Cartoon by Doruk Golcu

“I said blueberry muffin.” Her voice was hasty and showed irritation. Blueberry muffin! I wondered how a word that sounds so beautiful and slides so effortlessly could crash on my ears like a bug on a windshield, giving me no chance to compute its meaning. I can still remember her carefree tone, unmistakably an implication of simplicity—a blueberry muffin—words that the whole world should know!

But I didn’t. I had no idea what it was. Thinking back, this could have been the first time the word was used in my presence. It was my third week in the USA and my first day at work in the laundromat. My job was washing and drying. This was the easy part. The hard part was the money. I was slow at the register. When the change was not exact, pennies, dimes, and quarters were my nightmares. Oftentimes, I felt embarrassed to count money like a six year old and I left many annoyed and frustrated customers behind. This did not escape the owner’s attention. I was asked either to leave or to accept $ 4.75/hour (minimum wage was $5.25 back then).

The name of the woman mentioned above was Gladys, my co-worker at the laundromat. The story is one of the most ordinary to occur in almost every work place in the country: I was going to get something to eat and she asked me if I could bring her a blueberry muffin. I still remember her puzzled face when I asked her to write the b-l-u-e-b-e-r-r-y m-u-f-f-i-n on a piece of paper. After that day, I was her Muffin Man, a joke that continued to entertain us during unbearably boring hours of washing and folding.

It was late afternoon in December 1993. I was looking 15,000 feet down over the tops of the Alps, which just started to glow from the setting sun. In approximately seven hours, my plane was to land in New York City, a city that I only knew through books, media, and movies. Perhaps inspired by that breathtaking scene, for a brief moment, all the great expectations and dreams about the new world seemed so attainable. I was in a state of unbearable excitement and overwhelming optimism.

Three weeks later, I was broke, and I had nowhere to go. This was the time when all my dreams about advancing my education and bettering my life were dashed by my sponsor’s “things changed” speech. The price of her guilt was her offer to pay my return trip to Istanbul. But I was not ready to go back. I was stubborn and full of pride, not a very good combination with what I had, a $100 bill in my pocket. Deep inside, I knew that it was a foolish risk to take, but I took it and became a $4.75/hour laundryman for the next nine months.

My experience had nothing to do with culture shock; I was not the “fish out of water,” either. This was not a sudden death, but rather a gradual unconscious disintegration of self. It was unconscious because I simply was not aware of what was happening to me, and it was disintegration because it felt like the universe I knew was knocked from under me.

I can almost hear some of you out there thinking that I must not know a single word in English in order to experience alienation at such magnitude. This isn’t true. In fact, I had a good English education back home. However, I was naïve enough to equate the ability of reading and writing in English with “living in English.”

I would like to think that countless silly things I did were due to this shortcoming and not plain stupidity. One of those occurred on that special day, the day we all wish to remember with pleasant memories, my wedding day. Everything was going beautifully until our vows, where I interrupted the judge when he was reciting “my wedded wife,” and instead of repeating the words (which I was expected to do) I blurted a big fat “What?” This was an unconscious blunder of a conditioned mind. In Turkish, “evli” is the corresponding adjective for “married” or “wedded.” In this usage, I thought, “wedded” was a status quo, and it did not have a present connotation. I thought I was being asked to marry a woman who was already married! You can’t repeat that vow! Not if you are still “living in Turkish.”

Why did I stay? If it was so hard, why didn’t I go back? I wish I could say that I was working towards some divine plan or that I always do what I promise. No, none of that. I stayed because somebody told me I can’t. There I’ve said it. This was my dirty little secret. It was pure pride driven by anger. It was not a clear-cut plan with specific direction. It was my anger towards my unfulfilled dreams that kept me alive at the time. It was also my pride: the humiliation of going back was greater than staying and doing all the jobs that I hated to do.

Fourteen years later, I no longer recognize the muffin man. That person is diminished, and no longer exists. Yet a muffin man lives in many people around us. These are the people we see at every corner: bagel stores, laundromats, dry cleaners, gas stations, landscaping companies, and moving agencies. Quite often, I walk into these places, where I am greeted by many, and almost always, I leave with a large reluctant smile across my face.