That's how she talks, so you may understand why I didn't really process what the woman on my phone was saying. Also, I was preoccupied with dinner time, supervising the ingestion of chicken and rice by two little consumers who live in our house. I drew a picture in my mind of a Mediterranean kindergarten as I mouthed the name “Zeynep” to my wife and handed her the phone.My wife emitted the high-pitched squeal, the customary greeting among native females of the species, and started talking right away. “Oh, how is Rhodes? When did you get there? Do İsmail and Alara like it?”
Then my wife said “sorry” and handed my phone back to me. It wasn't her cousin, but a public relations woman who wanted to tell me about a new hotel that just opened near the airport, wanting me to interview the general manager.
I vaguely recalled having gotten an e-mail on this subject. I've driven to airports all my life, but tend to avoid the trip if I'm not flying anywhere. Might as well ask me if I want to come get a tooth extracted for no reason.
I've acclimated myself so much to Turkish culture that I don't like to say “no,” so I employed a traditional brush-off ploy, saying I would get back to her. “Please do,” she said, “It's been such a long time since we spoke.”
The public relations lady told me her name, but that didn't help. I can barely remember my kids' names, much less the name of some person I met at an event three-and-a-half years ago at that restored yalı in Yeniköy.
In the darkest corner of my heart, I suspected a psychological trick. Maybe public relations companies know that journalists meet hundreds of people every year and cannot possibly remember them all, so they pretend a passing acquaintance, hoping that the induced twinge of guilt might sway the reporter to commit to a story. Such a suspicion borders on the cynical, and as a professional journalist, I'm supposed to restrain myself at the skeptical level. I must always doubt, but never scoff.
A journalist is a walking paradox. The average person thinks of the reporter as an insider with access to all kinds of juicy information, but the reporter thinks of himself as an outsider, always trying to peer over the fence and see what's going on at the barbecue party to which he was not invited.
A freelance journalist is doubly an outsider, standing a step removed from his subject areas and even outside the walled office of the newspaper or whatever. I earn my livelihood from at least half a dozen sources, all news organizations, with offices in New York, London, Brussels, Washington, İstanbul. The Turkish office is as much a mystery to me as the far off places.
Just as I tend not to take public relations people seriously enough, staff editors and reporters tend to look down on freelancers, as if you're not quite good enough to hack it in the real world, not worthy of a real job. I have chosen to live this way because I want the freedom to pursue my own interests -- also, I never have liked being told what to do. But, of course, a freelancer is told what to do, and as I get older, I watch younger and younger people do strange things with my copy.
I sometimes suspect all of them of playing games. That reminds me of an exchange between characters played by Michael Keaton and Randy Quaid in “The Paper,” a film from the early 1990s: “When did you start getting so paranoid?” “When they started plotting against me.”
