Los Angeles Chronicles #2
[1] There was a burning void that I needed to fill so while Sadam Hussein was being transferred to a prison, where he eventually was going to be hanged, I was getting ready for a date with Tommy. We met at the third street promenade and watched Last Samurai with Tom Cruise. He seemed neurotic and quite distant so I immediately fell in love with him. We would hang out usually on weekends with him telling me that he was not the right person for me and when he drove away to Santa Barbara for another week of his studies I sat on the bed and at my Santa Monica room and missed him terribly. I would call him before he even left the city limits just to talk to him for a bit longer. He always seemed cold but I knew that eventually he would be coming back. Finally, when in desperation I copied and pasted lyrics of Madonna's 'Crazy for you' addressing them to him in an email from one of the computers in the library, he suggested we should go for a trip. We drove to Palm Springs to visit Byran and spent a night at his house.
[2] While Tommy was still trying to decide whether he wants to commit to anything more serious or not I continued my voyages into the journeys of finding the real love from the local library just opposite of the dry cleaners. Amy kept refusing to let me use her washing machine, in fact she acted as if the machine did not exist, so every weekend I had to continue dragging the white basked full of clothes to the establishment located two long blocks away. And while my socks were getting dry I continued my desperate attempts of finding love on the computer terminal across the street. Sometimes I would also go for a walk in squares taking different combination of turns to eventually end up in the washing place only to do the journey again. Amy continued to smoke and my clothes continued smelling of cigarettes. That was not the only issue with the house. Apart from having to tell the Korean landlord that I was Amy's nephew from Turkey I also had to walk to a payphone located near the campus as Amy didn't have wifi and it would be too expensive to use cell phone to make international calls.
[3] There was another bedroom in the apartment and this one was occupied by Amy's daughter Zola. She was exclusively using the other second bathroom adjacent to her room while Amy and I continued sharing the one near my room. Amy would sleep either on the couch in the living room or in a makeshift bedroom in a closet underneath the building stairs. Zola at first was quite distant and kept referring to me as a student but eventually she warmed up a bit and called me 'Jack'. They did not seem to be close together. Amy was still very much Turkish, she watched her Turkish comedies brought by the satelite dish installed outside of the apartment while Zola worked in a local hospital and was all American. The father, now dead, was an American solider being stationed in Turkey and that was how he met Amy and eventually brought her to America. We had never talked much about him. On the first night after I moved in I showed Amy pictures of my father and seeing that he had a big of a belly, her eyes widened up, she smiled and unanomisaly declared that he must be a rich man.
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