From broke in Newark to rich St. Thomas.

Saint Thomas and cruise ships, where I had two lucrative jobs waiting, a bit different than the Y.M.C.A. in Newark.

Mike insisted I do his next two bars, one came up in ninety eight and the last one a year later when I was back in Canada negotiating a Union career. It was a four month job during which I studied hard each night after work and took the test to get my Canadian license, a requirement for the Union, September through December. Then I left the States for good. I was inducted into the hall January 5th, 2000. From then on you might even call me a straight shooter, a tax paying, law abiding citizen, my pension started and my one goal, to move my son Will from Sanita’s vagrant lifestyle to my new one with a stable home and income and life, now slowly taking shape.

The bar in Hoboken was completed the third week of December. Sanita sent Will to Newark as agreed, while I of course payed for the flights and the child support even while he was with me. We spent several days in Hoboken, toured Manhattan, then flew to L.A. for a week-long visit with my father Bill and my stepmother Muriel for Christmas and New Years.

The place opened and I had to find new lodgings. Buddy thought that more work was imminent and told me to hang tight. The cheapest place I found to live was the Y.M.C.A. in downtown Newark, a derelict six story building that made my days in the warehouse in 1984 look rosy. But the room was only twenty dollars a night. It was all black. Newark was all black. I could look out my window down on the central town square at mid-day and see a thousand black pedestrians and not a single white. Buddy kept me in this money-draining limbo for a month and a half. There were a few cheap hotels in Hoboken and Weehawken that were rundown with weekly rates equivalent to that, much better locations and clientele, (mostly white drug addicts) which I discovered and stayed in on my next jobs there. But I didn’t know about them at the time. Ignorance is cruel.

The only good thing that happened in this dark interim, sitting at a cheap desk in a room that resembled a jail cell, was that I discovered Mark Twain and bought four of his novels and read each with delight. “Life on the Mississippi” was the best. But the place was a nightmare. I went out once a day for food and my door was locked at all times. The bathroom was down the hall and I was told repeatedly I didn’t belong there, both by the staff and the other tenants. Most of them resembled convicts and probably had been.

The place was modelled like a half-way house, funded by charities. That’s why it was so cheap. You couldn’t drink there. I found this out five weeks into my stay, a rum bottle on my desk by the window with a large Coca-Cola beside it, a Mark Twain in my hand, my feet on the desktop and a knock on my door. It was a spot inspection.

The fat, black lady peeked in and was shocked at the sight of the bottle, made me dump it out immediately in the sink down the hall. I asked angrily why they hadn’t told me the rules of the place when I moved in. They were incompetent to a ridiculous degree, no training and no skills. And here I was reading Mark Twain in their midst. It only reaffirmed that I was in the wrong place and had to get out of there.

That very hour, as soon as I was made to dump out a perfectly good half-pint of rum, I walked to the nearby liquor store, bought another and then went to a fast food place for one of those giant soft drink cups, a 32 ounce ‘Big Gulp’, poured half out and fit the whole pint of rum into it. Then I returned to the front desk of the Y.M.C.A., the ‘Big Gulp’ in my hand, straw in my mouth and apologized to the same fat lady now sitting behind the front desk, saying I was sorry and that it would never happen again, I just didn’t know the rules. She seemed positively charmed at my apology and said she expected we’d have no problems from then on. It probably made her day. I smiled, went up to my room and continued reading. But I was in a pathetic situation and the end of my stay was near.

I told Buddy my plight. I could read a good book anywhere, live in the smallest, ugliest cell. But this was ridiculous and unnecessary. I suppose that at the age of forty two my earlier taste for Black comedy and Surrealism was diminishing. Perhaps if I was reading Jonathan Swift or Rabelais or Celine’s ‘Death on the Instalment Plan’, I might have stayed longer.

I had a house and my son back in Rincon. Each week Buddy’s promises fell through. I was going back to P.R. He begged me to stay one more week, as Mike kept promising him the next big job in Hoboken, to start immediately. He was in negotiations for the lease. He even walked us through the empty building, so we knew he was in earnest. Buddy said I could stay with his brother Tom in Long Branch. Tom was shy and the opposite of Buddy in every way and still lived with his parents, unmarried, though he was a year older than Buddy, over forty. The parents were off on some vacation for a month so I could crash there for free. I gave him this one week and moved in.

