Seattle

By Tad Kosewicz

"Ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country" - John F. Kennedy, Ted Sorensen.

Yeah, I met this Ted Sorensen. His brother Bob invited me to live in his family's brownstone on the Upper East Side when I landed in New York. Bob was a Princeton professor at the time, but the person who recommended me to him and whose husband worked with him for the Radio Free Europe back in West Germany, told me that they thought he worked for the CIA. Could be, because Ted himself was a shoo-in for a CIA director under Carter, until Chappaquiddick came up. John F. I didn't meet, because he was shot dead before I came.

But later on, when I got bored with a library gig at Pace University and hired out as a busboy for the Oak Room in the Plaza Hotel, there was an old waiter there, Fred. Donald Trump, who bought The Plaza for a while for his then-wife paying her one dollar a year and for all the dresses she'd pick, would put up a plaque in the Oak Room right next to George M. Cohan's on Fred's 50th anniversary with the joint, pure Don.

Fred came from Italy as a kid and became a busboy, like me. One day he said to me, I like how you work, you have gusto. I didn't know the word but looked it up and it was good. And Fred told me that when he served John F. that John F. had pea soup and a Heineken. Pea soup and a Heineken, it felt like I got to know John F. too, just a little bit.

Anyway, I better start on the story because you ought to know that this way for you is out there too.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tad Kosewicz
• Release date: Sep 22, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005336813

Tad Kosewicz

Tad Kosewicz is the pen name of Tadeusz Korzeniewski. He has lived in Poland and then in America half a life in each. He won the Kościelski Prize for writing in Polish, and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship for writing in English. He lives in Seattle.He was born in the family of a WWII Home Army fighter. He studied electronics and philosophy, then joined the pre-Solidarity anti-Communist movement as an occasionally arrested underground writer and printer. His book "W Polsce" [In Poland] was published in the underground in 1981, and in England by an émigré publishing house. In 1984 it was awarded the Koscielski Prize. In 2005 Newsweek Polska ranked it as one of the Polish Books of the Century. In 2010 it was republished in post-Communist Poland, with prominent voices calling for including it in the school curriculum.In 1981 he moved from Poland to France and then on to New York (1983), Montana (1992), and Seattle (1998), where he lives today. In New York he worked as a busboy at the Oak Room in the Plaza Hotel. In Montana he worked on the Flathead Reservation in a burger joint. His first job in Seattle was as an office furniture installer on the Microsoft campus in Redmond. Of the many gigs he has done for a living in America, he most values his job as a security guard, guarding the Lansdowne portrait on its cross-country tour.He began writing in English around 1990. Generous America responded right off with a string of fellowships: from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, and more. At first, he wrote about his country of origin. The trouble started when he turned to the American stuff and hit the third-rail issues, his game. He was still fairly naive about the country, he thought that now since he was in America he could publicize the truth as he pleased. The contemporary American publishing world was just itching for it to be dropped on their desks, he imagined. Boy was he in for a surprise. To get ready to flatten that check, and like many before him, he hit the roads West. The year was 1992.In 2014, already on the other side of the country in Seattle, he published the paperback in English "To Wyoming" (in Polish "Do Wyoming," 2013). In 2018 he hardened it as "Americaa," the first in a series of ebooks on Europe, America, and Europeans worldwide. In 2022 came "Seattle." Substack's "Aurora Bridge" is set for 2024.Starting in 2022 (which also applies to all previous writings) Tadeusz Korzeniewski uses the pen name Tad Kosewicz.The photo: in Seattle 2004

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Tad Kosewicz

SEATTLE

Copyright © 2023 Tad Kosewicz

All rights reserved.

CONTENTS

Redmond

MAM

Green Lake

PAM

New York

New Hampshire

Black Hills

Duopolis

Ballard

Bellevue

Wotan Pass

Pipers Creek

The Author

I drive into Seattle with 600 bucks. I know nobody here. I have to find a job fast and within a week I land one on the Microsoft campus in Redmond.

I like stupid jobs. At Microsoft I install office furniture. Desks, panels, shelves, we also move offices, sometimes by whole floors. I like simple jobs because they're mandalas in the basest sense, and as a writer they help me not to sell out. I have yet to hear of a mainstream writer that didn’t lick ykw's balls. Here’s 20 bucks if you show me one that hasn’t.

On starting at Microsoft, Chad, my driver, and I get to reinstall a cabinet in one of the geeks’ offices. Piece of cake, we do it in under 20 minutes, drop a kind word, bow, and leave. And this guy must’ve had a tough morning or breakdown or, you know, and we soothed it for him because within minutes he emails our office with oh so much thanks and how we did it professionally and with class. They slap the email out on the board and I said that Chad supplied professionalism and myself class. It stuck. I worked on the campus until I got the money to rent a 1 bedroom by Green Lake, buy the furniture, a computer, and so on. Then I moved on.

I know you'd love to hear what it was like inside Microsoft, and I'll tell you that what struck me the most was this juice they had for free. You could drink as much OJ as you could survive. The restocking guys were rolling the hand trucks in and out of the kitchens like happy penguins all day long. Must've been Bill's adolescent head trip of how he would make the corpo world better when he grows up. Same with Jeff I guess, because when I later worked for Amazon, I'd bump into jillions of geeks walking out of the corpo huts their brown, yellow, spotted, obese, puny, proud, rude, lickspittle, asbo, adhd, jazzy-haired, etc., tail workers eager for a ten. The geeks would heartily pick up their crap with thin plastic bags, some making a twirl and taking it inside, probably for a doctor.

One weekend I was walking around Green Lake and this working single woman (there are no others in Seattle) was finishing picking up after her significant other, and I went, y’know, just the other day I read in the American Scientist that the researchers at the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Developmental Ethology in Vienna, Austria, have bred the kind of a dog that doesn’t crap, no thick stuff whatsoever, everything zips via urine ducts. Oh, really! she said.

After Microsoft I guarded art for Metz Art Museum and devoured the internet. Because the year is 2000 now and the internet is breaking huge. It parallels the age of great discoveries: new territories, new riches, new savages, new sins and redemptions. I also walk around Green