[bxxasxxa]

I recived an e-mail this morning.....

Hi Timex,
I am from the US and have been living in the DR with my Dominican
girlfriend. Altagracia, for about 4 months now. Do you think the below (or
parts of it) would be a worthwhile post? No hurry, I only get to the
internet once or so per week.

Dan DuVall La Primaveral de Villa Mella, where we live, is on the outskirts of the
city of Santo Domingo about 9 kilometers up Maximo Gomez as far as the
blue water tank on stilts and then our house is a 1 kilometer walk or a
25¢ per person ride on a Honda 70cc Cub Special motorbike away. When
we use such a concho Altagracia rides sidesaddle in the middle pressed
between me and the chauffeur. From our roof we can see mountains, and
our street, Loma de Chivo, which was asphalt at one time but now is
mostly paved with dust, is virtually a dead end as it narrows to a dirt
trail near a stream.

There are a few big houses like ours with three
bedrooms and steel burglar bars over the windows and doors (cost about
$18,000 US) but mostly the houses are small and unfinished with the rough
cement blocks not yet plastered or painted and with boards sometimes
covering the windows. A painted house usually means that the family has
some relatives in New York who send money. There are chickens and stray
dogs everywhere and always someone on the street unless it is raining
hard.

There is very little traffic and kids can play stickball in the
street, which, when they donÕt have a ball, they play with the small
frisbee-like caps from five gallon water jugs and bromsticks.

We live next door to a colmado (or bodega or corner store) where you can buy 10¢ of
tomato paste at a time; eggs, cigarettes, tampons, mints or aspirins
one at a time; cheese or salami by the slice, disposable razors, toilet
paper, powdered milk, soda, rum and beer. There is also a pool table and
a loud juke box in the colmado but it quiets down by about 9 PM on
weeknights and we all like the music anyway.

Six of us live in the house. Altagracia, me, and her four almost grown
children ages 15-21. Nothing is ever found in the same place twice.
Toothbrushes may be found in sink drains, in mop buckets, on the stove,
in shoes or under beds. I am sure we have toothbrushes in neighborÕs
houses. We have three plastic pitchers to keep water in the icebox and
they can generally be found each with about one ounce of water in them

We evidently use over 150 matches per day, that is, to light the stove
and candles when the power goes out. Someone here can eat a pint of
mayonnaise at a sitting. I have taken to hiding stuff.

Ours is a three bedroom house with two bathrooms, and one actually has
plumbing . The indoor bathroom, full of new fixtures, is dry and not
connected to any septic system that we can locate.

The paid receipt for the city water was counterfeited by the previous owners and, since we
are not going to pay someone elseÕs bill of over 10,000 pesos ($330)
and still accruing penalties, we pump water from an exposed pipe fitting
across the street on Tuesdays and Saturday nights, which are the times
the city diverts water to our neighborhood, to fill our cistern , if
there is electricity. The rest of the street does the same thing and
assures us that even if we did pay the bill, we would still never get the
water we paid for. After the cistern is full we pump water to a tinaco
on the roof that holds 200 gallons and supplies water by gravity to the
house. Many houses here do not have a cistern or tinaco and so, on
water nights, the street is filled with women hauling water in five gallon
buckets on their heads.

The electricity works pretty much the same way.
Our house is situated between two telephone poles and there is a web of
lamp-cord gauge wire spliced into the main power line that leads to
various outlets and bulb sockets in the house. When Altagracia turns on
her blow-drier the whole neighborhood dims. There is not a fuse or
breaker anywhere.

The house is constructed entirely of cement, roof and all,
so it canÕt burn down, but I make it a point to stand on one foot when
I touch a light switch cause I figure maybe the current wonÕt go
through my heart up one leg and down the other that way. We burn up a lot of light bulbs. Occasionally the power company sends a pickup truck with a
ladder and two men, called the cortadores, to cut the wires to the
houses of people who donÕt pay their bills and people like us who donÕt
even have a meter on the house. After they leave, the neighbor who is
the designated electrician hooks us back up for a dollar.

La Rubia, who lives across the street in a small pink wood house with a
galvanized tin roof, sells chicken every morning. She is tall, lean,
strong and perhaps in her fifties. She builds a fire outside on which she
boils a big pot of water to scald the chickens for plucking after
cutting their throats. She washes them and covers them with plastic bags,
hangs a scale from a tree limb and sells the poultry for about 15¢ more
per pound than Hipermercado Ole, the nearest supermarket. Usually she
wears jeans when she prepares the poultry but if she has just gotten
home from the disco she may still be wearing a tight dress or stretch
leisure suit. The chicken she sells is from the U.S. as is almost all the
chicken sold in the Dominican Republic. Altagracia tells me that people
only cook the local poultry Òfor diversionÓ because it is so tough.


