Lessons from a Gypsy Boy

When we started reading the book titled Gypsy Boy, we wanted to return it and ask for our money back. There was something weird about it. It came across like a horror film retold.

In our choice of reading materials, we confess to having been a sucker for true-to-life material, especially the bestseller variety. So much more exists in real life, why then do we go for the musical version, we ask ourselves. There are so many examples like The King and I, A Christmas Story told in ballet form, The Princess and the Pea, The Frog Prince and Rapunzel.

Two new books we have just acquired are Twelve Years a Slave, now with a film version, and Gypsy Boy, which is apparently still pure as far as versions are concerned. Gypsy Boy is the true story of Mikey Walsh and how his life had been pre-planned in the gypsy way of living. We had to force ourselves to read the book to prove a point that true stories didn’t need to be boring. After a series of girl children, daddy Frank began molding his only son Mikey into what he was, and his father’s father before him, which was to become a bare-knuckle champion boxer of all time (Pacman in the Pinoy version) of the story. Daddy Frank gave Mikey a necklace of tiny gold boxing gloves, which he was to wear and never take off.

The normal life of a Gypsy was to learn cuss words without necessarily understanding what they meant, and how violence was a way of life. Also, the Gypsy Boy’s attitude towards the LGBT community is similar to that of the Filipinos.

We know little of the people they call gypsies, and what we know is normally based on information circulated in whispers. Once, while walking around the mall, we caught sight of a commotion with the cops driving away a group of bedraggled men and women who were dressed funnily and smelled badly. “Those are gypsies,” whispered our friend Lanelle. “They are not allowed inside malls and closed establishments. So, they go around churches asking for alms for their meal for the day.”

Lanelle also told us that one shouldn’t shout or drive them away since they have hidden powers to bring illness and even death to those who treat them badly.

Other similarities we share with the gypsies are that they believed in ghosts and the supernatural. Our favorite ghosts are those of past, present, and to come from the movie A Christmas Carol. Our scariest is the giant kapre who lived inside the tree and fell in love with a human. Gypsy Boy lived with all these in his mind. He went to sleep dreaming of the handsome Edward Cullen from Twilight that youngsters followed until it became their favorite ghost story. Gypsy Boy’s Edward Cullen was his neighbor Sadie, who had the voice, hairstyling and mannerism of an actress from Hollywood.  

As Gypsy Boy grew older and was allowed to decide on matters by himself, he went back to being Mikey and it became the turning point of his real love story. He decided to tell the truth about his chosen partner, no matter how much it would hurt his parents. And just like in the movies, we wish the couple to live happily ever after.

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