It was 1982, and the economy was in the early stages of its first collapse from the misguided Republican philosophy that what this country really needed was a moron as president, and to bring an end to the god-awful suffering of the rich.
President
Waiting for a cigarette to trickle down
This, in a classic example of the bad timing that has characterized many of my major life decisions, was the time that I had chosen to start my own remodeling business. The endeavor was doomed also by my lack of experience (I had only been working in the field for a couple years at that time) and the fact that I’d spent most of my efforts establishing a relationship with a network of ambitious and active investors, whose common bond was their shared devotion to the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, and their practice of Transcendental Meditation. But they had the appearance and behavior of greedy young yuppie investors, and they were giving me more and more business, so I pretty much put all my eggs in their basket. Then one day, their contact person told me that the whole group was done with investing for now, and was going out to Maharishi University in Iowa to help the Maharishi levitate the fieldhouse by group meditation. I never heard whether or not they succeeded, but I hope it came down on somebody's toes.
Maharishi
So it was that I found myself working with Eli, an Israeli immigrant whom I’d met through Chuck Eckert. Eli’s visa had been about to expire, and Jeanine F., who owned an insurance agency on South St., had offered to marry Eli to make him legal. Eli thought this was a great and generous offer, and the wedding was a lot of fun. A couple weeks later, Eli was miserable, because apparently Jeanine had something more matrimonial in mind, and she was 25 yeas older than Eli, and looked it.
So a few months before Eli skipped town to escape Jeanine’s demands, he and I were working on the South Philly home of Sgt. Alan K., a police sargeant in the South St. district who was friends with Jeanine. Alan liked the carpentry work I was doing on his house, and one day took me aside and told me to go talk to a friend of his who was building a bar on Sixth St., right below South. It intrigued me so I went and met Jay, Alan’s friend. Jay was fashionably dressed, carried a walking stick, drove a Lincoln town car, and in every way exuded an aura that said “I’ve made a LOT of money selling cocaine, and now I’m looking for other things to amuse me.” But after a short conversation, he hired me, to be paid in cash on an hourly basis, to build a 36 foot brass topped bar out of solid oak, with all moldings and millwork, in oak made on site with equipment that he would provide. It was irresistible, so I agreed, and started the next week.
A couple things became obvious after a week or so. One was that Jay had never built a bar before, even though he referenced this bar that he built in Ft. Worth or that bar that he built in Chicago. The other obvious thing was that this bar was not being built with Jay’s money. Steve B. was the principal investor, it seemed, and his two brothers. Frank and Jeff were always around, though it was clearly Steve’s money, and he had supposedly made a fortune in commodities. None of that mattered to me: I was getting paid in cash regularly by Jay, who would pull up in his Lincoln Town car every Friday and dispense cash from a giant wad.
Big, tacky and pretentious...the perfect grifter car
He gave me just enough direction, that with my own design sense and with an ever increasing experience in woodworking I was able to make progress that pleased everyone involved, most of all Jay.
The outside of the bar, as well as the rest of the room that held the bar, was paneled with solid oak, which was wrapped in two piece molding, all 2000 ft of which were milled by me on site, using a table saw and route table.
The back bar was all crafted from solid oak, with a semicircular frame for a stained glass piece made by a local South St. artisan.
All this was more fun than I could have imagined getting paid for. There were other contractors working on site, but the bar was mine. There was an Italian gentleman working for Jay, who was general foreman on the job. Bill was huge, maybe 6’4”, spoke with a thick accent, and was firm but very genteel. He had a cousin, Marino, who was bought on to help me with the endless sanding and finishing that needed to be done, and he raved to Bill about my work, saying he hadn’t seen a craftsman like me since he left Italy. I was flattered, but at times felt as much of a fraud as Jay, because I was learning as I went, but I never let on to that.
Marino on the left, paperhanger whose name I forget on the right
As the bar and surrounding room got closer to completion, Jay came by one day, and offhandedly said that he was getting ready to build a restaurant and hotel complex in the Cayman Islands, and that he wanted me to come along. I said, sure Jay, and didn’t give it much thought.
