My blog

Getting a visa to the States wasn't easy back then. Despite that, the three of us, my girlfriend, my buddy and I decided to fill out the required forms and take them to a travel agency that would help us get visas. It was May. There was a heated campaign ahead of the June elections that were supposed to change everything, something we were completely unaware of and weren't really interested in. Our thoughts were occupied with the upcoming exam session of the ending second year of studies and looking for ideas for the upcoming vacation.

For some incomprehensible and unexplained reason, of the three of us, I was the only one allowed to enter America, and even though I was alone and couldn't afford a ticket, I knew I couldn't pass up this opportunity.

I remembered that three years earlier, when I turned eighteen, my mother, just in case, had given me unlimited power of attorney to her dollar account, where she had been saving up for a rainy day all her life, and since she had just gone away for some time and contact with her was difficult, so without her notice, I went to the bank and, feeling like a thief robbing my own mother, withdrew eight hundred American dollars.

It was an unimaginably huge pile of money, considering that at that time you could get a bottle of rye and juice at Peweks for one dollar.

The plane ticket to New York and back – an unforgettable pad of thin, glossy, colorful cards with a tracing paper backing – cost five hundred dollars, and I planned to spend the remaining three hundred dollars to cover the first few days of my stay in the States, without the slightest idea of what I would be able to buy there.

On the refrigerator, I left a note for Mom with a message that went something like this: "Dear Mom, I'm off to New York. I'll be back in three months. I borrowed $800 from your account. I'll pay you back when I get back. Don't worry about me. I love you." My younger brother, who witnessed Mom reading my message, told me later that it sounded like a heart attack. I called Mom often, assuring her that I was fine, that I had a job and was feeling fine.

My first ever flight – and everything I did on this trip, I did for the first time in my life – had a stopover in London, and there it turned out that due to some mistake in my booking I could not fly out at the scheduled time. They found me another connection, a few hours later, landing at Newark Airport instead of JFK. In itself, this was no problem for me, until I realized that I would not be able to notify the friend from the States with whom I was staying for the first few days and who was to pick me up from the airport. My friend did not have a landline, and mobile phones were not to appear in the world for another ten years.

My destination, 8 Judge Street, meant nothing to the cab driver. He stopped several times at police stations and asked for directions. It took us three hours to get there, and the bill was $52. I was horrified by the size of the bill, and even more so by how much of my financial resources my first expense in New York was eating up.
My friend, as soon as we hugged, immediately told me to get in the car and drove us to Manhattan. Although I remember it like it was yesterday, I couldn't describe the feeling I had standing in the middle of Times Square, the day after leaving a gray and sad Warsaw.

I found my first job after a few days as a "demolition man," for five dollars an hour. There were a dozen or so of us—a random collection of several nations from distant parts of the world. They gave us pickaxes, hammers, and axes, and ten hours to demolish a small shopping mall. Really awesome work.

I found another job in Borough Park, a neighborhood inhabited by Orthodox Jews. On my first day, I cleaned up a house after a fire. I moved and arranged old stuff, books, photos, memorabilia, and I couldn't resist reading and watching the history of the house. I spent the next two days building a sukkah. Orthodox Jews, during the holiday of Sukkot, live in sukkahs for seven days to commemorate the Jewish migration from Egyptian slavery to Israel.

The intended job I was doing until the end of my trip was selling vacuum cleaners. I joined one of the many so-called "agencies" that operated in Brooklyn and dealt with various businesses, especially providing various services to Poles living in New York. The company had two bosses - a Pole and an Italian, who sent me to the other end of the district every morning to get a tiny cup of thick as tar coffee, without which he could not start work.

Most of the people employed were Poles. We sold vacuum cleaners primarily to Poles living in New York, although sometimes those who knew English well tried selling to Americans as well. I made one such attempt, only to find out that my English was not perfect enough.

