Going Gypsy Read online

  Standing atop the mountain erroneously called a Bunny Slope, David coached me in the art of snowplowing and edge-digging before pointing me downhill. The boots’ tightness and bulkiness disappeared when put to proper use. I miraculously skied that horrifically steep and challenging Slope of the Small Hare without wiping out.

  After I’d done the same thing two whole times, Jules, my ski instructor, met us at the foot of the hill. Ready to show off my new moves, I waddled across the flat expanse between us and promptly fell flat at her feet. This did not bode well for my first lesson, the chairlift.

  David and Jules discussed my abilities and potential while I flailed deliriously, trying to get back up on my skis. Had they not noticed me down here?

  After what seemed like ten mortifying minutes, I was ultimately hoisted upright with assistance from both David and Jules, and I then began my slide toward the chairlift.

  Jules and I entered the long queue, and I watched in horror as my fellow skiers nonchalantly hopped on the chairs with dead-on timing. Timing looked crucial because the chairs moved at lightning speed and never stopped. Jules explained to me that for successful execution of the boarding procedure I must be in the proper position.

  “Keep your knees bent. Stick out your butt. Skis must be pointed forward. Hold your poles in your outside hand.”

  I opened my mouth to ask Jules what the poles were for, but after visualizing myself slipping in front of the speeding chair, knocked comatose, lifted up by the scruff of my jacket, carried fifty feet up, and then dropped to my death, I decided instead to concentrate on the task at hand.

  I followed Jules’s instruction to the letter. With eyes squeezed tight, I felt a slight bang on the back of my legs, and I was up! Must be how a toddler feels when an adult comes from behind and sweeps him off his feet with no warning—both vomit-inducing and exciting.

  Because I had been so worried about getting on this crazy contraption, I never considered how beautiful it would be once I was up in the air. The world was peaceful and white, like an old-fashioned Christmas card. Snow-laden trees stood starkly against the bright blue sky. I took it all in and immediately understood why people love winter so much. Then I made a big mistake.

  I looked down.

  We were just hanging by a thread! Living in a world with mandatory seatbelt laws, I found it very unnerving to be three miles above the unforgiving ground with absolutely nothing to hold me in. To take my mind off the wide-open spaces below, I chatted up Jules.

  Next thing I knew, we were about to get off.

  “What happens if I can’t get off?” I asked Jules.

  “What do you mean can’t get off? You mean if you decide not to get off? Not an option.” Jules called my bluff. “Just do like I tell you and you’ll be fine. Keep your tips up. Here we go!”

  Holding my ski poles in one hand as Jules instructed, I tipped my skis up and felt the ground come under them. Emitting a strange squeak, I left the chair and made it down the slight incline in one piece. I came to a stop and turned to flash a triumphant grin at Jules—and fell on my butt. Jeez.

  I managed to regain a sitting position, but Jules was determined to have me get up on my own. Problem was, I’d fallen in the path of the skiers and snowboarders exiting the lift behind me. The chairlift stops for nothing. Snow dudes and bunnies whizzed by to my left and right in no perceptible pattern. My biggest fear was that someone of my same skill level was about to fall over me and we’d become a tangled mass of rental gear, goggles, and embarrassment. Jules gave in. She sighed, popped off my skis and dragged me to my feet away from danger.

  Grinning wipeouts aside, Jules decided I was ready for Jelly Bean Hill and Candy Cane Lane. Daunting stuff, those. I breezed through like a pro. I’d become Suzy Chapstick with the wind blowing through my honey blond hair—mall bangs and all. No longer was I afraid of the Dr. Seuss–type characters on snowboards zooming by from above. I was on fire. Jelly Bean Hill—I own you!

  Having done her job, Jules handed me back into David’s capable hands. This time I was unquestionably vertical. David, who had just come from skiing trails with names like Big Cajones and Black Diamond Death Bowl, urged me to try some harder slopes. The really tough ones, like the semi-dreaded Licorice Gum Drop Mountain.

