I'm continuing my autobiography at infrequent intervals as I'm back at electrical work at a gold mine camp in Northern Ontario called Gogama. This might last through Christmas. For those of you who haven't read the earlier parts I'll provide links to them and the beginning, and add links to those segments to make them continuous. This segment takes place in 1996 when I'm forty two years old. My company, New Vision Construction, after a very lucrative run of three years doing store build-outs all over the island of Puerto Rico and then being swindled out of all its profits by our money man Victor, and all of us being suddenly unemployed, we return to Rincon and do small residential jobs which my friend Mickey is amazingly adept at finding. Then we receive a phone call from our nemesis.
Victor begs us to come back.
Courthouse in Fajardo, Puerto Rico.
Then two government contracts somehow fell into his lap, two ‘tribunals’ or courthouses, forty page long sets of complicated prints, with fancy judge’s chambers to be built from scratch, (no fixture packages to be sent from the States, or a supervisor to answer questions). The mill work, cabinetry and lighting, carpets, seats, benches and railings all had to be built by us. Mickey and I each received, on same night, a long, apologetic phone call, in a begging tone you might say, an offer of a higher salary, six hundred a week, our company credit cards back and nice hotel accommodations in Fajardo, where one of them was to be built. The other was in Mayaguez, thirty minutes from Rincon. The government had stipulated the price, nearly a half-million dollars each. This made his mouth water. If he accepted the price they were his.
Both buildings were already government offices and just needed the interiors to be remodeled. He asked us to inspect the one in Mayaguez, take pictures, then rush to San Juan and his office to look over the prints to see if this was feasible, for the money. It took the both of us the whole afternoon and next morning, filling pages with numbers, calling suppliers for prices.
I remember the Mayaguez courthouse (twice as large as the one in Fajardo) required and new drop ceiling and over a hundred and fifty new 2 by 4 fluorescent lights. I called my favorite San Juan supplier on a price for each fixture for such a large order. There was a silence for several minutes and he got back to me and said: 55.70 each, bulbs included. Then I called Graybar. They came up with 54.50. Then our third supplier in Mayaguez, telling him the exact size of the order and the price Graybar gave me, asking if he could beat it. This got us to 53.80 a fixture. Victor and Manny were standing by my side this whole time, listening intently.
Then I called our San Juan supplier one more time, told him the Mayaguez price and asked if he could do better. He must have walked out of his office to consult some higher-up, but five minutes later he gets back to me and says: 52.50, our bottom price. I said ‘deal’, we’ll need them in three weeks and pay up front. Victor and Manny both patted me on the back. They’d never seen such bargaining with suppliers before. I’d just put five hundred dollars in his pocket. This was typical of our relationship, I making them money in ways they didn’t even dream of, and my reward, a handshake.
By noon the next day we told them the price was close but profitable. Then the four of us visited the Fajardo site, half the size but almost the same set price, and after a half-hour walk through we told them this was pure gold, that they were going to make a killing on this one, without a doubt. They were so happy they took us out to dinner.
Mickey was probably the best woodworker on the island and no mahogany desktop or staircase or baluster or balustrade gave him a moments pause. I was needed for some very fancy lighting to be bought and installed, dimmers for courtrooms, electronic bolts to open and seal doors in sequence, and in the two jail-like holding rooms, tamper-proof lenses and surveillance cameras, items which were way beyond Victor and Manny’s comprehension.
In the interim Mickey and I had settled back in Rincon, for a break. Mickey was happy to spend more time with his family, accompany them to the beach, surf on good days, while I began building the second bedroom add-on to my cottage. We both had money in the bank. We became closer friends. Mickey started inviting me over for dinner. I’d show up early with a bottle of wine. Willy would disappear into Amy’s room while Erin cooked and we’d sit in the living room and talk, the three of us, pleasant conversations that lasted through the evening. Erin was intelligent and shared in our talks, on whatever subject, with as much input and pleasure as us. And our discussions were always on a fairly high plane, a rare thing in Rincon.
We took on these tribunals, which Victor desperately needed us to manage and build, tool belts on, at six hundred a week. The Mayaguez job came first and I was able to employ some Rincon surfer bums for a month, at six dollars an hour, only a few of them with any electrical experience, but all eager to learn and work. So I made more friends and they, some welcome income, which went a long way there though it would have gone further if half of it wasn’t spent on cocaine, right on the job site.
I found this out after two weeks, seeing them furiously working, unboxing lights and throwing them up as fast as Cecil and his buddies were putting in the drop ceiling. I asked Miami Dave, one of my recruits what was going on and he told me one of the guys I hired was a dealer, selling to all the crews there. I let it go another week as so much progress was being made, then I laid the dealer off, telling him why. He didn’t mind. He’d made a bundle and the job was almost over. Only Cecil complained to me, in a half-joking way, of the inconvenience this caused. He said now he had to cross the parking lot where before he just had to step inside the bathroom. I told him we were building a courthouse and that it just wasn’t right, so much drug dealing inside. He laughed.
