I didn’t know why the bottom rung of the ladder worried me. The bottom one was the easy one. It was the one on the top that was going to kill me.
“Another day, another dollar,” I said to myself, planting my foot on that bottom rung. It had no give in it, comforting since it was taking my weight and 40 pounds of welding gear. I swung my lifeline around a steel cable running up the length of the ladder, clipping in and moving up. The clamp was designed to allow movement upward but arrest any movement downward. A good policy to have. Only 400 feet to go to the top of the water tower.
I was working for Chicago Bridge & Iron, an outfit that built all kinds of enormous structures. For some jobs, it was smokestacks. For others, it was nuclear-containment vessels. Other times it was water towers. The one thing in common—it was all high steel, giant fabrications that required working in the sky between 400 and 1,000 feet up. Not many people worked that high, and I’d been more than a bit scared the first time I saw how far you could drop, but that was just motivation for me. Since I was a kid, I always wanted to go places other guys were afraid to go, do things others couldn’t or wouldn’t do. The fear let me know that it was worth my time, let me know the task passed my test. Now it was up to me, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to quit. Nothing was going to kick my ass. I loved forcing myself out of my comfort zone.
The money wasn’t too bad, either.
Working as a welder was a good job in 1975. They paid me $9 an hour to climb those ladders and fuse one piece of metal to another. That was enough in earnings in one day for a week’s worth of groceries for me, my wife, and our five kids. I’d have a month’s rent in just a few days of work. Not too shabby for a twenty-five-year-old with a growing family. The dangers didn’t even seem like dangers when you’re twenty-five. Mortality is something that happens to the other guy. The thing was, sometimes, you worked side-by-side with the other guy. And so did he. Hell, I was 10 feet tall, invisible and bulletproof—just ask me. That was the only time in my life that I knew everything. Been learning ever since.
Accidents happened. They happened with all too much regularity. Hell, in our southeast division, there were 600 boilermakers and laborers, and we’d lose 1 percent of those guys every year to accidents. Six men every single year. Breaking safety lines. Equipment failure. Acts of God. Lots of things can happen to a man at 800 feet in the air when he’s holding a welding rod that burns at over 3,000 degrees, and not a lot of them good. A one-inch air arc used for melting steel can reach minimum temps of 6,500 degrees Fahrenheit. One time, a foreman hired his son, only eighteen, to work the site. He was on the ground, not even up in the scaffolding, when someone working above somehow lost his grip on a grinder. The machine weighed about 20 pounds, and from where it fell, it took about six seconds to reach the ground. Every second, it just got faster and faster. By the time it hit the kid, that 20-pound grinder was moving at about 130 miles per hour, and it took him out instantly. The ambulance came, took the body away. His dad never came back to the site. The rest of us? We waited for over an hour before the accident was squared away, then we got back to work. It sounds cold, but there was nothing else but work, and that was exactly what we needed at that point in time. Stay occupied.
I kept climbing up the ladder. I didn’t want to think about the bad things that could happen, I just wanted to think about my safety and my job, what I needed to do. You overthink it, you can lose it. I’d seen that happen, too. Guys who were just like me, guys with more experience than me, who would go up every day to the job and then, one day—BOOM—it would just hit them like a flash of light: the danger, the risk. They’d grab on to the scaffolding with white knuckles, grip so tight you’d have to pry their fingers off with a crowbar. They couldn’t climb down. The foreman would have to call 911 so they could come up with a basket and lower them down to the ground. One bad day could be the last day they’d ever spend on the high steel. The ability to focus was paramount.
Guys who’ve never done the work don’t quite understand it. They might think that climbing a ladder fifty stories is just like climbing a ladder to fix their gutters, just a bit higher up. But it’s not that way. When you’re climbing something that big, going that high, you look up, and the ladder doesn’t just look like it goes up, it feels like it’s angling backward as you climb. So, you focus on the next rung and try not to think about the ladder bending backward, or then you may white knuckle the next grip, and they’d have to send a basket to get your dumb ass down.
