Our Day In The Sun (Chapter 59)

 

In fact our neighbor Tom had a slew of great stories about living on Grand Cayman as well as those about the many fascinating places that he and his wife Cece visited on their many travels. I often wish I had had a tape-recorder running when Tom would get loosened up and in the story-telling mode. I heard the one about the beans and a couple of other classics one afternoon when he ambled over to the house while we were still rehabbing the exterior with a crew of workmen. It was at the end of the work day, the other men had left and I invited Tom and Freddie Watler to have a cold Red-Stripe while I cooled off with a diet soda. We sat in the shade of the big palm tree near the cistern and enjoyed the seaview while Tom regaled us with some hysterical memories.

Tom loved a bargain and although he was certainly well off, he sported tennis shoes held together by duct-tape and t-shirts that looked like they’d been peppered with buck shot. One of the ways he saved money was by scouting for labor at the local bar on Saturday and Sunday mornings. The “Edge”, the local bistro still had a bar and at one time the place had been strictly a watering hole. As Tom described it, if you went in on a Saturday or Sunday morning, there would actually be drunks sleeping off the previous night’s imbibement, crashed out on the floor of the place. Apparently, this was a good time to catch them as they had usually drunk up all their ready cash and were in need of more to resume their liquid life-style ASAP.

However, you definitely get what you pay for, and these fellows were no exception to the rule. Tom described how the 2 guys he’d hired to paint an interior room put open paint cans down on top of finished wooden furniture, spilling paint and thereby ruining the finish of said furniture. Then, while one fellow was supposed to stand on a ladder to paint the ceilings, the other was supposed to hold the ladder for him. Unfortunately, they were both still so blasted that the guy on the ladder still fell off and spilled a gallon of paint all over the floor. Tom of course went ballistic when he discovered these transgressions and would probably have fired them both, but the more coherent one of the pair explained that he would have better luck with them painting while still hungover than if they completely sobered up. The logic seemed to appeal to Tom as he reckoned that a half-drunk person probably had a steadier hand than one who has sobered up enough to get the shakes.

As I mentioned in a previous episode, piped water was being installed in Bodden Town, and Tom had decided to have his house hooked up. Stories like the next one he related to Freddie and me were apparently not uncommon, and were the deciding factor in us abstaining from hooking up “Morning Glory Cottage” to the system. Anyway, Tom shopped around and found the cheapest guy he could to do the trenching and laying of the pipe from the roadside to his house. The water company was only responsible for the laying of the pipe along the road, the homeowner had to arrange to connect their own dwelling to the main pipe at the edge of the road. As Tom described the affair, he was lying in his hammock when he heard a tremendous “Bang” and the sound of a geyser. He leaped out of the hammock and ran to the front of the house and saw a huge torrent of water spewing into the air from near the front door.

Although Tom swore he had told the workmen that the Cistern pipework lay near the front door and that they should only hand dig in that area, the guy running the ditch-witch had driven the thing practically into the front door itself, severing the main cistern line and creating a water fountain like “Old Faithful”, flooding the entire front yard. When Tom lashed into the man for screwing up so badly, the guy merely replied,

“Sir, this is your lucky day! The last house we did, the roof blew off when we hit the Cistern pipe.”

The last story Tom told me that stuck out in my mind, really had more to do with the bizarre names of the characters involved. There were a pair of brothers who lived down the road from Bodden Town. Like many of the men on the Island, they were jacks of all trades. Tom had hired them to fix his roof and it had been a disaster. They either never showed up at all or when they did, were half-drunk and barely functional. After about a week of this aggravation Tom settled up with one brother who came straggling up and Tom told him to pay his brother his half and “thanks, but no thanks, their services were no longer required”.

About a week later, Tom was out in his yard when the other brother came wobbling up on his bicycle. This brother’s name was Elvis. Tom looked him up and down coldly and said a perfunctory hello. Elvis stopped his bike, fell off and looked up with eyes glazed and full of pleading.

At this point, Tom asked Elvis, “What’s up man, is there something I can do for you?”

Elvis replied, “Yeah, you can pay me my share for fixing the roof!”

Tom drew himself up and stared fixedly at the fallen fellow and shouted, “I already paid you. I gave your brother all the money I owed and he was supposed to pay you your share.”

At this the fellow snapped back and yelled, “No, no, I never got my money. Nope,….. HITLER NEVER PAID ME!!!!”

So if you’ve learned one thing from all of this, Islanders have a penchant for naming their children the most bizarre names you can think of; Elvis, Hitler, Iodine, Pepsi, the list goes on and on. But it did make the phone book an interesting read.

Our Day In The Sun (Chapter 58)

The Cayman Islands were unique in that they had gone from backwater, “Lost Islands”, to one of the hottest tourist destinations in the World in a relatively short span of time. Their infrastructure was strained to the limits to keep pace with the explosive growth and the majority of laborers, both white and blue collar types, were foreigners working on the Island. This “Overnight” change in the economy and demographics made for an interesting mixture of cultures. In some ways the Islands had one foot in the 19th Century and one in the 21st.

