In the bathroom, for example, we needed towels and a bath mat. There was a single roll of toilet paper, but we knew that that wouldn’t last forever. Grabbing a pad and pen, I started to make a list as we walked through the house:
Sheets
Blanket
Bedside Reading Lights
Nightlights
Towels
Wash cloth
Bath mat
Bar Soap
Toothpaste
Shampoo
Toilet Paper
Paper Towels
Plates
Cups
Silverware
Bowls
Food
Our list-making was interrupted by a knock on the door. We hadn’t even closed the door, so the knock was mostly an attention-getting move. We were already headed that way, so it only took us a few steps to get to the door. We found a middle-aged Latino woman who greeted us.
“Hola. La señora said to expect you this morning. Welcome to California. Did you have a good trip?”
“Yes, quite good, actually. Long, though.”
“Sí. I’ve never made the trip, but I’ve heard others tell of the many days it takes. In my home country you can drive from one coast to the other and back again in the same day.”
“Where are you from?” I asked, hoping that it was okay to ask such a question. I figured that since she had introduced the subject I was probably safe.
“Panama.”
We chitchatted for a minute, but then she got down to business. “We got everything set up as la señora requested. We moved a bed out here and got everything cleaned. My son painted the walls several weeks ago so that it could air out before you got here. La señora will be home late tonight, but she wanted me to check in with you and see that you had arrived okay before I left for the day.”
“What type of work does she do?” Bill asked, since neither of us knew anything about our new landlady.
“She is some movie studio hotshot. I don’t really know where or what exactly she does. She doesn’t tell, and I certainly don’t ask. Her deal with me is that I work when she’s not here and I’m gone when she is here. That’s what she wants, and it works for me.”
Bill did have one thing we needed. “Can you tell us where we can find two things: a grocery store, and a place to buy some household things like sheets, towels, pillows, things like that?”
She gave us the names of three different grocery stores in the immediate area along with directions to each. She drew up a simple map and put three big X’s on the map to indicate where each store was located. For the household things she sent us to Target. The GPS would get us there and hopefully back again.
Our first visitor, having fulfilled her obligation, took her leave. We turned back to our list, made a few more notations, but quickly realized that we didn’t need a list so much as we needed to walk up and down the aisles of a store and grab everything that we saw that we’d need. After conferring, we decided that now was as good a time as any, so we got back into the car. Now that was cruel, to get back in the car after spending a week in the vehicle getting here. We decided to tackle the most distant thing first, so I programmed the address for the Target store into the GPS.
Surprising both of us, we found the store without getting lost once or having the little device tell us that it was “recalculating.” I really did hate hearing the damned thing tell us that. It took two carts, but we got everything on our list, including some of the food things we needed since this Target store had grocery items as well. We knew that we’d need more things tomorrow, once we got settled in, but we had everything we’d need for today. Of course, in addition to the things we needed, we also picked up a few little treats that we wanted. I mean, really, Starburst candies were a necessity of life, in my opinion. And microwave popcorn surely qualified.
We had two Target gift cards that my mom had given us before we left home. That covered about half of our purchases, but it still left a hefty balance. I do believe that we surprised the clerk when we paid for the rest of our purchases with cash. I don’t know if she’d ever seen that much cash all in one place at one time. Another thing that was high on our To Do list was to find a bank and get ourselves financially established, get a checking account, get some money deposited, get an ATM card and hopefully at least a debit card that could serve as a credit card and allow us to not carry so much cash around with us.
Loading all of our loot into the car, we reprogrammed the GPS and easily got back home. Our afternoon was taken up with putting things away, washing and drying our new sheets and then making our bed, getting the bathroom set up, and putting the food away in the kitchen. We took a break and had a quick sandwich for a late lunch, of course realizing in the process that we needed several more things from the grocery store.
When I had a moment between tasks around the house, I called my mom and told her that we had arrived and made our first supply run to Target. We had talked every day during our journey out here, but she was most relieved to hear that we had made it to our new home and were starting to get settled. She asked us to take pictures of everything and send them to her as soon as possible. When I was done talking with her, she asked to talk to Bill, which was typical—she was treating him very much like another son, which was very sweet. I wasn’t jealous. Bill had had such a rough life and such a nonfunctioning mom himself that if mine could fill in in some way, I certainly wasn’t going to stand in the way of that happening.
“Do you want to try to go to one of the grocery stores nearby this afternoon and pick up a few more things, or would you rather wait and do that tomorrow?” Bill asked me.
I had sat on the sofa to call my mom, and he had joined me when he talked with her. It did feel good, and while we both were heavily inclined to stay put, we decided to do this one additional task and get it out of the way. Using the directions our first visitor had left us—I really should have asked her for her name!—we easily found the first store. Bill wanted to see all three before we picked one so we drove by the other two as well. They all looked pretty similar in size to me, so we tossed a mental coin and picked the one whose name we had never seen or heard of before.
