I didn’t have a lot of money when I left Texas and Mr. Wonderful let me stay with him in his apartment until I was able to find a job and a place of my own to live.
I had been in New York for about two weeks when I had both. I was hired at the first job I applied for. The job was working for the company that did the typesetting for a big Hollywood newspaper. I was impressed and so was my family.
Before I left Texas, I wrote my resume and had it printed. Then I went around to all my former bosses and some of the customers that I had worked with in the advertising and printing business and asked them for letters of reference. So, when I walked in for my first interview, I had the resume and five letters of reference. Later, the person who interviewed me told me that they had been impressed with how prepared I was. I was amazed. How could someone in New York be impressed by me? I was just a little girl from Iowa.
After I found my job, Mr. Wonderful took me to a rental office and I found a place to live. I rented a room in a house on Long Island that was just a few miles from where Mr. Wonderful lived.
The relationship with Mr. Wonderful seemed to be going okay for a while, but then I started noticing some things that didn’t fit. He was always going out with his friends or busy all of a sudden. One night when I was staying at his apartment I could hear his landlord talking to his wife in the apartment below about how he had someone else in his apartment the night before.
The friendship with his ex-girlfriend had moved back to being more than just friendship and he was juggling seeing both of us. I confronted him about it and that was the first time that we broke up. The breakup didn’t last long. He seemed to like being with both of us and I had convinced myself that if I showed him how wonderful I was, he would choose to stay with me. What a laugh.
My job was going great. I loved where I worked and I loved the people. Then technology stepped in and changed things. In 1990 the newspaper we did the typesetting for decided they were going to start producing their own type using computers. I was layed off because the company couldn’t afford to keep all of their employees without the business from the newspaper.
My layoff lasted about two weeks. The managing editor of the newspaper has told me to keep in touch. I called him one day to ask him if he knew anyone who was hiring. He told me to wait a few minutes and he would call me back. He called me back and told me to come into the offices in Manhattan for an interview. This was the next step in my grand adventure. My dream of New York had always included Manhattan and living on Long Island was getting boring. I wanted to be closer to Manhattan so I could go there whenever I felt like it.
After I got the job in Manhattan, I decided that I wanted to move out of the single room that I had been living in for three years. I moved further out on Long Island and the commute into Manhattan every morning took me two hours on the train.
The new apartment that I found was in the basement of a house. I loved the apartment, I loved the area where I was living, and I loved my landlords, but they weren’t very nice to each other. They used to come home late at night, slamming doors and yelling at each other. I lived there for nine months until I had had enough of being awakened with their yelling.
I started talking to some of the people that I was working with in Manhattan about where I should live. I had no clue about where to move after living on Long Island. One guy told me that I should move to New Jersey. I insulted him by replying that New Jersey smelled bad.
Then one of the editors told me to ask one of the secretaries and another part of my life changed. The secretary lived in Queens and she had a friend whose mother owned apartments that she rented out and she had two apartments available. I took the subway home with my friend and she introduced me to my future landlady. I fell in love with the area as soon as I saw it. The apartment that I found was about 1-1/2 blocks from the subway and there was a grocery store around the corner.
Mr. Wonderful and I had broken up just before I moved to Queens. I got tired of spending all the holidays by myself and I got tired of being with a man that thought it was okay to have two women that he was juggling and lying to all the time. I decided that it was better to be alone than to feel like I was only second best in someone’s life.
Living in New York has been one of the most wonderful experiences of my life. I thank God that he has allowed me to be here. I have grown and changed for the better in every way. I used to think that I had to go climb a mountain or live in a cave to find God. I found God in the crowded streets of Manhattan. He just needed to get me alone for a while so I could pay attention to all the wonderful things that he was showing me.
(To be continued ...)
© Pamela Sawyer, 2012
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