Now I went to town on my house, with Richard. We found some treated telephone poles, wood that wouldn’t rot in the earth for ages, cut them into eight foot lengths and had a friend with a tractor and an augur pound them four feet deep into the solid ground, spaced four feet apart. On this solid foundation we built the floor to the house, three to four feet off the ground, as it was slightly sloping. This kept the house bug free.

Even though the whole island was creeping with insects, the creosote on the pillars deterred them. We had the floor finished, a platform for the house when my accident happened, early February. Sanita was so excited about this progress that she took the kids, Willy and Nonny, to sleep on the platform that night, under the stars, in sleeping bags. I went out drinking with Addison to a sleazy bar for a few hours, to join them later.

Construction proceeds.

Addison told me something might happen that night. He recently had an altercation with a small time Puerto Rican drug dealer named Marcos, who lived just around the corner from the bar. But this night the sleazy local bar was filled with white surfers, as they were getting a slide show of famous contests and waves. He told me all this as we’re sipping our first rum and cokes and just asked me to watch his back. I agreed.

After a few hours and six or seven drinks I leave him standing at the bar to go to the bathroom. When I return he’s not there. I check the rest of the room, now half empty, then stroll outside to find him. I spot him right across the street, by a car, talking to three Puerto Ricans. He knew Spanish well as he’d been living there five years.

I walk over, stand beside him and can see they’re having an argument. A second later I’m smacked from behind, very hard, with a baseball bat, on the left side of my face. I fall to the ground but get up right away screaming, looking for someone to hit. But they’ve all run off. Only Addison is there holding me up. In a minute the police arrive, take me to their station in Rincon, but seeing my face so smashed in they call for an ambulance to take me to the general hospital in Mayaguez, thirty minutes away. Jaime and Addison are with me answering all questions because I’m in too much of a painful daze to be coherent, just sitting on a chair, holding my face and bleeding all over.

I don’t remember the ambulance ride, but I do remember waking up in the middle of the night in a rolling cot, all alone, in a hospital corridor, probably around 4 a.m. I’m in excruciating pain. I call out for help but no one comes. I’m so angry I get off the cot, grab it at one end and begin slamming it against a window in the corridor, wanting to break it. But it must have been wired glass as I didn’t smash it after many tries. But this does get the desired result, two people rush out, a man and a woman and they give me a strong shot. In a minute I’m out like a light. I wake up mid-morning in a room, with Jaime, Cindy and Sanita staring down at me.

Wrong place, wrong time, taking a baseball bat in the face for somebody else.

Sanita does the right thing. I’m transferred that morning to a private hospital in Mayaguez and operated upon right away by the best young surgeon in town, and probably the whole island. My jaw and cheekbones were shattered, over fifty breaks. The doctor repairs each one and reconstructs my face in a three hour long operation, wiring my jaw shut so it can heal. He did an amazing job as my face looked normal again six months later. But he told me it was the hardest reconstruction job he ever did, so much was shattered. He said he even surprised himself at how perfect it came out.

Being in a private hospital and operated upon by a private doctor, this set me back eight thousand dollars. But Sanita saved my face from permanent disfigurement, which would have been a life shattering experience. The money spent was nothing compared to that.

What amazes me in this narrative is how many times I’ve disparaged and demeaned her (for good reason) and then, honestly, I have to praise her to the skies. However much I try to dissect her she remains a total enigma, stupid and wise, using me in obvious ways and at the same time saving me in major crises, cold, unloving, sexless for years than coming through for me at the critical moments, like my personal angel.

One thing that moved her to this swift and decisive action was a story Cindy told her that very morning. Mayaguez central was a joke of a hospital, a hack place, free for the poor but incompetent, where, if I’d stayed there, I would have come out permanently disfigured, an ‘Elephant Man’.