Another store, another full cart, but a lot of it was nonperishable stuff that we needed but hadn’t bought, like dishwasher detergent, dish soap for the kitchen sink, the paper towels that we forgot at Target. We got some fresh fruit and vegetables and a bunch of frozen things to hold us until we could talk and figure out if either of us could cook and what we wanted to try to do about food.
By the time we got back home from that run and got everything put away, we were both dragging. We had covered an entire continent over the last week—I guess we had earned the right to be tired.
I made us some iced tea, which I put in our new, fancy ninety-nine-cent plastic cups (we bought four of them, living life on the wild side). With our tea in hand, we took a walk out to look at the pool and to check out the grounds of the house while there was still some light left to see by. We had been so overwhelmed the first time that we really had missed a lot.
It turned out that the house sat on a very sizable lot and was for the most part sheltered from the neighboring houses—at least our little house was. I couldn’t speak for the views from the upstairs of the big house. At the pool, it was almost as if we were the only two people on Earth. We were in a city with millions and millions of people, and yet it was so quiet and peaceful here. I loved it! My mind was a million miles away in deep thought when I felt Bill nudge me with his shoulder.
“Hey,” he said, smiling at me. “Kiss me.”
So I did. Hey, I’m not stupid. When a gorgeous man asks me to kiss him, I can assure you that I see no reason to object. We stood looking at the large swimming pool, the stone patio that surrounded it, and the view of the Pacific Ocean off in the distance. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky. It was a good day.
Our first night in our new home we heated up one of our frozen options and sat dow
n to eat it by the side of the pool. It was amazing to me that our landlady had this magnificent pool and she didn’t use it. I could easily see us spending hours, either in the pool or beside it at one of the tables or on one of the chairs that she had set up.
We were both exhausted. The accumulation of the travel, the monotony, the excitement, not to mention the bad mattresses we had experienced in our last two motel stops on the drive out here, all contributed to an overwhelming sense of fatigue. We both were beat. So we decided, why fight it? Just give in and go to bed, although I did sort of feel like my mother, going to bed at nine o’clock at night. I could handle this once or twice, but I certainly did not want to make a habit of going to bed at this hour.
Taking advantage of our beautiful bathroom, we both showered some of the road weariness off before climbing into our new bed under our new sheets.
“Oh, this is nice,” Bill said as he lay down on the mattress for the first time. I had just come out of the shower and was toweling myself off. The sight of my boyfriend sprawled out on the bed looking all relaxed and gorgeous was one of the wonders of the world.
“Yes, I have to agree,” I said.
“How can you tell?” he asked me. “You’re not even in bed yet.”
“I can see my gorgeous man quite nicely from right here, thank you very much. And yes, he is mighty fine.” I jumped on the bed, leaned over, and gave him a kiss. Bill reached his hands behind my head and gently pulled me down for a repeat. When that kiss ended, he looked up at me and smiled one of his killer smiles.
I simply said, “I am the luckiest man in the world.”
“Not true. That would be me, because I found you.”
“Sounds like a draw to me,” I conceded.
The light was turned off, and we were both sound asleep in less than a minute.
Chapter 6
Gainful Employment
THE next morning, we were up relatively early since we had gotten to bed early the previous evening. It was nothing my mother would have considered early, but it was plenty early for us. I woke with my boyfriend’s body wrapped around mine, just like I had found him the first night we ever slept together. I loved the feeling then, and I still did.
While we had a long list of things that we needed to do, those things were not necessarily as pressing as they had been the previous day. We found a bank first. When we walked in, the bank personnel seemed to have judged us as basic college students and didn’t seem to think we were worth their time. They quickly changed their mind when Bill produced a check for in excess of $100,000 to deposit into our new account.
When they saw the type of money we were talking about, they suddenly were much more interested in us and our business. We had entered the bank to open a checking account, but we left with both a checking account and an investment account—a safe investment account, all things considered, given the short-term nature of our needs. Even though I didn’t have anything like the money Bill had, I also opened a checking account. We had planned to open a joint checking account to hold all of our pooled resources, but Bill recommended that we not do that so that I would perhaps qualify for additional financial aid as a poor, independent, starving student with no money. As usual, his thinking was sound. While circumstances would not allow us to do this now, hopefully one day we would have some assets again and would be able to put them together in a joint account.
We left the bank immensely pleased with our accomplishments. We decided to go over to the campus and see if we could find out a few things about our classes and schedules for the fall semester, and also to see if there was any office that could help us find gainful employment. We were now, as far as the school was concerned, entirely on our own. We also needed to talk to the financial aid office to see what they could do for me in terms of tuition assistance.
Our trip to the campus was quick and easy; finding the various offices we needed, not so much. We finally got our schedules resolved for the fall semester, and then went off to tackle the financial aid issue. I didn’t think the school would be able to do anything much for me for the upcoming semester, but I was hoping that after that I would stand a better chance of qualifying for some assistance.
