Victor’s company, my creation.

Choices remain, same people, different dress codes.

To be fair I know there are men equally fastidious and on the opposite end of the spectrum, brutes among us that seem to belong to the paleolithic era, too crude in their manners and hormones to ever make any relationship work, only capable of clubbing a woman over the head to dragging her off to some soft plot of grass.

And their personalities are equally shallow and blunt, their talk is non-sequitur, with drugs and intoxication and sex their only concern. I know this because Mark Dudley was one of them, Sanita’s future choice as a mate. I say his full name, (though I avoid other people’s) because it doesn’t matter. He’s dead, a bullet to the head from some other drug dealer, soon after Sanita fled him, his just reward, and for her and Willy a timely escape.

My dealings with Madeline were from ninety-three to ninety-five, the happy and prosperous years of our ever-growing business, the sunshine years. That office scene would radically change by 1996, when Victor and Manny could finally put their heads together and figure out bids. But they both knew what I contributed to the business in those first years. And Victor, who yelled at everybody else, (except Madeline), being by nature an asshole, (and the kind who visibly enjoys being one), had to treat me with kid gloves.

He disliked and distrusted me for several reasons. First, for being Jaime’s close relative and best friend. Secondly, for being totally necessary to him after Jaime was ousted. And thirdly because I was friendly to his ex-wife Gina and their daughter, Renee, a few years older than Will, who loved playing with him. They had a swimming pool in their San Juan apartment when our partnership first began, before their own divorce. He was positively polite when we first met and invited Will and me to visit some weekends, for dinners and a stay in their spare bedroom, while Renee would make a bed with pillows and blankets for Will to sleep beside her bed, all very cute and happy.

I took Gina’s side during the divorce. She was heartbroken and I was sympathetic as it happened just after mine. I rented the spare bedroom in the apartment he left her, as she needed the extra money. A month later he rented the luxurious three bedroom condo on the beach of Isla Verde and parked me there with Mickey and John, his three main men, to get me out of her place. But I referred black Frank to her who took my place and rented the room after me, which Victor doubly resented.

So he was surly to me whenever I entered the front door but had to restrain any real show of disrespect, as I would sit down at my desk and prepare all the job bids, making him his money and the only one who could do it, (now that Jaime was gone) his life-blood. I considered the place half mine, and it was. He knew if I quit he’d loose more than half his clients in a week. They were the ones Jaime and I won over in our first year, by our hard work and constantly above par performance. I could and should have started my own construction company at that point in time. I would have left the island with a pile of money.

Then again, it might have kept me there much longer and my future with my son would have had a different outcome, possibly good but just as likely bad, for both of us, for the reasons I mentioned earlier, the dangers for a white child growing up there, the educational poverty of the place, and perhaps the business stealing the time I should have devoted to him.

Many of our clients insisted on talking to me, inquiring if I was in the office. We had no extension numbers, so all the phone calls went through Madeline, who punched a button. Most often I wasn’t in so they hung up. But the times I was there and picked up it grated Victor to no end, seeing my light flashing and wondering what private discussions we might be having. Usually he sat quiet and wondered, too proud to stoop to ask me, his employee, what was up, stewing in his own juices, dreaming up all sorts of plots and betrayals against him. Other times, when the call lasted a while, curiosity overcoming pride, he’d open his door and yell, two rooms away from mine: “what was that all about?"

Just to annoy him (for his rudeness), I’d give the most ambivalent replies, like: “it was about scheduling, if we can finish on time. It was ‘so and so’, and he might have more stores for us”. More often than not they were asking me if I were willing to do a build-out and sign the contract without him, on my own, for a lower price, even offering to help finance the job if I needed payroll capital. They knew the best employees would jump ship with me in an instant.

They’d visited our job sites often enough and talked to our best employees, (luring them out to the food court at coffee time to buy them donuts and ask questions) and from that and what they saw every day when I was on their site working away, they pieced together the whole picture. All the skilled workers hated Victor and praised me to the skies, as I worked hard alongside them so often, that I was a great electrician and foreman, and completely honest. They also saw that Victor overcharged them at every chance, with each change order that came up during the build-out of each store, which happened frequently, weekly, with every minor detail the architectural prints had missed, what we called in the business an ‘add-on’ and an extra charge. Whenever I encountered a change I had to make in the electrical scope, if it was easy and without much expense I did it 'gratis', and they saw this the few times I'd mention it. Most times I didn't even mention it. When you're making thousands of dollars you don't complain about losing a dime.

