American Gypsy (14 page)

One of my friends once asked, “Why didn't the Gypsies just go back to India?” But that would've been difficult to accomplish; after wandering for centuries they didn't have a country to go back to.

On this side of the Atlantic, a Romani is given the famous Hollywood makeover, and suddenly “Gypsy” means a free-spirited hippie or a bohemian; it's not seen as a stigma or even a race but as an exotic lifestyle choice. Perhaps this view has to do with the beginnings of modern America, which are to me, like the big bang theory, violent and wondrous. No one was safe from hatred and betrayal.
Everyone
was fighting to survive. It seemed the American Gypsies weren't immune to the neck-breaking race for what became the American Dream. Like so many others, they were more than willing to cut their roots in order to stake their claim on prosperity. Could that be the reason the American Gypsies largely escaped the more malevolent prejudices their European counterparts suffered?

One day Dad and I stumbled upon a novelty store in the heart of Hollywood. Olga and Roxy had gone straight to the nearest mall to avoid being embarrassed by Dad. Walking down Hollywood Boulevard was one of Dad's favorite activities, and he had a habit of stopping in front of his favorite stars with his feet planted on either side, disregarding the foot-traffic jams he created.

“
Nu shto B.B. King. Zakourim
(Well, B.B. King. Shall we light up)?” he'd say, and flick out his lighter and cigarette.

“Dad. People are looking.”

“Genius must draw attention. It can't be helped.”

After I dragged Dad away from the lengthy worship of King's star, we took one of the smaller streets winding up the hill and passed a store called Gypsy Lair, which my father indignantly translated into “Gypsy Liar” until I corrected him.

“It might be someone I know, from the old country,” he said.

But the clerk turned out to be a teenager with rosy cheeks.

“I'm, like, from San Fernando originally, but, like, I'm not at all like my parents.” The girl tossed her blond cornrows out of her face and leaned on the counter littered with “Gypsy” hair clips and gargantuan roses in a variety of the season's trendiest colors next to a bucket of mood rings. She wore a billowy top and a long skirt with tiny bells that jingled whenever she moved.

“So you not own this?” Dad motioned around the store. It was smaller than our living room and crammed with Halloween merchandise that consisted mostly of varieties of Gypsy costumes. Sexy Gypsy and Vampire Gypsy hung next to long-haired wigs and fake-coin necklaces. There were baskets full of scarves like the ones Stevie Nicks wore and Steven Tyler wrapped around his mike stands, and a table stacked with palm-reading books and tarot cards.

“I wish. That's how come I love working here, 'cause I'm, like, free-spirited, you know. My parents, they're Republican, but I'm like a Gypsy. I like to travel. And, like, experience life.”

“You Gypsy?” Dad asked, drumming his fingers on the rustic counter. He was smiling.

“I'm hungry,” I said in hopes of saving the poor girl from what was to come.

“I'm so totally Gypsy. I even belly dance.”

“Belly dance is Arab. You know, yes?”

She squinted.

“You know Gypsy is, how you say?” He looked at me. “
Natsyonalnost.
”

I had no choice. “It's a nationality.”

The girl bit her lower lip and stood up straight for the first time. She scratched her eyebrow and I noticed a tuft of blond hair peeking out of her underarm.

“From two hundred of years back,” my father continued. “In imperial Russia, Russian Roma has permission to citizen rights. They to train and sell horses. They pay
nalog
, which mean tax, and any business they want, they can do.
Vot tak
(That's right).”

“That's awesome,” she said in a voice that had lost some of its free-spiritedness.

Dad turned to me yet again. “
Shto takoe
awesome?”

My translation produced a clearing of the throat that usually indicated displeasure.

“And this store,” he said, “is no awesome. Is shame. In old Russia we has Gypsy counts and rich families. Gypsy has freedom but also they build big houses to live.”

I knew that if I let him, Dad would go on with the history lesson until the store closed or the girl broke into sobs. I didn't understand this urge he had to lecture or correct strangers on the subject. But as I grew older I found myself doing exactly that, because the conversation never ended at “I am Gypsy.”