I walk to OlŽ almost every day. It is like a large KMart with a
grocery store under the same roof. The traffic pattern of the shopping carts
resembles the traffic patterns on the streets, one must beware and be
prepared to run. There are frequent discussions with strangers in the
aisles over which guandules or ketchup or shampoo is the best. The price
of rice is high at the moment, averaging about 45¢ a pound, but at
OlŽ they have a bin that holds maybe a ton of loose rice that sells for
39¢ where you fill up plastic bags with grain scoops and then bring
them to a scale to be weighed. People run their fingers through the rice
and smell it before deciding how much to buy. A full bin can be emptied
in less than 2 hours.


The check-outs at OlŽ use bar code scanners and accept credit and
debit cards but nothing ever works right all the time. The cashier checks
every price scanned for errors and when there is one, calls for the guy
on roller skates who arrives after a while with a clipboard and notes
the UPC number. Then another person is called who has gone to find out
the right price, then one more person comes with a key to correct the
price in the register. If your debit card isnÕt accepted you simply
follow your cashier to the next register or the register after that until a
working card swiper is found. When you leave the store a person by the
exit marks your receipt with a blue magic marker, I donÕt know why.


He was here for a couple of hours the other day while his mother was
relaxing AltagraciaÕs hair. He has skinny legs and a gigantic head. I
first saw him on the sidewalk shoving a pointed stick into glass bottles
and then whipping the bottles off the stick at the dogs across the
street, and he hit a couple. Later I noticed him swinging a broomstick
chasing a 16 year old across the vacant lot. While he was here he slugged
our cocker spaniel, was found eating with both hands out of the icebox,
moved all the padlocks to different doors and then hid the keys,
locked Chavela in the bathroom, was caught pouring bleach into the hair
relaxer bottle, broke four ceramic tiles, and had to be dragged off the
garage roof twice because, aside from the chance of him falling off, there
are a bunch of live wires up there.

The second time I hauled him off
the garage I accidentally bounced his head off a low hanging curved sheet
metal roof that projects from the house, and his expression never
changed, if anything a faint smile crossed his lips. The next day we saw his
mother in town carrying a bleeding child across the street towards the
clinic.

She explained that he and Telly had been just throwing rocks at
each other when it somehow turned ugly and Telly laid the other kidÕs
head open with a stick. We call him Demonio Vivo, but his real name, as
near as I can tell, is Telly Tubby, named after the television cartoon
program. He is four. Altagracia says that he is going to kill someone
before he is twelve.


We sweep the sidewalk and street in front of our house every couple of
days and if you let your sidewalk get too cluttered someone from the
neighborhood junta comes around to talk to you. So there is always
someone on our street sweeping in front of their house but there are also 5
or 6 people sweeping stuff out of their houses onto the street and. If
your are on your porch, or galleria, the street is where you pitch or
spit all your small garbage like fruit seeds, bottle caps, candy wrappers
and toothpicks.

If you leave unbroken bottles on the street they are
picked up by morning by people who sell them for 1 peso each back to the
bottle factory. Only glass soda bottles have deposits and so are never
found on the street. Once you have paid a deposit on a soda bottle you
own one soda bottle, you can turn it in as the deposit when you buy
your next soda but you can't ever get your nickel back. So the average
bottle on the street is a beer bottle and the choices are Presidente in
green or Bohemia in brown. Bohemia costs 5 pesos less and so is found
more often in poor neighborhoods. I am sure that one could calculate the
average income of any street of any town in the Dominican Republic by
the ratio of found Presidente/Bohemia bottles. The majority of beer is
sold in 22 ounce bottles and comes with any number of plastic cups so
that you can share-- the beer stays colder and is a little cheaper that
way. 12 ounce bottles exist but are not the standard unit as in the U.S.
When you buy a beer in a colmado you ask for either a grande or a
chiquito and if it is an affluent neighborhood you get a Presidente and if you are in a poor neighborhood they ask you which brand.

The other notable item in the ecology of the street is dog ****. By
rough count there are eight dogs living at the four nearest houses and
all go in the street and there is no scooper law of any kind. While it is
certainly possible to step in something the road is not as mined as one
would expect. A hard rain helps, especially since we are on a steep
hill but I think most of it leaves stuck in car and truck tires. My own
dog's **** is very rarely in the same place the next day.

