The Third Wave_ A Volunteer Story - Alison Thompson [16]
I was flabbergasted and alone, with nothing and nowhere to go. I’d been in New York only a month and didn’t have any real friends I could turn to. I wasn’t so bothered about losing my clothes, but the loss of my personal items and family photos made me cry. Also gone were phone numbers I had collected of all the people I had met so far in the United States.
Just like that, I was homeless. I lived on the streets for four days. I walked around at night talking to safe-looking strangers and fell asleep during the day on the chairs outside the ladies’ powder room at Bloomingdale’s. I had so little money that I would watch people eating to feel full.
On the fourth day, I signed up for a free day membership at the New York Sports Club and went inside to take a shower and read the newspaper. I found and applied for a job as a nanny on Park Avenue, and was hired straightaway. I went to live with a Jewish family with twin ten-year-old boys, and I was back on my feet. I had a roof over my head and some spending money again.
Over the next few years, I tried a variety of jobs, from piano teacher to mathematics assistant to a professor at a college. Eventually I landed a job as an investment banker on Wall Street. It was an entry-level job, working in IPOs for a vice president, but I felt excited to be going there every day. I steadily moved up the corporate ladder to jobs with higher pay and more responsibility. I also received a large third-party insurance settlement from my bus accident, and invested it in land and stock options.
The inclination to be a filmmaker didn’t strike me until I was in my early thirties. I bought a video camera and took it with me everywhere I went, interviewing everyone from taxi drivers to bums sitting in the streets. I loved to look through the lens and capture people going about their everyday lives.
Thanks to my banking job, I was making a good salary and leading quite a jet-setting lifestyle, but the job didn’t fit my personality. So, when I was in my mid-thirties, I quit my secure job and decided to try to make it at something I was really passionate about. I signed up for an intensive fifteen-week course at NYU film school. I had no background other than the amateur films I had taken with my handheld camera, but I soon discovered that I could draw on all of my skills and life experiences—from teaching, to nursing, to travel, to photography—and combine them into storytelling.
A few months after the course ended, I helped raise one million dollars from my Wall Street banker friends to make my first comedy feature film. Shot in the streets of New York, it was called High Times Potluck and was written by Summer of Sam author Victor Colicchio. It was a fun, lighthearted movie about a suitcase of marijuana and the mob. I secretly dedicated the film to my sister, Lyndall, who had been busted for growing pot when she was a teenager. I was finishing up filming that project when the September 11 attacks happened.
In New York, I dated different types of men from all over the world. All of my romantic relationships were long-term. They usually ended when the guy had to move interstate or overseas for work, and I wasn’t ready to follow, attached as I was to New York. I let a few of my soul mates slip away, but I didn’t know it at the time.
In late 2002, I met Oscar. I was showing my film High Times Potluck in Toronto, where he was also showing his film. We met in the middle of a large crowd at my film party. He reached over and grabbed my arm, gently pulling me over, and started speaking with