They Called Us American Gypsy

It was dark when I woke up.

I could hear voices and some shadowy silhouettes outside the frosted glass door but no one was coming in. I didn’t want anyone either. I think they sensed that, and didn’t really know what to do. It felt like the aftermath of an acid trip, and I wasn’t quite sure whether I’d expanded my consciousness or left it somewhere out in the cosmos. The irony was I hadn’t taken anything. I just read a book and had my mind handed to me on a platter. Completely disassembled, and now I was left to rebuild it from scratch.

I remember squeezing my hands tightly to see if my most vital muscles were still working. I felt my fingers. Wiggled them. Convinced myself I hadn’t lost any motor skills. Other than that I still hadn’t moved.

Let’s see, where am I? Albert’s office bed. Eyes squinting, I could make out the two windows and the dull beam of red light from the neon signs across the street. Warmoesstraat was so narrow you could almost touch the building on the opposite side of the street. It was quiet, no music coming from downstairs, so it had to be after three in the morning. I hadn’t played that night. I hadn’t been aware of any music at all. I was totally tuned out.

I must have dozed off because when I opened my eyes Joe and Richard were standing over me, looking down, pondering my condition. They were the only two people with enough nerve to come in and check on me, and they had the good sense to know what not to ask. We had never been in this situation before. “Hey man, you OK? How are you feeling?” Part of me liked the attention, because actually I was feeling something close to okay, but I wasn’t ready to play. Not yet. It was a mental vacation I hadn’t known I needed.

I realised in the next few seconds I must have been more okay than I thought, because I was starving.

It seems I missed a Sunday. We had Monday off, so I used that day to recover. Funny, nobody asked too much about what happened. There seemed to be a taboo around people checking out mentally, and I wasn’t about to try to explain what I had just experienced. Some things you can’t put into words, at least not yet. From that point on it was a slow grind back to the Amsterdam groove.

Recovery is not a single moment. It’s a process.

In the weeks after the breakdown I started to observe things I had stopped noticing in our first few months after moving north. The light changing on the canal in the late afternoon. The specific smell of the club before the DJ started, wood and old smoke and something sweet underneath. The way a groove feels different at the end of a long set than it does at the beginning, looser, like you earned it. I had been playing on instinct for months. Now I was really listening again.

The room upstairs had not changed. Five mattresses on a linoleum floor, three tent corners with their clothesline curtains, chess games running day and night, hash smoke rising toward a ceiling we never really looked at. Carlos still brought his morning inventory of things he’d found between the seats in the bleachers. The JB’s still came through the floor at nine-thirty every night. Al Green still called us downstairs at midnight. None of that had changed. But something in me had shifted, and I was starting to understand that Frantz Fanon had not broken me. He had just shown me the pieces. What I did with them was up to me.

I became completely consumed by the music. Daily practice, not just the sets. Singing more, writing more, listening differently. The band was tight enough by then that we didn’t need to rehearse in any conventional sense, we just needed to play, and we played every night, and the playing got better. There is a kind of discipline that comes from the other side of a mental breakdown that you cannot manufacture any other way. You either find it or you don’t.

The Dutch winter had closed in completely by then. The grey ceiling I had convinced myself was temporary had become permanent, or at least it felt that way. No space between the sky and the earth. You were inside the cloud every waking hour, which for us meant every afternoon, since we rarely saw daylight. Holland is below sea level. A land reclaimed from the sea. We were vampires by schedule if not by nature. Carlos would sometimes wake us with stories of the previous night’s finds, things dropped or forgotten or abandoned between the bleachers. Every morning there was a small inventory of someone else’s night. We had become Gypsies in the truest sense of the word, stateless and adaptable, and the neighbourhood had started to recognise us as such. We were getting a street reputation for two reasons: we never rehearsed, but we also never stopped playing. They called us the Gypsies and we wore it.

It was about six months into our stay that we put on a concert at another venue on the west side of the city. Reality and American Gypsy on the same bill. By then we had a small following and Reality had theirs, and combined we thought we could fill this medium sized venue. Both bands played, and as always we tried to blow each other away. We always had something to prove. It was all or nothing, the way it had always been.

I noticed Frankie, Reality’s guitar player, talking to a girl during the changeover. Deep in conversation, laughing easily with each other. I assumed immediately that was his girlfriend and tried to talk myself out of the curiosity I felt, because she was gorgeous. Dark skinned, coco brown, a mix of Indian and African features that in California would have been simply a beautiful Black girl but here in Holland it was the last thing I expected. In Pasadena, girls like that were for football stars and cheerleaders only, not for shy dark skinned kids that took saxophone and piano lessons with no discernible social skills. I had learned early to aim elsewhere.

I started asking around anyway, because my confidence had grown since those early days mostly because of my travels, so I thought I was ready to settle down. I found my way over to Mitchell the bass player, who was more easygoing than the others. I asked him the question and he looked at me like the answer was obvious.

Oh that’s Millie. Frankie’s sister.

The world rearranged itself slightly.

I had not thought about women in any serious way since Spain. After the excesses of the castle and the road, I had arrived in Amsterdam with a genuine conviction that I was done with all of that, at least for the foreseeable future. I had meant it. Six months of living above the Ponderosa in the epicentre of the red light district with thirteen people in one room and no privacy had done nothing to change my mind. I was twenty-four years old and the development of my frontal lobe was apparently making its first real appearance.

And then there was Millie.

She was aloof but not unfriendly, which in my experience meant nothing was impossible, just nothing was certain. I found out she was a dancer. That she modeled. That she was from Curaçao, which explained the mix of everything I was unable to categorise. That she did not, as far as anyone could tell, have a boyfriend. Impossible, I thought, and yet apparently true. Girls like Millie did not come into the Ponderosa. She knew what kind of place it was, and Frankie knew, and between them they had a reasonable argument for staying away. I was patient now, willing to let things unfold naturally. In a way the breakdown had gifted me that patience, it’s the kind of stillness you only find when you’ve recently learned that the mind is not a fixed thing, and that what you think you know about yourself is only the beginning. It was my first real conscious encounter with trusting the universe, knowing that if I wanted this new relationship to grow, I had to jump and trust that the net would appear.

Eventually she came in. Once, with Frankie. And then again, alone to see me.

After that we fell the way you fall when you have been waiting for something without knowing what you were waiting for. Quickly, and with complete conviction.

I made a promise to myself the night I first saw her.

This was the girl I was going to marry.

“Quick heads up before I go… Bill and I are back at Cardea June 25th celebrating 25 years of making music together. Looking forward to this one.” Clisby $ Risby