Rincon, Puerto Rico

Goodbyes said, we headed Northeast. We visited Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons. As I mentioned before, Cody Wyoming was the most striking place I’ve ever seen. Then there was the long drive to Niagara Falls, where I had some valuable books to drop off at my mother’s. We spent a week there, flew from Buffalo to San Juan, where Jaime and Cindy picked us up and drove us the three hours to Rincon.

The place wasn’t entirely unknown to us because we visited Jaime there in 1991 for a week from St. Croix, a short flight away. But he had no work back then, just a new girlfriend who supported him. Now he had contacts and jobs and people working for him, several good ones. He took me to work from day one, remodeling a kitchen on a military base near San Juan. We left at five a.m. and arrived home late at night. Cindy was happy, as happy as she could be (she was always angry inside, which broke out in frequent fits of yelling) to have us stay in her expanded shack. Jaime had just finished building her a bedroom downstairs, (it was on a very steep hill in a jungle of trees). They gave us the upstairs and their old bedroom and bed under drapes of mosquito netting. She had a nine year old daughter, Nonny, who fell in love with Willy right away.

Sanita bought a small car and after two weeks found us a rental, a side house on a small farm, maybe four acres. It was a hundred feet from the larger house where a middle-aged woman, Irma, her husband, an 18 year old daughter and 17 year old son lived. They were a very typical Puerto Rican family with chickens, roosters and two noisy chihuahua’s that woke me up every morning around five a.m. chiming in with the roosters, then barking all day, every few minutes.

These people seemed impervious to the constant, annoying din. Yet they were nice folks, kind, though they knew hardly any English and we, just as little Spanish. Irma immediately fell in love with Willy. He was an angel in both looks and behavior, quiet and obedient, always smiling and ready to play any game. Their whole family was enamored. They begged us to let him stay with them many evenings, spoiled him with candies, took him with them on their farmyard chores and taught him his first words of Spanish. We lived with them for six months, until I bought a property and built enough of a house we could move into.

The little angel they fell in love with.

Rincon is the island’s one surf spot and famous for it’s having been the host of the 1968 world championships. Ever since that event, young Americans started gravitating to it, allured by the big waves each winter, the beauty of the place, and even more by the cheap cost of living there.

For the surfer bums rooms with bunkbeds rented around fifty dollars a month. A breakfast sandwich at one of the many ‘panaderias’ cost one dollar. A large plate of chicken and rice and beans (which they called ‘gandules’ and mixed in with the rice) was four dollars. All beers were a dollar a bottle, but you only had four choices, Heinekens, Becks, Medalla and one other cheap P.R. beer, Modelo, which even tasted cheap. A bottle of Bacardi was five dollars, the half-bottle two-fifty. Living costs were so low Sanita lived on the four hundred dollar a month child support I gave her when we split up. She rented a nice, two bedroom stucco house with tile floors, on a hill with a fine view of the ocean, for two thirty a month. Her electric bill was ten dollars a month, water the same. Food at the store was cheap and so was gas.

The weather was a perfect 70 to 90 degrees every day of the year, cool in the morning, hot by noon then cooling again in the evening. Each day had perfect, blue, cloudless skies. There were two so called rainy seasons, Spring and Fall, but they went like this: clear blue skies each day till about three p.m., then it clouded up and a brief downpour occurred about four, lasting less than an hour. Then the clouds dispersed to allow us to enjoy the beautiful red sunsets, every evening of the year. It was perfect weather. Only when a hurricane drifted near us would you see a whole day of overcast skies, and in the seven years I stayed there, that happened twice.

A few weeks after we arrived Jaime scored his first big contract, a ‘Gap’ store in the Mayaguez mall, only thirty minutes from Rincon. It was an eighty thousand dollar build-out, including the demolition of the old store, which was a bank with a huge vault, and the building of the Gap store to their exact specs. They provided the finishing’s, the slat wall, the counters and light fixtures, even the flooring tiles, as they wanted each store to have exactly the same look. They sent a supervisor from the States to watch over each phase of construction and give us direction when needed. This is how it was with every chain store we built, and we built many. The payments were also exactly the same with each store. You received a thirty percent check one-third of the way through the project, (determined by the supervisor) another at two-thirds completion, another when completed and they retained the last ten percent for a month (like a warranty) after it opened, to make sure everything was running fine.

It was lucky I showed up when I did because I had to loan Jaime twelve thousand dollars to make his weekly payroll until the first check came in. That happened about one month in, with seven laborers and rental tools (jack hammers and a compressor) and the truck fees to haul off all the demolition cement from the vault. But he repaid me thirteen thousand for the loan and was all set, monetarily, from then on. I worked and drove with him each day.

Unfortunately, the electrical part of the project was subbed out to a Puerto Rican contractor days before I arrived, so I helped with running the demolition crew each night. It was so noisy the mall manager forbid us to start until the mall closed at nine. After those four weeks I helped with the walls and cash wrap, taking four hundred a week salary, even though Jaime had far more able employees for those tasks, two Americans, Glen and Addison, both carpenters, and several locals, Cecil and Frank, who were paid half my salary.

The project was finished by early December, to everyone’s satisfaction.

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