We looked up names ending in "ski" in the phone book and called to offer to clean Kirby's 75th anniversary carpet with no obligation. Once the customer agreed to the appointment, I had about two hours to clean it and convince him to buy it.

Before starting to vacuum, I would remove the garbage bag and instead put in a special attachment in which paper, round inserts were easily replaced. While vacuuming, as soon as the paper became covered in dirt, I would immediately replace the dirty insert, placing it in a clearly visible place, preventing the host from throwing it in the trash. After half an hour of vacuuming, the entire living room was covered in dirty inserts, which were lying on the TV, sofas and chairs, giving the impression that the apartment was really dirty and giving the impression that the equipment used by the host was worthless.

Then I changed the attachment and moved on to washing, which was even more impressive thanks to the special detergent that made the carpet shine after washing and gave the impression that it was finally clean.

The highlight of my performances was the last deception in the bedroom, where after another change of attachment, I cleaned the mattress with a vibrating roller. Having previously made sure that the mattress had been functioning for a good few months, I showed a shredded sponge pulled out of the mattress, claiming that this vacuum cleaner cleans the mattress of the household members' skin, which is a breeding ground for various dangerous microorganisms - and at the same time I presented a catalog with enlarged photos of various strange bugs, which always made a huge impression on the host.

The list price of the vacuum cleaner was $1,200. The maximum I could reduce the price to was $850, of which I kept $150 for myself, and anything I managed to negotiate above $850 I split in half with my boss. In less than three months I sold 16 of these vacuum cleaners. Most of them were bought by highlanders from the Tatras who had gone to the States for a year or two, leaving their families in Poland and had been there for 10 or 15 years, sending money back to their homeland every month. They didn't even see the vacuum cleaners they bought because we sent them directly to Poland, to their wives.

From my experience with vacuum cleaners, I learned that I don't want to have anything to do with selling in the future. It's awfully tiring to have that glued-on smile that you can't peel off for a moment.

I had a company car. An old, rickety, but beautiful and atmospheric Mercedes 300 SEL, which after a few weeks was exchanged for a new, but bland Yugo - then the cheapest car in the States.

I went to pubs rather sporadically. I cooked for myself, ordered food from nearby pubs, or chose one of the nearby shops, of which there were plenty on every street, run by every possible nationality in the world. In each of these shops, in addition to shopping, you could eat something appropriate to the country the owner came from. I was particularly fond of the Mexican and Italian. They all also served sandwiches with thinly sliced turkey, lettuce, and mayonnaise. I could never understand how they could afford to sell sandwiches with such an indecently thick layer of meat for so little money.
When we ordered takeout, it was mostly Chinese, the most popular cuisine in New York at the time. I remember my first order, which arrived in those distinctive rectangular cardboard containers with Chinese stamps. It was beef with broccoli. We were eating in a larger group, and when I asked what this strange vegetable was, no one could believe that broccoli was not eaten in Poland.

For a few weeks I lived in a large apartment building, in a district inhabited mainly by Puerto Ricans. On the streets, every few meters, you would pass sellers of all kinds of drugs. For many days, the friend I lived with tried to convince me to try one of the drugs offered at the entrance to our staircase. I refused for a long time, but one day I came to the conclusion that I had to check how it worked. My friend suggested that I buy it myself, only instructing me on the name of the product that we should snort and the optimal amount for the three of us. I went out into the street, approached the first African-American and asked if he had it and how much it cost. He replied that half a gram costs forty dollars. I told him that it was terribly expensive and could he at least come down a little bit on the price, to which he replied that he couldn't, because he himself doesn't make any profit from it. So I asked what was the point of selling it without profit. And he told me that he would make money on me if I came to him for another plot of land, which he would sell to me for $45. And the son of a bitch was right. A short lesson in American economics.

In those three months I saw a lot, I got to know a lot, I learned a lot. I was 21 years old and I didn't know what was ahead of me. However, I had the feeling that it was only in my own hands and whatever I wanted to achieve, I would achieve it. That feeling was the best thing I brought from America.