ZINGARI or WOP either or I am

The last 10 months of my life I have spent in transit. In Philadelphia, I moved from my mold infested apartment into my silica filled studio, where I squatted illegally in my own university for three months until graduation. I was in ill health and immediately after graduating was without health insurance to fix my upper respiratory problems, so I did what all other poor Philadelphian students do after graduation. Moved to North Philly, but not the hip up and coming locale that is Fishtown. No, I get myself a job in Kensington at a bronze foundry, and move into Port Richmond. The walk down Tioga St. from work to home was only six blocks, but it felt like forever in a nightmare. Children barefoot, and shirtless, running with plastic guns and broken bottles, the kind found littering the ground ever inch or so. The parents of these children were barely my age, could most likely be found on the front porch of their multi colored asphalt sided broken windowed homes, smoking crack in the open air. Every other house doubled as a water ice stand, or pretzel shop, Chinese and Ebonics were the two tongues spoken.

This in combination with my job, which consisted of welding wax tiles to other sticks of wax for Michelle Oka-Doner, to be placed in Miami International Airport, is what prompted me to get the hell out of Philadelphia as fast as I could. The city had been telling me to leave since January, but school held me prisoner. In mid July, I walked out on my job, still not sure if they paid me my last paycheck or not, and moved back in with my mom. I bailed on my apartment in Port Richmond, leaving my mattress and some speakers an no word whatsoever to my landlord.

I was home less than a week, when I left on tour with my band the New Romantics for an 11 day tour through the North East of the United States. We lived in any house that would house us, one night ending up at Jake Sullivan's house in Vermont. Jake is a punk first and foremost, but he is a pro snowboarder as well, and we got to spend the night at his very crust punky apartment. There were some other pro skaters at the house and some cokehead from a New York metal band. These guys, not Jake. Were locked in a bedroom hiding to the best of their ability the huge mound of cocaine they had been consuming throughout the night. Another metal head, dressed in black and white striped tights cowboy boots and hair that puts Jon Bon Jovi's mullet in it's glory days to shame, happens to go into the attic and falls through the ceiling directly on top of the pile of coke. These guys try desperately to sort the fiberglass insulation from their eight ball, and the Beetlejuice panted guy was stuck in the ceiling. How fucking punk? The fiberglass getting into people's brains reminded me about being back at work on sculpture either at the foundry or at school. It was time to go.

I played out the rest of the summer on the beach living up the Atlantic City summer, for what may be the last time, with all my best friends from childhood, and then September 10th came along and on a plane I went.

I landed in Rome after a paranoid flight, ready to settle down. It has been seven weeks and I am further away from having an apartment than when I started. Justin put me up in a town called Marino, where he had been living in a similar condition to my own for some months. We shared a bedroom that became unbearably stinky over the six weeks I spent there. Two vagabonds, living in Rome on tourists visas not knowing how long the money or work will hold out, living on a diet of Porchetta and Vino interspersed with gelato.

I didn't do my laundry for the six weeks until yesterday, and this past week I was really developing a ripe odor. Justin told me that I smelled like rotting flesh. I hadn't taken a shower for four days, because of moving and not having a towel to dry myself. This life of constantly being on the move, bouncing from place to place has really taken a toll on my personal self worth. I feel like I am losing my identity, and at the same time I am enjoying every second of this life. I feel a growing affinity with the African and Southeast Asian merchants that sell fake handbags and sunglasses. I sell a fake story about the men that designed Italy. They sell fake versions of Italian designers.

This should in theory be my last month of this gypsy lifestyle, I just hope what I have learned from it might stay ingrained in my being.