In the following segments of my autobiography, describing what I must admit were easily my darkest days, some of my readers might consider me an idiot to be so blatantly honest and a fool for displaying myself so nakedly. I cut myself, and sometimes I cut deeply, but I do so to find an elusive truth about myself, to see into the nature of my being. Time has made me callous to any pains involved in this self-surgery and age has disencumbered me of the vanity and the hopes and fears that crowded my youth. My aim is the truthful depiction of my past. What lessons it draws redeems my mistakes and might just steer another down a better path, if any examples have any potency to guide us through this seemingly impenetrable maze we call life. That I survived to write about it and enjoy another serene fall evening on my porch, tranquil and satisfied, sipping the cool, circumambient air, speaks volumes.
The ill-fated encounter.
Mark, the only picture she took of him, before he was shot.
Sanita had left with Will to Florida five weeks earlier, following Mark to a new home. I was so deeply distracted by the construction fiasco at the mall in Caguas that her leaving with my son didn’t even register, at least in its implications. I was three hours away and tied to near impossible deadlines, the only time ever, working seven days a week, hiring and firing strangers, most of them little or no help at all, each day more headaches and complications repairing their mistakes and making a snails progress with my few good workers on six stores.
But I’d wisely rented a large house in Caguas and filled it with good friends. They worked with me and kept me sane. It felt like a relief I that didn’t have to drive home on weekends to see Will. I couldn’t spare the time. So I put him out of mind, with so many other things on it.
Once done and back home, sitting by the phone for a week expecting a call, and talking to Betty and Jaime and everyone else, all in the dark, I realized she didn’t just move, she absconded with my child, disappeared, kidnapped him with no plans to contact me or any of her family ever again. My first response to that shock and insanity on her part was heavy drinking.
The problem began with Sanita meeting Mark one morning, both strolling along the same beach by chance, an unlucky accident. He was in his daily drug haze, wandering for no reason, he hardly knew where. But he did know a stroll in the fresh, morning air would revive him enough for another afternoon and night of lines of coke and shots of rum, with the stereo blasting, sitting on his couch, most often by himself, sometimes with a temporary girlfriend. These days he happened to be alone.
She was wandering in her own muddle that morning, in her own aimlessness. She encountered him on one of the desolate coves. They chatted a few minutes. He invited her to his house nearby and must have had some charm and coherence and the appearance of a damaged, but redeemable human being, needing help. She fell in love, first with the house he owned and then with him, like a nurse to one in need, in a matter of days. She had a purpose all of a sudden and he saw that he’d found a new, starry-eyed lover.
His house was in the same ravine where she bought her property, halfway up a steep hill and impressive, probably costing him fifty thousand dollars six years earlier when he had it built. It was two stories, all wood, on stilts, with a surrounding deck on the first floor. The second was one large bedroom under a slanted tin roof, with large beam, rafters, high and impressive.
It’s unique feature was a huge bed in the middle, hanging on four, heavy chains, a medieval looking thing, swinging when anyone got on it, I don’t know how long, or to what possible effect. But it was his own self-invented girl magnet and had worked its magic more than once. Sanita loved it. I suppose being dizzy and in love is the same thing. It’s off-balance. One amplifies the other. And this bed did the trick.
The swinging bed with Mark's legs behind it. But she did tell me it was great, at first.
I’d met Mark twice before this unfortunate coupling, and only twice. Rincon was a small town, (population about five thousand) and all the Americans there you either met or heard about. Both Sanita and I were introduced to him one afternoon at a beach side bar by Jaime a few weeks after we arrived. We talked for an hour and he seemed like any other American there, an expatriate in love with the perfect weather and the beaches, from Florida, the closest thing to it, only better and much cheaper. After that he disappeared from us and all the public venues, restaurants and bars over the next four years and we forgot about him, as if he didn’t exist.
These were the years when he kept to his house. He spent a few months in Florida each year doing drug deals. But he had enemies. The only people in that trade who settled in Rincon were there for a reason. They were hiding. Even Captain Bill and Irving fell into that category. Over these years he befriended and seduced three women. Two American tourists and one Puerto Rican girl. Each one moved into his house. Each relationship lasted about four months and each ended with him beating the girl viciously, bruises all over, and she running to the police station and then leaving town forever.
The police did nothing over the first two girls except to register it in some file with his name on it. These girls were soon off the island and out of mind. When the beautiful P.R. girl stepped into their office, a local girl, her family well known to them, face bruised and crying, with the exact same story of this cohabitation, friendly at first, then turning violent with his drug abuse and temper fits, they took action.
One night soon after they kicked in his door. There were four of them and he was alone and drunk. With their sticks they walloped him, a hundred bruises, from head to foot, for the ones he’d given the girls. They left him in a fetal position on the floor. That was Puerto Rican justice, no reports, no paperwork. But everyone in town knew about it and the local police figured it would never happen again or disturb their morning coffee and serene office tranquility. I like Puerto Rican justice for its sublime efficiency and simple logic. It pushes our expensive, red tape procedures and lawyers out the door.
