The Coconut Chronicles
Two Guys, One Caribbean Dream House
Patrick Youngblood
This book was originally published as Tropic of Sunshine.
Also available in Paperback and Large Print editions.
Table of Contents
Map of Vieques
Prologue
Chapter 1 – A Ferry Tale
Chapter 2 – Tropical Fever
Chapter 3 – No Wanna Iguana
Chapter 4 – Unreal Estate
Chapter 5 – Conspicuous Consumption
Chapter 6 – Eureka!
Chapter 7 – A Gloom with a View
Chapter 8 – Spinning the Wheel
Chapter 9 – Absolutely Un-Fabulous
Chapter 10 – The Useless Islands
Chapter 11 – Christmas at the Uptown
Chapter 12 – Orange You Sorry?
Chapter 13 – Counter Revolution
Chapter 14 – Cold Comfort
Chapter 15 – Name Game
Chapter 16 – Flight of Fancy
Chapter 17 – Water the Chances
Chapter 18 – Concrete Ideas
Chapter 19 – Unglad Tidings
Chapter 20 – Tile N All
Chapter 21 – Beach Daze
Chapter 22 – Double Exposure
Chapter 23 – Crazy by Design
Chapter 24 – The Pachyderm Waltz
Chapter 25 – Vacant Stair
Chapter 26 – Downward Spiral
Chapter 27 – The International Language of Gardening
Chapter 28 – Touch and Glow
Chapter 29 – What’s in Store?
Chapter 30 – Chicken Out
Chapter 31 – Wild Things
Chapter 32 – Guests Sweet
Chapter 33 – Water Works
Chapter 34 – Relatively Awful
Chapter 35 – Branching Out
Chapter 36 – Let’s Get Plastered
Chapter 37 – The Whether Channel
Chapter 38 – Dancing with Lizards
Chapter 39 – Past Imperfect
Chapter 40 – Sticks and Pics
Chapter 41 – Up Against the Wall
Chapter 42 – Plantasia
Chapter 43 – Lattice Entertain You
Chapter 44 – Air Scare
Chapter 45 – Vanity Project
Chapter 46 – Party Tardy
Chapter 47 – Martini & Bossy
Chapter 48 – Agent Down!
Chapter 49 – The Deep End
About the Author
Contacts and Links
Ant Press Books
Vieques
Prologue
It was a rainy night in October 2004.
My partner, Michael Wiack, and I had just breathlessly announced to our best friends that we were considering buying and renovating a dilapidated house on Vieques Island, off the eastern coast of Puerto Rico. We could barely contain our excitement.
To our surprise, our friends seemed less than thrilled by our news. Phrases like “unstable investment” and “money pit” were bandied about. Dark glances were exchanged. Hands were wrung.
Caught off guard by their reaction, Michael and I couldn’t help wondering if we were, in fact, about to commit the financial equivalent of hari-kari. But the sheer dizzying thrill of venturing into the Caribbean real estate market eventually quelled our doubts, and after a few sleepless nights we decided to go for broke (quite literally, if our friends’ predictions proved correct). A couple of months later, we nervously took possession of our Vieques dream house, a rambling three-story fixer-upper with spectacular ocean views.
Overseeing such a huge renovation would have been challenging even if we had lived in Vieques full time. But we didn’t—we lived in Washington, D.C. How could we possibly manage the project while holding down full-time jobs in a city fifteen hundred miles away?
“Relax,” our realtor advised as we walked out of the bank on closing day. “Six months, tops, and your place will be perfect.”
His words were soothing, but his math was off by more than thirty months.
Three adventure-filled years later, our bank account was depleted and our patience was stretched to breaking point. Exhausted, we hung the last picture, fluffed the last throw pillow, and cracked open a bottle of champagne to celebrate the completion of our dream house.
Our house (Casa Dos Chivos) in Vieques
From the first day we’d set foot on the island we’d been smitten by its frozen-in-time charm. Thanks to the decidedly mixed blessing of fifty years of occupation by the U.S. Navy, Vieques had happily escaped the over-development that plagued many of its Caribbean neighbors. The stunning beaches were all but empty, the narrow roads were lightly travelled, and the residents were friendly and welcoming.
In a word, it was paradise.
And now that the Navy was shipping out for good, we had decided to buy a piece of it. But taming our little corner of Eden proved to be a crash course in how Vieques works—and how it doesn’t. Almost nothing went according to plan, and lots of projects went seriously off-track. Our renovation budget doubled and then tripled. Our property manager fired us. Our contractor became gravely ill. The Navy haltingly withdrew from the island, leaving a legacy of discord and mistrust in its wake.
Along the way we learned a number of unforgettable lessons: concrete houses can have termites; five-foot iguanas aren’t necessarily more afraid of you than you are of them; a property manager who paints your house orange instead of yellow may resign in a huff when you point out his little mistake. And that was just the beginning.
But by blustering, ad libbing, and laughing our way through the process, we survived the ordeal with our love of the island, and of our house, firmly intact.
Here’s our story.
