Mundo Artesanal is at the corner of Duarte and El Conde,
which is a shopping street closed to vehicles and, 5 years ago was usually
thronged with shoppers both tourists and Dominicans. My space is right in the
door on the corner so I pass time leaning in the doorway watching the street. Since
the elections in May tourist traffic has been way down, I would say foot
traffic has decreased 50% compared to the same time last year. It is not only
the elections that scared people away, a few weeks ago the US Embassy came out
with a travelers warning (http://santodomingo.usembassy.gov/sec-noc-120613.html)
regarding recent attacks on tourists arriving at the airport in Santo Domingo
involving corrupt taxi drivers as well as taxis being followed to hotels and
robbing people as they got out of the car. Cholera is still in the news. Many
stores have closed and are boarded up and there are holes in the street and
more beggars and thieves. The harbor still needs dredging to allow cruise ships
to get in and the world economy, especially in Europe, is not encouraging the
usual summer vacations to the colonial zone here. Business is dead. Some days,
not only my little area, but the whole gift shop registers zero sales. There
are large stores on the other three corners at Duarte/Conde: closest to where I
lean in the doorway and across Duarte is Jumbo Supermarket, catercorner is
Cuesta Ferretería a fancy hardware and department store, and across Conde is
Siderias California a department/clothes store.
Yesterday a man lit out of Jumbo and sprinted down Duarte
at top speed pursued instantly by two or three Jumbo employees and then by a
half a dozen fleet-footed idlers. A crowd collected and a few minutes later the
thief was lead back by two men who held him by locked elbows. Police showed up
and it turned out that he had stolen a $3 piece of cheese. Something like this
happens nearly weekly these days. A couple of weeks ago I saw the manager at
Jumbo, with pistol in hand, usher a man out of the store where they were met by
two Policia Nacional on a motorcycle who put the man between them on the bike and
took him away.
A month or so ago I was sitting inside the store around 4
in the afternoon trying to stay awake when I heard a series of gunshots and a
moment later a taxista came
in the store dripping blood and went to the bathroom. It turned out that three
armed men had robbed the banca,
where they sell lottery tickets, a block and a half up Duarte. The watchyman had just wandered off with his sawed-off
shotgun for a cup of coffee. When the men exited the banca a motorcycle with the usual two Policia Nacional
mounted happened to drive by
and the thieves mistakenly thought that they had been called for the robbery
and started shooting and scattered on foot. The cops and a small impromptu
posse, some of whom pulled pistols out of their waistbands, gave chase on foot
and the three were eventually rounded up. The taxista, who had been dozing on a box leaning against
the side of Mundo Artesanal had caught a stray bullet that somehow had threaded
its way between the parked cars a block away and lost the tip of the little
finger on his left hand.
Richard, who is one of the sales people in Mundo, did not
come into work yesterday because his hand had become infected. Two weeks ago he
went downstairs from his apartment to complain about loud music played by a
neighbor, one thing lead to another and when he tried to wrest the machete away
from the neighbor his right hand got sliced up to the tune of 50 stitches. The
two spent the night in jail in separate cells and were released when they
agreed to shake hands—left hands in this case.
Guy comes up to the storefront, big sloppy guy, shiny suit
coat, blue jeans, dress shoes, face kind of beat up, dark bags under eyes,
twitchy right eyelid and asks me how it is living here. I start to give him my
cost of living advice, look out for thieves, it’s tough in the barrios banter
and he eventually tells me that 10 years ago he and a partner bought a piece of
land here in Herrera near what is now an airport for $380,000 US and that,
tomorrow, now that the Minister of Finance of the Country and the IMF have
signed off, he is going to close a sale for 68 million dollars. His iPhone rang
and while he paced around the sidewalk talking on it I managed to overhear a
confirmation of an order for 40 pizzas to be delivered to the closing. He told
me that he is going to start a bank in Santo Domingo, said you only need 3
million here to do that. Before he walked off he handed me two dollars and said
to buy myself a beer when I got off work.
Two guys come in to the store and start looking at my
pictures. One is a big fat guy with a dark hair buzz cut, tee shirt with
scissored off sleeves and his friend is a skinny little guy with bad skin and a
blond buzz cut, I figured them for Merchant Marines or deportees. They reminded
me of the big mouse and the little mouse in the Warner Brothers cartoons who
were modeled after Laurel and Hardy or maybe Abbot and Costello. The big guy,
Paul, asked some questions about the Taínos and when I started to explain about
their cohoba drug ceremony
he asked me what the active agent in cohoba was and when I said DMT he started in about how it is in
every living organism, including our brains, and is even responsible for the
WHITE LIGHT that everyone is supposed to see just as they are dying. As the
conversation wandered he asked me, by the way, did I know the best way to
transfer like $200,000 cash from Canada to a high interest yielding account
here. He bought a $75 dollar panorama, which, these days, is a higher end sale
for me and I said I would recommend a good lawyer.