There are always people walking past the house on the way to the
colmado next door if only to hang out on the little galleria there. Children
as young as 4 walk the length of the street unaccompanied, clutching a
10 peso note in one hand and carrying the jam jar or empty coffee cup
in the other in which to bring home the 10 pesos worth of vegetable oil
or tomato paste.

Guys wait on the steps of the colmado to talk to girls
and mothers with babies chat with other mothers with babies. Shirts and
shoes are not required and women might be wearing anything from
cocktail dresses to skintight stretch jeans to nightgowns and might be
elaborately coifed or have a headfull of giant plastic hair rollers held in
place with one bobby pin each. (I am told that the rollers are often used
not to shape the hair but to arrange it to dry faster in the sun, not
many have blow driers and the power goes out so often anyway.) At night
however most people dress to go to the colmado and hairdos are ni-ni
and slacks and tee shirts are pressed and shoes shined.

The colmado has a
system of inverters, a series of car batteries that charge when there
is electricity and power the coolers and the juke box when the power
goes out, so there is almost always music playing and the music is almost
always either bachata or salsa and couples might dance on the little
galleria or in front of the counter inside. Lots of people go to the
colmado and don't buy anything.


At the little intersection near the bakery up the hill from our house
there are usually 5 or 6 motoconchos waiting to taxi customers up
Avenida Primaveral to the bigger intersection on Maximo Gomez. (Maximo Gomez
has actually become Avenida Hermanas Mirabel by the time it gets this
far North, but never mind). The conchos are mostly Honda 50 or 70cc
bikes but there also some 115cc Suzukis. The conchistas sit on their bikes
in the shade and talk and scan the horizon for someone signaling for a
ride which costs 10 pesos per person and 10 pesos more if there is a
lot of luggage. It costs 40 pesos to have two bags of cement brought to
your house from the building supply yard and they will drag a couple of
re-rod home for you too.

Once you have arrived at Maximo Gomez you have the choice of taking a
guagua or a carro or a city bus or a taxi. Guaguas are privately owned
buses that hold about 25 passengers and cost 10 pesos. There is a
driver and a cobrador who hangs out the bus door shouting the destination of
that particular guagua and bangs on the side of the guagua to signal
the driver when to stop for a fare or when to let someone off. A good
cobrador stows packages and helps old ladies find seats and a bad one
shortchanges or ignores requests to stop.

Carros are usually Toyota Corolla sedans and are usually totally
battered, lacking all mirrors and headliners, with the seats upholstered
with found, mysterious fabric and the windshield a bowed web of cracks and
clear packing tape. They also cost 10 pesos and are faster than a
guagua because they can weave in and out of traffic but run shorter routes
and usually won't leave the curb unless full-- 4 in the back and two in
front plus the driver. A very wide person or someone with enough
shopping bags to take up an extra seat has to pay double. To signal a guagua
or a carro to stop when you are on the street you wag an index finger
up and down.

City busses are rare and only stop at specific stops, but often only
cost 5 pesos. Altagracia still glows when she talks about the time last
month she came all the way from Gascue, where she works for only 5
pesos on the bus. Her commute if by guagua costs 10 pesos, by two carros
20 pesos and if by taxi 120 pesos.

[bxxasxxa]

To cross a large, busy street in Santo Domingo it is best to do it one
lane at a time, making sure that you are standing exactly on the
divider line (if there is one) while you are waiting for the next
opportunity to advance. It is also advisable to cross with packs of other
pedestrians and try to keep a large one between you and the oncoming traffic.

Always be on the lookout for motorcycles which may be speeding between
lanes and for vehicles which might be dragging things like 20 foot long
re-rod and remember to glance down to check for missing manhole covers.

At night cars with no lights can be especially dangerous. Right of way
belongs to whatever would do the most damage to the car and this
includes potholes-- a person (or a dog or a horse) could jump out of the way
but a pothole never. If a car suddenly swerves violently toward you it
is probably avoiding a pothole-- leap for the curb. At first I tried to
maintain an aloof, calm air when crossing the street here but now I am
not ashamed to run like a scared chicken.

Try to avoid crossing the
street altogether on weekends and holidays because, while there are
television ads advising against drunk driving, there is no law against it.

There is a law intended to discourage drinking while driving which states
that the driver must have both hands on the wheel at all times but it
must be that not many people know about it. It is not unusual for a bus
driver to be seen hoisting a large Presidente from between his legs
from time to time while driving.





