My father and Muriel visiting us in Puerto Rico.
There’s only so much screaming a man can take and Cindy’s was shrill and loud and frequent. She had the most muscle toned and tanned body of any woman in Rincon from constant surfing and she was often in a bikini, so you could see it in her arms and legs, shapely but prominent muscles, almost man muscles, as if she pumped iron everyday for hours. You wouldn’t want to come to blows with her. But her strongest ones were her vocal chords, from practice. She could scream at you and almost knock you over, it was so loud. She screamed at me a few times, as with everyone else, for trivial or imaginary reasons.
Once it was about me corrupting Jaime, because of the one time in San Juan we’d stumbled in together to a fancy restaurant dinner, in front of her, Victor, Sanita and Betty. We were high on a few lines of heroin and half an hour late, laughing throughout the meal, unable to contain ourselves or take more than a few bites of our meals, and visibly stoned. But it was all his idea as they were parting ways, Victor and him. This dinner was like the final handshake and he needed to get high to cushion the blow and I was his companion in the car on the way there, and not adverse to doing a few lines with my brother. He veered the car into the projects on the way there. It was a poor choice but the only way we could stomach the formality and the ugly manner we’d both been treated by all of them, except Betty. Our only alternative was to walk in that restaurant stone-cold sober and flip the table over on their heads, hopefully breaking a few skulls.
Another time Cindy lost it on me over Sanita, how terrible she was and no longer allowed on the premises. She was yelling at me, full force, on the terrace, about my ex-wife leaving me against all sanity. There was no arguing with her. She just loved screaming, often against any logic or reason. Everyone could see why Jaime walked away from a place half his. Barbara gladly invited him back to Dallas and took good care of him. He was lucky in finding her.
The young couple in my house lasted about six months I think. I don’t know, it’s curious history after that except that it had several tenants. One was a mother with three children who called me two years later in N.F. She’d stayed there six months and wanted me to give her the title to the lot for nothing, as if she deserved it. I told her it was seven years, not six months, and hung up. I think she moved out shortly after that, her dream of ownership shot down. But I resolved to sell the place well before any squatter’s rights kicked in.
I suspect others moved in or just used it for a sex rendezvous or drug binges and one by one pieces were striped from it, until finally it was derelict, just like many of my American friends, slowly stripped of culture and dignity, who stayed in P.R. Jean would check on it, (out of kindness for me) once and a while and at one point, seeing it abandoned, collected all the books left there, wet and ragged, put them into garbage bags and took them to her garage. A few years later, checking into one bag, from the smell she knew they were mildewed and rotted beyond saving and threw them out, a once fine library of fifty books meeting an ugly end. Lucky I’d read over half of them to my full satisfaction. But they were, to me, like old friends. The finely bound, twenty volume ‘Causeries du Lundi’ by Sainte-Beuve is the one set I sometimes think on with longing and regret.
Will and I spent the rest of the Summer in Niagara Fall and took a two week long trip by car to Alberta with my sister Janet and her husband Bob. She had a daughter in Edmonton and she had two daughters, one Will’s age. We toured the Rockies before heading back, a four day drive each way.
That fall I took on one last job in Hoboken for Mike. The ‘Edward hotel’ was now shut down so he found me a room in a similar place in Weehawken fifteen minutes away and picked me up at the train station. It was mostly electrical renovations so I rarely saw Buddy. Each night I studied for my electrical test for hours, reading through a thousand page long book called ‘The Electrical Code Book Simplified’. It went through every single item and explained why every rule in the code book, (five hundred pages long) was there, what it meant exactly, amplifying on it. After two months of this I went by train to N.F., took the test in November and passed it, with a seventy eight percent score.
In retrospect, I memorized ten times more details than I had to. All the hardest questions towards the end I aced. I slipped up on the trick questions at the beginning. It was a three hour test and everyone told me to skip the one, hard load calculation question because it took twenty minutes to calculate. They gave me a single blank sheet of paper and I did it because I was good at such math. It filled half a page and the person who scored the test wrote ‘great work’. That’s all I got back, that sheet and a breakdown on my scores on each of eight sections.
I was back at the apartment before Christmas. My mother was in Florida for the winter with her friend John, just like the year before, so I had the place all to myself. I also had Will for a week and we watched the millennium change by the Falls parks in a big celebration with bands and freezing cold weather. I was inducted into the Hall January 5th, at the monthly meeting, swearing a pledge. After that, my career was set. I made great money.
My Father died at eighty-one on vacation in Australia in 2001 snorkeling at the Great Barrier Reef. He had lived a very happy life with my stepmother Muriel the previous sixteen years. They shared a beautiful house and garden in an affluent neighborhood of LA near the campus of UCLA where she had worked as the head of the UCLA extension program, with hundreds of employees under her. So they had lots of money, many friends, and traveled to every corner of the globe on vacations that covered half of each year. That he died of a sudden heart attack while snorkeling the barrier reef, surrounded by colorful fish, after a good breakfast at a fine hotel, tells me his passing was well done, as he'd been in fine health up to that moment.
With the inheritance I made a down payment on a house right next to my sister Janet’s house, my other sister Sylvia living in the house right behind it, so our three backyards adjoined. I did this to secure Will permanently and in the summer of 2002 Sanita agreed. He began high school that fall in Niagara Falls. Now our custody was reversed and she had him every summer and long vacation. She was still struggling in Florida to find a decent job and place, finally landing one selling furniture in a large store that paid commissions on sales so that she made something above the minimum wage, but never raising her above a week by week struggle to pay the bills.
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