Travelling Freelancer
4.1 Travelling Freelancer offers a mix of creative and historical information, as well as often comedic and slightly surreal chapters on the more personal real life experiences of a travelling freelancer.
An example of the more comedic chapters can be previewed in, ‘NY Green Card Story’
2.9 NY Green Card Story
Writing/edit using VOICE C — Comedic/Farce
A Green Card New York Story
New York was nothing like I’d imagined. Less a life among the poets and revolutionaries of the Village, more the industrious business of being a freelance editor in the boomtime nineties, working hard and late, in the years before anyone had heard of a banking collapse. It was, among other things, an excellent place to be foreign. Travel makes a novelty of you — even the accent does half the work — in a way London never quite managed, London being a city where everyone is closed off, particularly to its own talent. So it was, in this dynamic and mildly xenophobic climate, that I fell in love.
There’s nothing normal about falling in love, and Dylan had it right: you can’t be sane and in love at the same time. For Alpha and me, this arrived as a thirty-block kiss on a bus from the Upper West Side down to the Village, en route to a birthday party for Anthony Haden-Guest. When New York disappeared under several feet of snow that winter, it only got worse — or better, depending on how you were counting. One night, trying to get across town by cab, her on the East Side, me on the West, our driver got the taxi lost in a blizzard in the middle of Central Park and was brought to a full stop by a police car coming the other way down what was, undeniably, a one-way road. Our actual idea of paradise was considerably more modest: bagels and lox on the Great Lawn, the Sunday Times, and the dogs of Manhattan going about their business.
THE PSYCHIC
Alpha was classically gorgeous, wore polo necks that did her lean stomach no disservice whatsoever, and was rumoured — though she denied it flatly every time — to have a gift for reading Fal, fortunes told from the grounds of Turkish coffee. This is something Turks do at the end of dinner, usually half as a joke. Before we met, while waitressing at a seafood restaurant called Deniz to fund her Master’s, she had read the cup of an elderly couple and announced, with total confidence, that she could see a baby’s face in it. Alpha saw babies everywhere — in clouds, in rugs, in the froth on a cappuccino — so this was not, to me, remarkable. It became remarkable when the couple’s doctor confirmed, entirely unprompted and to everyone’s considerable surprise, that there was in fact a baby on the way. This is how the rumour started that my first wife, one of the most down-to-earth people I have ever met, was secretly psychic. She never once claimed it. She never once denied it hard enough, either.
THE LOTTERY
Although we were, by any honest account, genuinely in love, we finally married with one eye on a green card lottery we’d entered separately, on Alpha’s advice, to double our odds. I won. This came as a considerable surprise, since the programme exists specifically to hand green cards to nationalities under-represented in US immigration, and an Englishman is about as over-represented as it’s possible to be. My only legitimate route in was marriage to someone from a country that qualified — in this case, Turkey, and in this case, Alpha, who was at the time working entirely legally on an H-1 visa, the sort of thing companies used to arrange by placing a job advert nobody was ever meant to answer, then hiring the person they’d wanted all along. I was on a B1/B2, the visa equivalent of standing at the edge of the party being tolerated rather than invited, which allowed me to work provided the money went first through a company account and only reached me afterwards, at a respectable distance, like inherited money passing through a trust.
When the INS envelope landed on the doormat — thick, official, the kind of envelope that has clearly been designed by a government to make your stomach drop before you’ve opened it — I assumed I was being deported, or possibly indicted, for a crime I hadn’t yet worked out I might have committed. It took several read-throughs to establish that I had, in fact, won the lottery. I had never entered any lottery in my life until Alpha suggested this one, and my first thought, opening that letter, was less how wonderful and more what exactly did you see in that coffee cup. She found this suggestion ridiculous. She did not deny it with quite her usual conviction.