Periodically, representatives of various Police benevolent associations would come by the job site, and Jay always made a big deal of paying them “donations” in cash. He said those payments were why we weren’t getting any parking tickets, and weren’t being hounded by building inspectors. It made sense, because both were true. He would hand Artie, who was the devoted right hand and go-fer to Steve, a small zippered satchel, and say, “Don’t lose that, there’s 30,000 bucks in there.”
Artie, an old school South St. hipster, standing behind the bar in progress. I traded my 1969 Gibson SG Custom to him for a butcher block countertop that I needed at the time. The guitar was for his ex-wife, who didn't even play. I would gladly trade him my truck to get it back today.
Everything Jay did said “Coke Dealer,” and I still couldn’t figure out his connection to Sgt. Alan, who seemed totally on the up and up, and who was married to a high profile TV personality.
Marge Pala
More and more, when I saw Jay, he would ask me about a passport and other arrangements that I might need to make before our trip to the Cayman islands. I had not really taken this talk seriously at first, but it became more and more apparent that Jay was totally serious about this. Island life had a particular attraction for me at that time in my life, which for various reasons was a time of restlessness, in spite of the fact that I had a six month old son whom I adored.
Travis and me
My marriage was becoming more strained for a number of reasons, some of my doing, some just of circumstance. The more I read about the Cayman islands, the more I was intrigued.
The Cayman Islands
When Bill, our Italian foreman, who was to be my roommate in the Caymans, started to tell me about the great Italian Food he would be cooking for me, I realized that this was real and imminent, and that I was going to have to make some decisions. We were looking at a year or two of work, so I decided that I would go, and if things were working out, I would bring my wife and child down there to live with me.
So I proceeded to get my passport and make other preparations, mental and emotional and practical, to embark on a new journey.
As the work on the bar got closer to completion, I began to do other carpentry tasks around the building
and also worked on Steve’s mansion in Gladwyn. I learned that Jay was also working on a restaurant for some gentleman of Italian descent and of questionable character on Third street.
-
Restaraunteurs
Some of their minions came to our our bar one day frantically looking for Jay. It seems that building inspector had shown up at the third street restaurant asking for permits. The workers there told him that Jay had “taken care” of the permits. The inspector replied “Who the F is Jay?” when they told him that Jay was in the Cayman islands and could not be reached at the moment (cell phones had not yet been invented) , he told them to tear down the three story addition that they’d built under Jay’s direction. Obviously this didn’t go over too well with the Italian gentlemen who were paying for the project. When Jay got back a meeting was arranged at our restaurant, and it so happened that it was only me and Jay who were there when they came over for a little goodfellas conversation. I was building a service bar on the first floor and Jay sat down with them at a table around the corner from me. Apparently, these men were the ones planning the complex in the Cayman islands, and they told Jay in no uncertain terms that he would not be going to the F-in' Cayman islands. He would not be going any f-in' where.
I didn’t see too much of Jay after that. I did some more work for Steve and his brothers right up until the opening of the restaurant, called Vital Spirits. The concept of the restaurant was an accommodation for every variation of dietary regulation. Vegetarian, vegan, kosher, alcoholic, breatharian (O2 pumped out of jets at the bar). It was overly ambitious and goofy in the way that many creative endeavors fueled by cocaine at that time were. It was doomed by the lack of practicality that doomed so many of those endeavors. It was closed soon after opening. I was working on south st about a year later, after taking a job with another contractor and I happened to run into one of the other subcontractors who worked on the bar. He told me that Steve and his brothers had been busted about six months after the job was done for the importation of tons of marijuana,
Tons of Ganja
and that they’d been victims of a Federal sting. I asked if Jay was part of their operation, whether he too had been locked up as they had been. He told me that the word on the street was that Jay was FBI. Suddenly, the light came on, and his association with Sargent Alan, as well as his occasional disappearances, and his association with the mafia types investing in the Cayman islands all began to make sense. Unwittingly, I had been a carpenter for the FBI. But in the process, I had learned much about woodworking, people, and my sometimes amazing naivete.
No comments:
Post a Comment