#Chapter 14

[Scrap #1] At the end I chose Berkeley was because of money. Or rather lack of them. Being admitted as a transfer student gave me a few extra months to figure out what I was going to do. Barry kept saying he was finally going to get a loan so he can repay me the rest of the money he owed me. About fifteen thousand dollars. Apparently, he found a bank manager at Wells Fargo he was going to approve it in just a matter of day. Or weeks. The amount would be enough to pay for the first semester and leave some more for the living expenses. Later, once he got back on his feet I could be driving back to Los Angeles and work remotely from Berkeley. Of course, none of that was going to happen and that check for eleven thousand dollars was never going to clear. But I decided to ignore it and continue living the dream of an artist. For the work that I did get pay I booked tickets to Boston. With Barry's camera in hand, to the sound of Raspberry Beret I waved Tommy goodbye and departed on my first trip to the East Coast.

[Scrap #2] I arrived into the 42nd Street just before five in the morning. It was still dark outside.  I had spent the last five hours on Greyhound from Boston and I was tired. The man seating to my right kept snoring and falling asleep on my shoulder so instead of getting some rest I had to stay vigilant trying to direct his head towards the window. The Natural History Museum was going to open soon so after absorbing the morning air of New York and figuring out how to use subway I made my way to the place and took a short nap in a dark room projecting a film about worms. Boston had been great. A bit foreign at the beginning but then more friendly, especially having found out that half of the population seemed to have some sort of Polish connection. I did the Red Trial, saw Boston Commons and took a ferry across the bay. The hostel owner's father was of course Polish as well. I talked about war in Iraq over a bottle of beer with one of the guests. He called me a scholar and claimed to have been a former speech writer of Bill Clinton.  

[Scrap #3] The next time I fell asleep was the subway heading to Wall Street. I woke up in Brooklyn and ended up walking by to New York by the bridge. I was going to spend my first night in New York at a hostel close to Harlem. It wasn't too bad apart from a distinct smell and the sounds of human bodies. The next day I was moving to Hilton just opposite of the former site of the World Trade Center. This is where Tommy joined me and we moved to our room on the 30th floor overlooking what was now a concrete whole left over from the buildings. Tommy was tired and needed to sleep so we didn't get to see the Empire State Building until late at night. Of course, I did not find out what happens to the ducks in winter. With Tommy gone I boarded a morning bus to Philadelphia. I had the Philly cheese and walked to the site where Tom Hanks used to work as a lawyer. I woke up to a humming of air conditioning and the sight of cloudy skies outside. My head hurt from all the wine I had a night before.

[Scrap #4] Sean I think was his name. We met an evening before and headed to get a dinner and some pretty expensive wine. I wasn't paying. I wore a white dotted shirt and fully enjoyed absorbing all the compliments coming my way. He worked in Delaware, something to be with banking. Later on his friend would join us making jokes about smoking pot. When the bill came I didn't even pretend to try paying. Triple digits was all I saw on the bill. When the train stopped at Washington DC all the headache was gone. I was going to stay at a hostel again and meet Ania, my high school friend who was doing one of the work holidays programs at a nearby theme park. We walked around downtown DC in the middle of the night and drank wine of the stairs of the hostel. The next day I took a train to Baltimore and caught a plane back to Los Angeles. We drove straight to West Hollywood after David picked me up from the airport. I had to stop by Wells Fargo to get some money. When I checked my account balance it showed exactly zero dollars. I was broke.

[Scrap #5] The work at Barry's continued as usual. I would come to his house and sit at the table in the living room. I would still be working on Flash and also doing some edits in Final Cut Pro. A year or so earlier Tomek had asked me to buy him a video camera so I had some old tapes from where I lived in Palm Desert. Me waking up early to catch the SunLink to Riverside or Akira looking at the camera driving me back from Palm Springs. Scenes from Los Angeles, Universal Studios. Rainer driving from Manhattan Beach to the sounds of Foo Fighters. Happy people. I had met Witold and Marek, two Polish entrepreneurs who were going to make millions selling diet pills and I was going to help drive the sales through a website. They were very impressed by the ease of my English conversations. Barry would occasionally come out with some money from his brother in Victorvile or an old aunt from Marilyn side. But the clock was ticking and that Romanian bank manager from Wells Fargo, Snejana I think was her name, was just a character that we all wished to believe that really existed.