RESTRAINT
We’d worked together for years at the Turkish-owned edit house — she in scheduling, then producing; I editing, then producing — long before either of us thought to have dinner. Our first date was A Heart in Winter at Columbus Circle, a film in which Depardieu, playing a master cellist, takes in a young cellist and proceeds to sleep with both his daughters, which I remember finding faintly arousing in a way I chose not to examine too closely at the time. Walking round the fountains afterwards, I wanted very much to kiss her. I did not. The Englishman-in-New-York in me — buttoned, restrained, professionally incapable of seizing a moment — got there first, and I have regretted it more or less continuously ever since.
Months later, on my thirtieth birthday, I tried again — dinner with my brother Jake and his girlfriend Nora, at Peter’s on Amsterdam, my son’s favourite spot for the Caesar salad. Everyone eventually went home except us. Her nerves, it turned out, were considerably better than mine. It became a birthday with a proper present at the end of it, and the East Side girl and the West Side boy became, from that point on, a fully operational green card love story.
THE OTHER MAN
There was one complication: Alpha was, strictly speaking, still living with someone else — a large, imposing ex-Marine — although she swore, repeatedly and with conviction, that they were separating and no longer sleeping together. I had my doubts, and spent a certain amount of energy privately imagining the two of them still sharing that flat, an exercise which did nothing for my peace of mind and considerably less for my chances against a US Marine in any physical dispute. We got through it. She stuck to her word. Nobody flattened anybody. In due course we made it to City Hall and did the whole thing properly.
She told me afterwards that the entire edit house had assumed I was sleeping with my clients — mostly female, mostly attractive, entirely untouched by me, on account of a shyness so profound it verged on a medical condition. I was the man from the Sting song, an Englishman in New York, too English by half to take advantage of what New York was clearly offering. She always maintained that if I simply stayed calm, it would eventually happen. She was, on this point as on most others, correct.
THE LAWYER
A year on, we were married properly in the NYC courthouse, my brother Jake — the actor — standing as our legal witness, and the whole thing had the mild unreality of watching yourself in a film you hadn’t quite agreed to be in.
Next came the INS interview — toothpaste, bed sides, photographs, the full forensic audit of a marriage designed to catch impostors — and beneath it, a genuine legal puzzle: to enter the lottery in the first place, hadn’t we needed to already be married? We had no idea. So we went looking for lawyers, and discovered, to our considerable surprise, that an alarming number of immigration lawyers had never once encountered our particular situation.
The most memorable of these consultations was conducted almost entirely in Spanish, with a lawyer who appeared to speak no English whatsoever, producing three-way high jinks between an Englishman, an Americanised Turk, and a woman filling in forms at speed. ¿Nombre? — Sorry, oh — my name, Charley Weber. Su país, madre, padre? We got surprisingly far on goodwill alone, right up until she asked, with total confidence, whether I trabaja. We looked at each other. Neither of us had the faintest idea. After several rounds of increasingly desperate mutual guessing, the word on the table appeared to be carnicero. She looked it up for us. Are you a butcher? No — I am a film editor. Ah. Profesión. We thanked her for her time and left before either of us could be accidentally reclassified as livestock traders.
THE HEIST
None of the lawyers could actually answer our question, so we did what any sensible couple does when faced with an unresolvable bureaucratic riddle: we went back to the scene of the crime. At the courthouse, we noticed that after each certificate was printed for the couple ahead in the queue, the laser printer kept spitting out a roll of pre-formatted, still-blank certificates before the names were added. We waited for a gap in the crowd, tore off two sheets, and ran — properly ran — down the corridors of City Hall, discovering only mid-sprint that a government building of that significance was almost certainly under surveillance from every angle, and that we were, at that moment, giving a very convincing audition for the role of small-time forgers. We hit the front steps at speed, dived into a cab, locked the doors, and didn’t look back until we were safely uptown.
