CHAPTER TWELVE
It had been around five months and the $3,000 my parents had given me (which would be close to $7,000 today) was almost gone and I was struggling. I still remember how excited I was when I got my work permit in the mail and was able to start earning a paycheck in this new country.
My tourist days, which were often filled with loneliness and boredom, had consisted mainly of riding a $50 red bicycle I had gotten at Kmart along the Monterey Bay Coastal Trail, watching TV, and keeping a diary. But those days were over, and it was time to go to work now — that is, if anybody was willing to hire me. I started looking in the newspaper for work every day. I couldn’t work on cars, cook, do construction, farm, or paint, and had no knowledge about plumbing or electricity. I had almost no skill set to offer to an employer, and I also lacked something very important: the English language skills to communicate with others. What I did have, however, was an extreme determination and a willingness to do any type of hard work.
One of my first jobs was washing dishes at Carl’s Jr., a chain of restaurants that had launched in Anaheim, near Disneyland, in the 1950s and expanded all over California by the end of the 1980s. I can’t remember my first interview for my first-ever job in America. I have no idea what the person interviewing me asked or how I answered those questions with my fifty-word English vocabulary, but I was hired.
By the time my shift ended and I was clocking out, usually late at night, my clothes and shoes looked nothing like they did when I had arrived earlier in the day. We always mopped the floors at the end of the night, and I recall slipping and sliding on wet and greasy floors all the time and even falling a couple of times. Before I started working there, I had no way of anticipating how much grease would be all over me after a day at Carl’s Jr.
I will always remember Carl’s Jr. as my first employer in America, and to this day their Santa Fe chicken sandwich is one of my favorite sandwiches to eat.
As grateful as I was for having a job and earning a paycheck, I kept an eye on the newspaper for different opportunities. After working at Carl’s Jr. for a while, I found a job washing windows for a company called Spotless Windows. The owner appeared to be a hardworking man who was probably in his fifties, and I thought it was very nice of him to hire me, as I had no experience — I may have washed a window or two back in Turkey, but I didn’t know any more about it than the average person. I thought to myself, “How hard could it be?” but I still was very nervous and afraid that I might not be able to do what was expected of me.
The owner had two guys working for him who were a few years older than me, probably in their mid-twenties. One of them was in the army, stationed at Fort Ord, and both of them were married with kids. We would drive out to rich coastal towns like Carmel and Pebble Beach in a company truck and wash windows in expensive homes. Earning $6.25 an hour when the minimum wage was $4.25, riding in a truck on our way to jobs, jamming to “Long Train Runnin’” by the Doobie Brothers, all seemed like a dream.
The worries I had felt before, of having very little money, an uncertain future, and all the other challenges I faced in 1991 — all of these were eased in my mind by the mere fact that I was living and working in California, the place that had filled my dreams for so long, and by my early awareness of the power of hope. As long as I stayed hopeful that things would improve, that someday I would be able to bring my mom to live with me here, that I would someday be able to buy a cozy little home with a fireplace and two cats and a dog in the yard, I could maintain the drive and motivation that would be required if I was to “make it” as an immigrant in this new country.
Sitting beside the Pacific Ocean, Carmel is a very nice beach town next to Monterey. Carmel felt completely alien to me. It was like a town from a fairy tale, with its gorgeous homes, fancy cars, stately trees, and vast ocean views. As much as I enjoyed the scenery as I was driving to job sites and climbing out of the truck onto exquisitely maintained driveways, I knew I didn’t belong there. I was the help.
Mastering the technique of washing windows was no easy task, and I was always worried that I would screw something up. And sure enough, I became so nervous one day that on my way down the stairs of a beautiful, expensive home, I knocked over a bucket of soapy water, which emptied itself so fast that before I could even fully register what had happened, there were slippery suds everywhere. I was consumed with embarrassment. The guys training me didn't make a big deal out of it, but I could see that the woman who owned the house, who had been observing our work, was not very happy. Soon after that incident, the owner of Spotless Windows let me go, and I was back to job hunting again.
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