The power went out last night, as usual, but when it came back on
around 10 PM it came back on with a snap, a crash and went out again but
only in our house and the house across the street where the family of Titi
live. Domingo (Titi's father) came over today to put the ground wire
back on the phone pole. He spliced on about three extra feet of wire and
made a hook in the free end, then with a long plastic pole he hoisted
the wire up to the transformer and hooked the wire back on to the big
ground cable at the top, it arced and sparked for a second and the lights
in the two houses came back on. We share the ground wire with Titi's
family but we each have independent live wires, so if our live wire burns
up or becomes loose it is only our house that goes dark.

Other news is that we need a filtrante, or leach field for our septic
system. As it stands now our septic tank, which is a small one, feeds
into the city sewer which is evidently stopped up. So when the hole
drilling truck comes it is going to drill a hole about 16 inches in diameter
and 80 feet deep and which will act as our leach field. We are going to
dig it in the side street between us and the colmado, no permit, just
going to do it. We do need to remember to warn the people who live on
the side street that no traffic will be able to come through for about a
half a day. If we don't, I am told, some of them with cars could get
pretty irate.

I am a photographer and I think I just bought the last black and white
photo enlarger in Santo Domingo. While searching for one I called about
40 photo labs and photographers from the yellow pages and got a total
of two leads-- and they were for the same enlarger! The digital
revolution has taken over completely here. There is also no black and white
chemistry or paper in the country. I went to Kodak headquarters on Avenida
Abraham Lincoln and spoke with Rafael Oller, who, as it turns out, is
head of Caribbean Operations for Kodak and he wished me luck.
Occasionally, he explained, materials can be sent from Puerto RIco, but not the
stuff I was looking for, and to order it from Rochester would require
two months and anyway, when I went to speak with the distributor who
could actually order it they said, ÒNahh.Ó

Life with Kiki has become unbearable. He is the oldest, he turned 21 on
Christmas Day, of Altagracia's four children and he just pawned the
washing machine we had stored in the garage, or marquisina, where he
sleeps with his brother, Jhoanglish, 19. He has also taken and sold the
stereo, the propane gas tank for the stove, three cell phones (including
his Mother's own which was filled with nearly irreplaceable numbers), my
cell phone which Chavela, Altagracia«s sixteen year old daughter,
recovered by calling my number before he was out of earshot with it and,
when it rang, he had to give it up. Altagracia recovered the stereo by
finding out from a neighbor which pawn shop he sold it to and getting
there within 24 hours after which the price would have gone up.

Kiki is very tall and very thin and very wide and is handsome despite
his foggy eye where he took a dozen birdshot from a shotgun blast last
summer. Perhaps it is that eye that contributes to his outlaw charm. He
is, what is known in the Dominican Republic as, a tiguere (teeg-u-ray),
which is, evidently, a unique sociological variety of delinquent.
Requirements for membership seem to be stealing from one's mother, never
working, making the maximum mess whenever possible, breaking bottles,
eating other people's food with both hands out of the refrigerator, ****ing
on the toilet seat, lying compulsively and smoking drugs.

Some tigueres
kill or kidnap or rape people, some snatch gold chains from the necks
of the women wearing them (when the guagua approaches the area known as
Duarte all the women on the bus take off their jewelry before getting
off), some sell drugs and some form small gangs and harass other
tigueres.

Police are afraid to enter some neighborhoods and a police who
arrests or kills many tigueres may become an assassination target. Some
tigueres carry short lengths of rerod as weapons, some use knives and a few
have pistols. And some just steal from their mothers.

Kiki has nothing. He sold the washing machine, worth 3,000 pesos for
600. When he sold the cell phones he didn't get paid more than a cheap
bottle of rum for the three of them because he trusted another tiguere.
He is capable of working construction (during one burst of energy he
shoveled two tons of sand, almost without stopping, up onto the roof of
the marquisina for me) but usually refuses because working with concrete
wears his shoes out too fast. He is without conscience-- less than a
week after stealing the cell phones he asked me for a ÒloanÓ to buy a
fighting cock. Somehow he cadges cigarettes and drinks and joints on
the street , and likely crack from time to time, and he seemingly only
eats what he steals now from the house when he can sneak in as he is now
banned from entering. But we don't keep much food around anymore.