I finally reached the top. It was so high up, I could literally see some very low-lying clouds below me, could see birds flying beneath me. When I first started the work, it took me six months before I was able to feel comfortable moving around. The first ninety days, anything that didn’t move, I tied off to it. I was taking no chances. Of course, it slowed me down considerably, but I didn’t care; I wanted to feel safe. Now I felt more secure. I walked to my spot, calm but aware. My workstation was waiting—a ladder hanging out over the rest of the world, anchored in by another one of the crew. These guys were professionals, like me, and they knew what they were doing. Still, it was my life hanging on the end of that ladder and dangling over a 400-foot drop. I gave the welding perch a good once-over. Trust but verify.
I pulled at my collar a little bit to get some more air. I was wearing what basically all the guys wore, a kind of informal welder’s uniform: denim pants, T-shirt under a long-sleeve denim shirt, leather boots, and a leather cape sleeve covering my torso and back, leather sleeves down to the wrists, and welding gloves that went to the elbow. It was a lot of gear to be wearing in Biloxi, Mississippi, in June, but it helped keep you separated from molten metal that might come flying off the structure. We all wore our denim shirts untucked, not because we were slobs, but because you sure as hell didn’t want any red-hot metal getting between your waist and your belt. Same reason why none of us wore lace-up work boots. You wanted to avoid molten slag getting caught in your laces and burning a hole through the top of your foot. If for some reason, God forbid, something got in that boot, we could slip it off without having to cut it off. That’s the sort of thing that could ruin your whole day, not to mention the fact you would never walk again without a limp.
You’d think guys might wear steel-toed boots for the work, something tough that could take a pounding, but no one did. If you had something heavy fall on your foot, and such things weren’t uncommon, you didn’t want a plate of steel over your toes. If you’re wearing just a good leather work boot when a 200-pound piece of metal falls on it, some of those toes are going to break. But if you’re wearing steel-toed boots, the metal’s going to pinch those toes right off. Better a broken toe than a severed one.
After all that climbing and hauling gear to your workstation, that’s when the fun really began: the welding. The welding we did was all stick welding. I started the first pass with a welding rod for mild steel (6010) that held two pieces of metal together. Then I finished that with a low-hydrogen rod called 7018, the final interior weld on that seam. I welded uphill, starting at the bottom of the seam and moving upward to the top.
I made each pass until the thickness of the seam was overfilled so another crew, the QA (quality assurance) guys, could grind the weld down flat and X-ray it for flaws. Then I went on the outside of the structure and used a tool called an air arc, cutting out the first pass of 6010 that I’d put in and then welding up the outside of the seam. As soon as I finished the seam, techs came by to prep it for X-ray to see if there were any flaws in the welds. If there were, I’d have to go back in, cut them out, and redo them. On big structures that held a lot of weight and nuclear-containment vessels, they were all 100 percent X-ray work.
We got a bonus of 25 cents for every good foot of weld we put down, but for every bad picture they took they’d penalize us 50 cents and make us stop working, go back, and fix the fuckup. Hey, in the real world, you fuck up, there are consequences. So, if you weren’t laying down new welds, you were losing money. It was called the picture bonus, so on top of the $9 per hour, I could make almost an additional $9 an hour by laying down good welds and not screwing up. If you didn’t do your job well, theoretically, you could end up in the hole, which would lead to your immediate dismissal. The foreman always walked around with a pocket full of cash to pay off slackers and send them down the road. We used to call it two weeks and a road map. Now, that’s incentive. Nobody wanted to lose their job and give up that good money. Hell, when you get paid that well, that’s about a steak dinner for two with all the trimmings and a couple of drinks—every two hours—in a restaurant that a blue-collar guy like me had no business being in. Didn’t mean I wouldn’t enjoy it, but my edges were a bit rough.
Speed was important. That’s why I carried my rod bag with another 25 to 30 pounds of welding rod. A can of welding rods weighed about 50 pounds, and I’d carry as much as I could. I wouldn’t waste time going to the toolshed to get more or waiting on ground crew to send up more rods. Welding rods would have to be stored in a rod oven to keep all moisture out of the equation. The humidity would cause you to lay down bad welds and cost you money. All rods exposed longer than a couple of hours had to be put back in the oven to dry out.
