American Gypsy (30 page)

Central Asian opiates were the most popular substances because they came cheap and were not yet regulated by the government. Once, in Kyrgyzstan, while our tour bus was passing a field of crimson poppies, I'd unknowingly witnessed the harvesting of hashish. I remember someone on the bus exclaiming that now they could finally score some top-quality
anasha
, or maybe even
plan
(a derivative of opium). Outside, several men, wearing nothing but underwear, were running through the flowers, their bodies glistening in the sunlight. Before taking to the field they had been slathered with sunflower-seed oil so that the flower pollen would collect on their skin. Later the women would roll the pollen off with their fingertips, then either dry it to be smoked in a cigarette or shape it into squares small enough to fit into a pipe. I grew up around many addicts. I can't remember the number of times an ambulance screamed its sirens into my dreams, jolting me awake to see my parents running in and out of our hotel room because a band member had overdosed on coke or was doped up enough to crawl up the walls.

That said, I wasn't about to lecture Annie.

Moments later Cruz came into the living room, his white T-shirt wet around the shoulders, snug above a pair of faded jeans. “Hey,” he said, smiling.

Neither one of us spoke as he led me to the door at the end of the hallway. Nothing but a mattress and a small desk with a chair occupied his room, yet it invited me in. Pinned above the mattress hung a small photograph: a close-up of a young woman with pixie-cut blond hair and enormous green eyes.

A dark blanket covering the windows cast a shadow over the surroundings, but not so much that I didn't notice the stacks of cassette tapes and books piled about. Many of the books had yellow Post-its peeking out.

“Sorry for the mess.” He shut the door and the room went black. The smell of him, something like falling leaves, drifted in the air. How was I going to do this? “Hold on,” he said. A moment later a floor lamp went on. “Do you want to sit?”

“It's okay.”

“What's the matter?” he said. He raised his hand to accept mine, but I took a step back.

“We have to talk.”

“Yeah?” He crossed his arms and leaned against the wall. “Is that asshole still coming around? Someone should remind your parents they don't live in Transylvania anymore.”

My fingers itched to touch his hair, dark at the ends where water dripped. “You have to stop the lessons,” I said.

“Why?”

“Because we're lying, and when they find out we'll both be in deep shit.”

“And?” He waved a hand, waiting for me to continue.

“And Olga's convinced something's going on between us. She's husband-hunting to save me from you.”

He looked at the floor and laughed softly. His shoulders shook with it. “I don't believe this.”

“You think I can do whatever I want, but I can't.”

“Because I'm not a Gypsy? It's not like we're living in the twentieth century or anything. Did you ever think that your stepmother's doing all this to piss off your mom? What if it has nothing to do with you?”

When I didn't answer he went on, his voice louder, sharper, his accent thickening. “Maybe if we went out a couple of times you'd find something worth standing up to your family about. Why are you afraid of this?”

“You're the closest thing to a friend I have—”

“There's more than friendship between us. But you won't even give us a fucking chance without expecting the worst.”

“I'm trying to be logical—”

“And how's that working out for you?”

My thoughts scattered out of reach. I couldn't bear to upset my father by choosing a boy with no past and no future, like I had done with Ruslan. Every mention of Cruz's family flashed in and out of our conversations like a streetlight passing by a car window.

“I can't,” I finally said, and studied the tapes at our feet with utmost interest. He was staring too hard, as if to catch the thoughts spinning webs inside my head. “You're making me uncomfortable.”

“
Merde!
Finally, a little honesty.”

“My family will never agree to let me see you. Do you want to sneak around like criminals?”

“I don't mind,” he said. “Why are you making such a big deal out of nothing?”

“Because it is to me.” I moved to leave, but he barred the door.

“Okay. Let's try it,” he said. “We'll be friends—fuck, it's not like we're anything more now—but on one condition. I'll prove that I'm right, that we should be dating, and the moment you admit it, all these bullshit rules are off the table. No matter what your family says.”

