I'm resuming my story in the fall of nineteen ninety eight, the second job Buddy drummed up for me after the Manhattan job, this one on the main drag of Hoboken, Washington street.
I remember telling my Amtrak adventures to our client who’d bought the landmark bar we were remodeling. He was five years younger than me and had a beautiful wife. They had me over on several Sundays to their nice apartment for some minor alterations, a few new fans and lights. They were an intelligent and lovely couple, had just enough money to afford this bar venture and were nervous over its success, as it meant their future prosperity, like a single, huge gamble at the roulette wheel, win big or loose everything. When they saw I was well educated they let me in on their fears, first the man, talking away with me as I worked, then the wife, overhearing us and joining in our conversation.
I was telling him it seemed like a very promising venture, as the location was famous, the corner of Washington street and Fourteenth. It had been a prominent bar for a century. He bought it at a good price as the former owner neglected its upkeep and lost its clientele as the place grew decrepit. It had a famous ceiling, all beautiful stained glass squares, which, when we first saw the place, were sagging down in several spots so low (with the lead seams stretching over the years), they looked like they might break and fall on our heads any minute. But it was so rare and remarkable he had a glass expert restore it, painstakingly, the whole two months we upgraded everything else, refitted the kitchen with new equipment and in the restaurant half elegant booths were added along each wall with pendant, pale green lights, dimmer controlled for mood, ever lower as the night wore on.
Buddy did the woodwork, making thick wood tables with amazing grains, unseen anywhere else. He did this through a connection he made in P.R. I was with him that day. We visited a small, hidden lumberyard in the outskirts of Mayaguez. The owner had Brazilian contacts and in a back shed, showed us a few rare hardwood trunks, twenty feet long, four and five feet in diameter, illegal to own or export. But the grains were strikingly beautiful. Buddy kept his number and somehow acquired what he needed. This was New Jersey. The booths were unique, something to talk about, and the finest restaurants in New York couldn’t match them.
One thing to note, once again reinforcing the fact that genius resides in the oddest places, the ceiling restoration was done by no expensive, specialty, glass company but by a single man who lived in Hoboken, a total drunk about fifty. He looked like a vagabond and hardly up to the job. Each day he showed up around noon and his breath stank of liquor from five feet away. But he set to work on his flimsy wood ladder, as old and beat up as he was, and showed his rare skill by restoring it to perfection, piece by piece, with such shaking hands I was sure he was going to drop and smash one of these irreplaceable tiles. I almost shuddered when I watched.
But he took out a section at a time, scraping off the old lead and refitting it with new, with a blowtorch, cleaning the glass and hanging it again from the original wires in the ceiling, adjusting each length so the ceiling had a perfect smoothness, like an ice rink upside down. It almost made one dizzy to look at, but it was beautiful, a work of art.
He did the same magic on the mirrors covering the wall behind the long bar, with their decorative scrolls in black and white around each section, taking them down and somehow restoring or repainting these eighteen-ninety gems to their pristine beauty, just as Buddy refinished to the bar itself. When you walked into that room you felt like you walked into a saloon from a century earlier. I told our client, (Dave) it was bound to be a success because it was so unique. It was high priced but Hoboken and the surrounding areas were full of the rich. He was going to be the chef. He’d worked in five star restaurants as head chef. That’s how he saved up the money over a decade for this venture. He was bound to succeed.
The next Sunday I came over to put up a fancy bathroom light. They were both at my side, asking me about my life, as the week before we’d pretty much covered theirs. They sat me down at the dining room table, plied me with wine and snacks, and we talked the whole afternoon. After my education, travels and then my sad tale of marriage, which they seemed to commiserate, I told them I thought theirs was lovely and bound to last as they both had talents and intelligence, a comfortable living in a culturally rich place, individual interests and mutual ones, to balance out a private and a shared life. Mine was a mismatch, the two of us so far apart in character and mind that when the money ran out it was bound to dissolve. I told them I inherited a wad, enough to afford all the places we’d lived and how I didn’t have to work for years and just read and wrote journals and a novel. They were fascinated by my story.
It grew quite intimate, this talk. They told me they both loved reading and before sleep they each had their own bedside light and read side by side. She liked good novels and he books on restaurants, on running them, or travel books, as they took vacations each year. I said this was a perfect picture of harmony, each following their own interests, but side by side, compatible habits, mutually satisfying. They loved that long conversation and told me so, it showed in their looks. If I’d stayed in Hoboken we would have become close friends. But this happened near the tail end of the job. Buddy had no more work for me and I had to keep working.