Any way I could think of to save time, I’d do it. My lunch “hour” was the five minutes I’d need to shovel down the sandwich and apple I had in my lunchbox. There were no port-a-potties 50 stories up, so while some guys would climb down that ladder to hit the head, other guys would just relieve themselves off the side of the tower. It might sound uncouth, but the time saved could buy a man a nice new pair of boots. Taking a piss was expensive on the high steel. I’d even seen guys take a dump in an empty rod can and then heave it over the side. Worked great, except that one time the wind caught it and ended up spraying everyone’s cars with shit from on high. Brought a literal meaning to the term “shit storm.”
It may sound gross, but time was money. If we finished up the job before schedule and under budget, the crew got to split 40 percent of what we saved. If someone wasn’t cutting it, he was messing with our money, and that would not be tolerated. This could be a problem with new guys. They didn’t know the pace, didn’t necessarily know how we did things, and they could slow us down. On our crew you did your job and did it right or we would make you pay, and it wasn’t going to be pleasant. One time, and only once, a guy was such a damn slacker that the crew waited until he went to the port-a-potties and wrapped a welding rod through the hasp of the lock. Then they had the crane operator lift it up and shake it around before setting it down. We unlocked it, and the newbie came stumbling out, covered in shit and with a brand-new perspective. But a guy would have to really be dragging ass to get a code red like that.
It was thirsty work. I always worked in the southeast, in Alabama and Mississippi and Georgia and Florida, because I liked being able to work year-round and not have to worry about bad weather. But that also meant that I was wearing three layers of clothing, including a layer of leather, in Mississippi on a 100-degree day while blasting a steel plate with up to 6,500 degrees of heat. The company always provided salt pills to the crew so we’d retain water. And they’d send up these 10-gallon Igloo coolers full of water and ice so we didn’t pass out. Just doing your job, it was easy to lose 7 pounds a day just from sweating. It sure made a man thirsty. For some, maybe even thirsty for something stronger than water.
And that’s what nearly killed me.
When you’re building something enormous, like a water tower, you have the crane you’re using pull itself up to the next level. The crane climbs up the structure as you complete the lower portions. You’re basically using the crane to disassemble and reassemble itself at a higher point on the structure. We call this “jumping the rig.” We’d finished a lower level and were prepping the jump the rig. We worked it primarily as a three-man job. Two guys would sit on the base of the cage that housed the boom of the crane in wing seats and get raised to the next level, using steel pry bars to push the cage away from the welded seams, so it wouldn’t get hung up. A crane operator sat 50 to 75 yards away, responding to our hand signals to go faster, slower, brake, or whatever we indicated. Crane signals on high steel are all uniform, so it’s not something that you just make up as you go along.
I took one wing seat, and my brother-in-law, Scotty, took the other one. Scotty had been the one to help get me the job on the site.
“Watch that seam,” he said, pushing out his pry bar.
That’s when the world started to fall away.
The cage just started sliding down the cable that had been pulling us up. It wasn’t a freefall, but we were going down, and picking up speed.
My right hand went to the straps holding me in place, as did Scotty’s. We only had two options: We could stay on and hope that the cage offered some protection or cushion once we hit bottom. Or we could try to peel out and jump, maybe grab a cable on the way down.
Either way, the odds were good we were going to die.
We dropped about 50 feet in the three seconds before the brakes re-engaged. Longest three seconds of my life. It wasn’t a sharp shock, not the immediate snap of a hangman’s noose. The brake was designed to arrest a fall more gradually, so it wouldn’t tear the equipment apart. And thank God it was, or the impact might have broken our backs.
Scotty and I caught our breaths.
“You okay?” he asked.
“Yeah. You?” I replied.
“Still alive,” he said.
In most places, you fall five stories, the boss would say, “Take the rest of the day.” Not us. We unstrapped ourselves and finished jumping the rig before heading down to solid ground.
It had only been about forty-five minutes, but that was plenty of time for Scotty and me to get pissed. You start with the adrenaline of almost dying, and then you add the realization that someone was responsible for what happened. Then that adrenaline is transformed from “survival” to “payback.”
“You guys okay?” one of the other guys, Bill, asked.
“Getting there,” I said.
“Shit, when I saw Clarence Irishing up his coffee this morning, I figured he was just feeling cold,” Bill said. It was only a ten-man crew. If one guy heard or saw something, we’d all know it eventually.
