Sea Gypsy

The Sea Gypsy was not born as such. One is never quite born into who they are, usually (there are always those rare times when you can see someone’s star shining out of them as a baby, some just before even). No, he was a lotus; crooked, with seams, a particularly pathology of stitching starting from the outside in, for it was always those external influences which bore themselves down upon him, pressing and ripping his petals from early childhood. His mother was a drug addict. Nothing special there. She had turned tricks for money and somehow was pregnant with the spawn of a beautifully kind and gentle homosexual. Sea Gypsy used to remember being driven around in the back of his gay ol’ dad’s car while Neil Diamond’s “Forever In Blue Jeans” played, Sea Gypsy always singing along to the wrong words, thinking it was “Forever in Blue Cheese”…His mother was all he had though, mostly, growing up. And she raped him every chance she could get. He was like a little adult, due to this and other facts. He would sit at home, after school, alone and looking to break out, as post marijuana/drinking/general drugging get togethers with his mom and her drug riddled johns / friends, they would leave for long periods at a time, and Sea Gypsy, not yet that, would scour the place since she always locked it up tight when leaving him there. At least she was protecting him, in some capacity, she thought. By the time he was 10 he always knew how to bust out, and was also trying out many of the items left out on the coffee table himself. He became a pro at this and much else. She used him like she was used – his body there to comfort her in some pitchfork in the night sort of way….the hushed sound of angry townspeople gathering in the distance, stomping their way towards you but you can’t quite tell when it is they are coming for you. Once, earlier, when the abuse had just begun (five or so), when he was living a short stint with his dad (he wore the rainbow coloured shirts and had the sweetest mustache in San Diego, Sea Gypsy thought), his mother managed to kidnap him away to Hawaii and work full time as a prostitute there. His grandmother Nani (Nana Nani), a North American and Mexican Aztec carved straight from a ritualistic totem pole (the grandma who was wise, and psychic and detached from all of this) came with his grandpa and rescued him. He would remember them until the days when both of them died – that was a cry which set him back on the heroin for a spell. But first – the boy grew up, looking for escapes and finding them always, and most definitely on his own. He ran away from his mother, still drug addicted, her sagging tits one of the worst memories that he had to witness.

He always loved slender, young looking girls after that. His first (and probably one true) love, M, was light as a butterfly and was only 16 when they met – he was working behind the deli counter at 28, having just gotten fired from one of many office jobs – he would bring his briefcase to work, even though he was nothing close to executive in any way, shape or method – usually a temp, in for the week or the day. Trying to make money to support his habits…the ones which made him forget his mother’s tits and losses. He used to carry cocaine in that briefcase, and was known to leave with it, for his lunch break, and sit in his car (an old Camino, which was allotted in proper jest to his half Mexi-Cali heritage) and get high and then just……not come back. This graduated to heroin, and falling asleep there in the back of his car, in the office building’s parking lot. Waking up the next day, ready for work but then again not, due to urine stains and the occasional migraine. Either way, his office career was going nowhere. So, the deli it was. He was slicing the meats as he did, and this young girl and her mother came up to him, and he saw her angelic face, dark eyes and ghostly skin reflecting in the meat counter glass. He was in awe, but was known to keep his cool about most things (he kept his cool about his own mother raping him, so this was really not a problem) and asked her if she needed help. She was mostly dumbstruck at him, and when he took off his baseball cap and his princely dark hair flopped on downwards into and around his face, well, she was struck completely mute. And he loved her long, and lean body, small and non offending breasts were like honey to him, since he would often tell her how, in his words, “big, floppy tits….uhhhhhh (shudder, there was always a shudder)” reminded him of his mother and that just wouldn’t do. After this first meeting, it went the way it usually does. They were together, he then cheated and stole and gave into his heroin, finally running away on a trip to Costa Rica while she was left in his apartment, just like he once was, told by his roommate that he had gone. He was the sort of heroin addict that, even when clean and sober and one of the foremost sponsors in the Mar Vista chapter of AA (Heroin junkies and most former drug types preferred AA over NA…there is a reason – perhaps they see alcohol as the moat around which their castles of puke, theft and self circumstance arose), he would hear “Monkey Man” on the car radio while driving around Mulholland Drive, the twists and turns, the ocean just there, and sigh out – “God, this song makes me want Heroin”. He knew the darkness under his eyes told the shadowed story of his demise and rise (he had it figured that he never really had a downfall, since he’s been rising since the lowest day, which was the one on which he was born), especially when he spoke at AA meetings, which he interwove into his musician/writer/surfer life like the most steady of constitutionals.