[Scrap #6] I packed the car with boxes, golf clubs I bought with Diego and that bear that Tommy got me for my birthday when we drove to the Grand Canyon. It was late when we entered the park so we slept in the car at one of of the parking lots and arrived to Las Vegas one day late. Two years earlier, I drove the same route with Akira. Late at night we drove through Highway 89, managed to get to Prescott before running out of gas and later, when the sun was already up, we got pulled over by police for driving four miles per hour too fast. On those two occasions it was a rental but now I finally had my own car. Kamil wanted to get rid of his Honda Accord so he convinced me to buy it from him for five thousand dollars to be paid in instalments over the next ten months. A silver station wagon with a manual transition. We stood in at the back alley of Amy's place admiring and testing my new acquisition. On my first ride I took the [101] to the valley to see Eric and show off my new acquisition.

[Scrap #7] The Zoot Suit Riots is what I learned about during my last months in LA. Because I couldn't leave the States for more than six months without losing my visa rights, I had to take additional class and stay in Santa Monica over the summer. It was the outfit I suggested to Barry we should be wearing once we get the funding. He tried to convince me to stay and enrol into his own university. I kindly refused and instead took from him a check, with eleven thousand dollars written on it. A check that was never going to clear. Amy was gone to Turkey and I shared the place with Zola, her daughter who lived in the other room. She once fed me Mahi fish inspired by the South Beach Diet. For Amy's departing flight we drove to the airport in a taxi but now I could pick her up in my new Honda. On the way home she would leave forward and then backwards every time it lost the monumentum while I changed the gears. I never told her about being accepted to Berkeley. I feared the disappointment so instead, I said I needed to go back home.

[Scrap #8] It was a movie called Vincent that I watched when I decided to choose Berkeley. A young boy who dreamed of becoming an astronuat. I traded one dream for another, a bigger one. After leaving the 2nd street cinema I took the Blue Bus to Westwood. It was already dark when I got to the campus. The same place visited with Akira on our first trip to Los Angeles on that autumn October afternoon when the sun was slowly getting ready to set. I walked around the buildings and touched the walls as to apologise for the choice I had made. This was the place I dreamed of when picking up my high school diploma. The same place I was trying to project my body to. I had come here with Ranier to take a photo in front of the Bruin and with Diego when we sat in front of the library and he would tell me about the zombies walking around the ground ahead of the final exams. I came here with Thansamay in those days when Reagan died, when he pulled down my trousers and tore them down. The red brick buildings I was not going to attend.  

[Scrap #9] One of the conditions of being accepted into Berkeley was that my semester was not going to start until Spring. I did try to negotiate by writing an email from Santa Monica Library but the response had never come. I didn't want to seem ungrateful so I humbly accepted the offer. That meant that I was going to spend the next three months in Poland and not come back to California until early January. The autumn in Poland was rainy, dark and cold. I spent the days between reading the Count of Monte Christo in Tomek's old room (mine had been converted to a bedroom) and the living room. There I attended a daily ritual of drinking coffee with my parents and reporting on the daily movements in the stock price of Google. The TV was filled with the pictures and sounds of Ukraine's Orange Revolution. I was lying on my bed staring at the bill that had just arrived from Berkeley. [Fourteen thousand seven hundred and fifty two] dollars. Tomek had volunterred to lend me the first ten thousand and there was an option of instalments which meant that at least I could survive for the first few months.

[Scrap #10] The Bay Area was not that much warmer than Poland. I was picked up from the curb of the arrivals of the SFO by Darren Yip. He drove a dark [Honda CRV] and we had never met in person. He was an international student from Hong Kong and also used to study in Santa Monica College. That, and a few chats, was all the connection we had. Despite that, I was going to spend the first few nights at his place in Oakland and then we were going to move to a two bedroom apartment in Albany. There we would become roommates for the foreseeable future. The place was on a hill overlooking a town and the BART overground tracks. Darren's room was going to have a balcony and mine will have the bathroom with shower. We met the landlord, a young Chinese guy, in the living room. We went over the contract and the place was ours. The apartment was bare. Daren was going to rent a U-Haul and move his things to the living room. I had to get a bed from a local store on the University Avenue and fly to Los Angeles to get my car.