“Yeah, Biloxi in summer can practically give you fucking frostbite,” I said.
Goddamn Clarence. He was the crane operator. Classic Southern good ol’ boy. Not much between the ears. He’d put whiskey in his coffee, and he must have let his foot slip off the crane’s brake. And almost killed us.
Scotty started running his hand over his 5-pound sledgehammer like he was warming it up. We’d use the tool to beat down bull pins that we used for fitting, but I think Scotty now had another beat down in mind.
As soon as we got to the deck, Scotty had one thing on his mind. He slid that sledge out of his tool belt and made a beeline for Clarence. The crane operator was an older guy, maybe forty-five or so, and if Scotty had his way, he wasn’t going to get one minute older.
Before Scotty could cave his skull in, he got wrapped up by our foreman, Carl Dover. Scotty was no stick figure. He was about 6'1", 195 pounds of solid muscle, chiseled by years of working high steel, but Carl had about 2 inches and 30 pounds on him. Carl was one tough son of a bitch, definitely the kind of guy you’d want on your side in a fight. The edges are pretty rough on boilermakers. Redneck boilermakers make New York City construction workers look like crossing guards. No offense to the trades in New York, but these guys were something you had to see to believe. We never worked by local union laws. We were part of the international union and rules were different, if they existed at all. These guys would fight at the drop of a hard hat. Hell, sometimes they would even throw the hat to get things going.
“Easy, Scotty,” Carl said. Scotty was no shrinking violet, but he wasn’t so lost in his adrenaline rage that he wanted to mix it up with Carl.
“Clarence is out of here. I gave him his walking papers,” Carl said. It was enough to get Scotty to holster his sledge.
It got my heart rate up, that’s for sure. I was pretty shaken up. So shaken up that I took half an hour to let the tremors go away before going back up top to work. You can’t make good welds while you’re shaking, but you can’t earn any bonus money if you’re sitting one out. That’s just how it worked. There’s an accident, there’s an injury, you treat it, you fix the equipment, and you get back to work.
And it’s not like this put the fear of God into the rest of the crew. It was like playing a football game. A guy gets a concussion, tears an ACL, or dislocates a shoulder—that’s rough, it’s unfortunate, but that’s his problem. Should have moved a little faster, should have practiced more, should have seen it coming. It’s not a problem that’s going to get solved by the rest of the team quitting.
I put everything in my bag at the end of the day—my lunchbox, my welder’s helmet, my unused sticks. It was 40 to 50 pounds going up, and the same minus some water or coffee coming down. Carrying 50 pounds of gear down 400 feet of ladder after a full day of welding, and almost getting killed, can really tire a man. Some people wanted a faster way down.
Faster, on a 400-foot water tower, isn’t always safer.
“You want the express, Lee?” said Frankie, another welder.
“Not today,” I said.
“Suit yourself,” he said, slipping on his welding gloves. He grabbed a 11/2-inch steel cable hanging from the center post of the tower, smiled, and jumped off.
Jesus Christ, that was insane. The guy was basically falling 400 feet, just using his gloves to brake a little bit on the way down. And that’s dangerous enough on a good day. His lifeline was just over an inch-thick braided steel wire. If he picked the wrong cable, one with a quarter-inch burr sticking out of it, that welding glove wouldn’t stop it. The glove was good enough protection from the friction of holding the cable, but if he hit a steel stinger 100 feet down, it would tear right through that glove, rip out his flesh and tendons on the way. If he didn’t bleed out, he’d sure as hell lose his grip and fall the rest of the way. But I never saw anyone fall using the express line.
Sometimes, I suppose, you just have to take a risk.
Eventually, I decided I wanted something more stable. I liked the work, liked the pay, but we’d always be moving. We’d complete a new job, we’d move on. You’d hope to work on a nuclear-containment vessel, because those would be two-year commitments. Otherwise, it was finish the project and move to another city. It was a good way to get exposed to different restaurants, but not a great way to get to know the neighbors.
