CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
In 1998, after we had lived together for a couple of months, Metin moved out of the house we were sharing to live with his girlfriend. His friend Lauren, who owned the house, wanted to sell it, so it was time for me to find another place to live...again.
My mother came to visit around that time, too, and she brought my younger cousin Sercan with her. He was seventeen at that point, but he still seemed like the kid I had known in Izmir. Once again, Mom stepped in to help her son out. Together, we found a two-bedroom apartment about a mile from where I was living. It was in a building called the Scottsmen Apartments, and she put down the deposit.
I had been working at Macy’s for a little while and was barely surviving on the $6 an hour they paid (about $11 today). I thought about finding another job, but they were giving me forty hours a week, and my schedule was varied but not arduous, since it was a store that didn’t open extremely early or close extremely late. And there were aspects of it that I really liked. I got to put on nice clothes, which made me feel good, and meet a lot of people from all sorts of backgrounds.
Yes, the job was demanding — working in retail is hard and requires a lot of patience. Most of the customers I interacted with were nice, but every so often someone moody, snobby, or just plain hard to please would come in and make things difficult for me and the rest of the staff. On the other hand, there were times when I became bored because there were hardly any customers in the department I was assigned to that day. I would be there almost entirely alone, pacing the floor and folding and organizing the same stacks of clothes over and over.
After Mom and Sercan returned to Turkey, I became very depressed. I was all alone in a town where I really didn’t have many friends. A couple of the international students I had met during my visits from Sonora had already gone back to Turkey. Just as I had missed Karsiyaka when I first came to America, I now missed Sonora. I had become very familiar with this feeling of sadness by then. But it never got any easier to deal with.
It was becoming very difficult to afford my apartment — every month, it was a struggle to pay the rent on my own. I was afraid to turn on the air conditioner during the hot Fresno summer because I knew I couldn’t pay a high electric bill.
I had been in America for over seven years and I felt like I had not made much progress. In fact, it seemed like I was starting all over again every year, if not every few months. I didn’t even know what a savings account was, because I had been struggling from paycheck to paycheck the entire time I’d been in the United States.
One day, I saw an ad posted by three college students looking for a fourth roommate. I called the number on the flyer and we agreed to meet in person, a sort of job interview.
They lived in a nice, two-story house in a good part of town — with a pool table! — and our personalities meshed well, so they invited me to move in. I was very happy to begin living in a new place with roommates.
Mike, whose parents owned the house, was of Danish descent, Ken was from Southern California, and Chris had a Portuguese background, though he’d grown up in San Jose.
Both Mike and Ken ran track, Mike for Fresno State and Ken for Fresno City College. Chris was a huge fan of the Benfica soccer team from Lisbon, and he also attended Fresno State. They were all really nice guys and we became good friends very quickly. We also got along well with our neighbors who lived across the street, two of whom were swimmers for Fresno State. We would all get together often, especially during the holiday season.
Mike had a girlfriend named Melissa, too, who was at our house sometimes. One day I came home from Macy’s and there was a news crew interviewing her; out of respect, I stepped outside. Although I knew Melissa was an athlete, I would later learn that she was a competitive pole-vaulter who was training for the world championships. I will always remember Melissa as a humble and kind person.
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