Virtual Gypsyz

London piercing Doc Martens I want to get my hair cut at Tony & Guy and look “smart” like sophisticated European girls straddling the Prime Meridian instead of a hippie long-haired wannabe Janis Joplin in Vienna drinking hot chocolate, I just want to sit in a café and sip on it and watch people until I get to Munich where Claudia, our hostess, is so educated and rich and I want to live just like she does after Nuremburg Hitler energy seeps into my subconscious for use later so that ugly people in Berlin watch Beavis and Butthead in German running back and forth across checkpoint Charlie with no consequences I am free I am free I am free of confessions in Edinburgh beers Yo La Tengo Chapel Hill techno twist to Washington, DC intern in a patent law firm on M Street that paves the way to New Hampshire Jewish girlz wearing Donna Karen that I can’t afford when I move to Michigan for a newspaper internship that turns into a crush on Karen and HTML coding search and replace Seattle for Colorado chiles drying in the afternoon sun because he went to San Francisco and I met a pioneer who gave me a break in a South Beach Warehouse with brick walls so I could feel like Ally McBeal but I am in my 20s and everyone is riding around on segues drinking Starbucks until I ride the MUNI to North Beach I traveled from city to city by instinct and because no one tried to stop me but I always had a job and a place to live so it was easy I met other Virtual Gypsyz in San Francisco at the height of the dot.com boom and the city looked more like a college campus with 20-somethings gliding around the warehouse district on segues while sipping from cardboard Starbucks cups but on a rare hot day in April 2001, I climb onto the bus toward North Beach and sit next to a B-O-Y with big brown eyes he speaks first and smiles I am a single woman in a city full of inappropriate suitors but he pops the question: “Would you like to get coffee sometime?” and we travel to a Russian Hill Art Show but I have to move out and get my own studio in the Tendernob where Trannies across the street fraternize with firemen on 9/11 more entertaining and louder than “Blind Date” on my tiny TV that swirls to Mexico City Murals and a trek to Costa Rica Mushrooms and Lenchak Match-ups in Nicaragua Butterflies over a small plane to Corn Islands with wind mills and the island I wished for in 1993 but I had forgotten and Honduras Slums lead to Guatemala Ruins and finally I land in MyAmi Vice money sex power real estate boom bust boom.