I took a new job, working for Allis-Chalmers as a fabricator and then as a supervisor in the maintenance department of Midwest Steel outside of Gary, Indiana. The highest I ever worked there was maybe 80 feet off the ground, so it didn’t have quite the adrenaline rush of the old days. I worked steadily for about five years before the work started drying up due to too much competition from overseas. I saw the writing on the wall and started moonlighting as a bartender to make a little extra money. When they closed the plant at Midwest, I was working nights and parties at the bar at the local chapter of the Elks Club.
It was there that I heard about another opportunity: running my own place. There was a bar that was available that I might be able to lease. The good news was that it was affordable. The bad news was that there were some good reasons it was.
One reason was that it was almost literally a shithole. The place stank and needed a power wash over every corner. The owner, Quinlan, was blind, but I guess he must have lost his sense of smell, too, because that place needed some serious work. We couldn’t afford to hire it out, so I did it myself. We closed the place down for a month while I got it to where it needed to be. We cleaned, replaced carpet, built a DJ booth, a dance floor, everything we thought that we needed to make it work. We called the place, for no real reason other than it sounded like a proper name for a bar, J.D.’s Place.
Another reason that it was cheap was that the place was a biker bar. The local motorcycle club, the Devil’s Diciples (they intentionally misspelled the word disciples so as not to give the impression they were part of any organized religion, as if that were likely), liked to use it as an unofficial clubhouse. So, it was loud and the regulars, the lifeblood of any bar, liked to get in fights every night and smash the place up. A slow night was only two fights. But hell, I liked a challenge. And I liked the idea of being my own boss.
You hear a lot of things about bikers, how the Hells Angels will gut you with a motor oil opener or how the Mongols all carry .44 Magnums or how the Gypsy Jokers eat the flesh of their enemies. Pretty lurid, cinematic tales of violence and debauchery. And maybe those guys really ride like that and fight like that and leave a trail of bodies in their wake. But these guys? I called them the Klingons. Not because they, or I, were huge Star Trek fans, but because they seemed to just attach themselves to things, like my bar. Not that they weren’t dangerous, make no mistake about that. But I think they also wanted to pledge to be brought in to a larger organization, wanted to be an affiliate for a bigger club. That is to say, I didn’t find them too intimidating. Though in hindsight, maybe I should have.
Maybe I just wasn’t smart enough to be afraid, but I wasn’t going to back down from these pricks. I sure as hell wasn’t going to let them walk over me or let them tell me who ran my place. They had no respect for someone who just caved. You either stood up, or you got eaten alive. You’ve got to stand your ground, or you better just throw in the towel. I have a lot of four-letter words in my vocabulary, but “quit” doesn’t happen to be one of them.
I let them know that they were welcome to come to my place to drink and have a good time, but they had to behave, in a manner of speaking. Their money was as good as anyone’s. But I made it clear that I wouldn’t tolerate them insulting or abusing women, random fighting, or basically any of the things they enjoyed doing. I wouldn’t accept them trying to impress or intimidate the decent customers by showing off their knives or guns, which I would do my best to relieve them of at the door. Break my rules, and I’d show them the door, either peacefully or they could pretend it was Burger King, and they could have it their way.
It took more than a few busted heads to send the message, but that message finally started coming through, loud and clear. If someone tried to slap his girlfriend around in my place, he was going out the door. He had two options: conscious or unconscious. The first time it happened, I wasn’t nervous. It wasn’t my first fight.
Some guys like to get in fights because they want to talk a lot of smack. They bellow about how tough they are, and they hope that their friends hold them back. After a few insults, they feel big and nobody had to get hurt. But I wasn’t squaring off with these guys so I could feel tough. I didn’t get in someone’s face just to talk shit. If I had to fight, my goal was to be the one walking away, not the one getting carried out.
“You’re done here. Out,” I told the biker.
“Ah, I don’t think so,” he said.
“You can walk out, or you can be carried out. Your choice.”
If he threw a punch, I was ready. If he wanted to jaw some more, then he’d made the decision to get carried out. I had no problems decking a guy who couldn’t listen.
There were lots of fights I had to break up, lots of guys I had to show the door. Eventually, they started to self-police. It was still a pretty boisterous crowd. We had live music every now and then, but mostly we used our DJ booth, which I manned nightly as it afforded me an elevated view of the whole bar and dance floor area so I could respond quickly if needed.