Last year a customer eating a hotdog and drinking a coke in
Rudy’s little café in Mundo Artesanal keeled over in a diabetic coma. I got
called over because he only spoke English and he eventually was able to mumble,
“juice.” I shot over to Jumbo and bought two cartons of orange juice but when I
got back the victim, whose name turned out to be Felipe, or Phil from the upper
east side of NY, was still dazed but sitting up on the floor. He said he was
fine and not to worry. We helped him back up on his stool at the counter but he
passed out again a minute later and hit the floor like a wet sack of rice,
cutting his head on the way down. There were four taxistas standing around waiting for fares and none
agreed to take Phil to a hospital unless he paid up front. Finally Richard and
I guaranteed payment and piled Phil into the nearest taxi. When we pulled up to
Clinica Abréu Phil became alert and begged us to bring him home where he had
his insulin, which was only a few more blocks so we did. The taxista charged him 500 pesos which was a real soaking
for a 10 block ride. Rudy eventually closed up his hotdog stand but I still saw
Phil from time to time walking the Conde. When he wore shorts you could see his
lower legs were red and swollen. He was on some kind of disability and
collected social security but ran monthly tabs at the restaurant, pharmacy and colmado. My friend Hal waited to meet him for breakfast
yesterday but Phil never showed up. The American Embassy came around later in
the morning to his apartment to collect the body. He had died in bed.
Hal stops by to chat almost every day. He used to be the
famous Mafia boss Meyer Lansky’s driver and errand guy and spent years in Haiti
and Cuba running casinos. Says Meyer Lansky never swore. Hal gave Baby Doc
Duvallier his first bicycle for a birthday present and used to put shopping
bags full of money on Papa Doc’s desk to help with the casino license. He says
he offered to broker a deal for the new president of Haiti, Martelly, an
ex-performer who used to sing in one of Hal’s casinos, with the Israelis to arm
a police force but Martelly goofed and used the word army in a press release and the U.N stepped on the
deal because nobody wants Haiti to have an army, remembering the body count
from the last time. Hal knows the people who the Sopranos were modeled after
(Tony Acceratti for one), knows Whitey Bolger the Boston gangster who was
played by Jack Nicholson in the movie—“I don’t know where he is, but he calls
to chat every so often” and then when they caught him—“ I doubt they are going
make anything stick” and Henry Hill from the movie Goodfellas—“That guy was a
born crook, I saw him swindle someone out of $10,000 once in about an hour with
a phony real estate deal. He always wanted to be made but he wasn’t Italian.” When I asked him, half
joking, if he knew where Jimmy Hoffa was he said no but that he knew they would
NEVER find the body. Hal is 85 and says the FBI comes down to Santo Domingo
from time to time to ask him questions and he says he can’t figure out why,
“cause almost everyone I knew is dead.” He would like to go back to the States
for cataract surgery and thinks he probably could since as far as he knows
there is no warrant out for him but says at his age it’s not worth even taking
a chance on getting arrested so he’s trying to figure out a way to get Medicare
to pay for the operation here.
On Sunday morning four months ago Rudy, my German friend
here who makes the tee shirts, who used to have the hot dog stand in Mundo and
whose wedding I went to last year and who has a 7 month old baby named Lars,
walked out the front door of his house in Los Frailes and bumped into two tigueres taking a motorcycle away from some dude on the
street. Everyone panicked and while Rudy was either backing away or trying to
scale the sliding driveway gate to get back inside someone shot him in the
ankle shattering tibia and fibula. A neighbor brought him to the Plaza de
Salud. The hospital had to mail
order the steel pins required for the surgery so Rudy had to wait until Friday
for the bone setting. But when Friday rolled around he was informed that the
operation was postponed until he found at least two volunteers to donate blood
to the blood bank in case he needed any extra. Some of his employees tried but forgot
to bring their cedulas or
IDs; all his wife’s sisters were having their periods and so were disallowed;
Richard in Mundo Artesanal has no cedula; Modesta is underweight. I went with one of Miriam’s
brother-in-laws to try to donate the final pint. An uncle was already there in
line but he was disqualified because he is older than 65 and the brother-in-law
turned out to be anemic but I qualified since my tattoos are more than ten
years old. When my blood bag was about half full, Rudy’s wife poked her head in
the door and said Rudy was on his way to surgery. He is walking with crutches
now but his shin has a wicked curve to it and his foot is angled funny so he is
going to Germany to try to have it reset.