He has asked to borrow the machete (which he had begun to grind into a
stabbing tool) when he goes out at night. in case of seeing certain
friends. He and his brother also nearly completed making, what I think is
known as a zip gun, a single shot pistol fabricated out of scraps of
steel and springs. They called it a harpoon at first and said it was for
fishing but when a neighbor's 4 year old (Demonio Vivo in fact) found
it accidentally in the marquisina and reported it to his mother and she
threatened to tell the police I embargoed all the tools and banned it
from the premises. It has since resurfaced briefly twice but no closer
to firing capability and the boys believe me now, I think, that I will
throw it in the River Isabela if I see it again.

A couple of weeks ago Kiki proposed that I loan him 10,000 pesos
($330), one half of the initial, for a small used pickup truck that he could
use to sell vegetables in the city that he would buy in the country. I
said that if he worked for a few months as a gesture of good faith and
managed to save something that I was sure we could work something out.
A few days later he told me that he had the other 10,000 as good as
borrowed. Deal breaker. A few days after that I found him leaving the
house wearing two shirts before 8 in the morning and he said he was on his
way to the docks in Haina looking to stowaway. He only wants money to
leave, the 10,000 borrowed pesos would have gone for passage on a yola,
one of the boats that sink on their way, illegally, to Puerto Rico. He
will never work. He will eventually die on the streets or in jail or in
a swamped yola.

Altagracia is torn. She is fed up, again, but still has a mother's
fear of one of her children starving to death on the street. She can cut
him off 95 percent but cannot sever the tie. No relatives will take
him, and he has lots-- 31 older brothers and sisters from his father's
wanderings before he met Altagracia. She is afraid he will get sick. So
am I, but I also daydream about pepper spraying and beating the **** out
of him.


It is Saturday and I am in one of the deserted offices in the museum
working on the design for the catolog for my show of photographs of
indigenous cave art. Of course I had to buy ink for the printer and a ream
of paper, but so it goes. So IÕm printing catalog proofs from my laptop
and while waiting for the paper to come out I am online here writing
and reading email on the museum's computer. Almost like the 20th or even
21st century!

Some recent drama on the home front. I forget what I've told you about
the two deadbeat lying thieves, 19 and 21, that are Altagracia's
malcriado oldest spawn, but things have been getting worse, worse that is
after they«ve taken and sold one of the propane tanks for the kitchen
stove, a washing machine, 5 cell phones including both Altagracias and my
personal cell phones with all the contacts etc (actually miraculously
got mine back, another story) the stereo,the machete, the bread knife
and they even pawned their own shoes which of course mom had to replace.
And this too after I had to forbid them to continue building a homemade
pistol under threat of calling the police and after they have each had
friends cruising for them armed (reportedly) with pistols and shotguns.
I have promised the older one that I will call the police the next time
anything big disappears.

He really does not want to go to jail, which
is why he steals from his own family because he knows that Mom does not
want him to go to jail because she would have to bring him dinner every
day which is how it works here, but I promised him that I would love to
bring him dinner every day in jail, and he believes me, as he should.
Of course boxes of matches, small change, candles, tubes of toothpaste
and food from the refrigerator forget em. Anyway last night I caught one
of them ****ing on the cement patio where I am building a garden
planter thing and I lost it, really screamed at him, not the first time
either, (it had been smelling of **** there before and I had patiently
explained to all three boys that we had a toilet etc, that **** smells bad
etc.) called him an animal, sucio (dirty, a very strong word here) etc
as loud as I could yell.

So early this morning as I am still lying in
bed what do I hear outside the window, in the patio? ****ing!!! Other
deadbeat. So at the moment we are under a 24 hour ultimatum, the first
actually although there have been 15 day ultimatums which came and went
unnoticed, if those two are not out by
tomorrow, I leave, and if I leave everyone starves to death. I feel bad
for the two younger ones, especially Niningo because we are friends and
have trust, but jesus christ!!!!!! So I was about to call my American
friend here and ask to move in for a couple of months and split the rent
but Altagracia called me and said she was shipping the two out to
Pizarete, the last town they lived in, a good distance away. Vamos a ver
(we'll see).

Boy am I ****ed off. This is after loaning them both money,
paying for medical stuff for both of them and being a generally nice
guy with them, gradually getting angrier and angrier and angrier. I dream
of tapping them each on the shoulder while they are sleeping in bed and
pepper spraying the **** out of them. Do you think they would pay
attention to that?

