My struggle to free my mind

On one Sunday morning, when everyone was gone from the house, I took the bus to New Brunswick. The first place I visited was the Hungarian bookstore which was open for the church goers. The owner gave me a warm welcome and invited me to sit down.

“I remember you,” he said. “You came in here the other day with your Sponsors.”

“Yes,” I answered briefly.

“Well, my son, I have to warn you! Those Dippies will brainwash you in no time. They are worse than the communists.”

I agreed with him and then I told him I would not mind moving out.

“Unfortunately, I am so new here,” I said then. “I don’t know yet how this system works.”

“Do you have a job?”

“Yes, and I’ve already saved over three hundred dollars in one month.”

“No kidding! You have more money than I do.” He picked up his notebook and looked for a telephone number in it. “Would you be interested in renting a furnished room?” he asked before dialing the number. “It’s only a few blocks from here in a very nice and very clean house. The owner is an old Hungarian. The room is upstairs and you have your own bathroom. It’s only twenty dollars a week and you have complete privacy.”

“Wow! That sounds exactly like what I need.”

He spoke with the owner and then he gave me directions.

I rented the room without hesitation and then I found a taxi cab to take me home. I was hoping I would not find anyone in the house so moving out would be without complications. I told the taxi driver to wait. It took only a few minutes to pack my belongings but by the time I was downstairs, my Sponsor and his wife had arrived.

“What is this taxi doing here?” the man asked me startled.

“I am moving out,” I said bluntly.

“You are moving out,” he said shaking his head. “Just like that… You are moving out. Wow!”

“Why?” his wife asked loudly. “Why? Have we done anything to chase you away? And where do you think you are going? You have no idea how dangerous this country is. You are not ready to be on your own! And… did we not deserve a prior notice?”

I just wanted to be out. I wanted to be on my own.

“I am sorry,” I said in a hurry. “An hour ago I did not know I would be moving. I found a furnished room and I have already made arrangements. I paid the rent and I put down a deposit as well. I am very grateful for all your help and when I have more money…”

“Oh, forget it!” the man shouted me down. “Just go! You owe us nothing. Good luck to you.”

I hesitated for a moment.

“I’m sure you’ll have more peace once I am out of here. Thanks again for all you have done for me.”

After I got into the taxi, I felt shaken. I calmed down only by the time I arrived at my new address.

The taxi cost me about the same as a week’s rent.

The owner gave me the keys and then he quickly left me alone.

By the time I unpacked my luggage, it was getting dark outside. The room was not very warm so I stood close to the big old radiator. As I was standing there, I looked out the window and saw some snowflakes swirling around the street light.

Everything was quiet. No traffic in the street, no sign of life anywhere.

Suddenly, I felt very lonely.

As I watched the snowflakes, some sort of pain started in my soul and it was gradually getting stronger. I began to feel like I had lost something very precious that can never be found again… and it disturbed me a great deal that I had no idea of what that something was.

I knew I had to go to bed because I had to get up early in the morning. Much earlier than before in order to be on time walking the twenty-minute distance to Livingston Avenue where I could wait for the bus to take me to Brown Boveri. Those early morning walks in the frozen darkness, trekking through some of the worst slums of the city, I will remember vividly as long as I live.

The first Monday morning after I moved out, my Sponsor’s son actually said hello to me when I arrived at work. He handed me a piece of paper with a few words in Hungarian offering to drive me to the bank every Friday, like before, to cash my paycheck. I accepted, said ‘thanks’ and we smiled at each other.

I knew I could not do that work too much longer. It was driving me crazy as my headache was becoming permanent. The only idea of how I might go about trying to find another job came from my Sponsor. Once he had told me never to go to an employment agency in case I needed a job. So, one day I called in sick and found ‘Snelling and Snelling’ in the business district of the city.

The agent spoke very poor Hungarian but he understood what I wanted. He gave me an address and said:

“Just go there. They speak Hungarian.”

He happened to send me to a bank, to the Magyar Bank. Magyar means Hungarian but that bank was Hungarian only in its name. It was founded by Hungarian emigrants to serve the once very large Hungarian community.

