Authors: Beth Raymer
The call worked. Awake, Magic was now ready to gamble. Bernard gave me a happy glance and projected his voice: “Give him any amount. Let him name the price.”
“One hundred and eighty tousand—one-eight-oh—Magic say will make him a happy mon, Mr. Bernard.”
Unable to contain his excitement, Bernard did the wave, all by himself. “Make whisky six … seven … nine. Who’s ordering the
chicharrones de
chicken-o? Money line! Eight twenty. Eight forty. Eight fifty.”
Phones went crazy. Monitors twinkled like Christmas lights. Wladimir continued his sermon: “Dis is why we need to give tanks to God for all dat happen in life. From every habit, we learn.”
“What we
need
is more Xanax,” Bah-Bah interrupted, now looking despondent. He fumbled for the pill bottles behind the emptied gallons of Wild Turkey lining his bookshelf. “I have a heart murmur. I just remembered.”
Referring to his own habits, Wladi counted on his fingers. “Drog, al
co
hol, married womans.
Sos
pension from mis
con
duct.”
“Gross
misconduct, buddy,” corrected Bah-Bah.
Wladi and I watched Bah-Bah kneel on the carpet. On all fours, he searched for stray Xanax. His white, meaty legs wobbled inside polyester shorts so short they looked like hot pants.
“Not even a cow looks so bad,” Wladi said, in a quiet voice.
“Do you get Bah-Bah coke?” I asked him. “Tell me the truth.”
“Betty, I am local people from Curaçao. I do not
fock
people up in de workplace.”
“What do you mean?”
“I get him de good shit.”
“Like how much?”
“I don’t know. A lot. A lot.” He raised his eyebrows.
“A lot.”
Bernard opened his wallet and pulled out more money. “Now! Wladi, before I forget …”
Though Wladi was our line manager, he spent the better part of his workweek praying, fasting, and summoning miracles for the teams we needed to win. “UCLA minus three,” said Bernard. “And if it’s not too much to ask, see if God can heal Scott Rolen’s strained calf muscle before tonight’s game.”
“God bless you, Bernard,” said Wladi as he snatched the money from him.
Approaching the hanger-on responsible for his suspension, Wladi adjusted the neck of his wifebeater. “Dear God,” he said. He forced his smoky eyes directly through the man’s skull. “Tanks so much for making me better looking dan dis
og
ly gringo defect mother focker!”
“Donate your brain to primate research, you hear me?” the hanger-on shouted, once Wladi was out of earshot.
From the window I watched Wladi light his cigarette against the sun and wind and inhale the first divine breaths of a one-week paid vacation. I envied him. I was sick of staying in the office all day long, watching the guys eat fried chicken, kvetch about starting lineups, and sprinkle their feet with odor powder (which they’d then toss over their shoulder, like salt, for good luck). I wanted
out
. Not out of the business per se, just outside. In a spell of lucidity, and with no consideration for my workload, I ran down the steps. Before Wladi had the chance to floor the accelerator and spin the wheel, I hopped in the passenger seat. “I have gas money,” I said, unable to roll down the windows or switch off the Jesucristo radio station fast enough. “Let’s go to the beach!”
Speed was joy. We raced along the tangled, broke-down streets.
Whizzing through the downtown square, past shirtless, shoeless kids and American fast-food chains. Past hot-pink eighteenth-century mansions turned crumbled crack houses, the inhabitants drunk on cane liquor or asleep in the yard. Over the Queen Juliana Bridge, barges cruising languidly down below. Crude oil coming in. Refined oil going out. And here, the landscape broke free. Under peaceful clouds, wild pigs and blue iguanas scampered through miles of blooming cacti. Off forty-foot cliffs, we jumped into sparkling waves. A moment later we burst to the surface. Smiling, panting through the heavy, honeyed air, we collapsed onto the white powder shore.
Rainy season brought magnificent storms, as sudden and erratic as temper tantrums. Drenched, the island fogged and steamed. White light shot through the drizzle and worked its alchemy below, giving the muddy potholes a golden luster. We became rich.
So frequent were our shoreline, candlelit, surf-and-turf meals that Bernard—who didn’t drink—bought the restaurant owner a new cooler, ensuring that every Heineken his dear employees ordered would be frosty. Hungry for a larger entourage, Bernard brought over scores of friends. We purchased more company cars, rented more luxury apartments, and added more people to ASAP’s ever-growing profit-sharing plan. On love’s impulse, he flew with Maritza to the DR to meet her family and get electricity for her village. From a pay phone in downtown Santo Domingo, he called with sad reports.