[bxxasxxa]

Those two were to live with their father but he was killed in August,
no one ever planned for them to live with us. Things with Altagracia
herself are still fine, although she is a little uncomfortable with this
ultimatum, and the museum show (now scheduled for March 15) might
actually be a big deal, the catalog I am designing has grown to 14 pages and
they evidently have someone who wants to pay for the printing costs.

The museum is going to pay for the glass for the pictures although I will
wind up buying the other nearly half sheet of glass from the glass
store because, well I don't really know why but the sheets come 40x60
inches and the pictures use glass 32x40 (which in the States was a standard
size) and the glass store doesn't want to get stuck with the 28x40 inch
scraps, I guess, although they are pretty big to be called scraps, but
I should be able to use them as long as I don't try to store them at
home.


So Kiki moved out for a few days but didnÕt pack any clothes and the
other one is actually working so he got a deferment on his eviction.
When I realized that Kiki was back I actually did call a taxi and did
move out with my camera stuff and Chloe (my cocker spaniel) to a pension
for a night. This may have served to speed up the placement process and
also sent the message that I meant it.

Now, however, during this same
time there had been a brutal break in and double murder in the
neighborhood and also the guy that has the chimi sandwich stand up at the
corner got robbed again so everyone is a little nervous and since I will be
leaving in 3 months to work in the States and Altagracia is not keen on
being left in the house with only her son Niningo (15) and daughter
Chavela (16) and without the two big guys because tigueres donÕt usually
break into houses where a lot of men live so I am not sure how hard I
should push the eviction actions.

I was reading on the galleria after lunch today when I heard a bottle
smash up beyond the house of la Rubia, then Demonio (not Demonio Vivo 4
year old but a 20 something with long arms and an athletic gait) comes
tearing down the dirt slope with Britannia, a stocky local young mother
with orange vertical hair , charging right behind him with a knife.
They stop in the street in front of our house and square off about 20 feet
apart, he is clutching a broken Presidente bottle as a weapon in one
hand and is holding his side, where he has already been stabbed, with the
other.

La Rubia gets between them, they each pick up throwing-sized
chunks of broken concrete and each winds up and threatens to deploy,
Demonio yells that he is going to kill her, La Rubia stays between them, and
eventually they go separate ways. But nobody thinks it is over.
Evidently DemonioÕs wife had been sending Britannia food, which is a common
thing here, but Britannia had not been returning the dishes. Any form of
disrespect in the area of food ranks low in the Danteesque hierarchy of
dos and donts.

Later in the day two guys come to the door looking for Kiki and
calmly tell Chavela that they would like to stab him because they donÕt
like him being friends with one of their enemies. Kiki was not here at the
time so they wandered off after waiting out front for a little while.
When Kiki returns and hears the news he leaves singing quietly to
himself and casually twirling a two foot piece of steel re-rod. Later I see
him moseying down the street flipping a switch blade around and then
later in the afternoon when Altagracia sees him out front with a pair of
scissors she goes out and grabs him by the shoulder, spins him around
and sends him to the marquisina. But a half hour or so later one of the
barrio elders calls for him and explains that Kiki is not in the
wrong, so far. And so then they leave, presumably to go try to straighten
out what might only be a misunderstanding.

So, to top it off; about five minutes after they leave two more
tigueres show up outside the marquisina and announce that they are going out
to look for Kiki but donÕt say why, they leave, and then Joanglish
comes home from work.

He is working as a night watchman and because he has
to go back very early in the morning the supervisor had let him take
the signed-out, loaded .38 Taurus, made in Brazil, home with him. Nobody
argued when I confiscated the pistol for the night, he has the shells
and when he leaves for work in the morning he can have the pistol back.


Chavela is AltagraciaÕs sixteen year old daughter. She is cocky and
confident, well known in the neighborhood and the source of nearly all my
gossip. She comes home daily from school at noon, cooks lunch of rice
with beans with a side dish, sweeps and mops the house and galleria,
washes the dishes left from the six lunches and does the laundry. Last
year in Pizarete, Chavela had had a novio (serious boyfriend) who was in
his twenties and was a police officer, one of the ones who take the risk
of shooting and arresting tigueres and so eventually a small band of
them chased him down on the Autopista Duarte and killed him.

I was living
in the States at the time carrying on a telephone courtship with
Altagracia and it was in all the Dominican newspapers that I read on the
internet. Less than a year later her father, and the father of all four of
AltagraciaÕs children, Luis, 74 and divorced from Altagracia for three
years, was killed by a nightwatchman, or watchy-man, who knew him and
who had broken into his apartment to steal a hundred dollars. Luis
evidently woke up during the robbery and got a couple of licks in with a
machete before the robber clubbed him in the head and then left, locking
the door from the outside, preventing Luis from crawling out for help.
Kiki showed up at the apartment the next day to visit his father and
Luis died only hours later. After the robbery the watchy-man, a drug
addict, went to work covered with blood and so now is in prison awaiting
his unscheduled trial.