One
A Ferry Tale
I was watering the asparagus ferns in the window box running along the back wall of the house when our next door neighbor swung open the chain-link gate separating our properties and swaggered towards me, brandishing a bottle of Medalla beer and a cigarette.
“You take me, fairy.”
I was tempted to take offense, but I’d learned not to judge people in Vieques at face value. You never knew. Besides, Jane, our property manager, had warned us that this guy was a tad eccentric. Apparently his family had practically settled the island a couple of centuries back and had owned our entire hill at one time. But in recent years they had been forced to sell off the land, parcel by parcel, until all that was left was his scraggly little quarter-acre with its constantly barking dog and rickety lean-to, crowned by a pigeon coop.
Instinctively I turned to Michael for guidance but he was nowhere in sight. A faint, telltale whirring sound snaked around the side of the house. He was weed whacking again. This had become his default activity. Some people bowl in their spare time, others play computer games or watch TV; Michael whacks weeds. Not that I’m complaining. The grass in Vieques—in fact, all things green, including our asparagus ferns—grows with photosynthetic abandon.
I sketched a brief smile, anxious to convey neighborly bonhomie. The man smiled back, patting his ample stomach which jutted out from beneath his too-tight shirt.
“Did you say fairy?” I asked.
He eyed me for a brief moment, then took a swig of beer. The cigarette was doing a slow burn towards his index finger, but he didn’t seem to notice.
“Big boat.”
Ah. Ferry. Sighing under my breath, I peeled off my gardening gloves.
“Uno momento,” I said, smiling again.
> The guy seemed harmless enough, but a quick conference with Michael was definitely in order. He’d know what to do.
As a naturally quiet person who is constantly accused of sneaking up on people, I’ve developed the habit of making all sorts of unnecessary noises to signal my approach. As a result, I can usually be heard a mile off, scuffing my shoes on the floor, fake-coughing, sneezing, rustling whatever papers I happen to be holding, anything to signify my approach.
But a weed whacker is a powerful noise adversary, and after running through my full repertoire of faux sounds I finally resorted to laying a hand on Michael’s shoulder. He gasped audibly, then switched off the machine.
“Sorry,” I said.
I could still hear a faint whirring sound in my ears and could only imagine the cacophony of screeches hurtling around inside his skull.
“That’s okay,” he said with the studied patience of someone who has grown used to being interrupted in the middle of any number of critically important activities over the course of a twelve-year relationship. “What’s up?”
“It’s our neighbor,” I said, cutting my eyes towards the back of the house.
His expression conveyed an epic lack of concern. His trigger finger visibly twitched. I could almost see a cartoon bubble over his head: So many weeds, so little time.
“Which one?”
It was my turn to roll my eyes.
“The guy next door,” I almost hissed. “The one whose name we don’t know, although we should by now.”
We had heard him called Humberto, Tito and Chago on various occasions, and now we weren’t sure which was his real name and were too embarrassed to ask.
“Uh huh.”
“I think he wants a ride to the ferry.”
This brought the trigger finger to a full stop.
“Now?”
“He’s at the gate.”
He hesitated, clearly torn between the clarion call of solidarity with his partner in a Time of Need and the unbridled delights of decimating unwanted vegetation. With a slight grimace he propped the weed whacker against the terrace balustrade.
“I’ll be there in two minutes.”
But by the time I got back to the gate Humberto/Tito/Chago was gone. Before long, however, I heard singing from inside his house.
“¡Hola!” I called.
There was no answer, but the man’s dog, stationed as usual on top of his ramshackle doghouse, whipped himself up into a frenzy of barking in response. I waited as patiently as I could. Soon Michael came around the side of the house jangling the car keys.
“Where is he?”
Unfortunately the sound of Michael’s voice threw the dog into further paroxysms of hysteria. It was like a scene from White Fang, minus the snow.
“I’m not sure,” I shouted. “I think he went back inside his house.”
“Hmm. Does he want a ride or not?”
Michael could be so linear in his thinking sometimes. Surely he’d been around Vieques long enough to know that logic simply didn’t apply here.
“He said he did.”
A mutinous expression stole over Michael’s face.
“Obviously he changed his mind.”
He glanced back towards the garden. The whacker beckoned. I was losing him fast. As if on cue, our neighbor’s door popped open and out he shot, bearing not one but three beers this time. A brewski for each of us, including whoever was planning to drive. This was nothing new—we’d seen young boys swigging beers as they clopped along bareback on wild horses, cops chugging Medallas in their patrol cars. It was definitely a beery island.
Michael accepted the proffered bottle graciously enough but parked it firmly in the cup holder once he got behind the wheel. I climbed into the back seat and took a big chug of mine.
Despite my best efforts our passenger wouldn’t put on his seat belt. Always fanatical about car safety, I did everything I could but wrap it around his neck. But he just pushed it away laughingly, as if I were trying to tickle him. And off we went.
“¿Cómo se llama?” (What’s your name?) I asked, trying desperately to fill the silence.
