It wasn’t a tourist place. Isidro said, “You want the most beautiful beach we go to Isla Verde.” No, he liked this one. Okay. Isidro believed it was because of the young girls in their bathing suits. The tourist would fix a long lens to his camera and photograph the girls discreetly, without calling attention to himself. Isidro loved this guy.

He kept his money-listen to this, Isidro told his wife-in a money belt made of blue cloth beneath his shirt. He would take money out of it only in the taxi, next to me, Isidro said. He goes in a shop and buys something for his mother in New Jersey, he returns to the taxi before he puts the change in his money belt. He trusts me, Isidro said. Isidro had lived in New York City nine years in a basement and was relieved to be back. His wife, who had never left Puerto Rico, didn’t say anything.

Every morning pick him up on Ashford Avenue by the DuPont Plaza, he’s ready to go. Ask him how he slept. Oh, he slept like a baby with the breeze that comes from the ocean.

This ocean was different, the tourist believed, than the ocean up in New Jersey. Though it must be the same water because the oceans were all connected and the water would get to different places.

“You know what?” the tourist said. “I might’ve pissed in that same water when it was up in New Jersey a long time ago, ‘ey? I mean back when I was a teenager. I liked to piss on things then. Or be pissing in an alley when a girl comes along? Pretend you don’t see her and give her a flash?… You go up in the mountains there and take a piss in a stream, where does it go? It goes out’n the ocean. People have been doing it, they been taking leaks, millions and millions of people for thousands of years they been doing it, but it don’t change the ocean any, does it? You ever thought of that?”