That’s how I got a pretty nasty injury. A guy got out of line, and so I threw a punch, but it just didn’t land right. I felt the pain in my wrist when I connected, but sometimes it hurts to hit people, so I didn’t think much of it. Three days later, it was just getting more and more sore. I went to the doctor’s and got the bad news: the wrist was broken. Then the worse news: it was torn up pretty bad. Over the next two and a half years, I’d get four surgeries, two bone grafts, and ligament repair before I was finally “healed.” Still, I’d rather endure the pain and grief than to acquiesce to people who are trying to take my livelihood away. I am and always have been a proud man. I take care of my own. My ability to feed and take care of my family was paramount to me. Do the right thing, or I would make you pay, even if it cost me personally.
Eventually, we got the place to where we wanted it to be. We upgraded to playing videos for entertainment, some Eagles and Phil Collins and the Miami Vice theme. People stopped coming in looking for a fight as a way to pass the time. When I was working the bar, I could start looking for empty glasses to fill instead of constantly looking for hands slipping under leather jackets, reaching for concealed weapons. Things were getting better.
That turned out to be a mistake, of sorts. While Quinlan, the owner, may have been blind (I never knew how he lost his sight), he could still see a good thing when it was in front of him. I’d made the bar respectable, made it safe, and that meant I’d also turned it into a moneymaker. Quinlan was one of those rare people who liked money, and he responded in kind. When it came time to renew our lease, he told me that business seemed so good, I shouldn’t mind paying triple what we’d originally agreed to if I wanted to continue. I told him thanks but no thanks. J.D.’s Place would just have to find a new location.
That’s, in part, how I found out about paradise.
It’s a cliché that people talk to the bartender, but some clichés exist because they’re rooted in reality. My trip to paradise came about because someone wanted to talk to the guy pouring the drinks.
A friend of mine, Kelly, had been visiting Grand Cayman in the Caribbean, and on the way back had stopped off in Provo (Providenciales) in Turks and Caicos.
“You ever been to Turks and Caicos, Lee?” he asked.
“Hell, I’ve never even seen the ocean,” I replied.
“This place is amazing. You can see the ocean from pretty much any point on the land. And if you like running a restaurant and bar here in Indiana, wouldn’t it be even better to run the same kind of place in a tropical paradise?”
“I don’t know. We have the Pacers, after all. Then again, that might not actually be a selling point.”
“It’s like out of a dream.”
Maybe it was the kind of dream worth visiting.
Carl Hiaasen, the crime novelist, once talked about how criminals made it easier for him to be a writer because they did so many flamboyant, crazy things in Florida. When asked why Florida and not Detroit, he said, basically, “If you had a choice, would you rather be a car thief in Detroit or Miami?” There’s going to be people everywhere, but you’re going to get a more colorful group where the sun shines and the drinks have umbrellas in them.
Not everyone dreams of living on a tropical island. My wife, Mary Anne, took a little convincing. She thought it was kind of a harebrained scheme.
“What do we know about living in another country?”
“They speak English there. It would be like moving to Florida.”
“How many times have you even been on a plane?”
“Just once or twice. That means that this time, it would still be fun and exciting. Not old hat, like for jet-setters.”
“Do you even own a passport?”
“Don’t need one. I checked. Just a driver’s license and a birth certificate.”
“That’s all we need?”
“That’s it.”
“Then what could possibly go wrong?”
We weren’t crazy. We didn’t just fly in, throw money on the bar, and become islanders. But I was intrigued, so I flew out to Turks and Caicos to check it out. After I landed in Provo, there’s a place they take you called Oohh-Aahh Hill, because that was the sound you made when you got a load of the view. Just incredible. The place that was up for lease had a great view and was located not merely on the water, but literally built over the water. I just had to get it. It would mean breaking the lease on the current J.D.’s Place, which I’d never done before, but I just wasn’t going to be denied.
When I returned from my recon, I’d proved to Mary Anne that I’d been able to successfully cross the water. Other than that, she was pretty right-on-the-money about me being out of my depth.
We became islanders.