When I showed up for the job interview, a woman with a Hungarian last name greeted me. She told me in broken Hungarian that still thousands of first generation Hungarians lived in and around New Brunswick, and that most of those people kept their money in the Magyar Bank so the bank needed a teller who spoke their language. The pay was lower than at Brown Boveri but money was not a concern for me at that time so I immediately accepted the offer.

After about a week of training, I began working as a teller, earning just a little more than seventy dollars a week after taxes. That money was still plenty for me as I had no expenses other than the rent and the food. I could even save some money every week.

Most importantly, I felt greatly relieved not having to operate the engraving machine any longer. I could dress nicely – in fact that was dictated by the dress code of the bank - and that alone made me feel significantly better. The room I rented was only a five-minute walk from the bank through the heart of the Hungarian district that was a desirable neighborhood in those days.

Customers were curious about me, the newcomer, so I always had long lines at my cashier window. I made a lot of friends who, from time to time, dropped in just to say hello to me, and, if I was not busy, to have at least a brief conversation with me.

Although the depression I sank into during my first couple of months in America was over, I still did not feel too good because I was very homesick. I missed most of what I left behind in Hungary. I felt like there was a vacuum in my soul and in my mind. Everything that used to fill me up was not there anymore. Still being so strongly attached to the past, I subconsciously rejected just about everything new around me.

I knew that even if I wanted to, I could not return to Hungary. ‘If the authorities let me return, I would probably have to go to jail,’ I thought. Of course, I could reason that it would be foolish of me to go back to get locked up. At the same time, my mind was struggling as everything was so new and overwhelming. The freedom I had dreamed about was all around me but my mind could not just grow up to it overnight. I suffered because I knew very little. I had mental pain because of the limitation in my ability to think. I lacked self confidence because of how I had been conditioned in the communist system.

As painful as it was for me just to go back to my rented room after work, instead of meeting friends and spending the evenings in cafes as in Hungary, I did take learning the English language seriously. I spent most of my free time, including weekends, leaning over my English grammar book. I had a coworker in the bank, an American-born young fellow, who was kind enough to read all the lessons in my book onto two cassette tapes which turned out to be a great tool for learning.

Eva, the lady I met in the plane when flying to New York, left the man that sponsored her and ended up living with a relative not far from New Brunswick. She came to visit me a few times, spent the nights with me on weekends, but since she appeared more confused than me about what to do, what direction to take, I did not feel like initiating a permanent relationship with her. Besides, she was so much older than me. Last time I saw her was at the beginning of summer. I never heard from her again.

One Monday on my way home from the bank, I stopped by the Hungarian bookstore to brag to the owner about the check I had collected the previous weekend in the amount of 150 dollars.

“I won my section in a chess tournament that was held in New York City,” I told him. “It’s like two weeks of my earnings in the bank.”

During my earlier visits, I always complained about something. He was the only one that would listen to my whining, the only one that I could talk to about how I felt.

“Well, that’s a great accomplishment,” he said, “but don’t get carried away now. There is a long road ahead of you and it’s mainly uphill. You’ll be all right. Just give it some time… Here, take this home and read it. Bring it back in a couple of weeks.”

The book he gave me did not interest me as it was full of ‘beautiful’ poems. I was not ready for beauty. ‘Beauty would just make me feel more pain,’ I thought.

When I took the book back, the bookshop owner gave me a flyer.

“See that date?” he said. “There is a ball in the Hungarian Club this Saturday evening. Be there at eight, I want to introduce you to a very neat Hungarian girl.”

The girl I was introduced to turned out to be a teacher at a local school that was run by the Catholic Church there. She was about five years older than me but she looked much younger. Dressed in Hungarian folk custom, with a permanent smile on her face, she was quite an attraction.

After I danced with her, we walked outside to have a conversation. She was just as curious about me as I was about her so we asked a lot of personal questions of each other. She listened carefully as I told her the story of my life. By the time we were ready to go back for another dance, I concluded that she was a modest and very intelligent woman with a high moral standard. I was deeply impressed. Of course, I was also very naïve to believe everything she had said.

