Your man won’t crave another pussy ever…

Disclaimer: Stories and opinions here are limited experiences and not a generalization. 

I lived in a pretty nice looking building – for communist architecture. It was new and built by my father’s construction team the year I was born. It was a 4 story, brick colored, U-shaped building, with several entrances and a nice inner yard where us kids could just run and play from dawn till late at night. My entrance was on the outside and that always bothered me, cause I had to go around the building to get to the interior yard, and that felt like it robbed me of precious minutes of play.

But it also exposed me to more dangers, because going around in the street there were more chances of running into weirdos, neighborhood pedos, cars, horse-drawn carriages, stray dogs, and, if there was a storm, flaming sparks from the electricity wires getting slammed together in the wind. We didn’t have an intercom or key, most entrances were left open, so many times our front entrance was used as a public toilet. The smell of piss and concrete is still with me today.

One summer day, must have been around 8-9 years old, as I went out and around the building  to visit my privileged friend ‘on the interior’, I ran into a couple of gypsy kids. Half naked, dirty, barefeet, they were hanging around the garbage bin. As I came in all cheerful and careless, of course they had to pick on me. They asked if I had money – like what kid would have money at the time, we is poor bro… I told them to leave me alone. At that point they both ran towards me, one in front, one in the back, caught me in a firm grip and told me they would take me with them. Being face to face with one of the little offenders, I noticed he had a dried earthworm hanging out of his mouth, like he was chewing on the other side of it. No, we didn’t experiment with such alternative protein sources, even if meat was scarce. Soy – yeah, worms – maybe gypsies were on to something.

I started arguing with them and as I raised my voice, my friend’s father who happened to be out in the balcony, heard me and poked his head out to see what the ruckus was about. “Leave her alone or I’ll come downstairs and strangle you” he yelled, and the two little pricks ran away. To be fair, I think he said something much worse, but in the interest of not getting him arrested for child abuse…

I think I was more disgusted with having touched their little filthy bodies than actually being afraid of being kidnapped. Parents would sometimes tell us those kids had fleas. I walked upstairs to my friend’s house and calmed down with some homemade salty cheese pies made by her mom. 

In Romania, gypsies were a permanent presence, a minority population in its own right. For the sake of the story and the real memories it evokes, political correctness aside, they will be called gypsies here, as this was the name they were referred to by everyone, including themselves. 

Gypsies were our boogie men, our monsters, the most frequent scare tactic used by parents to make the little ones obey. “If you don’t do this, I will have the gypsies take you away” … Oh the terror, I’ve seen kids literally die inside when they heard that. Kids, and adults alike, feared them. Having to walk over to my aunt’s house was a pretty daunting experience as I would have to pass by a few gypsy houses on the way there. In all fairness, it was so much learned fear, but nothing bad ever happened to me except for smelling the surroundings. These houses just reeked. Garbage would pile up everywhere in the yards, and aggressive dogs would jump at the fence as you walked by and bark at you. The highest adrenaline moment came when you’d realize the fence had a hole in it… Literally as a child I had so much adrenaline pump through my veins, that I made a life goal out of chilling in my adulthood. Skydiving is for pussies. 

It wasn’t like the ex-nomad gypsies owned the houses, they were given homes, usually nationalized houses forcibly taken from people when communists passed some of their nationalization laws. Not even sure if some gypsies were actually squatters in such houses, as their camps were dispersed and most of them had to turn from nomads into city dwellers. They were not allowed to be themselves, and I don’t remember them being recognized as a minority. But “communism is great in theory” –  the voice of some woke person nowadays echoes in my head. 

Gypsy women always had their traditional garments on, layers of colorful pattern skirts, usually in colors like pink, red and yellow, a bandana on the head, braids, gold coins and shawls. They were not the scary ones, unless you stood in their way – but their offspring were absolute little tyrants. Men would usually wear fedoras and black pants and drive horse carriages. What? Carriages – yes, in the city, as some of you already know cause you still saw it around Europe somewhere. Some of those contraptions were really sketchy, if you drove behind them you’d have to keep the distance for fear of an imminent disintegration. 

One summer day as my friend and I took our squeaky bikes for a ride in the park, we had the misfortune of running into a bunch of gypsies riding their carriage. They started following us, probably hoping to get our bikes. We sped up to the point where we could barely keep up pedaling through the bumpy park alleys, but we couldn’t lose the sounds of the clops behind us. We eventually managed to escape through some narrow alleys, but that was enough to make us avoid them like plague from that point on. 

Gypsy culture is amazing in its own way, but their everyday reputation was of thieves, pickpockets, con artists and pumpkin seed sellers. That’s right, they would often be out in parks and beaches, or at sports events, selling roasted pumpkin seeds. Looking back, one has to wonder how they actually got pumpkin seeds because if you saw their houses, they weren’t exactly the kind of people to cultivate the land and grow their own pumpkins, and at the time there were no bulk stores or anything like that. Maybe it was magic. 

Gypsy women were into the magic stuff – black magic, white magic, bullshit magic. Some had a reputation of healers, fortune tellers, card readers and spell casters and breakers. Unfathomably, the entire population feared their curses. 

These second-hand witches would wander in the parks and approach people who were sitting on benches, abusively starting to “read” the cards for them so they would coerce them into giving them some money for the forced reading. The fear of the curse was enough. They would hook them up with good stuff “I see your man is only thinking of you” (even more enthralling to hear when you are, ahem, single) or bad stuff like “you are cursed to never get married” which of course no young woman ever wanted to hear, so usually that would determine them to pull out some money and pay for the gypsy woman to finish her reading. “I’m cursing your enemies and making your man not crave another pussy ever”. And that’s how men became clingy stalkers…

Let’s face it, nobody was doing any fortune telling. These were scams, lies and praying on the vulnerable. I am still in awe to see western women nowadays proud of having gypsy blood because they think they are natural born witches. I have to wonder if the only thing they inherited through their bloodline is a delusion that they have some kind of mystic powers. Yeah you got me, I don’t believe in fortune telling, and I certainly don’t believe a certain race or culture has more mystic powers. Sometimes I wonder if gypsies made a living with fortune telling because it was easy work, easy to deceive, and didn’t require any real skills, all backed up by myths from previous generations. It’s always fun to have your cards read until you hear you will die, and the antidote is a magic spell only the gypsy woman can cast for you… for a fee.

If you were more god-fearing and wanted to go to a priest for the same magic spell, the fee would apply as well, plus you’d have to do hardcore praying for a month. I really don’t know who started this charade anymore, nor do I care to find out. I still look at the big picture now and start to wonder what went wrong, how did it go wrong, in a country that feared gypsies and trusted priests. Blame the communists…