No footage of the Green Card Lovers’ Great Certificate Heist ever surfaced on the evening news. As it turned out, the paperwork needed reprinting properly anyway once the actual interview date arrived, which meant the entire operation had been, strictly speaking, unnecessary — a fact we agreed, by unspoken mutual consent, never to discuss again.
THE INTERVIEW
At the final meeting, the agent never once asked to see the certificate we’d nearly gone to prison over. She began well — on hearing I’d been educated in England, she mentioned she’d grown up under the same system herself, in the West Indies — and then spent the next several minutes cheerfully and thoroughly dismantling the entire legacy of British colonialism, which felt, under the circumstances, like being mugged by someone who’d first complimented your coat.
Then came the real interrogation. Photographs. Toothpaste. Joint accounts. Asked whether we had any, I said no. Alpha, in the same breath, said yes. The truth, as usual, sat somewhere between us — one shared American Express card — but what saved us, I’ve always believed, was the sheer unfeigned fury we each turned on the other in that instant. No actor alive could fake that particular note of marital outrage. Only the real thing sounds like that. Our INS agent, evidently satisfied on this point if no other, granted us both our green cards, colonial grievances notwithstanding.
Epilogue – Freedom & Control
“Goodby Asia, I’ll remember you with warmth and grace. By the way, I will miss you. Between the lines which guide me back to youth” C. Weber. Lyrics on leaving Istanbul for LA
For me, Turkey began as the most interesting, innovative and wild experience. A society experiencing it’s first full stretch into a healthy freedom. It was completely different to the West – It was a sort of wild west of the East. And the Dance & Techno Festival was my introduction. By the time I finally left it had morphed into a depressingly closed state where freedoms were being shut down and opposition from all levels of society, from the Gezi protestors and the Capulcas – who for the first time came from all strata of society – to the open and socially aware tycoons who supported them and were subsequently targeted, mainly through investigations into their taxes. Presumably always a fairly fluid science for the higher earners across Turkish society – which has always had a fairly large wealth gap.
East or West, what do I prefer? It would switch, as soon as I was set to return to work in the west or east. I would already miss the other. In their former free state, possibly the hisrorical richness of Asia or Turkey – and I don’t mean that in a culturally woke sense. Perhaps it just suited my nature as a curious explorer. Less homogenised and more historically and culturaly multi-layered.
A chapter I initally cut to get faster to the core of the book, Gezi and my wife’s childhood village. The Black Sea
The third book research trip, on my return to Turkey — the big story of which was Gezi — took me via Trabzon, the capital of Turkey’s northern Black Sea region. From there I took a minibus up into the mountains to explore the area and stay with a friend of a friend, a Harvard-educated Texan Sufi called Joe Shamis. When I arrived, they met me at the bus stop and helped me carry my bag up a steep main street in the city, which sat relatively high and mountainous. They fed me generously, and we exchanged stories about our mutual wandering Sufi friend, who had apparently given a presentation to my host’s class of young chemists on the effect of psychedelics on the human mind. Amused and fed, I thanked my hosts and his roommate before going to my room and collapsing onto a very welcome bed.
When I woke, my host the chemist was already at work, so I ventured out hoping to find some breakfast and catch a glimpse of the famously green, mountainous region where my ex had gone to train with the Kurdish guerrillas. I wasn’t privy to all the details — they were implicated in a plot, for which her father was later arrested and imprisoned.
I had been on the road so long that I’d forgotten it was the middle of Ramadan, until I made the faux pas of asking a local in the park where I could get a meal. He looked around and asked if I knew it was Ramadan — all the cafés were closed. I apologised and admitted I hadn’t realised. He then asked what I was doing, a foreigner sitting on a park bench in this part of the world. I explained I was researching a book, looking for stories and people to interview for my journalism portfolio, and that I’d lived in Turkey for many years. He told me he happened to have a twin who worked as a historical guide for the area, taking visitors up into the mountains to Old Gümüşhane, above the new town — once the leading trading and cultural city of the inland region, historically populated by a rich mix of Armenians, Greeks and Turks. Surprised, I said that sounded perfect. He called his brother, and, having explained the situation, the brother agreed to meet us in the park once he’d finished his work, if I could wait twenty minutes.
