by Captain Lee
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 b
etter.
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 o
f 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.