Well, not exactly. We weren’t natives to Turks and Caicos, and that turned out to be a pretty significant detail. We could run the restaurant, but we couldn’t own it outright. We leased it from the owner, along with our apartment. And since I wasn’t a native, I had to get a work permit, which was a pretty significant ding at $2,000 per year. It seemed wrong that I’d have to pay the cost of a car in order to have the pleasure of working twelve hours a day, but that’s how it was done.
You’d think living on a tropical island would be easy. You do your job, you make money, and if you don’t, you just eat coconuts and mangoes that fall from the trees and sleep on the beach. But hell, if it were that easy, that’s what everybody would be doing.
And that’s not what everybody was doing.
Running a business as a foreigner in an unfamiliar country presented quite a few challenges. For instance: water was expensive. You’d be surrounded by it, but if you wanted your ice cubes to taste refreshing instead of salty, you’d have to buy water, and it wasn’t cheap. Electricity was more expensive than rent, mostly as a way to power the refrigeration. We had to pay $800 per month for the rent, and $1,400 per month just for the electric.
In short order, I started to realize we were seriously underfinanced. When I decided to lease the new place, I didn’t realize that milk in Provo sold for $8 per gallon, which was about what it would cost for two tickets to the movies. There were only two grocery stores, and in short order, I figured out that they seemed to have an understanding to keep their prices as high as possible. There was no price war between those two operations. So, if we had any hope of staying in business, we’d have to import things from the States, and that plane only landed once a week.
It wasn’t just like going to a new place when we moved to Provo—it was like moving to a new time period, in a past where technology was still a bit lagging. While computers in 1980 weren’t as ubiquitous as they are now, banks could still move money around fairly quickly. But in Provo it was like going to a banana republic from the fifties. Everything was done by hand on ink-stained ledgers. If you wanted to get a check cashed, you’d have to spend hours waiting for people to review all the accounts by hand, checking ledgers and calling other banks. It would take forever to complete the simplest transaction.
That wasn’t confined to the banking industry. Turks and Caicos was an island paradise, and they seemed to take their laid-back casual pace surprisingly seriously. Part of the business of a bar owner and restaurateur like myself was getting meat, fruit, vegetables, and all manner of perishables delivered. But getting it to the island wasn’t the same thing as getting it to our restaurant.
I arrived at the customs office. “I’m here to pick up fifty pounds of ground beef and fifty pounds of frozen chicken,” I told the first guy I saw. I assumed he’d take me to the tarmac so I could quickly inspect the shipment and take it to my place. Not so.
“Get in line,” the customs official said.
I looked at the line. There were already twenty people waiting.
“There isn’t somebody here who just does perishables?” I asked. “Or is there a refrigerated storage unit you use?”
“You have to stand in line. First come, first served.”
That seemed fair but also maddening. So, I waited. I had no choice. I could even see through a window in the back of the customs office where my shipment was resting on the tarmac. Just sitting there in the hot sun, getting less and less frozen, and more and more worthless.
Finally, with just one person left in front of me, the customs agent running the line for receiving said, “It’s lunch time. Please come back in two hours.”
Wait—what? They closed the customs office for lunch? That seemed absurd. And they took two hours for lunch, every day? I told the man that I needed my food before it spoiled.
“You’re in luck.”
“Oh yeah?” I asked.
“You’re second in line.”
“But what do I do now? The office is closed for lunch.”
“You can come back in two hours. But usually, the line starts forming very quickly. People want to conduct their business.”
“I can only imagine.”
“Or you can wait here, where you’re second in line.”
“You want me to wait here for two hours doing nothing? I’ve already been here for two hours waiting to get this far.”
“It’s up to you.”
It’s a special kind of torture watching perfectly good food spoil on hot pavement over the course of four hours because no one at the customs office knew what the hell they were doing. I suppose if they had a clue, they’d be working at the local supermarket charging me $8 a gallon for milk.
So, there was incompetence. But at least that was rooted in indifference. The bigger problem was the corruption.
It wasn’t like the island was some kind of Mecca for organized crime, but there was the law, and then there was how things were done. And those two categories didn’t always have a ton of overlap.
If you wanted to hire someone for your business, they had to be a native of Turks and Caicos, or I could pay another $2,000 in work permits. We were doing a lot of work in our restaurant, which meant that we had to hire a guy to work the bar, another couple of guys to work as waiters. In short order, we learned that the bartender, Fred, was stealing.