As promised, the lessons stopped. Cruz told Dad that he was failing several classes and was required to attend after-school tutoring to get back on track. My father sulked for about two hours. But as he lived in a world most of us didn't occupy, he got over it. I couldn't read Olga as well, but having experienced her bloodthirsty nature firsthand, I kept myself on guard.

Meanwhile, to uphold my part of the bargain, I hung out with Cruz and his gang. Remaining friends with him proved tricky because I liked him even more now that I couldn't have him. I looked at him and imagined wrapping my arms around his neck like the monkey Olga compared me to. Only three things kept our friendship from spilling over into something more intimate: Olga; a friend of Annie's named Alison who tagged along after Cruz; and school, where I spent so much time I should've had my own cot in some corner.

The band teacher had taken me under his wing, becoming my mentor and champion. The music wing of the school auditorium building was never empty, not even hours after the last bell. And that was where I went to escape life. But I wasn't alone. The students who went hungry at home or came to school with bruises on their faces had also found their makeshift home on the carpeted steps of Mr. North's band-room stage, books and homework folders out, pencils scribbling. A kid with tribal body piercings once confessed that he slept in the band equipment room whenever he could sneak in unseen. “It's the only place my father can't yank my pants off,” he joked once. Mr. North tripped over him one morning, all bundled up in the red-and-white marching-band uniforms of the Hollywood High Sheiks, but never reported him.

Sometimes after school, I sat in the chair closest to the teacher's desk, piled with dog-eared paperbacks, and listened to Mr. North quote the inspirational authors he loved. He'd balance on the edge of his desk, feet up on a chair.

“Paulo Coelho once wrote, ‘Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dream.'”

“But I have a dream. I am learning how to be a real American.”

Mr. North slapped his khakied knees with amusement. “Slow down, Pinocchio. How about you be what you already are.”

“Like what?”

“Figure it out. Pretend you're holding a block of clay yay big. Now make something out of it.”

Music was the only clay I knew. I started to perform as much as possible: recitals, concerts, school band recordings. We even made an appearance on one of Dennis Miller's TV shows (I played cymbals, since my piano was too heavy to haul to the studio). My self-confidence soared, and before long, even my family's theatrics didn't faze me so much anymore.

Whenever someone looked at me as if to say “Are your parents for real?” I reminded myself that this was how
exotic
people lived, so suck it.

Cruz turned up at every performance, as a good friend might, sometimes with Alison tailing him to make sure we spent as little time alone as possible. The girl was Marilyn Monroe to my Carol Burnett. She knew it and I knew it. After a while I desperately wanted to ask Cruz if they were together. Friends asked questions like that, right? Annie and Brandon came, too, flanked by other Goths. They intrigued me; I liked the idea of their darkness in the face of color-coded normalcy.

Secretly I'd yearned for friendship all my life.

Mom had several best friends back in Russia, and the way they brought over groceries or the latest perfumes freshly smuggled in from across the border, and assembled weekly inside our smoky kitchen, convinced me that friends
are
family. That was the kind of care these women put into their relationships: if you came over, my mother would have the tea brewing and the stew heating up and her ear open before you'd taken off your shoes. She got that quality from Grandma Rose, for sure.