They hated the telephone calls with him, (he never visited the sites), always finagling for more money, a liar and a cheat. But I wasn’t ready to take plunge and start my own business. I was satisfied with my pay, but confused, practically frozen, in my private life and not ready to tackle a whole new set of complications. If Sanita had been at my side at this point and our marriage intact, cozy in our little cottage, I would have done it and we’d probably be rich, living in something close to a mansion within a few years, as the profits from each store were often five or ten thousand. But I shouldn’t prognosticate on ‘what might have been’. Life is too filled with flukes and freak occurrences to foretell any future.

Here’s an example: In those early days, as our business took off, I had quite the reputation as a clever bidder. The other American contractors on the island at that time, when new malls were sprouting up like mushrooms, ran into me often and took note, because I usually had three times more contracts than they had and they wanted to know my secrets at winning bids. We were often working in these new shells of malls, doing store build-outs right next door to each other, sometimes with contracts from the very same chain stores from the States, sharing advice, so we became friends.

There was a famous sidewalk bar across the street from the El San Juan Casino on the Isla Verde strip. Jaime and I often sat there in our first year, looking over prints. All the busy street traffic saw us at work as the sidewalk adjoined the round stools and counter. Friends would notice and join us there. This was before we discovered the amenities and perks of the El San Juan wine bar in the lobby, better vintages, better blonds.

It was our pit stop on the way to the casino, right down the street. A year later, (with him settled in Rincon, running the Calypso) I’d still go there after work for a drink, as our condo was walking distance away. One evening I’m approached by a young American contractor, Jeffrey, (my age) who I’d met once before, a friend of a friend so to speak. He had long, curly, blond hair and a hippy-like demeanor, not your average contractor but I liked him. He had a new set of prints with him for a movie theater to be finished inside a nearby mall, in Santurce, and asked if I’d look at them and give him some ideas.

We roll out the prints right there. He buys me another rum and coke and I ask him for a pad and pen and go to work. Then he plies me with a few more drinks, sitting beside me silent and watching, as I get carried away and write out a breakdown of every scope of the work, in columns, just as I did for our own stores each week. I was fascinated with prints in those days. They were a new-found language of books to read. But I was much too generous in this talent, giving it all away for free, (to Victor or anyone who asked nicely). In two hours and five pages of breakdowns, notes and numbers, explaining to him all the details I saw in the print notes, the hidden costs, like the large amounts of scaffolding he’d have to rent to finish the high ceilings and their costs, I come up with a price, two hundred and seventy thousand for the job. He shakes my hand and walks off with the prints and my pages.

Some eight months later he comes up to me at the very same bar, (I was even in the same seat at the far end, such were my habits) overjoyed to see me. The first thing he does is loudly order two shots of rum, one for each of us. Then he tells me he submitted my price, won the bid, that it all went smoothly and after everything was tallied up at the end he’d made a clear profit of almost eighty thousand dollars. Again he shakes my hand and leaves, telling me he’s in a hurry now but promising to buy me dinner at a Five Star in San Juan, my choice. Over my rum I pause and reflect upon all this data, thinking he should have given me some cut, maybe five percent, more than a fancy dinner. I didn’t even get that because I never saw him again.

But a year later I ran into the man I met him through, in another new mall, a contractor named Ross. Both of us were building a store there. I ask about Jeffrey. He tells me sadly his friend just died of cancer, totally unexpected, a tragic loss, leaving a wife and small child behind. He visited him for the last time in the hospital a few weeks earlier.

So there’s the rub, the complex machinations of our fates, our futures, all in a nutshell, good and bad always interwoven and at any moment all expectations dashed to pieces, so much so that whenever good fortune befalls me, I suspect there must be something bad lurking just around the corner. And when I just miss what looked like some great opportunity, I shrug it off without regrets, thinking it could easily have contained the poison seeds of my own destruction.

I enjoy the little things in life. Each morning I wake up I bless my stars that I’ve lived to see another day. Then I think of breakfast, a book I might want to read later on or a movie to watch that night. If I stay home, indoors all day, or on my porch, discounting a chance heart attack or stroke, such a humble goal is likely to be reached and richly enjoyed.

Beyond that scale, all planning is problematic. We all form hopes and visions for our wider futures, some spanning decades. It’s a natural habit of our incessantly scheming brains. But we’re much too small in this wide universe to know what’s going to happen next. The wisest course is to enjoy whatever good falls our way, even if they’re crumbs. Because the smallest things can sustain us and even please, if taken with the right attitude and frame of mind, consistent with the small but intelligent creatures we are. To think that bigger, more expansive goals deliver greater pleasures and then chase after them, with all the hard work and the time and sacrifices required to attain them, that’s folly, unless of course, you happen to be Alexander the Great.