in his late twenties, tall, athletic looking and strong, but told us he had A.I.D.S. He always sold us a larger bag than anyone else.
I was deeply saddened a few years later when I drove in and asked for him. I hadn’t been there in a long while and the boy I talked to told me Basilio was dead. What a short life for such a smiling, friendly fellow. I would have introduced him to my mother, he was that nice and polite. I wished I’d known him better. He grew up and spent his whole life in that grim little plot, yet he seemed like a complete and happy man every time we came by, full of talk and vitality. I thought of Yorick, and Hamlet looking at his skull, and could have said: “Poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio, a fellow of infinite jest”...
On this warm night, (in December) I walked along the main street, many young men standing in the doorways of their small houses, all adjoining, built right up to the sidewalk. There were no yards. I was greeted with smiles. I asked one where I might find a twenty dollar bag of coke. He directed me a few doors down as politely as if I asked some Canadian where the next Tim Horton's was. Sure enough there was another young man there who gladly honored my request. I turned around and calmly strolled back up the hill. The rumor of danger was false.
Our twenty dollar a day regimen only lasted a week. But it was romantic. We breakfasted every morning at a ‘Subway’ across the street, worked all day with a lunch break, found a cheap place for dinner and I had just enough left for a pint of rum. I remember reading a fat paperback of Jack London stories at the time with great delight as I sipped my rum in that strange setting. Tom and Paola would go to bed early. So would Irving. I’d be up a few hours more with one dim light, in the quiet, sometimes overhearing Tom and his girl at their love making, muffled by the sound of Irving’s snoring. We had no privacy but didn’t mind. Our shower situation was even more embarrassing. We had none so we hooked up a hose in the courtyard to the wall and showered one at a time, naked. Paola was paranoid someone might see her, which was odd, considering the dresses she made. She closed the door and insisted we stay in the front while she took her quick, cold wash.
I mentioned our regimen only lasted a week. One day I was walking just a few blocks away and noticed a sign saying, ‘Electricians needed’. It was a small commercial building just outside the tourist zone being remodelled. I went back the next morning and scored Irving and myself a job, the pay eight dollars an hour. It was almost complete but they were in a rush to finish. The foreman had Irving put up fluorescent 2 by 4 lights from the top step of a ten foot ladder, a balancing act and hard work. They needed a twelve foot ladder but didn’t have one. I was led to an electrical room where two large panels (six feet tall) had to be mounted on walls and all the pipes below them (some fifteen to each) which were cut off a few inches above the floor line had to be continued into the panels with the proper connectors. The pipes in the floor were at all angles, not straight up, the slopiest work I ever saw. I could see this was another case of “pass along the headache, walk away, someone else will fix it”.
Irving quit after a week and went home grumbling with his small paycheck. Tom brought him his wages from the store a few weeks later. I stayed two weeks, mounting the large panels so low to the floor, (six inches) no one could see how crooked the pipes coming into them were, banging each as straight as I could with a hammer, a mess of dents.
By then our store was done. I’d help Tom after work each day and weekends. The final step was the floor. We cheated on that. It should have been poured cement but the client couldn’t afford it. So we raked some gravel fairly smooth, put down a rubber undercoat and a cheap carpet on top of that. The floor was a little spongy but who cared. This was an African shop. The owner was happy and paid us off. I flew to Buffalo and caught the bus to Niagara Falls and my mother’s spare room, just before Christmas. She would be leaving for Florida with her friend John in a few days where they had a trailer and I’d have the apartment all to myself for over three months.
