A sound studio and working with Buddy again.
Sanita reconnects, for money.
The job in Manhattan went smoothly, lasting seven weeks. It was located in the last blocks left of what was called ‘Little Italy’. Chinatown was encroaching in on every side and swallowing it up. It was the second floor of a narrow apartment building, leased by some young handsome guy who hosted a weekly music show on television. He wanted a ‘sound studio’ built where he could record and promote some new talent. I forget his name but when I mentioned it to my eighteen year old niece back then her knees quivered and she said: “You met (so and so), oh my god”.
To me he was just a nice, handsome chap in his early thirties who dropped by once a week to see the progress of our work and pay us. He always paid on time. He wanted to use the large one bedroom apartment as a sales center, having us build multiple booths and a roll-over telephone system, involving four pair wires to six stations so that the receptionists who staffed them could take down floods of orders. He wanted to find raw talent and sell stacks of C.D.’s.
The sound room in the middle was unique. It had to be triple rocked on all sides and ceiling, the floor raised a foot with sand filling the gap, and special order thick, two-layered glass on two walls so that you could watch the artist inside at the mike, give hand signals to him and keep the room one hundred percent soundproof.
By now I knew the area and made wiser choices. I stayed on the fifth floor of the ‘Edwards’ hotel in Hoboken with a weekly rate and took that short, pleasant ferry ride across the river each morning with a newspaper and coffee in hand, just like the brokers, and a fifteen block walk to work. It was once again twenty dollars an hour under the table and we worked at least fifty hours a week. I built up a bank account and was never short of money again.
That Spring Sanita resurfaced, beaten up several times and leaving Mark for good. She was staying with Joan and finally contacted me at the front desk of the ‘Edwards’, through Betty, her mother. I always kept her informed of my fast changing residences for just this contingency. Sanita agreed to send Willy to me for three weeks if I resumed the four hundred a month child support. She needed the money badly and I agreed. She moved around quite a bit soon after that but always left me numbers to reach her. She was even quite pleasant on the phone when we talked each week, sometimes twice, but always on a Sunday around noon, for a half-hour of chit-chat and news.
I’d come home to the hotel and the old, fat man behind the desk would hand me any messages. Then I’d call her from a pay phone. He had throat cancer and most of his vocal chords were cut out, so that he had an electronic amplifying box put in their place, visible on his neck, a small box, as creepy as the sound of his voice, with a metal, machine-like resonance to it. He walked with a cane but still smoked cigars constantly, the cause of his illness. He scared Will and probably every child he met, but was extra nice to me, running this flea-bag hotel, half filled with drug addicts, while I was one of the few tenants who always paid on time and the only one to rent the fifth floor.
Will and I had a fine time exploring New York that summer. We flew to Niagara Falls for his birthday for a week, with all his cousins visiting, then back again for a few more days in New York. Things were now starting to look up. It seemed that the more I distanced myself from Puerto Rico, the more I rose above poverty and misery. Sanita was now glad to unburden herself of Willy for short spans and Will was overjoyed to spend all the time he could with me. I had money to buy him presents, and I knew what things he liked. Chinatown was a colorful row of cheap electronic shops full of gizmos and games. The World Trade center, (still standing) had an educational toy store in the basement with science-based learning games and projects. Manhattan also had some of the best computer stores in the world.
The three weeks I took off dented my savings. But it was between stores and Buddy had another bar renovation in Hoboken starting a week after I sent Will back to Florida, loaded with gifts and restored in mood. His life with Sanita, constantly moving, with different schools and her poverty and cheap apartments was trying, and as he grew older he showed this displeasure with outright defiance.
Buddy kept me busy through the fall. I was able to walk to work from the hotel, some ten blocks, and being paid well, actually enjoying life again. Hoboken had some of the best delis in the world. I went to the movie theaters once a week and read books in my suite with a fine view of the New York City skyline. I talked to Sanita and Will at least once a week. I was slowly getting over her departure and life without her, emotionally. She was struggling but trying hard, moving from one job to the next, mostly sales positions, never mentioning the latest boyfriend she just met who precipitated the latest, sudden move, just giving me each new address where I’d mail her the monthly check.
That had been forfeited when she absconded with Mark. But now I figured it would tie her to me, dependence-wise, though it also seemed like graft on her part, as I certainly didn’t owe it to her with our first agreement so flagrantly severed and broken. But I had the money and knew it would help Will. She actually sweet-talked me into it. I’d call her on Sunday mornings from a phone booth in Hoboken.
One such morning she told me, in the sweetest voice, how much she missed me (she must have been between boyfriends that week) suggesting vaguely we might even be together again someday. This threw my heart and mind into total disarray and I was quite shook up, agitated with thoughts until the next Sunday, when I questioned her precisely on her hints and found out it would be no time soon, if ever. They were just feminine musings on her part.
From then on, I told her, a bit angry, to spare me such false hopes. And I calmed my thoughts again over the next weeks with the conviction, the certainty, that our separation and divorce were forever. This mental finality helped soothe my soul a great deal. I continued to send the four hundred dollars. But I made it clear in letters enfolding the checks that it was for his meals, clothes, schoolbooks and any games or computer accessories he might desire, child support, not Sanita support. I had no way of monitoring it but didn't care. This was my lifeline to my son and I was on a steady course of gaining ever more custody of him.