Gümüşhane means “house of silver” in Turkish. It was a mixed-ethnic city that grew up to meet the residential and commercial needs of the community working in the nearby mining and minting plants, a few miles west of the city, which supplied the coinage for the Ottoman army.
As my guide explained, the current chapter of that history was that Greek and Armenian descendants of the town’s former residents — people who had grown up on family stories passed down from their grandparents — were now visiting to get a firsthand impression of the place. Not insignificantly, they were taking home a handful of soil from that ancestral ground, to carry back to their grandparents in Greece or Armenia.
The landscape was parched, arid and barren as we made our way on foot up the dirt road from the new town to Old Gümüşhane, hoping for cooler, greener, more shaded pastures — and, with any luck, interesting stories. I wasn’t disappointed when we finally reached the top of the road. Above a certain altitude, nature in the region seemed to spring to life in abundance — greenery, deer, and fruit trees bursting with apricots, forming a kind of secret paradise. The council, which we’d stop by on the way back, was apparently planning to develop a ski site to revitalise the area, which, although mostly fallen into neglect, was being restored through grants aimed at preserving it as a unique time capsule of Turkish architecture and history. My guide promised we could visit one such classical Armenian home restoration in progress, after we’d toured the old city itself, which in scale felt more like a small town or village than a single settlement.
He showed me the ruins of his old school, and as we walked through the remains of the key municipal buildings that had once administered the city — the guild hall among them — it seemed the different ethnicities had mixed and got along reasonably well, at least until the war of independence, after the Western allies’ unsuccessful attempt to carve up Turkey between them. The stories of how the Greeks and Armenians were driven from their homes in Turkey are horrifically brutal, and eventually there was an agreed exchange of populations: ethnic Turks living in Greece returned to Turkey, and the Greek inhabitants of towns like this one moved to Argyroupoli, a town and suburb south of Athens.
In the front of my mind was the question of whether ethnic cleansing or forced separation ever really works, or whether it does more harm than good — especially given our current age of polarisation, between the cosmopolitan, educated communities on the coasts, in Turkey and in the USA alike, and their more rural, inland counterparts.
Go further east, to India and Pakistan, and a significant part of the population would say that separation came at a catastrophic human, cultural and economic cost.
A lot of these ideas and frustrations weren’t so different from what’s happening in my own country, the UK — to a lesser extent, perhaps, with Brexit — and now with Trump’s ideas of ethnic and cultural separation in the USA.
As we made our way around the old town, we heard workers hammering somewhere ahead. We stopped in at a classical old Armenian house being restored by Armenian craftsmen. It was near the site of his grandfather’s old home, where he had grown up, that I asked my guide — who clearly missed the intercultural richness of his upbringing — whether he was looking at it all through rose-tinted glasses, and whether it had really been as idyllic a melting pot as he remembered. We were standing, by then, in the middle of the ruins of his grandfather’s old farm, and it was here that he told me the story that seemed to sum up the whole tour. One day, it had come to his grandfather’s attention — a man who seemed to have been a central figure locally — that one of his stable hands had been bullying an Armenian worker on the farm. In response, he pulled the perpetrator out in front of the other stable hands and whipped him. My guide told the story with real pride, beaming, clearly waiting for my approval, and I tried not to look too shocked at the brutality of it. But I took his point: by no means were all the Turks of old Gümüşhane racist, biased, or unaware of the need for some shared, universal rules of behaviour, for the sake of a community’s ability to live together and survive.
I was encouraged, and a little moved, to find such a humanist in what was, on the whole, a hard-right, MHP-supporting area. He was an impressive man, and gave me some hope that there were still voices of tolerance out there, still interested in the old ideal of a shared, non-polarised culture.
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