The great Polansky

‘Hello Lenox. Listen, I’ve just heard that poor old Ric is dead’. It’s Pedro del Puntazo on the line. We talk a little as we remember Polansky, a giant among the Mojácar foreigners.

Ric Polansky came to the pueblo from Mason City, Iowa, in the late 1960s. His brother Paul had invited him over. Paul worked with a businessman from Madrid called Manolo de Ayo in a lonely place called Lomos del Cantal on the then undeveloped coast of Mojácar. It is funny how times change. In those days, few people were interested in living so far away from town – and on the playa too. You could pick up land then for a peseta per square meter. Paul was a very blond, tall and attractive man whose job was to look for buyers for the houses that Manolo Ayo had just built and charm them into buying a place. Ric joined the company and shortly afterwards, he and his brother took over the business.

It is remembered as the ‘golden era’ of Mojácar, at least by those who lived it. Years later Paul left the area and went to live first in London, then in the USA and now as a writer and poet, he commutes between Serbia and Italy. Ric on the other hand never wanted to leave Mojácar and he remained focused on the construction business which he (and Paul) had now expanded to the Cortijo Grande in Turre. Years later, with the rise of the Mojaquera families and the extraordinary opportunities and demand in the construction business, Ric complained: "I go to the town hall with a project and I have to wait a year, while other folk get theirs rubber-stamped right away." His business faltered and he discovered that he was obliged to deal with one bank-manager after another, sometimes escorting one out the back door as another waited at the front. He told me that he had to juggle mortgages on his properties, to use some as guarantees to lift the loads off of others. Tricky times, he would tell me.

I knew Ric from the beginning, when, as they say, he had all his hair. He was an active person: he played tennis and golf and he travelled a lot, especially to Peru, where he explored with the best of them, looking for ancient cities and other relics from the Incas. He would tell great tales about his adventures. I remember one where he was caught in a gold mine hundreds of miles from nowhere together with some thoroughly dangerous people and Ric with a broken leg.

In Spain his great passion was bullfighting. He knew many matadors and was well known to local aficionados. He never missed the bullfights in Almería, and with his marked resemblance to Hemingway, chubby, bearded, clutching a wine-skin and wearing a red beret, his presence was highly considered and appreciated in the ring. One day, invited by Canal Sur TV to a recording, he came face to face with the famous Granada bullfighter El Fandi. "You do very well, but you have to get closer to the bull," he said in front of the cameras to the shocked champion. His Spanish was not of the best, but for some reason, everyone always understood him perfectly.

Sometimes he would invite me to go and have a curry lunch. Curry, as some Spaniards may not know, is an Indian culinary invention very popular with the British, and the spicier the better. Its great value is that you have to drink large glasses of beer to alleviate the burning in the throat. There are a considerable number of Indian restaurants in Mojácar and Turre, aimed strictly for the palates of the Saxons. Ric in later years could not drive due to health reasons, but who still liked to have a pint or three, would call me (he would bellow down the phone, 'Say Lenox, fancy a curry?') so I would pick him up from his house - a huge mansion located in privileged heights on the Mojácar road towards Carboneras - to go eat. Well eat and drink. Ric, by now very fat and in need of two sticks to help prop him up, hardly fit in the car and he resolutely refused to wear a seat belt. It is a wonder to me how I always managed to complete my run and return home without a fine after a titanic meal of beer-dipped curry. Over those meals, and the brandies that followed, we spent happy times as Ric always had something outrageous to tell. He wrote up his adventures in many articles which appeared in the local press, both in English and Spanish. The reader never knew what he was going to read, but he knew he was going to laugh.

The last time I was at his house, there was a team from Antena3 TV recording a piece about the Mojácar hippies in the sixties.  Ric, who had never smoked a joint in his life and in those days tended anyway to look like a Coca-Cola swilling Mormon, and I, who was fifteen years old by 1970 when the period in question had come to an end, were perhaps not the most appropriate people to deal with the subject, but we took advantage of our imagination and we gave the reporters what they wanted, that is, orgies, cannabis parties, alcohol ... and whatever else we could invent.

Ric had three children. Jobi, the second, died young a few years ago. He also had two adorable twin grandchildren from his first-born, Luke. He liked to show his prized photos of the little brothers running around Alaska, where they live. His youngest son, Micah, who works in New York, is a passionate marathon runner. And of course, there is Ric's wife, Karen, who for many years has led the direction of Paws, the animal protector in Mojácar.

Ric was one of the greatest of all the peculiar people who arrived in the pueblo in the early days, where everything still needed to be done. He was very visible and boisterous, quite impossible to ignore when present. Latterly he had been in poor health and he preferred not to be seen by his friends. But every day, on Facebook, he gave us a sign that he was still alive.

With the coronavirus we will not be able to go to his funeral. So I must look forward to the day when we can raise a memorial to the Great Ric Polansky. My friend Ric.

Traducido del original en Almería Hoy aquí.