Gypsies, tramps and thieves
We'd hear it from the people of the town
They'd call us gypsies, tramps and thieves
But every night all the men would come around
And lay their money down.
This Cher song was a chart-topper the year I was born. Maybe that's why I've known the tune and the lyrics for as long as I can remember. The chorus resonates with me. Identifies me, or something I need. This need, this song, I think it flutters like a ribbon from my aura.
I have many gypsy stories.
Here's the first and the last.
Lille, France. 1995.
It's my 23rd birthday, not like it matters or that anyone would notice. I'm living in Lille, a French city with all the post-apocalyptic charm you'd expect from a town that was bombed to bits by the Nazis (who then ran over it with their tanks a few times just to be sure) and then rebuilt out of cheap concrete and some really bad ideas about modern architecture.
It sucks here, and I hate it. I just moved here a month ago, and it'll be another two months until I meet Jean-Francois and his leather pants, Elvis-Jesus and his fire-eating torches, and the rest of that motley lot. My friends stateside are not the Hallmark and kisses sort.
But I'm young, goth, and perfectly comfortable with solitude. At this point in my life, the notion of waltzing around a cemetery in the middle of the night, drinking Bordeaux straight from the bottle, and singing depressing French ballads to the trees sounds like a lovely way to celebrate.
To this end, I have scouted out a suitably decrepit cemetery surrounded by a decaying brick wall that looks like an easy bounce. I have purchased a bottle of Louis Jadot Beaujolais, an inexpensive but perfectly acceptable red wine. I have learned all the words to Un Samedi Soir Sur La Terre. I have painted my eyes with kohl, put on my favorite black dress and my Doc Martens, and draped a length of black lace around my head and neck. My bottle of wine, my journal, and some storm candles are in my ratty carpet bag. I walk to the metro stop across the street - Lille Grand Palais.
I don't pay any attention to the French, who are unaccustomed to the whole goth thing and just don't know whether to shit or go blind whenever they see me coming their way. A gypsy boy gets on at the next stop, and begins his plaintive panhandling. He asks everyone for money. Everyone. Everyone except me. He gets to me, looks at my face, startles, jumps about a foot into the air, and gives me the sign of the evil eye. Then he hisses like a cat, and runs off to the other end of the car.
This is very disconcerting.
I've never actually frightened a small child before. Much less a superstitious gypsy child with a large and protective family. He's staring at me. I smile at him. I coax him back over to me, slowly, as one would with a feral cat. I get off the train when he does, at Grand Place, and offer to buy him a sandwich. He is still scowling at me, but with less ferocity.
Over our dinner, I tell him I am going to the cemetery to dance and drink wine. He nods in understanding. This seems to make sense to him. We say goodbye.
I see him again a few months later, with his mother, in the Monoprix. I'm choosing a wedge of Brie when I see them. His mother is nearly as slight and short as he is, but has long curly black hair and very assertive body language. I am delighted to see that she is dressed just like a storybook gypsy, with layers of skirts and a wrap-around blouse and soft-looking leather boots. Her eyes are big in a gamine face. The boy sees me, and yammers loudly and excitedly at his mother, pulling at her sleeve and pointing.
She turns to look at me, nods at the boy, and then moves with a startlingly smooth swiftness to my side. It has all happened very fast.
"Give me 10 francs," she demands, and sticks out her hand.
10 francs? Usually gypsies ask for at least 50, if not more. I've been hit up for as much as 200 near the train station. I never give money to gypsy fortune tellers. I have Tarot cards, and they're free. But this feels different.
I pull out a 10 franc coin and hand it to her. She takes my hand in hers. Her hand is small and warm. Her skin is firm, tough but not rough. She pokes at my palm and the sides of my hand with one slender finger. Without looking up at me, she falls into a rapid murmur of heavily accented French that I can barely understand. When she finishes, she looks up. I look back at her.
"You understand?" she asks.
"No," I answer honestly. "I'm a foreigner."
She heaves a deep, regretful sigh, and pulls an iridescent pink glass pebble from a little pouch at her waist. She puts it in my hand, and curls my fingers around it with her own, while whispering something that doesn't sound remotely like French. For luck, she says. And she says it in English.
Then she, and her little boy, head over to the boucherie aisle. I stand, open-mouthed, in aisle six, with a wedge of Brie in my left hand, and good fortune in my right. Apples, I manage to think. I also need apples.
As near as I can tell, it was also around that time that my eyes began to turn green. I've looked at pictures to be sure. They used to be a tweedy blue and brown hazel. Since that year, the blues and browns have transmuted into varying shades of green. Now, almost ten years later, they are an almost startling leaf green, especially in the sun.
And what of my luck? My family and friends will tell you that I'm an exceptionally lucky woman. Dice, in particular, seem almost to obey me, something I can't bring myself to exploit. It is a little bit of magic that I can do, and I don't want to scare it off by using it in non-magical ways.
Good luck has never stopped me from making bad decisions. I've made a lot of bad decisions and proceeded to learn necessary things from them. Luck never got in the way of that, for better or worse.
But I do think it has saved me from the ugliest and most brutal consequences of my sometimes misguided actions, especially those involving foolish superhero-wannabe interventions.
