No Caravan
memoir part 2
Blackout
To be in love is fantastic, and there’s also that sense of surprise at your good fortune: the pure luck of it. You’re the luckiest person on earth and you know it and revel in it. At least I did, and on top of that I also knew how it had been before. I still had my past to contend with, but then who doesn’t? Of course the past tends to come back and bite you, or something like that, but I lived in blissful ignorance of the fact. And besides, I had Jesse and music and the river to help me forget.
Eventually I told Jesse about Jake. I wondered if he was disgusted by me; if, in revealing my history, the illusion–because there must be one–had shattered. I waited. “I just wish you’d never met him,” he said finally. “If I ever meet that piece of shit I’ll probably fucking kill him.”
I thought that this was unlikely, but liked hearing it.
Everyone adored Jesse. He was open–hearted and quick to laugh, curious about everything, and good at everything he did. And, like me, he was crazy about music. He was in a band and played the guitar and wrote and sang punk songs about skateboarding and country songs about beer and ska songs about girls and sometimes quiet instrumental songs with no lyrics.
He showed me a record he’d found at a thrift store. It was a collection of old folk songs, from the Ukraine, Romania, Hungary, Greece and France. He picked up his guitar and tried to play along. “Come on, get out your violin,” he said. We listened and learned, picking out the tunes as we went along. We bought more records and checked out CD’s from the historical-folk section at the library.
It was compelling, this old-world music. It reminded me of the Les Blank movies my parents took me to as a kid; documentaries about American folk musicians, music of slaves and farm laborers–the original Blues, Creole, Tex-Mex, and Polka. It was how I got introduced to Cajun music, and, especially, The Hackberry Ramblers–whose nasal, plaintive recording of “Jolie Blonde” first inspired me to start playing my violin like a fiddle. It was as if this European music was an older version of traditional American folk music, which, of course, it was.
“Maybe we should just move to Europe,” said Jesse. “We could buy a van to live in and travel around and play music. We could look for the people who still play these songs. The real thing.”
“I’d like that,” I said.
Jesse lived in a shitty rental house with Greg and a few other guys. Hippies and punks and skaters—even some rednecks—that he’d grown up with. There was a big overgrown yard with a trampoline, and kids and dogs running around, hardly supervised, happy.
One day, not long after we met, we were sitting in his yard under an oak tree. Jesse lay on his back, an arm across his face to block the sun. I reached over and brushed the curls off of his forehead. He caught my hand in his and held it for a moment, smiling.
After a few minutes he sat up and stretched. Then, as I watched, he held out his hands in front of him and began to count on his fingers.
“Fifteen,” he said after a moment.
“Fifteen what?”
“I’m on a mission,” he said, “I’m trying to get blackout drunk every night for a month. I’m on day sixteen.”
“What the fuck is blackout drunk?”
“Seriously? Uh, okay... it’s like—when you drink so fucking much you just pass out. Like, out cold. And you can’t remember anything; you can’t remember shit the next day.”
I was quiet. I picked up a tiny oak leaf, felt the sharp prick of its edge as I drew it down along the top of my knee. The line that it left was whiter than my skin.
“That sounds kind of dangerous,” I said finally. I flicked the leaf back into the grass.
“Maybe. But it’s hella fun.”
There was a party that night at Jesse’s house. We all drank a lot. But I couldn’t keep up with Jesse, nobody could. He didn’t black out until after we went to bed. It took me a second to figure out what had happened.
“Jesse?” There was the sound of him breathing. I rolled his dead weight off of me and lay in the dark, embarrassed for both of us. The wind blew outside. I listened to the sound of a branch, scraping the window.
He didn’t drink like that again, at least not on the nights I was with him. If we stayed at his house he always got shit-faced with his friends, but most nights we spent at my house, listening to records and making out. I liked it better that way.
No Caravan
In the spring I sold my house and almost everything else, and we filled our packs with clothes and books and tied our skateboards to the packs and put Wogart in a crate and carried our violin and guitar in our hands and got on a plane to Europe. We didn’t know when, or if, we’d be back. I had a little money from selling the house; enough to support our travels for a few months. Or maybe we’d make new friends and learn another language and stay there, forever. We were excited to travel. We wanted to play our music on the streets and pay for it all in that way. We had written some of our own songs, but it all sounded like old music, the kind of songs you’d hear in a French cafe in the thirties maybe–all guitars and accordions and violins. We played a lot of the old Klezmer songs too, many of which were sad; the plight of the Jews. And we had learned the songs of the Greek underground, written by heroin addicts, refugees of the Greco-Turkish war. We were hell-bent on resuscitating this old music. We’d play the old songs and we’d play them right, rough and simple the way they ought to be. Maybe we’d meet some real Gypsies and learn from the source. We romanticized all of it. We wanted to live it, as much as we could. We wanted to be it.
We bought a beat up old delivery van in Madrid. There was room in the back for a mattress. We found one, pretty clean, in a ditch on the side of the road. Someone had dumped a whole household there. There was some lumber and tools and pots and pans and linens and a couple of chairs and a table and shelves. Jesse hung up the shelves and built a raised platform for the mattress. I set up the bed and fashioned some curtains. The van felt cozy enough when we were done. After a while we thought of it simply as home.
“Dear Casey,” I wrote to my friend. “This place is pretty dope. We’re living in a van and shitting in a pot. Wish you were here.”
She wrote back: “Dear Anna. Thanks. I think I’m good. Yours, Casey.”
We drove the van all over Europe. We went everywhere, playing on the streets for tips. We practiced hard on the days we weren’t busking and played as well as we could. Sometimes we’d be playing, totally absorbed by the music, and then we might come to for a moment, look up, and see that a crowd of people had gathered to listen. Sometimes it was too cold or windy or rainy or the cops kicked us out before we’d even tuned up. “No caravan,” they said. We became used to hearing it; a reference to the Roma people who still caravanned together all over Europe and were generally disliked. We clearly weren't Gypsies, but the way we were living, it was close enough, I guess, and we understood what they meant: “You're dirty and poor and you live in a van and this does not look good to the tourists.”
We were always looking for remnants–the beauty or simplicity–of the old world. Sometimes we were disappointed–like when we got to a village that had looked intact and lovely in photos, but was actually surrounded by strip malls. Or we were shocked–like when we saw how in the slums of Nice the trash was not picked up but piled alongside the houses, the children playing barefoot in rags, the reek of raw sewage, choking the air. We hadn’t known there could be poverty like that in a first world country.
But we were always on the outside, just passing through, and everything we saw, good or bad, was a part of our adventure, and kept a kind of allure because of it.
Part 3:
Risky and crazy lovable chapter. Anna.
Fun! Love the music bits. Reminding me… I used to love Hungarian folk songs. Will find again today.