But he didn’t answer. Was my accent that bad? Did he not speak Spanish? Michael was no help. Clearly he just wanted to be done with this chore as quickly as possible. In fact, he drove with such uncharacteristic speed that our neighbor was thrown against the passenger door as we rounded the corner at the bottom of our hill. This occasioned another outburst of giggling.
“Llama,” I persisted. “What’s your llama?”
Michael gave me a Look in the rearview mirror.
“Oh my God!” our passenger suddenly shouted. “Oh my God!”
Michael, anticipating an adorable toddler dawdling in the road ahead of us or a tarantula salivating its way up his leg, slammed on the brakes, hurtling our passenger into the dashboard. His head hit the windshield with a resounding thump. He laughed again, then rubbed his skull with the back of his hand and downed another slug of beer.
We craned our necks to survey the road in front, to the side and behind. Nothing.
“What,” Michael said, a note of exasperation creeping into his voice for the first time, “was that about?”
The man reached over and began running his fingers through Michael’s admittedly lustrous locks.
“Oh my God!” he crooned again, smiling idiotically.
“Don’t do that,” I said feebly. “Michael doesn’t like having his hair touched.”
As far as I knew this wasn’t strictly true. Although Michael certainly possessed his share of hang-ups, having his hair touched wasn’t one of them. And yet I felt reasonably confident that he preferred not being fondled by our portly neighbor. I tried to think of the word for “hair” in Spanish but drew a blank. Anyway, unless I could construct a phrase expressly warning against hair-touching he’d probably think I was encouraging him.
“Are you meeting someone at the ferry, or are you going to Fajardo?” I asked.
But it was no use. Even if I’d held a Ph.D. in Spanish it would have been tough getting a conversation going with this man in his present state. He turned and stared at me, then belched, threw his empty out the window and reached for Michael’s untouched bottle. No use wasting a good beer, his expression seemed to say.
He laughed and screamed, “Oh my God!” all the way to the ferry terminal, which, not incidentally, we reached in record time.
We learned afterwards that his name was Feliz.
Happy.
How appropriate.
Two
Tropical Fever
It had all started at a dinner party several years earlier in Washington, D.C., where Michael and I had made our home for nine years.
As we lingered over coffee and dessert with our fellow guests, dreading the moment when we’d have to shrug on our coats and scurry home through the freezing February night, the subject of tropical escapes came up (as it did with thudding regularity at midwinter get-togethers). Several Caribbean resorts were mentioned and just as quickly nixed: “Chock full of cruise ships,” “too expensive,” “dangerous.”
And then, just when it began to seem like every island Michael and I hadn’t already visited was saddled with some fatal flaw, a fellow guest made a suggestion.
“If you’re tired of everywhere else,” he drawled, “try Vieques.”
It rang a bell, but I couldn’t remember why. I Googled it when we got home.
Aha.
Al Sharpton and Bobby Kennedy, Jr. had been arrested there a couple of years earlier. It seemed they’d objected to the U.S. Navy’s fifty-year-old habit of using the island for bombing practice. I couldn’t say I blamed them—it was pretty droit de seigneur for the U.S. to kick the residents off their land just so they could blow it to smithereens.
There were plenty of pictures of the island. It looked gorgeous. And warm. It snowed the day after the dinner party. When I got home that night I handed Michael a stiff drink and made my case for a week in Vieques.
It wasn’t exactly the ecstatic response I’d hoped for but neither was it a no.
“I’ve got an idea,” he continued. “Why don’t we celebrate your birthday in Vieques?”
“But that’s two months away!”
He chuckled indulgently.
“Okay, keep you knickers on. We’ll pop down to South Beach for a long weekend later this month to make sure you don’t expire from the cold.”
“Hmm,” I stalled.
“Think about it. Won’t it be fun to turn fifty on a tropical island?”
“It won’t be fun to turn fifty anywhere.”
“Fair enough, but it’ll be more fun in the Caribbean than, say, here in D.C.”
“I guess,” I responded, definitely in a sulk now.
“Then it’s settled. Now,” he went on, kicking into planning mode, “would you rather stay in a hotel or rent a house?”
“In South Beach?”
“In Vieques.”
“A house.”
Fiftieth birthday, here I come.
☼ ☼ ☼
I’ve seen SUVs bigger than the plane we took from San Juan (the capital of Puerto Rico), to Vieques Island. To be honest, I’m never at my best in small aircraft. The pilots always strike me as being far too young and relaxed. I prefer my pilots middle-aged and tense.
Luckily I was seated next to a woman who talked non-stop about her brilliant son the whole flight. It seemed he’d recently been named general manager of the new resort on the island and was destined to become a supernova in the firmament of the hospitality industry. (We heard later that he was canned for gross incompetence.)
The barrage of information she supplied about her son, in a loud braying voice, had a deliciously stupefying effect on me. In fact, after about ten minutes, I was so anesthetized with boredom that I actually hazarded a look out the window. For a couple of carefree moments I managed to forget that we were hurtling through space in a rickety box, borne aloft by a spinning blade. Unfortunately, my new-found courage deserted me as we began our descent.
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