I was working in the kitchen when I came out to see how the front of the house was faring.
“How’s it going out here?” I asked Fred.
“It’s okay,” he said.
I took a look at his tip jar—it was practically overflowing. We must be doing a little bit better than “okay.”
“How’s the till? Plenty of change?” I asked.
He ejected the cash drawer. Bare bones. There was more money in the tip jar than the register, which was never a good sign.
“You helping yourself to the till?” I asked. “Getting an advance?”
“It’s no problem,” Fred said.
“Hell, yes, it’s a problem. That’s my money in that tip jar.”
“No, you don’t understand. This is how it works.”
“Not at my place.”
I gave him his walking papers. I thought that, by firing a guy stealing from me, I’d be saving money. But because I fired a native, I then had to pay him three months’ severance. It’s the kind of thing that really promotes employee retention, even if they are ripping you off.
Turned out that skimming was just how business was done down there. Like a tip. They even had a word for it: “teefin’.” For the pleasure of paying him to serve drinks, I could expect him to pocket about a buck for every drink he poured.
So, Fred was out, and we replaced him with Timothy. Timothy seemed like a great guy to have on the team. He was tall, handsome, really outgoing, and smart. He’d gone to college in the States, so I figured he’d be an improvement over Fred. But Timothy wasn’t above teefing, either. Just the cost of doing business in the islands.
Still, I assumed that I could weather that storm. Part of what brought me to the island was that they were going to be opening a hotel and casino in Provo. Casinos meant gamblers, which meant lots of tourists coming into town to eat, drink, and be merry. Unfortunately, the casino investors ran out of money a year after we arrived, with only two floors of the property built, so not only did it mean that I couldn’t count on the business from the customers, but I couldn’t even count on the business from the construction workers I was expecting to build the place.
We were already cash-poor when we arrived, and those setbacks made us cash-starving. We had no choice but to close up our place on the waterfront and get a smaller, cheaper place instead. I found a spot in a strip mall that seemed ideal. It wasn’t the dream location we had before, but it would serve as a decent breakfast and lunch spot until we could build our bankroll a bit.
Again, the law required that, as a non-native, I needed a partner, so we asked Timothy to be our business partner. He could help us get permits, hire staff, all the things we’d need. The good news was that he had a lot of energy.
The bad news was that some of that energy came from smoking crack.
Drugs were a huge problem on the island back then, and Timothy got pulled into it. And while we had hoped his college degree would be a great asset to us as a business partner, there’s nothing worse than an educated thief.
“Lee—I’m going to need another five hundred for some work permits for the restaurant.”
“Kind of steep, isn’t it?” I asked.
“Is there anything on this island that isn’t more expensive than it should be?”
“True enough,” I said, getting him the money.
Cash came in, and then got quickly converted to crack. He blew through all our money. Our little breakfast and lunch place never even opened its doors. Maybe we could have hung on a little longer, but when the horse is dead, stop kicking it.
We were down to our last $75 when I saw an ad in a dive shop, a posting for a sailboat captain looking for a mate. No experience required. If there was one thing I had in abundance, it was no experience. I signed up.
I’d never even seen the ocean until I came to Turks and Caicos. And now I was being paid to sail through it.
It was a basic sailing ship, a basic delivery. There were four guys on, working in four-hour shifts. We’d sail to St. Martin, then they’d provide me my ticket back to Provo, plus $50 a day for the time at sea. It seemed like a fortune.
“Can you take orders?” the owner asked.
“You pay in cash?” I answered.
“Cash once we’ve come in to port.”
“Then I’ll do whatever you say.”
We were both pretty desperate. A match made in heaven.
That’s when I discovered I was a bit vulnerable to seasickness. I did my job, then went to my bunk to wretch. I didn’t eat for six days. But damn, I loved it from the moment I got on board. Walking off the dock in St. Martin, the captain handed me a huge wad of cash. It seemed like all the money in the world.
It was only after I’d boarded the plane home that I realized I was only given half the money I’d been promised. It may seem rude to count the cash you’re handed, but business is business.
Trust but verify.
I told Mary Anne when I got home that a career change was on order and that this was what I wanted to do.