  I relented and, after showing off my new chairlift prowess, went to peer over the edge of the slope. Thank God my boots were so tight that my knees couldn’t buckle at the sight of the drop-off—that was one mother of a Gum Drop. I refused to budge. David slyly changed his tactics from coddling to out-and-out mocking—until I bit my lip, closed my eyes, and dug in, hoping to snowplow my way down the mountain.

  Nope, too steep. Instead I turned and careened straight sideways across the slope. Not having covered this special kind of stupidity in my lessons, I did what came naturally. I freaked out. Ridding myself of the poles, which seemed logical since I still had no clue why I’d been carrying them around all day, I laid out flailing in the snow hoping to stem the velocity of my slide. It did, but not all that well. My full-body sprawl finally skidded me to a stop about twenty feet below my initial impact crater—and my poles.

  “You lost your poles, dumbass,” was the first thing I heard. “Now I have to climb up there and get them.”

  “Don’t call me dumbass—I’m trying as hard as I can,” I pouted.

  David insisted that “dumbass” wasn’t actually included in the statement. I’m inclined to believe him. We’ll just call it dumbass implied and leave it there.

  Regardless, I was not about to let David come riding to the rescue. I was going to retrieve the poles myself.

  Incidentally, it is much less problematic to return to the upright and locked position when collapsed on a steep hill, so I had that going for me. Using my skis’ edges, my left hip, and my shredded dignity, I managed to worm my way up to the orphaned poles. I soldiered on to conquer the dastardly Gum Drop. Multiple times.

  Now that I’d mastered the kiddie slopes, I felt there might be hope for me on skis. It really is fun to zoom around on the white stuff. That is why people do it, right? I don’t have to be fabulous to have a great time.

  Maybe I’ll even stick around long enough next time to find out what the poles are for.

  11

  windycity420

  No broken bones. We were more than a little sore, but all in one piece. No small feat considering I hadn’t been on skis in over a decade and Veronica never had. The respite did us good, and we were almost finished with our reconstruction project. There was still one small screw in the works. Once the newly degreased condo was rented out, where would we go? Back to the islands?

  It had long been a semi-plan of ours to find a boat and float around the Caribbean after the kids left. We figured we could pick up work along the way and become windblown yachties. Back when we were living in Tennessee, we took a rare kid-free vacation that sprouted the seed of this yacht dream from the fertile ground on the island of Tobago.

  That’s when we fell in love with the Caribbean. We even tried to buy a small hotel there and escape to the tropics. I could cook and play guitar in the bar while Veronica ran the desk, did the books, and brought in guests from the far corners of the globe with her mad Internet skills. The kids could run barefoot, play in the surf, and meet people from all over the world.

  It sounded great, probably a whole lot better than it would have been in real life, but the legal issues of owning a business in a foreign land and the owner’s island-time lack of urgency to sell scuttled our big idea. Yet our island fever endured.

  Several years later, the fates conspired to push us into treating that malady. Veronica’s living room web design company had grown to over one hundred clients. What began as a sort of hobby, back when the Internet was not much more than a novelty, was devouring our domicile. My little Techno Nerd had parlayed what started as an experimental project of making a website for my band into a full-blown business, creating homes on the Internet for some of Nashville’s biggest s
tars. Before long, our living room looked like NASA Mission Control. Houston, we have a problem.

  Veronica knew things had outgrown our available space. That, and the fact that she could never get away from work because it was always waiting right outside our bedroom door, meant something had to give. She decided to either move the operation into an office or sell it outright. When an offer came from a larger design company, she didn’t hesitate.

  Meanwhile I was in the midst of a bad cliché, right in the middle of every quintessential music business legal tribulation imaginable. My latest recording contract had disintegrated into three years of wrangling with lawyers, executives, producers, record companies, ex-managers, agents, publishers, and bandmates. I’d had enough. I went to my manager and told him I was done. The next day we bought tickets for an exploratory visit to St. Croix.

  I knew about the island from friends who had worked there, and since it is US territory we could relocate just like moving to a different state.