Victor once told me that if he could pay his laborers in cocaine instead of cash each Friday, many of them would accept the deal. The wives would be unhappy, but he’d be twice as rich, buying in bulk, paying in ‘paquetes’, the Puerto Rican word for packages, the small zip-lock bags all drugs were sold in, twenty dollars each.
The Fajardo job came next and lasted a pleasant five weeks. Mickey and I shared a fancy hotel room overlooking the harbor. Manny often had dinner with us at some nice restaurant, before driving home to his new apartment in a high rise in San Juan. We used our credit cards and Victor didn’t seem to mind, as the job progressed swiftly and he was making a fortune. He was sometimes generous to us, his foremen, (as with the condo in Isla Verde), when his fortunes were high, as long as he got his nine-tenths.
As we had nothing else to do in Fajardo, the furthest place from Rincon, Mickey and I worked weekends for an extra two hundred. One Sunday, at the end of the project, there was little left to install but the doors between the chambers. The carpet was in, the moldings and trim, the judge’s platform and bench, railings and stands, most of these pre-ordered from the States and cut to fit. The doors were a solid, dark wood, beautifully grained and heavy, for the soundproof factor, as chambers had to be private. There were twelve to be cut and hinged and fitted into their metal frames, already in place.
I remember that day well as I was finishing a panel and witnessed the whole scene. Mickey and Manny and another carpenter, a young, overweight American, each had their own sawhorses and tools set up and ready to proceed at 8 a.m. each on a separate door. The job required finesse and skill, as each door had to fit perfectly, open and close silently with the slightest of gaps to the frame, for the sound barrier. This is the discrepancy in talent, visible in any set of craftsmen, in every trade.
Mickey worked silently, smoothly, and finished eight doors to perfection in eight hours. Manny could be heard swearing at times, putting up a door, taking it down again and finished two by day’s end to acceptable standards. The other carpenter finished one, with even more cursing. Mickey finished off the last door the next day, in an hour. He was a true craftsman, an artist in wood and tile, just as I was in electrical work. We never boasted about it, just going about our jobs, because we proved it to everyone around with our productivity and the beauty of the finished work, everyday. That’s why we were such good friends, we were alike in talent.
I don’t wish to demean Manny. He had much less practice at carpentry. But he had talents and wisdom in other fields that I admired. I’ll mention them now, as I had less and less to do with him after this job, running into him on fewer occasions, and from hearsay and the scenes I witnessed, seeing another sad love affair play out.
Manny was a former boxer, built like one and handsome, except for the slightly crooked nose. He was suave, spoke perfect, fast English and was aggressive, bristling with energy. He would have fit right in on Wall Street in a suit. He married a Japanese girl, shorter by six inches but just as muscular and feisty and hot-tempered, Sass, whom I met a dozen times. They had Olympic sex bouts, but they also fought often, as Manny was a womanizer, on the road all week with our stores all over the island.
She ran a gym and taught work-outs in Mayaguez, where they had a nice apartment. I knew them over four years and several times, on our way to work on a Monday morning, I’d pick him up, (as they shared a car) and notice bruises on his face. She’d have them too and they broke up regularly. I even witnessed one of their screaming matches, still going on early one Monday as he stepped into my car, rolling down the window and having me wait so they could throw a few more ugly insults at each other, she in her pajamas, barefoot in the driveway, too furious to care what the neighbors looking out their windows might think. But then they’d make up with a marathon ‘fuck-fest’ (as he coined it) and be a couple again.
They finally split up just before I left the island. Then I heard from friends that he’d resumed his old heroin habit, some time after he moved into his fancy San Juan apartment alone. All the years I’d known him before he was abstinent, not even touching a drop of alcohol though eating with Mickey and me on numerous occasions, while we knocked off several bottles of wine.
After the reformation of our company, when I was kicked out of the office, he took over the bidding of stores with Victor, on my models, using all my sheets of bids which Victor was careful to keep. But he would sometimes sneak out to me on some worksite and pull me aside with a few pages of prints and questions, which I’d lean over and answer as best I could, tool belt on. If it was a long session and many questions answered to his delight, he’d promise to buy me dinner that night and always made true on these, as he was a man of his word.
I remember visiting him in this apartment just before I left, going out of my way to say ‘goodbye’. He was standing in his kitchen alone and depressed. Sass had left him and was serious about leaving the island very soon. I don’t know how a beautiful Japanese woman ended up so far from home in the first place. She was a real rarity there, unique, I never met another. I tried to cheer him up, saying he had money and opportunities and all the potential in the world, but to no avail. I left a bit bewildered, sad like he was, and heard less than a year later he was dead of a heroin overdose. It must have been love.
He could have chosen from scores of beautiful women a new partner, eager to join him in that classy apartment. Besides his great looks, body-builder’s muscles, and money, he had charm, wit and could see through people, predict them. He had boundless energy, often talking as fast as a James Cagney all worked up. But he also had empathy and felt for me after my break-up with Sanita, slapping me on the back at work saying, ‘things will get better’, or vising my shack in Rincon when I was there alone after Willy was gone and take me out to dinner to cheer me up.