*   *   *

Grandpa Andrei once warned Dad that if he thought in America everyone would accept him as he was, he might as well find himself a remote island to live out the rest of his life on.

“Remember,” Grandpa told Dad during our very last Russian New Year's, “only your homeland will bring you happiness, especially in your old age.”

Mom had joined two long tables and then covered them with a white tablecloth to accommodate several dozen guests. The Christmas-tree lights, along with the candles and the garland lights strung from the ceiling, bounced off the crystal wineglasses and the silverware. The living room looked like it floated inside a burst of fireworks.

Earlier Dad had gone to the butcher to pick up the suckling pig he'd ordered weeks in advance. By the time it arrived at our party it had been seasoned and roasted in the fire pit of a local restaurant. Mom made her famous
tort-salat
. There was also salted herring with raw onion rings and massive mounds of mashed potatoes next to piles of boiled dill potatoes next to stuffed potatoes and potatoes au gratin. Bowls full of garlicky yogurt sauce nestled next to grape leaves stuffed with ground beef and rice. Armenian
basturma
(wind-cured beef), Astrakhanskaya caviar made with eggplant, and regular black and red caviar were all present and ready to be devoured by our increasingly intoxicated guests. There was so much liquor, you had to lean around the bottles to speak with the person across the table.

All through the night more food and vodka appeared as if my parents had come into the possession of the fabled tablecloth straight out of a Russian fairy tale that granted your wish for any food or drink you wanted.

According to the Chinese horoscope, 1990 was to be the year of the metal horse, and since every bit of luck counted in our household, everyone was to hold something metal when the TV hosts rang the midnight bell. To increase the New Year's good fortune, our candles burned inside silver votives, people rested their cigarettes in iron ashtrays, and a neighbor named Timor brought a box of nails in case one of us found ourselves metal-less at the last minute.

“You're young,” Grandpa said close to Dad's ear so as to be heard, “so you chase a perfect life. But do you really think there are no labels in America?”

“This land has brought us nothing but bad luck,” Dad said. “For every good thing, five bad ones happen.”

“Not that again. This damn curse will travel wherever you take it.” Grandpa tapped his temple. “Up in that mulish head of yours.”

The TV hosts were announcing that we had a minute left until midnight, and the voices shifted from scattered-loud to deafening. We counted down the year along with the TV, with our lucky charms raised high in our hands. I was holding a fork, Roxy a teaspoon, and Zhanna a pair of tweezers she'd found in the bathroom.

Dad smacked his knees, his face now animated with daydreams. “No matter,” he said. “I don't want to end up eighty, playing chess on the bench outside my house with a bunch of drunks I've known since nursery school. I don't want to pretend to have nothing so that the
Kommunisti
don't show up at my door and confiscate my life away from me. I should to be able to enjoy the money I make, even if I'm Rom.”

“What's this nonsense?” Grandpa said. “I enjoy my money, I do. But why flaunt it?”

“All I'm saying is that everyone wants to live there. Why? Because everyone is allowed to do as they please. In America you won't have to hide your wealth under the living-room floorboards.”

But even then Grandpa's words felt more real than my father's. He seemed to know things others didn't. Very different from Dad, who acted like he knew things people just didn't get.

After his conversation with the salesgirl inside the Gypsy Lair, Dad stayed in a sour mood for days. How a young girl could possibly be familiar with the particulars of the class system of imperial Russia was a mystery to me, but the logistics mattered little to my father, who had found the first flaws in the country he had worshipped for so very long.

 

CHER AND I HAVE THINGS IN COMMON

Communicating with strangers is death to an introvert, and even more so to a teenage introvert. How about a teenage immigrant introvert sporting a pair of acid-washed jeans with leg warmers pulled over the bottoms? As soon as I stepped on the campus grounds of Hollywood High on my first day of school, I recognized my folly. My Lioness did not fit in, either—not with the half-shaved skulls nor the locks streaked with blue.