ChavelaÕs first novio here in Villa Mella, Andres, was glum,
taciturn and unsmiling but handsome and came to visit Chavela on the galleria nearly nightly to whisper and make out but began to arrive later and
later and later each night until Chavela figured out that, as she put
it-- she was not the first dish of the night and so she dumped him.
Chavela is now seeing Marwell who is charming, hardworking and large and has a motorcycle.

One evening Marwell invited Kiki to take the bike for a
short spin and before Altagracia could discourage the generous gesture,
Kiki took off with it, not coming back until more than an hour later
dragging the exhaust pipe behind him. Altagracia said that if he had not
broken the exhaust that he would have ridden until it was out of gas
and left it. But Marwell and Chavela are still an item; although he does
not come around quite as often he did bring her a large stuffed bear
with lots of candy on ValentineÕs Day and he calls.

Jhoanglish, 19, is tall and thin like his older brother Kiki but lacks
any dangerous presence. He is an inveterate fictionalizer and if he
told me it was raining I would have to be getting pretty wet before I
believed him. He sings rap and reageton and sometimes does his own laundry
and sometimes finds work but never sticks to it. When he landed this
job as a watchy-man we were all very happy. But the next day we found out
that he would need 300 pesos as a security deposit for the uniform. And
then that he would need to take two guaguas each way to and from work.
And that the Clean Conduct Certificate from the Police Department would
cost 50 pesos. But we loaned him the money on the promise that he woudl
pay it back out of his first paycheck.

His second night of work he fired the shotgun into the air two times outside the bank he was guarding which meant that the supervisor had to schedule him for a psych appointment. Evidently many watchy-men work for years without ever discharging their weapon but during his third night and before having the opportunity to see the psychologist he emptied the pistol shooting over the heads of some suspicious looking people outside a different bank .

Before
going in to work the fourth night he woke up in the marquisina with a
fever, a boil on his upper lip and his right testicle swollen to the size
of a lechoza (a football shaped melon about the size of a grapefruit)
and so we took him to a clinic where they prescribed antibiotics and no
work for a few days. The next time Jhoanglish leaves for work the phone
rings about an hour later and itÕs him saying that he forgot his hat
and if someone doesnÕt bring it to him right away he will be fired.

So
we tear the house apart, find the hat (and the tie) and realize that no
one knows where to take them except for Kiki who got hired once for
almost a full day by the same company but who is too hungover from
something to go or just doesnÕt want to go and so we figure out the name of
the company by reading it on the front of the hat, find the phone number
in the phone book and when Altagracia calls for directions the
supervisor tells her that there is no problem, that Jhoanglish can borrow a hat
for the night but that, by the way, did we know he is about half crazy?

But we are relieved to know that there is someone there who knows him
and that he didnÕt just borrow or steal the uniform so that we would
give him guagua and lunch money every day. So it is about a week later
and Jhoanglish is still borrowing the guagua fares and going in to work
every day, sometimes at 4 in the morning, sometimes at 4 in the
afternoon, but inevitably returns about two hours later saying that they had
nothing for him that day. Tomorrow there is no work because there is a
general strike but he tells us that it will be payday nonetheless. I
canÕt wait.

Altagaracia has decided that, despite my tales of the cold in
Massachusetts, she would like to visit this summer when I am there working.

Every resident of the Dominican Republic has a cedula I.D. with a
number that, like a social security number in the States, is linked with
ones birth certificate and that one carries for life. But for Altagracia
to apply for a passport she must obtain her birth certificate from the
city where she was declared. But since she was not declared until she
was about 17 and still too young to vote, although she had two children,
and was declared by an uncle and was not given the appellido of her
father, Mateo, but of her mother, Garcia Poche or Pochet and since the
birth certificate is evidently not filed under the date of birth but under
the date of declaration, it is not so easy.

We went to the townhall of
Bani and went upstairs where there was a hall lined with maybe a dozen
offices, none with signs saying what they were about, and all with
equally long lines. Altagracia asked a cleaning lady to unlock the bathroom
for her and while we, the cleaning lady and I, were waiting fo rher to
come out we chatted and when she did come out the cleaning lady brought
us to a friend of hers in one of the Kafkaesque offices who, after

[bxxasxxa]

We will have to wait for Dan, to come back with more.
I spaced it out so it was easier to read, other than that, it's untouched.