The second time I met him was an evening at Irving’s apartment, about two months before Sanita encountered him, just before Tom and Kim arrived. We were working on a little store, Irving and I, halfway between Aguadilla and Arecibo, a fifty minute drive. This was when I first became friends with Jean, a woman Irving introduced me to. She was seven years older than me, had been in Rincon twenty years but was single and owned a large house with her sister, Joan, a three story house with rental rooms. She wanted some work too so I hired her.
A few weeks into this job Irving suggested I spend the Friday night with him at his apartment and enjoy some coke. We dropped Jean off. She neither drank nor did drugs, except pot. As we were drinking beers and discussing plans, Mark showed up and joined us. He was a friend of Irving’s from way back. He seemed like a decent guy, so we included him in our plans to get high. They insisted on crack but I said I’d only do lines. We each threw in a twenty and Irving took my car and set off and was soon back. They smoked, I snorted and we proceeded to a sleazy bar one block away with a pool table where I encountered Marcos, the guy that broke my jaw with the baseball bat three years earlier, and not seen by me since the pathetic trial that followed after it.
We’d gone to court while my mouth was still wired shut, Addison as witness and Sanita holding my arm, still my wife, all of us well dressed. The judge looked over the police report. He asked how I knew this was an assault with a weapon. Maybe Marcos just punched me in the face. We walked up to the bench, showed him the pictures of my face taken at the hospital, (Cindy took them) and Addison testified he saw the baseball bat and how the police snuck it in their trunk right after they showed up. The judge considered all this evidence a few minutes, turned to me and said: ‘Marcos has no money. His family is poor, (this was the truth). He can pay you six hundred dollars if you agree to drop the charge to a misdemeanor or you can keep the charge at aggravated assault with a weapon, a felony. But he’s not going to jail. If it ever happens again he will’.
The medical bill I showed the judge was for eight thousand dollars, paid off. I said six hundred back was worthless to me. I wanted the felony charge, and so it stuck. Marcos was playing pool but dropped his stick and left the sleazy bar as soon as I walked in. Mark knew him and asked me about this strange scene. I told him my story and he told me that Marcos lived just a few houses away with his old mother, never had a job and sold a few bags for a scanty living. After one game of pool we left and I drove home, all of us rather depressed by the whole situation.
But now it was Sanita’s turn for the ‘disastrous’ relationship. She met him when Kim and I were working in S.J.. His face was yellow and bloated from years of abuse. His liver must have been in bad shape. But she said ‘hello’ in a girlish enough way that he instantly invited her over to his house. And just like the girls before, she was wowed by the place and after a few more visits in the following days, ever longer visits and talks, then dinners together there, she was ensnared by his early charm and seeming graciousness.
He could see she was still quite beautiful, and by the way she immediately fell head over heals in love with him, I’m sure he discovered that she was completely mutable, a manikin, like putty in one’s hands, easy to bend and talk into any position. But with such warm, responding, living flesh the sex must have been mutually delightful at first. Sanita was starved for it by her own doing and until the hepatitis made itself known, and Mark’s true character, she was in Seventh Heaven.
She knew he was sick; it was so visible. But she imagined her love and care, her cooking healthy meals for him and her presence, her complete sexual submission would give him a new reason for living. The nurse role was one deeply implanted in her imagination, doubling her infatuation for him. She even thought her constant love could ween him off the drugs and drink that were killing him, which he promised her he’d try, with the first fine meals she began cooking him daily in his well equipped kitchen. The dinners lasted late with all the talk, and after a few, with the lights dimmed, led straight to the hanging bed.
She fell into this love swoon in a matter of days. When she told her friends they were aghast, all of them. They grabbed her by the shoulders, shook her and said she was making a huge mistake. But in her mind she knew they were wrong. She could change him.
Her closest and most level-headed friend, Laura, was most shocked of all, caring deeply for her safety. She did so much pleading to bring Sanita back to reason, mentioning his jaundiced skin, the history of the other three girls, his straight and steady spiraling down towards death, his rampant drug use worse every year, with hardly a friend left in Rincon and without a care, their relationship was doomed. And besides putting her own life in harm’s way she was putting Willy’s in jeopardy too. Sanita was so upset at this conversation she left abruptly, considering her no longer a friend.
I know all this because the first thing Laura did when I was back home on Saturday morning was rush to my house in a panic and tell me the whole story and “we’ve got to do everything to stop this”. I called Sanita’s that morning and found the phone ominously unanswered, (unlike every other week) but supposed she was out on errands or about to drop Will off any minute.
Little did I know they were already both moved in with Mark, embedded in her case.
I told Laura I could do little as she no longer listened to me. In fact she was just as likely to do the opposite of anything I suggested. Mark only lived a half mile from my place, in the next ravine over from the road that led up to my hill and very close to the Calypso. I told her I doubted Willie was in any serious danger from Mark and as long as I still had him every weekend I could get inside reports and keep tabs on exactly what life was like in their new house. But I was concerned and would inform her of everything I found out. If she could rally all of Sanita’s women acquaintances, the three Cindy’s, Jean and a few others to her cause I would be grateful. With that Laura left, still visibly upset, saying she would try.