Ten people sleeping in a piece of room! Power outages every two minutes! Very. Bad. Neighbors
. He recited the routing number. We wired him money. And though eighty thousand dollars is certainly an amount worth taking into account, inside the ASAP zone it was shrugged off and referred to as a “ham sandwich.” Meaning something of little substance. A snack.
With Bernard on his own escapades, I took six-hour lunch breaks. Wladi acted as my guide, showing me a whole new side of the island. Accompanying him in public was like shadowing a
beloved mayor. In lively Rastafarian neighborhoods, in bars that served French fries in peanut sauce and spiced rum in Dixie cups, patrons rose from their stools to shake his hand. Bartenders offered him cigarettes and tried to get him involved in their crazy drug-smuggling schemes.
“Why is everything always free?” I said. I lifted a steaming on-the-house bowl of goat’s blood soup to my lips.
“Me? I? I?” he said, tapping his own chest for emphasis, as though I were the one who didn’t understand English. “Best car washer on the island!”
True, Wladi did pay close attention to detail. But surely his popularity had more to do with his street connections. Days into his first sports-book job, some four years earlier, Wladi saw an opportunity while watching his American boss and supervisors snort coke. He started to supply the drugs himself. As a middleman, Wladi made a lot of money buying drugs for them. Whatever they needed, be it more weed, more blow, or more crack, the bosses would send Wladi out with a wad of cash that included a generous tip for taking the risk. Efficient and resourceful, he always knew where to go, and whom to call, even in the toughest of jams. In his boss’s condo, surrounded by an ocean view and central A/C, the supervisors showed their gratitude by inviting him in to freebase.
How do you say in English? Adrenalina!
Wladi felt like he was shifting into third, gas pedal to floor, heading toward a cliff with no brakes. Which is how he lived his life for the next two years. Racing, overheating, crashing, living like he wanted to die, up until the moment he almost did. High on crack while buying crack in a cracked-out neighborhood, Wladi got into a fight. The man reached for his gun. Wladi backed toward his car. The man cocked his gun. Wladi apologized. The man pulled the trigger. The gun misfired.
The next morning, Wladi opened the
Vigilante
and saw his would-be killer’s picture. Overnight, the guy had shot and killed someone else. Staring into the Rasta man’s bloodshot eyes, Wladi heard the voice of God.
Wladimir
, God said,
I love you
. Everyone
was always telling Wladi how much God loved him. But now he
knew
. On the north side of the island where the water is rough, Wladi stood waist high in the ocean. The minister absolved Wladi of his sins and Wladi fell backward in his arms.
Meanwhile, the Feds busted Wladi’s boss, whose wife had visited the island, discovered his prostitute girlfriend, filed for divorce, and turned him in. In his house they found guns. And a million dollars cash stuffed inside the walls. No wonder Wladi had always assumed
The Sopranos
was a reality show.
A lot of sports books come down to the island and most of them disappear pretty quickly. For whatever reasons—bankruptcy, fear of getting busted, rampant VD contagion—they hold a fire sale and flee in the middle of the night. And in their wake they leave inflated prices at the snack shacks and whorehouses, a drug-addicted clerk or two, and scores of unemployed islanders feeling used and angry, frantically looking for another job. This betrayal reinforces their belief that Americans, however generous they are when times are good, are nonetheless faithless, wasteful children. Children who think they’re more powerful than God.
Born again, Wladi felt his burdens lift. The shame and guilt were gone. There was nothing for him to hide, and no one to hide from, anymore. God knew how much Wladi had lied and cheated—He knew about all the bad shit—and He still loved him. It was such a relief. At church, Wladi learned that gambling was a sin. He also learned that a new sports book was hiring. Finding it easier to abstain from sex than the business, Wladi attended the ASAP interviews at the island’s Denny’s. Right away Wladi saw that Bernard wasn’t like his other gambling bosses. He didn’t do drugs or brag. He wasn’t Italian. He didn’t wax his eyebrows. From what Wladi could tell, he just liked to eat. Wladi felt safe with him.
Even so, “the zone,” as locals refer to sports books, is no place for a recovering drug addict. There’s too much yelling, blaming, and negativity, and not enough encouragement. Nothing to achieve, really. Each time Wladi’s ideas went dismissed, his feelings of inferiority grew and he internalized the judgment of others. Within two months at ASAP, he relapsed.