As I suspected, there wasn’t a lot they could do for me financially for the first semester. They were able to come up with a few thousand dollars of assistance, which certainly would help. But from the second semester onward, and definitely from the next fall semester onward, they would be able to do a great deal to help me. So my mission now was to find a job so that I could make enough money to survive until the second year. The person at the financial aid office sent us across campus to yet another office that handled student employment. There was such an office, but they were largely useless for my purposes, primarily offering jobs on campus that featured just a few hours of work per week at ridiculous rates. We left the campus to go find lunch and talk all of this over.
One thing we had failed to purchase yet was a way to make coffee in the morning, and Bill loved coffee, so when he spotted a Starbucks coffee shop on our way home, he asked if we could stop. The place wasn’t especially crowded. That was a first—these places always seemed packed with people camped out, working on their laptops, taking advantage of the free Wi-Fi Starbucks offered.
Bill got his coffee and sat inhaling the aroma with a look of near ecstasy on his face. Wait a minute! I was supposed to be the only one who could put that look there! I had competition! No, this would not stand!
I got an iced tea and a scone. I’d never had a scone before, but it looked interesting so I thought why not. As we sat and talked over our morning, we agreed that we needed to find jobs. How we were going to go about that was another issue entirely.
As we were enjoying our first coffee and tea in California—or in any coffee shop ever, for that matter—the place became busier and busier. They were doing very brisk business, with people coming in and taking their beverages to go. The people working behind the counter were running constantly to try to keep up. And it was at that point that I saw it—a Help Wanted sign in the window. I directed Bill’s attention to the sign and raised my eyebrows, as if to say “So, what do you think?”
He didn’t respond immediately, but mulled it over for a moment. He shrugged, seeming less than enthused with the idea. When there was a break in the customer traffic I went up to the counter and asked for details about the job. The job was open immediately and started at $9.15 per hour. I talked it over with Bill and then filled out an application. After a brief interview, I was hired on the spot and told to report the next morning at 6:00 a.m. I was less than enthused with the early start time, but at least I’d be finished by 2:00 in the afternoon and have part of the afternoon to do something with Bill.
As we headed back home, I asked Bill what troubled him about the job.
“I just don’t want to do that,” he said.
“What do you want to do?”
“I don’t really know. I want to look around and see what my options are rather than grab the first thing that pops up in front of me.”
Which, of course, made me feel like an idiot for having done exactly that. But I got over that quickly, because I had a job. I was a mere high school graduate—the number of possibilities open to me were most likely not that huge. Overall, I was happy, despite Bill’s reluctance.
“So how are you going to find other options?” I asked.
“I don’t know yet. Just look around, I suppose.”
As it turned out, he didn’t have to look very far since a job came to him that evening, but I’ll get to that. After our coffee shop visit, Bill told me that he wanted to do something fun and that he had a good idea.
“Do we have our clothes on or off for this idea?”
“For this one, on.”
“Okay. What is it?”
“I want to see the ocean. I know we see it from our house, but I want to go and walk by it, touch it, feel it.”
The idea was wonderful. I don’t know wh
y I hadn’t thought of it earlier myself. We stopped at home, changed into shorts, T-shirts, and sandals and drove to the beach. It took us a little work to find the ocean. The GPS didn’t have a setting for Pacific Ocean, and we didn’t know the names of any beaches to give it to work with, so we had to find our way the old-fashioned way—by trial and error. We had a lot of errors, since streets that we thought would go where we wanted didn’t. But eventually we got there. It took us quite a bit of looking to find a place to park since it seemed to be a popular day for the beach, but eventually we did.
A look of sheer bliss appeared on Bill’s face as we took off our sandals and walked barefoot in the sand. I hung back a bit and snapped a few pictures of Bill. I had him turn around and pose for me with the ocean as backdrop. He hammed it up a good deal, striking several faux muscle man poses. When he pulled off his T-shirt it worked a lot better, since he did have muscles from all of our farm supply store work. And as a track person, his legs were like tree trunks. Oh, how I loved licking my way up those legs. The calves…. Okay. Where was I? Oh yes, Bill, muscles, water.
He tossed me his shirt and took off running toward the water. I got a bunch more pictures of him entering it, him looking shocked at how cold the water was, him jumping back out. He tried again, but no, it was still cold.
I hadn’t been paying much attention to anything around us while I was busy taking Bill’s picture, so I practically jumped when I heard a voice right beside me. “Hey, little dudes. Want me to take a picture of the two of you together?”
At first I was skeptical, thinking it could just be a ploy to get his hands on my camera, but I looked the guy over. He looked like someone who hung out at the beach a good deal. He was muscled, tanned, toned, and gorgeous. And for some reason he just struck me as real, if that makes any sense. So I handed him my camera after pointing to the shutter button and ran over to stand beside Bill.
Go West Young Man Page 7