Tom was a pleasant companion, unemployed at the time but with years of experience in construction. We got along well and talked all day. One curious thing to note happened that week as we enjoyed a few beers each evening at his kitchen table. His best friend since childhood lived several houses down the street. He was now a cop, had been so for ten years, and Tom was still his closest friend. Now Tom had the habit of rolling up a joint every evening and enjoying it. His cop friend would often drop by at just this time, in uniform.

I’d sit and watch amazed as the police officer casually sat down with us, took the beer that Tom always offered him, enjoyed our casual talk and company for the next half-hour, then got up, thanked us for our hospitality and left, home to the wife. All this while Tom was smoking his joint and his friend acting as if it didn’t exist.

One night, out of curiosity, I asked Tom how long this had been going on. He said: “about ten years. As long as I don’t blow it in his face he doesn’t mind my habit. He told me he could overlook it. Everyone has their petty vices and he values my friendship far more than that. Besides, his marriage isn’t going well lately and he comes to me for advice”.

Friendship trumps laws. It’s more important, and this was an obvious example of it, as this cop seemed like a strict one, dedicated to law and order. He’d tell us of the people he busted that day, some for petty drug possession, almost always blacks, and why his work was so important. But Tom’s friendship was on a different plane, perhaps the only time he rose above his career and home life. And things are overlooked in that human situation. Tom didn’t blow the smoke in his direction or offer the joint to me in his presence. It was his own private vice. The cop never brought the matter up in the six days I was there. It was invisible to him. Finally I called Sanita and asked her to pick me up in San Juan. I was sick of broken promises. She agreed and I returned.

As soon as Victor found out I was back he called me up with stores to build, right away, two fat ones in St. Thomas. I made five thousand dollars in seven weeks. My folly was that I poured it all again into improving my house, starting on my second story bedroom.

But Victor’s luck kept rolling along and he scored another store in St Croix, a ‘Foot Locker’ in a new mall there. He sent five of us, me first, as I knew the island. I rented two apartments and Victor sent four employees. After the first week, besides those four, I knew we needed more help. I called Tom C. in New Jersey. He wasn’t doing anything and was probably bored. But he did have carpentry and construction skills, learned on jobs which his brother dragged him into years earlier. He’d shown some brief sparks of interest as I described the Caribbean islands in our talks at his kitchen table. I told him I had good work for a month and would fly him down for a trial, all expenses paid. He accepted.

In St. Croix I put him up with me. He had his own room, worked as my assistant, pulling wire, installing the lights in the grid ceiling and wiring them up, as good as any helper I had. About the third weekend I decided to celebrate our progress and bought a gram of coke one Saturday night and split it with him. He took his half into his room and locked the door. I sat the rest of the evening at the table, doing a few lines, drinking rum, wondering what was up, expecting him to come out and share my company at the table and have a great talk. A few times I got up and knocked on his door, but no answer. Then I quit trying and went to bed. The next day, Sunday, he was up and normal but with no excuses or explanations.

Now I had questions about him, a strange, odd, feeling, but nothing enough to change our relationship. We finished the store, then went back to Rincon. I showed him the town and he was mildly impressed. The best place I could find for him to stay was a fancy bread and breakfast, owned by a friend of mine and for whom I’d done some electrical work for free. So he owed me a favor. He had seven vacant units and as it was summertime none were rented. I talked him into giving one to Tom for twenty a night. They went for sixty in the wintertime. He agreed. This place was right above the Calypso bar, one hundred yards away, with a beautiful view and setting.

As I didn’t want Tom to run out of money I offered him a job working on my house, doing unfinished trim work in the main room and the new bedroom. He agreed. Another strange thing was that Sanita came into the picture. She needed extra money and also wanted to work on the house, painting the trim Tom was putting put up and then painting the new bedroom a nice light blue. She always was a good painter. For all her faults I’ll never deny her that. The only condition she had was that whenever she was working on my house I shouldn’t be present, except for the few minutes to pay her each evening. She liked working with Tom and told me so.

But just as this started, Victor scored another store for me to wire, in an obscure town in the hills, called Moca, only a forty minute drive from Rincon. It was a small, easy store so I drove there everyday and began the electrical work, wondering what was going on between Sanita and Tom in my own house, perhaps my very own bed. Yet Tom was so meek and open with me, I couldn’t imagine the worst. And Sanita too wasn’t his type at all so I imagined them just working together and chatting away like chipmunks, all day long. I knew she was bored with her life on the island. It was stagnant, and all her own doing, doing nothing. Any new stranger that spoke English was a welcome diversion for her. And now Kim had entered the picture, a new presence in my mind and Tom's, full of fresh possibilities, as vibrant as her own vivacity.

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