There were more fax machines per capita than anywhere else in the world. Phone calls were insanely expensive, so most people faxed, especially for overseas calls, which meant every call that wasn’t local. At the same time there were still shopkeepers who used abucuses to tally sales. The computer was still a fairly new commodity on the Island, tariffs and duties kept them out of the reach of most and there was a monopoly on Internet Service Providers, the Islands’ own Cable and Wireless Co. had a lock on the market and charged astronomically high rates. At the same time, the entire Island of Grand Cayman was being strung with fibre-optic cable.

The Seven-Mile Beach corridor, was of course a highly modernized area with piped water, sewerage and by the time we had been there a few years, modern, state of the art lumber yards, hardware stores and grocery stores that rivaled anything back in the states. Strip Malls and Gallerias were everywhere.

But just a few miles away from Seven Mile Beach, it was as if time had stopped. Groceries were limited to what you could buy in a gas station. As time went on, some of the stations began to add some more food items, fresh produce and freezers for dairy products. But often, if you wanted a particular commodity, say sausages, you would have to go to one place, get the owner to go with you to another building, open up and get you your sausages.

My neighbor Tom told me about an incident that was sort of illustrative of the laid-back attitude of most of the shop-owners. Tom had found a small, hole-in-the-wall “Grocery” store in the little village of Tall Trees, a few miles from Bodden Town, that carried a particular kind of canned beans he really liked. Apparently, Tom wasn’t the only one who liked them, as they were often sold out. Finally, after searching the store for about the fifth time and not finding his favorite tinned beans, Tom asked the owner what was up. The owner, yawned and stretched and explained that so many people wanted the beans, it was a real hassle to keep them stocked, so he just quit selling them altogether.

As we were redoing the inside of “Morning Glory Cottage”, we decided to change the rather worn toilet seats. Catherine and I agreed that wooden ones would be the ideal choice. However, we both recalled the incident that I related earlier in Chapter 21, wherein we waited and waited for our promised wooden toilet seats that we had planned to use when we redecorated the condo at Lancaster House. Then it hit me like a thunder-bolt. Since we had ordered those seats over 2 years earlier, I calculated that in Island Time, they probably would have arrived recently at Larry’s Hardware and Gifts. We hopped in Vincent and drove to Larry’s and, Voila, sure enough, there were the 2 wooden toilet seats we had ordered all that long time ago.

Our Day In The Sun (Chapter 57)

There is an old comedic sight gag that entails a person approaching a chest of drawers where one of the drawers is open. The person pushes in the open drawer, only to have another drawer open and the process is repeated and usually gets a big laugh.

That’s what the current “War on Drugs” reminds me of only I don’t hear any laughter. Untold billions of our tax money is spent to “Win” the “War on Drugs” and as soon as one channel is closed, another opens.

The Caribbean has long been a hotbed of drug smuggling activity. Ships loaded with contraband in South America take their goods to various Islands in the Caribbean and drop them and then they are transshipped from there to the U.S. Of course there are airplanes doing the same thing. When conditions get too “Hot” in one place, the smugglers simply change their methods or places of transhipment.

It used to really annoy me when from my “Office” I saw American Coast Guard jets hotrodding around the Island and burning fuel and money on this futile “War”. Several times a week, Coast Guard Lear Jets would roar overhead, just above the beach, probably ogling girls in bikinis. At one point there was even a “Secret” Air Force Base set up on the Island to monitor the drug flow. And yet, drug drops like the one I had witnessed went on with total impunity.

It begs the questions of why is our Coast Guard patrolling a thousand miles from the U.S. Mainland and why is it necessary to have yet another Military Base set up on Foreign soil?

I asked a friend on the Island who was extremely well-connected, works for a major institution of the Global Financial Sector the very same questions. He told me that a thorough investigation of the drug trade had been carried out on the Island by a British Entity and they made significant progress in uncovering the illicit trail of contraband and money, but when the investigation reached into the local Political Hierarchy, it was summarily terminated. In other words, they could arrest the low-level operatives, a couple of mid-level people, but they could go no further up the food chain, thank you very much, now please leave.

Much like the current debate over Health Care, the problem is complex and involves so many powerful players that the average citizen will never get all the facts. I believe some of the same entities are at work to keep the “Drug War” alive which are now trying to sabotage any changes to the Status Quo in Health Care.

They are the big Pharmaceutical Companies, Insurance Companies or Government Agencies and Politicians who feed on graft associated with both issues or simply rely on it for a paycheck. I certainly don’t have the answer to the insane levels of money required to buy Health Insurance or to purchase Medical Care. But I do know that the “Drug War” is a colossal waste of money, time and energy.

There are real wars which need to be fought these days. Keeping the markets safe for Big Pharma is not a good enough reason to squander our precious resources of men and women and money. Our Prisons are overrun with people incarcerated for drug offenses. Now we have an epidemic of child rapists and murderers out on early release because there aren’t enough cells to hold the pot-smokers and coke-snorters, tweakers and smackheads.

There is something very wrong with this picture.