The fact is that after experiencing the sorry state of moral standard in communist Hungary, I wanted to believe that in America - where I supposed the priests were not secret agents of the regime - churchgoers were not hypocrites, and religious unmarried women did not fool around.

By the time fall arrived, I was deeply in love, mainly because she kept resisting my attempts to take her to bed. She made it clear that there would be no sex before the wedding day. When I proposed, she accepted, so I purchased the two wedding rings with my meager savings.

The weekend before our planned wedding, she invited a few of her friends to her parent’s house where she lived to have an afternoon tea party. Four of her girlfriends showed up with their husbands. Soon after the party began, two of the couples left. The parents were out for a walk and when my fiancée had to answer a phone call - which she took in her bedroom and stayed on it for quite some time - I was left with the two couples in the living room. While the two men stepped outside to smoke, the two women shocked me with what they quickly revealed to me. It was mainly one of them who spoke with the other one nodding to support the statement:

“Think it over before you rush into this marriage,” the woman said. “Seemingly, she is a saint. However, many of us know that she leads a double life. Are you ready for this? She is the lover of the priest that will marry the two of you. Their relationship won’t end because you marry her. She just needs a husband because she is quickly becoming an old maid. The priest can’t marry her, you know that. He would if he could. They have been in love for a long time. Of course, they have to hide their relationship. They are extremely discrete. Once you marry her, there will be even less reason for people to suspect her double standard.”

“Find someone who is a better match for you,” suggested the other woman just as their husbands were returning.

I was in emotional pain that night. I thought I loved her too much to leave her. I just could not imagine continuing my life without her.

At the same time, I had no reason to doubt what I had learned, especially because there were occasions when I already had my own suspicions. Suddenly, those suspicions made sense.

The following day, as difficult a decision as it was, I told her I changed my mind about marrying her. She became almost hysterical and demanded an explanation. I told her that I realized I was not ready to nail myself down.

“Look,” I told her, “my life is just beginning. When I arrived in America, I felt like I was a newborn. I am still far from being free in my mind. Getting married would mean giving up my freedom. At least that’s the way I imagine marriage, and I think that’s the way you talked to me about it, too. I can not give up what I don’t yet have.”

As I spoke to her, I could actually relate to what I was saying so in spite of the heavy pain in my soul, I began to feel I was really doing the right thing by leaving her. ‘Even if she had no relationship with anyone else,’ I thought.

Today, I often wonder whether what those two ladies told me was true, and who they really saved.

After the breakup, I did not feel like talking to anyone for quite some time. I was no longer looking for the company of well dressed, sophisticated Hungarians. I also had enough of the shallow conversations I had with customers in the bank.

I left the bank and went to work for a contractor. The guy was a second generation Hungarian, spoke mainly English, and he was a lot of fun. We painted houses, and I was making much more money than a teller. October was a great time to work as a painter. Working outside under the deep blue sky in pleasant temperatures and low humidity while watching the colorful leaves of trees made me feel like I would never want to do any other kind of work.

I spent all my free time learning English.

At the end of November, when the painter retired for the winter, I was out of work.

I had enough money saved so I started thinking about buying a used car. I needed the car if I wanted to find another job. Opportunities within walking distance of my rented room were very limited, or even using the few and infrequent buses in the city. I found a cheap Opel for six hundred dollars payable in six monthly installments. I passed the driver’s license test without any problem.

Having a car made a huge difference. It made me feel that finally I was really in America. Just a few days after I took possession of the Opel, I found a girlfriend to enjoy it with. She was a very nice twenty-year old student from Taiwan. I drove her to the Delaware Water Gap, and then to New York City on weekends.

I found work in a factory, working on the night shift, making pins for electronic equipment. There were hundreds of the same machines lined up in a huge hall, producing unbearable noise. One could not hear anything from the noise, not even shouting. I guess it was that noise, as well as working the night shift, why once again I started hating America.