Tim H.

[intorkercet]

This was probably the best writing here in 5 years, if not since it started.

[PhillipHer]

Get him to put it in a Blog. I signed up for one but haven't had the time to do anything about it, so I fear it will lapse. This is the sort of thing that would go down well in the Blogs section. As a post, it will have a few days of attention and then fade away into obscurity.

[fedordzen]

Outstanding, a real eye opener! Dan should have a blog.

[broksaksaak]

Interesting and comical.

Some pics would be great.

Did I read correctly that your house cost only $18,000 US? ( Any chance of posting a pic?)

Larry

[bxxasxxa]

Hi Timex,
I am from the US and have been living in the DR with my Dominican
girlfriend. Altagracia, for about 4 months now. Do you think the below (or
parts of it) would be a worthwhile post? No hurry, I only get to the
internet once or so per week.

Dan DuVall
I will make it a STICKY, untill Dan, gets back.

Tim H.

[QualityReachOut]

Excellent reading. A lot of it is truly a slice of life in The DR. Other parts I can't identify with, but like Robert said I guess it is a real eye opener and a view into the life of some of these guys that rob, kill, etc in the barrios...

Anxiously waiting for the next installment...

[GlictStiply]

That kept me reading.....
I will certainly look forward to more.

Lisa C.

[HedgeYourBets]

Fantastic.............& too good to just leave it here. When (& given your lifestyle if ) you get the time, do a collection of short stories & go for publication.......or maybe write it when you're back in the US & unimpeded by delinquent patrol & all the other things........but please, get it in print. You owe it to yourself.

[WeissVine]

Dan's piece is definitely brilliant.

Here's some on Dan:

http://www.simons-rock.edu/~dand/homepage.html

Mirador

[Sleedyhex]

I felt like I was there. I hope that Dan adds more soon.

Moca

[Freeptube]

amazing narrative.....

as someone who spent a small part of childhood in the barrio of Herrera (many,many years ago) ... a lot of this rings true...except for the violence.

funny how that world seemed normal......trips to the water pump...carrying back drinking/bathing water on your head.....no bathrooms....bathtub was an aliminum cannister....surreal, but true

[Mangoman]

These blogs were seriously funny but I hope people realize this man is playing with fire. He came to this country to look for trouble. These tigre boys who would sell their mom if they could get a decent price for her (being hooked on drugs as well) would kill that gringo in a heartbeat if they find out he has 500 dollars in his wallet. This is a prime example of a gringo who came to this country to mingle in with the lowest form of this dominican society and find it amusing living among them. How do you think some gringos wind up dead in some barrios of this country? I wish him good luck.
AZB

[WeissVine]

These blogs were seriously funny but I hope people realize this man is playing with fire. He came to this country to look for trouble. AZB, don't be to quick to judge Dan, I'm positive he knows what he's doing and he's in no great danger. I'm very familiar with the place since about 25 years ago. Also, don't lose the perspective that his story is only a story, and like a good writer he has taken poetic license...

Mirador

[yWleIJm4]

Just would like to congratulate the author ; true ,half true or pure fiction is not important ...the story is right ..written with humor as if the author is the spectator of all of the the scenes .. despite the fact that he is involved as well .I really enjoyed reading it

[gariharrr]

I have no idea how you had so much patience. Might you be clergy?

On the photographer side, wow, truelly some incredible photo's on your side.

Keep up the good work!

[Mangoman]

AZB, don't be to quick to judge Dan, I'm positive he knows what he's doing and he's in no great danger. I'm very familiar with the place since about 25 years ago. Also, don't lose the perspective that his story is only a story, and like a good writer he has taken poetic license...

Mirador

Don't be a fool to think for a moment that its only a story. This man could not have gotten into such details without living in the area and being part of the household that he has just described. To my understanding, he is not a young man, or why would he put up with a woman who has grown up kids? he is an old fellow well into his late 50's or 60's. He can be taken out by these tigres in a heartbeat if they would want to sell his camera equipment or see him with huge cash amount. Just because he knows the family and the area doesn't mean he cannot be a target of a deadly crime. This man is truely looking for trouble and is certainly playing with fire. He writes well, but he claims to be a photographer. So I am sure he is not living among these people because he is looking for a new topic to write his next novel. He is pushing his luck if he stays there any longer.
AZB