“Deestroyed,” Wladi said, rocking on the Quinta Cindy hammock. “My Savior told me to take off Saturday morneeng shift but I did not leesten.” Looking tired and acting restless, he chainsmoked and rambled, “I hate how unfair sports book is. Fat Italian gringos make it hard for me. Dey tink I’m lazy, dey tell Bernard I’m sucks.”
Our live-in servant brought us strips of green mango dipped in crushed chilies. Around us, landscapers worked to the rhythm of the slow waltz playing on their radio.
Wladi placed a bump of coke at the end of his cigarette and smoked it in one go. I jumped rope. We were on our lunch break.
“Wladi. What if, right now, Jesus is on his way down to earth? He’s going to get here and you’re going to be high.”
I had used this tactic on my sister once and it worked.
“Betty, believe me. Jesus is my friend. If He is coming to Curaçao, He will tell me.” He scowled at the black spiral of smoke hanging over him. “I pray for God to give Bernard wisdom, to guide ASAP in de right way. But de question is always at my mind: Why are Americans
soch
big dickheads?”
“Not all Americans are. The guys in the office, it’s their M.O. Bernard doesn’t have very good taste in friends.”
“I dream of Bernard taking my NBA advices. I dream he stand up and shout ‘our nomber one handicapper, Wladimir, say Peestons minos two for two hundred tousand USD. Go! Go! Go!’
Fock
ers ignore my NBA
o
pinion.”
He turned pensive. “I do not know when de devil may grab me and tell me to
com
mit murder.”
I stopped jumping rope. “Wladimir! You cannot murder people just because they don’t respect your NBA picks. I’m sure the Bible says something to that effect.”
Wladi’s on-again-off-again born-again extremes, relapses, and crying spells made him seem, at times, an out-and-out psycho. Still, he was turning out to be the closest thing I had to a friend on the island. Whether fired up on drugs or the Holy Spirit, he stopped by the house at crazy hours, eager to share his latest spiritual epiphany and include me in his life. Every day, he took me somewhere
new. He showed me the island’s boxing gym, where I started training twice a week, and secret coves teeming with seahorses, where I did my morning workout routine. At Plastic Baai, the part of the ocean where the garbage company dumps all the dead animals, we helped his friends hunt octopus the size of bathtubs. Adventures slipped effortlessly from one to the next and, fairly quickly, I created a life for myself. On her day off, Pamela picked me up and took me shopping along the promenade. Sometimes after lunch we visited her witch doctor. The Italian crew picked up on my diminishing work ethic and tried to hypnotize me.
You are not working in the Caribbean
, they said, in a dreamy tone.
You are working from a basement in South Philly. It’s snowing. You have to work the phones
. I nodded. It didn’t work. The mounting afternoon heat made it impossible to wear clothes or change betting lines. The only realistic thing for me to do was drive to a beach and find a shaded spot to slip in and out of consciousness. When it was dark enough, I skinny-dipped. Floating on my back, I looked up at the moon, already bright at dusk. Soft warm waves lapped against my skin and I felt the lightness and pleasure of being surrounded by water, completely cut off from the rest of the world.
We thought we were imagining it, but no. The calypso band really was playing “Purple Haze.”
Hand in hand, Jeremy and I walked along the promenade. The sun’s glare off the white coral walls made his eyes squint that one-eyed pirate stare of his. He peered across the harbor, at the oil refineries’ rusty networks of pipes and silos, as though he couldn’t quite believe he’d just spent seven hours on a plane to look at an industrial landscape complete with gas flares licking the sky.
“Isn’t it pretty here?” I said, trying to direct his attention to the lovely pontoon bridge.
He held my curls from my face and spread SPF 55 across my cheeks. “How is it you see beauty where none exists?” he said. “Did you have a traumatic childhood?”
Smiling in the unfaltering sunshine, he waited for me to do the same. He was a smart aleck, albeit a lovable one, and at that moment I found him irresistible.
For five months, I’d been sending Jeremy eleven-page love letters, inviting him down, but he was unable to get time off work. Finally, he pitched a story about hedge funds moving to Curaçao to avoid certain tax laws and his editor sent him on a one-week assignment. Wanting everything to be perfect, I set him up with a neat desk and phone line inside ASAP.