The Amazon.com Biography of the King of the Gypsies which was Submitted by Himself after Happening upon Rachael Yamagata's own Amazon.com Biography
It is I, King of the Gypsies!
I couldn't find my own book on here, so I've chosen to submit my bio with Michael Dregni's excellent biography of Django Reinhardt. Whenever I think of gypsies, I think of Django first.
And I'm a gypsy. The king of them. So you'd think I'd know, wouldn't you?
To tell the truth, I haven't read Dregni's biography of Django. I just was searching for my own book after seeing Rachael Yamagata's biography attached to her album "Happenstance" and, after failing to find it, I settled on submitting my bio to Amazon attached to Grengi's book on Django. I don't know if it'll get accepted, seeing as how I'm not actually the author of the book on Django. So if you're reading this, thank an editor at Amazon.com. Or you are an editor at Amazon.com. Hello.
First things first: am I a real king? Well, no. Not in the "anointed by God, blessed and Holy Leader, George W. Bush, speaks with angels, pulled a sword out of a stone, manifest destiny" kind of way. But the King of the Gypsies was never appointed that way, not except once, in the '60s, and I'm not so sure that was for real, anyway.
I was chosen in a random drawing amongst our troupe one Saturday afternoon about twelve years ago, I was holding the Queen of Spades, which was the card we use to determine our king. Ha! No, I'm just kidding. That'd be a stupid way to pick a king.
So I was in the studio back in the day. And when I say "studio" I mean the accountancy office I worked in. It's just one of those places you end up. Got a degree in accountant stuff, headed out into the workplace and everyone was like "Hey, why don't you go work for this accountancy firm? Why don't you try your cousin Ed? He's a CPA down in the city, isn't he?" So I tried Ed, who I didn't really know all that well, anyway, and he hooked me up with a job. But I felt sort of... empty. You know? The job just lacked creativity for me. I guess I was getting the wrong clients or something. And my penchant for dancing and wearing bandanas just didn't go down all that well around the office, least of all with my cousin Ed, who turned out to be wholly unlikable and not very familial-like, when the chips were down.
During my tenure at the accountancy office I met a girl, as people often do. Her name was Sally. We spent a lot of lunch hours together. She said she was drawn to me by my dance. And singing. Which I hadn't mentioned. I also sang. Not particularly well, in my own estimation, but I got by.
It's nice, to have people to confide in, the way I could confide in Sally. We shared dreams the way I only dream of doing now, now that I'm King. As King, I always have this niggling worry in the back of my mind that it's going to wind up in Hello Magazine or splashed all over the pages of some other tabloid.
So we shared dreams on those long, lazy lunch hours: how she wanted to play saxophone, despite a lack of training and musical ear. I wanted to sing and dance and wear various head gear ranging from baseball caps to wool hats to scarves and bandanas. It was Sally that said to me one day, "You know, you should be King of the Gypsies instead of some accountant. You could be just like Django." She said 'accountant' like it was a bad thing, which I don't necessarily think it is.
So that did it. I believe I left work the following week, never to return, and took up my new job as King of The Gypsies. I bought a guitar that almost but not quite matched my favorite bandana and hit the road. And whenever I rang home or talked to relatives I would meet in various cities who would enquire after what I was doing with my life these days, I would tell them I was the King of the Gypsies.
It's kind of hazy now, like a dream. Which, of course, it is, in its own special way.
Summary
disclaimer:
This is also not continued from last week. Or the week before, for that matter.
It's... ehm... oh, all right. Listen. This week you're getting rejects. Seconds, you might say.
Oh man. I'm sorry. I know. We don't normally do this sort of thing, you know?
McSweeneys gave this one a pass, but we liked it. So we took it, damn it. So, umm, sure, technically, this is a reject. But we would prefer you to look at it like a diamond we saved from being chucked out. Or at least a nickel that we saved from being thrown out. Every little penny helps.
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