She told Sanita the story of one of her former boyfriends, a guy named Carlos. Jaime and I knew him well as we’d hired him for the Gap job just four months earlier (at Cindy’s recommendation) to help demolish the vault in the old store. It was all sledgehammer work and hard work, carrying out heavy slabs of bricks to trucks, which we had to do at night when the mall was closed because of the noise. He was extremely glad we hired him because he rarely got a job. He only had one hand. But on the job he was our favorite, always cheerful and encouraging the others to keep slugging away. He was in his mid-thirties, very healthy, strong and full of energy. But he’d been in a car accident five years earlier, when he was Cindy’s lover, handsome, a surfer and full of life and personality.

It was a head-on collision at night. He flew through the windshield and somehow the hood of his car popped off and he was lying, passed out, on the front of his car. But his hand was right on some hot spot of the engine, maybe the radiator, for some twenty minutes before the ambulance arrived and by that time it was badly burned.

They took him to Mayaguez central, bandaged his hand, and Cindy Rice sat by his bedside day and night, always complaining that he was receiving too little attention. She didn’t know medicine but she was right in her hunch and sure enough, they weren’t changing the dressings on his hand enough and after a week gangrene set in and parts had to be amputated, all his fingers and half of his palm, leaving an ugly stump.

He got more work done with one hand than most others did with two. And he taunted them to try to keep up with him, which they did. So he proved to be the best worker we had.

Even though my jaw was wired shut, after five days in the hospital, and a few days at our farm rental, eating one Demerol each night for the pain, I resumed work on our house with Richard. I had to have all my meals blended and sucked through a straw. But you can blend anything, even a steak. We made great progress over the next two months. The only thing I couldn’t do was swing a hammer. Every time I did the vibration sent a painful shock wave straight to my jaw.

So Richard did all the nailing, while I took measurements and cut the two by fours. We became even closer friends after the accident. His girlfriend still came by and now she fed me my milkshakes at lunch, made and packed by Sanita in a cooler, but delivered by her, holding the glass and straw up to my mouth, like a nurse, thinking she had to do this as if I were an invalid, which I pretended to be, sucking away and thanking her repeatedly and staring into her pretty face just inches away. Even Steve got a kick out of watching this routine as he knew exactly what was up.

We got another big laugh out of Willy. Sanita would drop him off for hours, along with our dog, who loved to roam the hills around us, and Trish would take care of Will, like a pretend mother, often holding him in her lap and playing simple games with him, like throwing pebbles at a can. Our dog’s name was ‘Homer’, but Willy couldn’t quite pronounce it yet and every time he’d run too far away Willy would yell out, his voice echoing through the valley, “Homo, come back, come back Homo”.

This sent all of us into peals of laughter. The hours I spent there building my house with Richard, with Trish watching us, sitting on the hillside ten feet away in the short grass, knees up in front of her, wearing sneakers and white shorts, with her girlfriend and Will in her lap, were some of my happiest moments for me on that island.

The first version of our shack, when we moved in. I built it with my own hands, so I loved it. It reminded me of my bohemian days of simplicity. With more money over the next years I added two bedrooms and many other improvements.

The house was one room with a bathroom and a loft above it, Sanita’s and my bedroom, a double mattress and a foot of floor left over for a lamp. The kitchen was a covered deck with built in counters and shelves. Our bathroom was a sink and toilet. I never finished tiling the shower stall so I set one up on the Canipa tree with a shower head called an ‘insta-hot’. It plugged into an outlet and heated the water lukewarm as it came out the nozzle. This was all you wanted in that hot climate, even when taking a shower at five a.m. No use describing it when pictures show it better. Too bad I have none of the interior of the house.

Our open kitchen and the shower deck. You can see the bottles of shampoo and the pipe going up the tree. Christmas time, with Kitty, Jack taking the picture.

This was the first, primitive prototype we moved into. We wanted to get away from the farm, with all it’s noise. I’d built this with my own two hands, with Steve’s help, and I was proud of it. I added on and fixed it up continually, more than doubling its size over the years.

next post https://www.publish0x.com/robert-oreilly/sanita-drifts-away-xmydveq