‘Why did I have to come so far away from my homeland?’ I often wondered, especially around three or four o’clock in the morning when I could hardly stay awake any longer. ‘I should have tried to stay in Europe, somewhere in Germany or Austria, or even in Switzerland.’

I had a German grammar book that I had picked up somewhere in a New York bookstore during the summer for one dollar. It was written for Hungarians. As I was getting sick and tired of learning English, and since I began to feel like I would not want to stay in America too long, I decided to start learning German. Every evening before leaving for work, I wrote twenty German words and their Hungarian meanings onto a small piece of paper that would easily fit in one of the pockets of my overalls. During the nights I learned the words. The hammering noise of the machines made those words stick in my mind forever.

When spring arrived in March, I thought it was time for another change.

I started reading the ‘help wanted’ ads and found just the kind of work I thought I would really like. I became a Good Humor ice cream man. I rented the truck and purchased the goods from the company. I had my license for the city of Cranford, an almost all-whites community, where I drove my route every day, seven days a week, ringing my bell and stopping at every corner, waiting for kids to emerge from their homes to buy my candy bars, ice cream cones, sodas, chips, etc.

As I was more or less in my own business, I began to think that now I really made it, I was in America functioning as a capitalist.

I had a full day every day. I started early as first I had to drive to the company’s warehouse to pick up the truck and the goods. It took me almost an hour to drive to Cranford. After I was done with the morning half of my route, I stopped for lunch, usually at the local Roy Rogers fast food restaurant where I loved the juicy roast beef sandwich. When I finished the day, usually by late afternoon, I drove back to the warehouse where I could plug in the refrigerator for the night. It was usually getting dark when I arrived home and I still had to count and roll the pile of coins, most of them pennies. My profit for the best day was about fifty dollars, just a bit more than what I used to earn as a painter.

On rainy days I lost money because I had to pay the rent but could sell hardly anything.

On one very stormy day, it started raining heavily shortly after I arrived in Cranford. Sitting in my ice cream truck parked at Roy Rogers, listening to music on my transistor radio, I waited almost the whole day for the rain to stop. Finally, I got tired of waiting and decided to drive to New York City. By the time I found a parking space on the west side of Central Park, the rain stopped and the sun came out.

Walking in the park, I saw an elegantly dressed young woman still holding the umbrella over her head. When I caught up with her, I realized she was at least ten years older then me.

“The rain has stopped,” I said trying to get her attention.

“Oh, did it?” she replied smiling at me. “I did not even notice. Thanks for letting me know.” She shook the water off her umbrella and then closed it.

“Do you mind if I walk with you?” I asked.

“I don’t if you tell me where your heavy accent comes from.”

It was not easy but I managed a conversation with her.

“Well, I live right here, up on the fifth floor,” she said stopping at the entrance of an Upper East Side apartment building. “Do you care to come up for a cup of tea?”

Her apartment was full of paintings. I could tell she was a rich woman.

“I’ve just got divorced,” she told me after we made ourselves comfortable on a sofa. “And guess what! I’ve just had my tubes tied.”

I had no idea of what she was talking about.

“Never heard of sterilization?” She smiled. “Look!” She lifted her skirt and then pulled down the top of her snow white silk panties to show me the scar the surgery left. “I don’t want to have to worry about getting pregnant, especially now that my ex is out of my life.” She sighed. “Man! I am a free woman. Now I can make love to whoever I want. I can even make love to you. Isn’t that great? What do you think? Do you like my legs?”

She did have beautiful legs.

Unfortunately, by the time I was back on the west side of Central Park a few hours later, my ice cream truck was towed. It took me over a couple of hours and two days of my profit to recover it from the towing company.

Towards the end of summer, my sales started dropping off. I was burned out anyway from working all the time. I had over a thousand dollars in a savings account, and my car was already paid off, so I did not hesitate long before I quit the ice cream business.

Moving to New York City

The day after I surrendered the truck to Good Humor, I took the bus to New York. Walking up and down on Fifth Avenue in mid-Manhattan, I saw a young man, dressed in a nice uniform, standing in front of a fancy-looking building.