Intermezzo
Gypsy children don't go to school. Gypsy children don't go to the dentist. Gypsy children steal roses out of the police commissariat gardens and sell them to tourists in Vieux Lille. Gypsy children get on the metro and sing arias, pass their kerchiefs, and use the money to buy all the sweets they want.
I know this because I've seen them giggling as they scale the fence, coming out with armloads of full-blooming roses. I've seen the little girls who sing opera mulling over their choice of candy with all the ponderousness of a serious investor. The proprietess obviously wants to disapprove of them, but they have at least 150 francs in change, and their chattering is musical.
I don't think she even knows that they make her smile.
Gypsy children are hard edged, street smart, and laugh a great deal. They have superstitions that seem like a cross between religious observance and a complicated game, with hand jive and chants to match. They make me believe that it is possible to have wonder without the handicap of naivete.
They make me believe that there are humans who would survive the return of wild magic.
Boston, USA. 2001.
"I can help you," she says.
I've been hooked by a Downtown Crossing gypsy. That, if nothing else, would tell me how utterly daft and witless another day of tilting at revenue-generating windmills has made me. Normally, I have eyes that love a challenge and a surefooted smile, and that keeps them off. Not today. And these gypsies have always seemed sharky to me, sharks instead of dolphins like the gypsies in Lille. Offer a hand, lose a limb. They scare me, a little.
"You have problems," the gypsy says unnecessarily. "I can help you. Now."
If this was a cartoon, her irises would be pinwheeling and the pupils would be expanding and contracting hypnotically. As it is, they're open very wide. I can practically hear her inside my head, telling me that she is All-Knowing and Very Worthy of hiring as an all-around personal coach, not to mention personal banker, cash preferred.
This is very impressive, and even though it doesn't work too well on me personally, I can tell it's a dilly of a mind control trick. I almost want to apologize to her, and explain that I developed high resistance to hypnotic suggestion as a result of surviving a relationship with an uber-controlling, spooky, Shaolin sociopath and apparent mindreader, but I think that would sound silly.
Instead, I do something even sillier.
I plant myself firmly on my feet, gaze deeply into her eyes, and lock on with mental teeth like an etheric pit bull's. For some reason it is important, vitally important to me that she look away first.
The hell with that, I know exactly why it's important to me. I need to know I'm not weak. I need to know I'm not just another easy mark in a crowd of corporate drones buzzing too and from hives of commerce. So I stare into her eyes, and become Zax.
In response to this, the gypsy woman looks to the heavens and bursts out laughing.
I notice for the first time that she's missing a number of mission-critical front teeth. "Fine, fine," she says, laughing and waving me off. "But you still need a man in your life."
What? Man? Back up! No, don't. "I'll work on it," I say, and turn away.
But I almost wished I'd listened to whatever she had to say, and done whatever completely moronic thing she was going to encourage me to do. Because apparently it was all leading up to a sweetheart scam that would have involved a seductive gypsy man.
Context: I spent six hours in pointless meetings today, during which I mostly fended off invisible knife attacks from Machiavellian corporate courtiers who have more venom than imagination or intellect. I am in the middle of the corporate ladder, which is the worse place in the world to be. I have anklebiters below and bloodsucking executives above me, and I'm very tired of it all.
What I do know is that right now I'd be willing to lose my savings, my job, and my mind over a Rom lover who would ruin my life so comprehensively that I'd have to start over. The appeal of this idea actually freezes me in my tracks.
A romantic apocalypse and a fresh start. An acceleration toward a deep aqua underworld, a place from which I could kick off and launch myself back into warmer, clearer waters. A merman to take me down, down, down, because I've been caught in this limbo, this stasis for too long now. Directional movement of any kind would be preferable.
It would appear that these thoughts are dangerous, summoning thoughts, because now I can see my lover's jade eyes and thick, glossy black hair. I can see his eyes crinkling as he laughs. I can feel his rough hands on the soft skin of my shoulders. I can smell fresh citrus, spiced rum, dark tobacco, and sea salt. It's his smell. The immediacy of him is overwhelming. I close my eyes, dizzy and weak.
I've been bewitched. It courses through my blood, desire and longing. And even though I want this more than anything, I do not turn around. I know she is still watching me with dancing eyes, and I do not turn around.
"Full hands and empty arms?" she says mockingly inside my head. And then she, and my synaesthetic vision of a lover, are gone. I gasp for air. All around me, people stream to and from the Park Street T station. They are a river of normalcy. They wash away the strange and beautiful and terrifying magic of the moment, and carry me effortlessly on the humped back of their inertia - down, into the tunnels.
On the train, I'm surrounded by their limp faces and bland, puddinglike auras of discontent and resignation. Their smell of newspaper ink and defeat. Their stale coffee breath and involuntary, depressive exhalations. I sink helplessly into this miasma. It takes all my energy just to keep on breathing.
That night, I dream of her. "Full hands and empty arms," she says again, but sorrowfully. "Full hands and empty arms." Her eyes are patient and kind. She waits for me to get it. And then I do. An inner sea-change shifts all my tectonic idea plates. I feel this change like a drop in barometric pressure. I'm different, just like that. I know what I need.
Her eyes reflect what has happened to me, and she laughs. It's not a mean laugh. It's a friendly, conspiratorial, joyful laugh. Like she knows we're going to get away with it. We really will. If I can just be brave enough to pack what I can in my car and run, run, run away from here.
Just go. she whispers.
So I do.
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