Postcards From Past Homes – Part III

January 1st, 2012 § 1 Comment

I’ve struggled all my life with my sleep pattern. If it can be called that at all. If you were to graph the duration, start and end times of my night’s sleep the lines would look like the currency graph of a country that goes in and out of war. There are the odd days where I go into perfectly deep sleep at 10:30 pm and wake up fresh as a lily at 7:30 am. But in the months that go by between two such days I wake up not fully slept or overslept anywhere between 8:45 am and noon and rushing around to get a shower and brush in before zooming off to work.

I have no recollection of the night before the morning I flew out to California to interview with a major Silicon Valley firm who had responded to my online job application. All I remember is the knot of anxiety in my chest which underscored by a heavy tiredness from not sleeping enough manifested in a dull ache around the sockets of my eyes. My friend had picked me up from my East 8th street apartment and dropped me to Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport. I vaguely remember was running to the boarding area and the airline employees rushing me through the gate. They were smiling and joking about how another two minutes and they would have left without me. That would have been bad. Really bad. The said Silicon Valley firm had arranged to have me flown over to their headquarters for a one-on-one interview. Missing the flight would possibly have meant making a deal-breakingly bad impression even if by some chance they would agree to book me another flight.

I landed at Norman Y. Mineta San Jose International Airport and in the 5 minutes it took me to get out, I bought my first ever cup of Dunkin Donuts coffee. I remember it being flavorful, sweet and satisfying. It pumped my blood with the desperately needed sugar and jolted me into a somewhat coherent state of mind. The driver of the Lincoln towncar was an enormous white man with a kind face and a comb-over wearing a black suit. At the end of the 10 minute ride to Santa Clara I fumbled in my pockets for cash and fingered what I knew was a $5 bill. I hesitated to make a decision with my slow, lagging brain. I knew I couldn’t ask for change in return. He wished me a good day and got in the car and drove off. I felt cheap and small.

The interview was unlike any other I’d been in. They were polite, unpretentious and friendly. Not bitter sharks trying to trip me up with a clever puzzle or drilling me about each bullet on my resume. By the end I was kind of even having fun talking to these people. I received an email about a month later informing me that they were interested in hiring me. Unable to control my emotions, I had had to get up from my chair at the lab and pace around for a few minutes to let the excitement settle down.

Cupertino, CA was posh and manicured compared to our dusty, rickety neighborhood in Tempe, AZ. My cousin had been kind enough to let me move into her place where she lived with her husband and 3 children. They had held on to their rental home instead of trying to buy a bigger house elsewhere because of the elite Cupertino school district. It was cramped and I felt my presence weigh heavily on the household. A million toys were perpetually scattered all over the house. The youngest one had dismantled several household items that lay around like relics of a ransacked home. A clock with the minutes hand bent into an “L” shape, a fan with its front grill removed, an old smartphone with its screened covered in a dry and caked coating composed of dribble and macaroni and cheese, a dead laptop with several keys ripped out to expose red stub buttons and green circuitry underneath. To lighten the impact of my presence, I would run errands and pick up the kids from school. The parking lot of the Garden Gate Elementary School was a sight to behold around 2 pm. It seemed like someone had taken a picture of a school in Hyderabad and replaced all the Maruti Suzukis with Toyota Corollas, the dusty courtyard with a lush green lawn, the rough, patchy road with well finished pavement and trash and debris with perfectly stenciled bright yellow and white lines guiding traffic on the street. What was not replaced however was clusters of Indian mothers in their nighties being excitedly chatty with each other before their children came running out of the classrooms. I observed them carefully and mentally placed them on a spectrum of cultural assimilation. You could tell the ones that had physically moved the US but not made an iota of effort to actually look around and see whats happening. They wore frilly nighties, had braided hair and made no fuss about weaving through the backed up cars to cross the street paying absolutely no heed and rendering no visual apology to the motorists. The slightly more integrated ones wore jeans and a sweatshirt and drove up in an MPV van. If they caught sight of their children before they actually got to the school curbside, they would stop dead center in the middle of the parking lot, get out and yell over the noise to their kids who would take the cue and come running and be shoved into the backseat. They would then make an illegal u-turn and drive off instead of driving around to exit from the designated spot thus betraying the incompleteness of their integration into American ways. The most assimilated mothers of all would be in their running clothes and often have a Martha Stewart haircut. They would wait under a tree out of everyone’s way and chat with sophistication with an Asian mother or even a Caucasian second-grade teacher.

I found my 3rd Street apartment on Craigslist. A super suburban townhouse in Santa Clara. I was mortally afraid of living alone so I picked a house that had 4 rooms each occupied by a different tenant. The thought of having roommates was comforting. One of the rooms, I discovered, was not for rent. It was the commuter room of the husband of the Asian landlady who used it as a crashpad when he was in town. He was rarely ever home though and it lay mostly empty. One night I saw him smoking out in the patio and asked him what he did for a living.

“I sell staff”. He spoke with a thick Chinese accent.

“What do you sell?”

“All kind of staff.”

The other roommate was a 19 year old, sickly thin, pale Chinese girl who had a phone attached to her head with scotch tape it seemed. She never came out of her room. Months after I moved in, one night when I was eating by myself at the dining table I saw her doing the dishes and over the noise of the tap I heard her sobbing. She missed her boyfriend. I promised her I would cook her a meal one of these days. She nodded with the typical Chinese politeness that implied that she appreciated my kindness but would never take me up on the offer. The other roommate was marginally more social. She wore spectacles with large black plastic frames and loved shoes. Her shoes filled the entire shoe closet downstairs which was supposed to be shared by everyone. I once came home to find the most enormous crab I have ever seen sitting in our sink submerged in hot water. He was big enough to take up the entire sink and one of his claws opened and closed slowly like some kind of creepy mechanical toy from an eighteenth century home display. I’ve never been shocked like that in my entire life. I had come home in a rush, turned on the tap in the kitchen sink and blindly stuck my hand underneath the running water only to look down and discover that my middle finger had knocked against a hard, slimy surface. It was her boyfriend’s father’s birthday and they were trying to keep it alive until the evening since fresh crab tasted better than dead crab. Even though I had lived with her for months now, I had to suppress the urge to ask whether the hours of psychological torment the crab underwent remaining half alive in the sink did anything for the flavour.

Most of my colleagues were married with families. The unmarried ones hopelessly socially inept. There was no social orientation, no effort to include me in the team. Business as usual. I became progressively more depressed as my long distance relationship floundered like a roller coaster. This was not the life of freedom I had imagined California to be. I answered a Craigslist ad titled “Learn Improv Comedy for Free!”. It turned out the group rehearsed in open air at Mitchell Park in Palo Alto on Thursdays. I landed up there on a Winter evening. It was completely dark and the park was huge. I hesitated for a few moments and considered that perhaps it was a trap when an elderly, pale looking lady with petrified eyes looked at me through the darkness. She had her hands wrapped around herself for warmth.

“Are you here for the improv?”

I stayed with the group ThursProv for two years and we performed in many theaters across the Bay Area. Most of them were tiny basements or backrooms behind a front business like a bar or gallery. Our culminating performance was a 25 minute set as part of the “Night of the Improv Rising Starts” at the Eureka Theater in North Beach. I made many friends over the course of those years and started to develop the first signs of a social life. Of a life, really. Enough to get a foot in the door. Now, I could actually choose a life that I wanted, not just weather what came my way.