“Do you get paid for just standing here?” I asked him.

“Of course, I do,” he replied laughing.

“Not bad,” I said. “And how do you get a job like this?”

“It depends on the accent you have.”

After I told him I was from Hungary, he gave me a name, a phone number and an address.

“Karoly is the superintendent in that luxury apartment complex. He is a great guy. Tell him I sent you. Call him if he is not there.”

The high-rise building was at the corner of Third Avenue and 53^rd Street, and Karoly happened to be in the lobby when I got there.

After I introduced myself, he took me into his office where he asked me a few questions in Hungarian, and then he offered me a job without me asking for it.

“I am tired of working with unintelligent people. You’ll start as a janitor, vacuuming the floors. Come Friday, I will fire one of the eight doormen and you’ll take over. Pay is not bad, about two hundred a week. Of course, as a doorman, you’ll also get tips from the tenants. You’ll be working the day shift all the time.”

As I had to take the bus to the city from New Brunswick, I had to get up very early to get to work on time. I commuted only for a couple of weeks. In the meantime, I sold my Opel for five hundred dollars. I found a small furnished room in Queens, in Jackson Heights, for only twenty-five dollars a week. The room was one of three bedrooms in an apartment on the top floor of a house owned by an Armenian family. I had two roommates, an old Scottish guy in the master bedroom, and a young Bulgarian in the other room. We shared the kitchen and the bathroom, and we got along very well. Taking the number 7 train to Manhattan, I no longer had to get up before six o’clock.

Working as a security doorman was a lot of fun. There were all kinds of rich people living in the building, some of them well-known artists. The lowest rent on the first couple of floors was close to two thousand dollars a month. The Swiss Ambassador was among the tenants. There were two of us, doormen, on every shift, so if one of us had to get out to the corner on Third Avenue to fetch a taxi cab, the other one remained in the lobby to man the switchboard announcing guests or answering tenants’ requests and complaints.

Just around the corner from the entrance to our lobby was a savings bank; that is where I deposited my paychecks every Friday. My expenses were minimal so I was able to save most of what I earned.

On my way to and from the subway station, I often stopped at the ground floor café of the new Citibank building. I had a cup of tea and read the newspaper. I had an easy, relaxed life. The only activity that created stress for me was playing chess. New York had nice chess clubs, and just about every weekend there was a tournament somewhere. I often had to work on weekends so I did not get to play too many tournaments.

One day, as I was walking aimlessly on Fifth Avenue, a short Japanese girl with a big smile stopped me.

“Where do you think you are going?” she asked me in her very heavy accent.

“I am just walking,” I replied.

“So you don’t know? No particular goal? Most of us are like that.”

We ended up having a conversation as I did not feel uncomfortable using my broken English. Her English was not much better than mine. Soon, I found out that she was a member of some religious group and that their ‘church’ was only a few steps away at the corner of Forty-Second Street.

“Please, come in with me,” she said, “we are having dinner soon and you are invited.”

When I followed the Japanese girl to their gathering place inside, I had no way of knowing that spending time with the ‘congregation’ would not only improve my English but also help me find a new direction for my mind.

“Welcome to the Unification Church,” I was greeted by other members inside who were just as smiling and polite and humble as the girl that found me on Fifth Avenue.

The chicken dinner was free and delicious. The prayers I heard were a challenge for my English. Someone played the guitar and many in the group sang. I did not understand any of the songs. There were many different nationalities in the group, mainly young people, the majority being Korean and Japanese.

This first religious experience was a very pleasant one for me.

In a way, I felt at home among the Moonies, the name the media created for the group, and I visited them a couple of times every week. The more I questioned their Divine Principle, authored by the Korean priest, Rev. Sun M. Moon, the more I understood about Christianity, and the Christian way of life.

Regardless of how much I enjoyed their company, when they asked me to join their organization, I declined.

“I am glad I am finally free from the communist system,” I explained. “I would not be able to convince myself that I should join any group even if it was as attractive as this church.”

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