By María Eugenia Guerra

I cannot say I was surprised to hear on the evening news and to read in the Laredo Morning Times that a gentleman named Rudy Torres who had passed himself off as a contractor had been charged with felony theft, that dba Greywolf Construction, had allegedly bilked a Laredo woman of several thousand dollars.
My guess is that there is more than a handful of us who gave him deposits on jobs that were never completed.
Glib and possessed of an edgy nervousness, Rudy Torres, a consummate name dropper with references, had fingernails bitten to the quick that made me cringe. Had he dropped my name after my experience with him, I'd have been quick to stand between him and the money of anyone who believed he was going to make good on a promise.
Rudy Torres wanted to make roof repairs on our old building downtown, which in the end would have consisted of the simple application of Elastomeric paint for metal, a paint that dries in a membrane. I gave him a deposit to buy the paint for that job, which he neither began nor completed, though he did show me a can of paint from the back of an old black SUV equipped with chota emergency lights.
I also paid Rudy Torres a deposit to shore the foundation of our old ranch house, a project he began and never finished. His "crew" of gentlemen who had the appearance of binge drinkers and day laborers recruited from a street corner in Laredo were literally dumped off at the ranch gate as Rudy drove up the road to a job at Luis Lozano's ranch. It turned out he used me as a reference to Luis and Luis as a reference to me.
"Can you lend me a shovel?" one of the crew members asked me after being left off by Torres. Not only did they not have tools for the foundation work, they were left there without water, and they didn't know squat about foundation work. I later paid someone else handsomely for the work to be done. But not before the Greywolf outfit tore into the water lines around our house several times, reconnecting tuberia in ways that made leaks spring like fountains in unexpected places, and not before they made a mess of such proportions that I asked Mr. Torres to stop working on my property.
I remember so well one of the vehicles that brought some of Greywolf's workers out here -- an old truck seething burnt oil and radiator heat, an old vehicle with broken head lamps, broken turn signals, expired plates.
What a grim experience -- a deposit paid up-front and the daily aggravation of knowing the work was never moving along, and finally the realization that it had been money poorly spent, that I had been duped.

Work Hard, Fly Right? Misery and time and money poorly spent. That's how I would sum up a recent Continental Airlines flight to Dallas, which as many of you know, stops first in Houston. Ditto for the return flight. My business in Dallas was over at 2 p.m. but the only flight available to me was an evening flight, a flight delayed for takeoff by rainstorms. That delay caused me to miss my connecting flight from Houston to Laredo. Had we not sat on a runway in Houston for more than 30 minutes before disembarking, I might have made my flight to Laredo.
Continental officials told me they could not retrieve my luggage, but changed their minds when I made a berrinche as only a tired and irritable person from Laredo can do. I got my luggage and waited at Houston International until my sister Amanda could leave her own birthday party in not-too-nearby Angleton, Texas to come for me. It was midnight before she came and about 2:30 a.m. when I went to sleep at the Best Western in Angleton. Besides incurring the expense of a room, I had to rent a car to get back to Laredo.
Continental wanted to reimburse me only for the Houston-Laredo leg of the trip, telling me that was the unused portion. I told them I would not have been in Houston had their airline not placed me there on a trip home. Though they refunded the entire Dallas-Laredo part of the trip, they would not make good on the $200 bucks I spent on lodging and a rent car, despite the fact that other passengers were given a coupon for lodging at a nearby hotel.
Did I mention the rental went flat?