Author Topic: “Gypsy Boy,” by pseudonym 'Mikey Walsh' --Born Romany Gypsy, Born Gay  (Read 4809 times)

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/17/books/gypsy-boy-a-memoir-by-mikey-walsh.html



Books of The Times
Fighters and Lovers,
All Misunderstood

‘Gypsy Boy,’ a Memoir by Mikey Walsh

By DWIGHT GARNER
Published: February 16, 2012





“Bigger. Fatter. Gypsier.” So read billboards in London recently, advertising new episodes of the popular reality series “Big Fat Gypsy Weddings.” If you’ve seen this show, you can see why it has rankled some of England’s nomads. Its female characters can make Snooki, from “Jersey Shore,” seem like an Oxford don.

Britain’s obsession with Gypsy culture has spread into bookstores. The Guardian  reported last fall that four separate memoirs — by Gypsies, and by Irish travelers, who are sometimes called “white Gypsies” — were on paperback best-seller lists. There’s a sense of closed circles that are finally opening up. These coming-of-age memoirs take you places “Big Fat Gypsy Weddings” can’t, or won’t, go.

The buzziest of these books, and the first to arrive in the United States, is “Gypsy Boy,” by Mikey Walsh. (The name is a pseudonym.) It’s brash and frightening and funny — tonally, think of Frank McCourt meeting Axl Rose — without offering any real graininess or depth. The second half dissolves into daft romance-novel melodrama. But the thing is alive, and you grab your furtive literary pleasures where you can.

“Gypsy Boy” is largely about patriarchal trauma; it’s a trailer-park “Great Santini.” The author says he was born into Gypsy royalty, into a clan of champion bare-knuckle fighters. “My father was a pureblood, a great man,” the author writes, “a Black Knight of raging firepower.”

Where Mr. Walsh’s father went, brawls followed. Every sentient Gypsy male wanted to challenge his dominance. The author’s grandfather explained how to go about this brutal work: “One. Good. Hit. Put out your man like a candle.”

This bare-knuckle fighting world was chronicled recently in a documentary called “Knuckle,” and HBO has acquired the rights to make a series out of the film.

Mr. Walsh’s father wanted to turn his son into a fighter, too. He beat the author daily, teaching him how to take a punch. He beat his son more furiously when he began to discover that he was more of a lover than a fighter.

“I wasn’t the son he dreamed of,” Mr. Walsh says, “and he was never going to forgive me for that.”

The reader picks up on clues about Mr. Walsh’s sexuality long before his father does. He likes dresses, makeup, Barbra Streisand’s songs and “The Wizard of Oz.” When a macho relative brags about having met famous people, the author blurts, “Oh my God, have you met Madonna?”

This memoir can be grim. Some of the beatings are intense; teeth, mucus and blood fall to the floor. The author is raped repeatedly by a male relative. When he runs away from home at 15, and his father discovers he is gay, he puts a bounty on his head. Hence the pseudonym.

But “Gypsy Boy” is more buoyant than you might expect. The author is proud of his Gypsy heritage, and he is an unsentimental but affectionate observer of his people’s ways. He dispels myths about Gypsy life. His people are rarely poor, he writes. And he explains that there’s no such thing as a “Gypsy curse.” Gypsies merely pretend such a thing exists to frighten (or fleece) non-Gypsies.

He is piquant on Gypsies and their bold bad taste. His book is tattooed with descriptions of gold teeth, velour tracksuits, fake breasts and a woman with a mullet so long she could sit on it. One of his aunts wears “stilettos with clear straps and thick plastic soles filled with water, rainbow glitter and with a tiny gold scale model of the Eiffel Tower welded inside each heel.”

This book contains one of the funniest shoplifting scenes I can remember. The author tags along with his chain-smoking kleptomaniac Aunt Minnie, who stuffs mountains of stolen goods under a cheap fur coat. When she and Mr. Walsh are confronted, she runs while “screaming that the store detective on her tail was a maniac trying to kill her, in the hope that some gullible bystander might wrestle him to the ground.”

Memorable, too, is the eating in “Gypsy Boy.” The food writer Michael Pollan, were he to read this, would collapse into his steel-cut oatmeal. Mr. Walsh’s family lived on fried take-out food, beans and sugary cereal, and ate in front of the television. “Our father would usually have more salt than food on his plate,” he writes, “often using several spoons of it on a single meal.”

On those occasions when his mother cooked, everything was “scorched as black as a witch’s heart,” except the sprouts, which had a “nuclear green glow.”

The medical care this sweet woman provided was just as terrifying. When the author’s sister finds her hands broken out in warts, she is forced to soak them in slug juice mother extracted herself.

The second half of “Gypsy Boy” depicts Mr. Walsh’s coming out, his running away from home and his first relationships with men. This material is warm-hearted, and I can imagine many people being touched by it. But the book’s narrative slows to a crawl, and the writing loses whatever starch it once contained. Pages of dialogue sound like this: “I’m not letting you go,” he said. “I’ll wait. We’ll find a way, somehow.”

Don’t come to “Gypsy Boy” looking for sociology, for a wide-angle view of Gypsy history and life. For that you will have to turn to very good books like Isabel Fonseca’s “Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and Their Journey” (1995). But Mr. Walsh’s book, at its best, is lean and scrappy. The author may not be much of a fighter, but on the page a lot of his punches land.



GYPSY BOY
My Life in the Secret World of the Romany Gypsies
By Mikey Walsh
278 pages.
Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press
$24.99.


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