There was this place in Kirovakan, up on a hill near the town's rim, where people gathered to collect mineral water from several elaborate drinking fountains built on a natural spring called Sour Water, or Tetoo Dzhoor in Armenian. Grandma and I took plastic jugs up that path several times a week during my summer visits. We usually went at night, when the air blossomed inside our lungs. People made their way to the spring from all over town, the tips of the men's cigars and pipes like a stream of lights in motion. “Just a quick trip,” Grandma promised every time. But once at the fountains, old friends and neighbors accosted us and the conversations filled hours. You'd think Grandma was everyone's relative, not just mine. “Rosik
tota.
Let me help you carry the water home?”
Tota
in Armenian means “auntie,” and younger generations will use it as a respectful address for elders. Men call each other
akhper
(brother), women
khirik
(sister). The Armenian language is designed for kinship. I sipped the mineral water straight from the fountain and let it flow down my throat like a cool fizzy firework, and I sat on one of the many benches and waited while Grandma made inquiries of Artem Petrosyan's legal woes, and Ani Ovsepyan's family troubles, and Florik Mahachetryan's ability to have that ninth kid without complications even if she was past fifty and should start thinking about herself instead of her husband's lustful nature. She never appeared bored or impatient, her face open, voice compassionate. Grandma and Mom bickered over countless things, but maybe it was because they resembled each other so much.

My father, on the other hand? Well, most of Mom's friends avoided him. Something about his guarded manner.

Dad used to warn me regularly against trusting the
gadjen
. But despite his voice of vigilance ringing in my head now, I began to open up to my new friends and crave their company.

It turned out that the house Cruz lived in belonged to Annie's mother, Delma. She worked a night shift at a local hospital and slept most of the day, unseen until the weekends, when she'd grill steaks the size of Frisbees and sing catchy tunes in Portuguese along with Annie and sometimes even Cruz. Brandon and Alison practically lived at Annie's, and they had free run of the house.

I knew more about Annie's mother than I did about Cruz's parents, but every time I asked him about them, he changed the subject. How was that fair? He asked me to relax and let him in while he kept me out. It seemed that the details he'd shared about his dad and
Benedita
were as much as I'd hear of his past, as if he'd left himself unguarded for that one bus ride, then barred the doors before too much escaped. Annie had volunteered some information, but nothing specific, only that Cruz had often come to stay throughout his childhood and that I should refrain from asking him about his family. But Brandon let it slip that Cruz's mother left home when he was a little kid and that he'd been obsessed with finding her ever since.

I had plenty of time to figure out a way of making Cruz talk.

Thanks to Dad's preoccupation with his musical arrangements, and to Olga's disappearing acts, I finally had the freedom to come and go as I pleased. At seventeen I felt adult enough to act as irresponsibly as they did, and old enough to recognize that Dad had been wrong about friendship.

 

ON THE ROOF

On most days walking home from school I could hear Dad and Olga shouting, and if they caught me at the front door, they immediately pulled me into their fights. Soon I started to use my bedroom window instead of the door.

Back in Moscow when my parents fought, I became the reluctant spy. Roxy was too young, but both my parents knew that I was the right age to remember events in detail.

“Did someone clean the living-room rug while I was gone?” Mom was saying one day as we entered a public
banya
located inside a five-story neoclassical building.

“I don't think so.”

This particular
banya
, with its mermaid-themed mosaics and gigantic windows, was my favorite. When I stood in the main bathing area the size of an Olympic swimming complex, I felt like a fish at the bottom of the ocean with sunlight streaming down over me through the water.

“Oh. It looked like it was moved.”

“Dad probably used it under Vova's drums during rehearsal.” A mistake, since Mom had forbidden my father to set up drums on the Persian rugs. We pushed our way through the busy lobby lined with kiosks selling cigarettes and newspapers, shoeshine booths, and hair salons where women with rosy cheeks were getting perms.

We found our lockers and undressed, hanging the clothes on the hooks and locking the valuables behind dented doors. The
banya
split into two wings, men's and women's; inside those areas modesty was as distant a Russian concept as pay-per-view. Naked, we found our bench—one of many dotting the tiled floor of the main bathhouse—and on it our buckets, along with eucalyptus branches tied in a bunch. As we bathed, Mom fumed over the fact that Dad's friends drank the three bottles of Armenian cognac she'd been saving to use as “gifts” for our case worker at the American embassy. I hadn't wanted to tell her those details, but between the steam flushing my cheeks pink and the soothing murmur of women's voices bouncing against the high ceilings, I was in a great mood, tongue unguarded.