In Russia, schools encompassed all grades. Seven-year-olds played hide-and-seek alongside the ninth-graders. Older kids took care of the younger ones. There, you were part of one community, whether you liked it or not, and all of us shared responsibilities according to our age. Teenagers helped out in the kitchens and on the playgrounds. Kids old enough to mop the floors of their classrooms or wipe the windows mopped and wiped, no matter what kind of a car their folks owned.

At Hollywood High, school was an empire divided, dictated by geography as much as by identity. On one end of the campus, the one closer to Hollywood Boulevard, you'd find the black-trench-coat territory, the Performing Arts Magnet School. Girls with purple hair, guys in dresses, and other artistic types with pierced noses and studded tongues lurked in the cavernous hallways of the auditorium, with its underbelly of music classrooms. It also housed the cafeteria—the only common ground for all students, regardless of their fashion sense, ethnicity, or level of weird.

Everybody on this end aimed to be a superstar someday. Hollywood High had given the world Judy Garland, Carol Burnett, and even Cher, who is adored as much as soccer by half of Europe. Using a prepaid international calling card (an essential in an immigrant neighborhood), I called Zhanna to tell her I'd be attending the same school that Cher once did. She screamed into the phone. According to Zhanna and Romani tradition, it couldn't be simple coincidence—it was a sign of great things to come. I hoped so. After all, I was in America now. Great things were as common here as Twinkies.

Only a few hundred yards away, on the side of the school bordering Sunset Boulevard, the buzz of foreign tongues filled the hallways, spilling outside through massive windows: Spanish, Romanian, Mandarin, and Arabic. Sprinkled in between endured a small number of American kids who happened to live in the neighborhood but did not aspire to superstardom. My first bouts of English tutelage took place on this side of the campus.

By this time in my life I spoke three languages: Russian, Armenian, and Rromanes. The Romani side of the family slipped into Rromanes only when they wanted to say something they didn't want anyone else to understand. After Mom left Armenia she preferred to speak Russian, said it made for a more sophisticated first impression. I had to ask Aunt Siranoosh to teach me Armenian. Every town had its own dialect. If two Armenians met on the moon, they'd know, after a few words, to which earthly city the other belonged. Armenian is livelier than Russian but not as rowdy as Rromanes. It has ties to Greek but is strongly influenced by ancient Iranian tongues. In fact, when I spoke it outside Armenia, people often assumed I was from the Middle East. It had come in handy only when I visited Grandma Rose in the summer, but I loved to practice speaking it.

And here I was, the bubble of foreignness keeping me prisoner up to that moment, about to be popped. Closer than ever to finally discovering the America of bootlegged movies that my parents collected like holy relics.

I wandered through the crowd, watching the entire population of the world milling about me. There were so many variations here that everyone fit in by not fitting in.

I was astonished to hear my counselor—the baldheaded and bespectacled Mr. Bedrosian—explain in Armenian how an American high school operated.

As far as Mr. Bedrosian knew, I had a Ukrainian father and an Armenian mother. He had no inkling of my “other” nationality, and I preferred it that way. I had long ago discovered that it was best to reveal my Roma side only to those I'd known for a while and to really anticipate how that piece of information would affect them.

A friend had called it the “Beauty and the Beast” syndrome. I was once waiting to meet up with Zhanna inside a coffee shop in Moscow, sipping my hot chocolate at the counter near a window overlooking a busy square, when a woman next to me started up a conversation. “How old are you?” “Fourteen.” “Are those music books in your sack?” “I play the piano.” “How wonderful! I've always wanted to try.” Then she asked if I could watch her grocery bags while she used the pay phone. “Sure,” I said, and she had made to leave with a grateful smile when her eyes fell on my cousin who'd come in through the door. Zhanna's long sparkly skirt (the way she dressed only when the laundry hadn't been done) and her long loose hair made the woman's step falter. The stranger watched Zhanna's progress across the room with a stifled breath. When it became obvious that the Gypsy was approaching us, she sat back down and muttered, “I'll call later.” Only a few sips into our hot chocolate, the owner asked us to leave.

My Beast would remain safely veiled from Mr. Bedrosian.

The top of Mr. Bedrosian's head barely came up to my chin as he marched ahead of me down the hallway.