I know I’m going a little out of my way in this description but I like to balance out my long list of dysfunctional unions with a happy one.
This was October of 1998. I got a hold of Tom’s number and talked to him. He was excited to hear my voice and said he had a store to remodel in old San Juan and could use my help. Since it was there I wouldn’t need a car, (which I didn’t have) just my hand tools and suitcase. He’d pick me up at the airport and we could live in the store for free while we worked on it, about six weeks of work. He couldn’t pay me much, maybe ten an hour, but he begged me to come. So, with no other prospects right then and bills to pay, I did.
This was my last flirt with Puerto Rican poverty, but a colorful one. The store was right in the heart of old San Juan, the tourist district, fed by all the cruise ships stopping for a day, a small unit in a row of them, all attached and stretching a block long. The building itself and all the others around the square were three hundred or more years old and by city ordinance all painted their original colors, orange stucco walls with heavy, wide, green wooden doors.
The only change allowed to these ancient houses was that they had glass windows to display their goods, small ones so they still maintained the look of the old city. The streets outside were all cobblestones. They did radiate a postcard charm.
Our space had been empty for years and a young black man in his thirties, recently from Africa and with a heavy accent, had leased it and wanted to make it a shop for African imports, colorful clothes, handcrafts, bags, jewelry, hats and knickknacks, kind of a strange idea for such a spot, but with so many hundreds of tourists walking by each day, all year round, any touristy thing would sell well. So it was a good idea, as his wares were different from the other shops. He had no competition and the tourists were mindless as to where they were or what to buy. They were just on vacation, on a spending spree.
When we arrived I realized our accommodations were the floor of one narrow, deep, musty smelling shell of a room that was ten years dirty and dusty, full of cobwebs. There was a toilet and sink in the far back. The room was about sixty feet deep and fifteen wide. Tom had brought sleeping bags for beds. The whole floor had been ripped out and was now dirt. There was a decayed cash-wrap on one side, about ten feet back from the front and it still had a narrow wooden floor behind it so I claimed this for my bedroom. Paola of course was there and they just slept on the floor in the very back,. The darkness of the room was their only privacy. The front windows had long ago been boarded up and we left them that way for our own until the interior was done.
There was electricity and I had an extension cord and drop light to read by at night and a broken chair to lean against the wall and set my feet on the counter. The bathroom had a dim light which we left on so we could find it in the night, otherwise it would be pitch black and people would be stepping all over Tom and Paola on their way there. I say ‘people’ because we had two other residents after the first week. There was a six week deadline and Tom realized the two of us weren’t enough, even though I helped with the carpentry most of the day. The electrical work was minimal.
I recruited Irving. He was broke. I told him he’d be sleeping on a dirt floor, but he was ready to come there with the other worker Tom recruited, Johnny, the rough character I bought my property from six years earlier and hadn’t seen since then. I have no idea how Tom met him but he did have some construction skills and like most people in Rincon, was broke. He had a car and sleeping bag. To entice Irving I told him right outside our door there would be hundreds of beautiful tourist women strolling by all dressed up, from all parts of the world, and there were. That alone was enough for him. They showed up a day after we called.
I called Johnny a rough character because he really was so. He looked and acted just the same as I remembered him, and I questioned Tom on this choice before he arrived. Tom said he was the only one he knew who might come. He spoke perfect English but he spoke very little. He was constantly morose. He was about fifty, had a beer belly, and the most pitted face. He seemed to hold some secret grudge, as if life had cheated him badly, (and in that respect, it had). So he rarely talked to anyone. When he saw and recognized me he just gave me a dour ‘hello’ and a nod that he knew me. He took orders from Tom, worked hard all day but nothing else beyond the bare necessities. Paola distrusted him and made Tom lay him off after three weeks. He took his pay and drove home, the same half-sad, half-angry look on his face, the whole time sulking.
Irving made up in talk enough for ten people. He was a chatterbox, all day long. Our work was dirty and nasty at first. We had to leave the front door shut all the time. Tourists didn’t want to see a cloud of dust and sweaty men at work, (just trinkets in windows) or hear hammer drills buzzing away. We had a side door in the back that opened to a small, enclosed courtyard between three other sides. It had no purpose and the other doors to it were always locked and closed. On two sides the buildings were two stories with a few windows looking down at it. But like the doors they were closed with curtains. We never saw another soul enter it all the time we were there. So we kept that door open day and night and claimed the space as our own. It too was cobblestone and had one spigot against our wall. I figured the whole group of buildings was one large mansion long ago, of some grandee sent from Spain to rule the island. We were on the main square of old town. Perhaps Ponce de Leon once lived there.