He loved to tell the story of his overdose (the main one) on heroin, just before which he was hiding out in the attic from the cops with two bags of coke stuck up his ass. That was his defining moment, and he died – twice – (which he loved to bring up to Misha in the beginning, and a decade later when they found each other again and knew that they were sewn together, Psychic Boy and Clairvoyant Girl as they called themselves – for better or worse. During the second or third time they were together, she’d look at him, those adoring brown eyes knowing and then forgetting about the magic that they both had, which others would take and use and throw back at them, deflated. She’d say “you’re my soul mate” and he’d look her dead pan in the eyes, no smile and sigh, saying “seems like there’s no way out of it”. He loved her more than his body or mind could take, and this racked them both year in and year out, always re-connecting and dis-connecting, each other’s heroin and redemption at the very same time. He lived a low key, and relatively sane life for someone who never drank, smoked or did drugs anymore. For someone with his past (until his mother died, he barely spoke to her, still maintaining a good and solid visiting friendship with his dad, who himself had full blown AIDS). People’s tragedies didn’t faze him – yet he never would make his out to be more tragic, terrible or important than anyone’s. He just wanted to see it through and see what was next. The AA’s loved him – he was good looking, not typically so, his Mexican-Indian strong nose against dark, tan skin and green eyes. His hair always grown out, his dress always like a 16 year old, even when he was pushing 40 – he simply didn’t age. He had a sort of charisma one might only feel in a superstar of some kind, but one with a solid center filled up with immovable magnetism. There were actual celebrities around – as there always were where substance abuse took place….Anthony Hopkins was in one of his groups, and on his 5 year anniversary, Robert Downey Jr. presented him with the anniversary cake, later exclaiming to those around him – “Is he an actor? I feel like he’s famous and I know him”. M once stole his old cassettes of some speeches he gave, which were filled with real, and honest applause and not once tender drop of bullshit. He didn’t know what to do with bullshit, excuses, lies and compartmentalizations, and I loved him immediately for this fact. Sea Gypsy swam through oceans and oceans of hurt, shit and disappointment, the empty silence hounding back at him every time he waited to be helped, or saved or redeemed. He began to practice Buddhism, quite regularly, but not obsessively, he just apologized for kicking the shit out of the lies around him, and that he was on a rigorous spiritual journey. I use that line and another he coined - his spoken and written words were like an unheard of gold that was said to exist in some happier time, but you don’t know if it was every real, or a made up fairytale. His phrases like this made you believe it was worth looking for, even if these words were just around the outermost walls of the great maze.

He used to stumble upon Henry Hill on Venice Beach, washed up, leather faced and with a bunch of other drunks, chatting, stealing, drinking. He talked to all those guys, and had what one might term as an old man’s soul. Henry Hill used to show up at the occasional AA meeting, but would be drunk, or stealing cookies and snacks, and end up back on the beach with his brethren – living out of his car, or worse. The Sea Gypsy was the ultimate picture of Buddhism, the lotus growing up out of the muck. He made this completely visible to any and all who knew him, once he got a tattoo of a big, bounding Lotus Flower – growing up artfully from the track marks on his elbow and forearm. He didn’t share more, you had to ask him about it if you were curious. Even then, he’d probably tell you a story about someone else. He would always warn M about the others, taking the light from them, the fireflies – they always wanted to catch people like them, keep them in a jar just to look upon their light, not caring if they killed you in the process, cut off your ability to breathe and fly. They didn’t give a shit, long as they could see some of your light. The world is not always a benign place. Them that do this will do this, because it is their nature to do so. And Sea Gypsy never held that against him – but he would give them one fucking second of his light and time. This, ultimately is what split them up, but to this day, she shares things with him occasionally, and he will ask about her. They even cross paths now and again. He told her, since it was 7 years between each time they were together, that in another 7 years or when they are old, in many more sets of 7 to come, maybe they can work it out then. He would say these things on a daily basis, when he played his upright bass in that old man/big band at the Veteran’s Club up in Eagle Rock. He was jealous of you, and your sips of whiskey and wine when feeling “inspired” or taking a bath – he said “God, I wish I could do that. It must be so nice to be able to just enjoy a set amount”.

Tough as nails in the palms of Christ, he is. He still is, and will always be. He chanted for truth – so much of it that it would turn his life and experience on fire, burn down all the fear and blackness out of him, in little bits, day by day. He cat, a black stray called Needle, would sit on the couch and watch him play. He looked like a rock star with lifetimes to spare. His eyes told you this, even when he was not talking. When angry at him, M used to say “you look like a mean Indian!” because he would look at her, knowing all that wasn’t right, or true or the way it naturally should be, with those green Eagle Eyes. Standing with his sinewy, surfer’s arms crossed was the way he liked it best. Too much of everything, not enough of anything, those fields of fireflies fought inside of him. Simple, and with the beauty of every instant on the tip of his tongue and fingertips surrounding most every of his moves, he is always in some west coast café, my Mexican brother and Captain of the 7th Cavalry of Truth, playing the bass or reading a book or writing a brilliant set of words unlike anyone else could even be wired to do – exclaiming, when the machine has got you, swallowed you up, and made you its slave, it’s easy. It’s so easy. “Just turn the machine off”.

M. Lucia