Joe Perez

Nov. 12, 1989

This from Joe Perez, a Puerto Rican and my former superintendent at 312 Water Street (he helped me move my car yesterday)

It is hard, he says, to get used to living with a woman after being single. He married the first time at 17. "Too young. That was the worst mistake I ever made in my life."  He had two kids and quit that wife. "Dan got married, you know. I asked him, Dan, have you gotten used to bumping into her yet? Yeah. That's what I had to get used to when I got married again. I was single for 12 years before I got with this wife. I lived with a lots of womans, but it's different when you're married to them. You gotta get used to bumping into 'em. Boy oh boy. When you're trying to get ready in the morning! And in the bed! You're used to having it all to yourself and then you got to share it with them. It ain't easy."

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When Joe was still in Puerto Rico he worked in construction and several times saw men fall from a great height. One guy fell about sixy feet and when he hit bounced like a rubber ball — a series of quickening, shortening bounces. Another fellow fell about 30 stories, striking four beams en route to the fifth and final girder, over which he draped, said Joe, like a sack of sand on a pipe. The third tumbler also fell about 30 stories, but survived due to a bizarre and dubious  act of fortune. The man, a welder, was impaled through the abdomen on a vertical rod of some sort and actually slid about 12 feet onto the pole before coming to a halt. Workers quickly threw down planks to build a sort of temporary bridge, then brought out a cutting torch. As they burned the rod in two, other workers had to continually douse the skewered welder with water, to keep him from being cooked by conducted heat. After cutting the rod the rescuers transported the injured man down an elevator with the rod sticking out two sides of him. The man was conscious and talking the whole time, but  unable to stand erect, said Joe. Doctors said what saved the man was, in Joe's words,  "his underwears." His underclothes evidently got poked into his abdomen and acted as a plug against internal bleeding