CHAPTER ELEVEN
I met Barbara at a restaurant, through a friend of a friend. She was an attractive lady in her thirties. She was constantly surrounded by a group of friends, both men and women, but somehow she was interested in me. We exchanged phone numbers and began to hang out together.
I was still only eighteen and couldn’t legally drink alcohol in the US, something that I enjoyed with my high school buddies back home. Barbara could get me into bars on charm alone; she was a well-known customer and a fixture on the local social scene, so I swam along in her wake and without anyone questioning my presence. It was a lot of fun but frightening at the same time; when you’re as broke as I was, every social situation is a minefield. What if something suddenly costs money that you didn’t know you would need and can’t afford to spend? Somehow, though, things always seemed to work out.
It was a giddy, exciting sensation, like I had been inducted into a secret club. Frankly, it was thrilling just to be around other people after spending so many days riding my bicycle through town alone. The human spirit can only survive on beautiful scenery for so long all alone. Plus I was hanging with Americans in California. At the time, for a Turkish immigrant teenager like myself, there seemed to be nothing cooler than that.
Barbara took me to some house parties, where we played darts and pool, and as a teen I enjoyed the fact that her girlfriends were cute and flirtatious. My English skills were improving, although very slowly, but my visa was coming to its end. I worked up the nerve to confess to Barbara that I would have to go back home when my visa expired. She was disappointed and, after several long discussions, we decided to get married so that I could stay. I think she also liked her friends to see that she could attract a younger man. We got married in a simple ceremony at a hotel on the beach in Monterey, with just two friends by my side. I was very nervous — I hadn’t even told my mother! — but proud, too, to be with an American girl.
I moved in with Barbara and her roommates after the wedding. We all lived in their small condo a few blocks away from downtown Monterey, and it was exactly the kind of fun lifestyle I had envisioned before arriving in the US. I spent my days and nights drinking beer, playing darts, shooting pool, and hanging around bars with my new American wife. Finally, life in California was becoming what I had imagined all along — or so I thought.
I got my driver's license and my US work permit, both of which seemed like huge steps forward for an immigrant boy. Sometimes I would just sit and stare at my California driver’s license, hardly able to believe that it was real. Of course, I didn’t have the money to buy a car, but a friend or a coworker would let me drive their car sometimes. I got a speeding ticket within two weeks of getting my license, pulled over for driving at fifty-two miles per hour in a thirty-five zone.
I got quite a few tickets for traffic violations in the first ten years of living in this country, mainly for speeding and rolling through stop signs, and always felt surprised when a police car would come out of nowhere and pull me over. It would take me many years to become sufficiently mindful of police officers on the road in America.
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