  We flew down to look at houses, explore work prospects, and check out the school possibilities for the kids. Everything seemed very viable, and in fact the school situation looked to have a big upside compared to what we were facing in Nashville. Instead of having three kids attending three different schools, they could all go together and receive what looked to us to be a much better education.

  We jumped in and, after an initial adjustment period, took right to life in the Virgin Islands. In hindsight, it was one of the best things we ever did for our family. To this day, all three children consider St. Croix home.

  Part of us does too. In our boat dreams, Christiansted Harbor is always our home port. But now that we had the chance to make that dream a reality, something didn’t seem quite right. After spending the past decade on an isolated island, we missed our stateside family and friends. Our nearest relatives had been more than a thousand miles away. There were loved ones in Nashville whom we hadn’t seen since we left, and Veronica had relatives on the West Coast we had not been able to visit in at least a decade.

  We generally only made it up to the States once a year, and after the girls went off to college, that annual trip meant going to see them. Sometimes folks would meet up with us, and other times people came down to visit the island, especially in the winter. But all in all we had been pretty out of touch.

  So when we were getting ready to leave the formerly oil slicked abode, reconnecting became priority number one. But how? The logistics were daunting, to say the least. Our relatives and friends were scattered across the country from New York to Los Angeles. That would mean dozens of flights. Where would we stay? We’d need rental cars, restaurants, taxis, trains, and buses. It sounded like an awful lot of planning considering our no-plans plan. Plus, the price tag could easily spill into five figures, scrambling the nest egg.

  “What if we got a motor home?”

  It just popped into my head, so I blurted it out. I got no answer. Veronica was thinking, possibly that I was crazy. I started working on the idea aloud.

  “For what we would spend on airplanes, hotels, and rental cars, we could buy an old RV and then get rid of it when we’re done. We could stop and see stuff along the way, you know, hit the hotspots, and we’d have our bed with us every night. Then, if we’re lucky, we can sell it for about what we paid for it.”

  As it turned out, she didn’t think I’d completely lost my mind, which was nice. “It sounds like it might work,” she said. “Yeah, it just might be the answer.”

  She looked a touch worried and added, “But this doesn’t mean we’re never getting a boat, does it?”

  “Isn’t an RV just a land boat?”

  Veronica lifted an eyebrow. I knew that look.

  I backpedaled with, “The plan is no plans, right? Let me look into the motor home idea some, see what they cost and stuff. Let’s see if it’s even feasible.”

  So I did a little research and learned what to look for in a used RV. Obviously it needed to be mechanically sound, but smelling the inside could be just as important. If it smells musty, there’s probably a leak, and leaks are not your friend, unless living with fungus and replacing carpet constantly sound like fun.

  In addition to running well and not smelling like a damp basement, there were a couple of other criteria that needed to be met. I needed enough room to stand up inside, and have some buffer space, since I bash my body on things on a regular basis, often drawing blood. I’m so bad about it that one of The Boy’s junior high friends once asked Veronica while I was changing a tire, “Isn’t it a good thing that Mr. James isn’t a hemophiliac?”

  I also didn’t want some giant land barge that would be impossible to park or maneuver in cities. Ideally, something old enough to have a precomputerized engine that I could change a filter on without needing an engineering degree. It had to have a sleeping loft over the cab, both for space efficiency and because I knew that there was no way we would make up and stow away a fold-down bed every day. We had to have a full bathroom (showering is important) and a decent kitchen, since the avoidance of eating every meal at restaurants was part of the point. Oh yeah, heat and air conditioning would be nice too.

  After a little looking around, spending around ten grand seemed reasonable, but dealer selections in that price range were not great. I decided to try eBay. There were quite a few RVs listed, and the bids seemed rather low, well under our ten thousand threshold, but I faced a dilemma with purchasing a vehicle online. There’s no freakin’ way I was bidding on something I hadn’t been able to test-drive. So I limited the search to cities that were reasonably close to good ole Generic Midwestern College Town.

  Chicago! Close enough. I called a guy with the eBay handle of windycity420 and explained that we were interested in his motor home, but wanted to test-drive it first. He understood, so we arranged to meet in a few days, a couple of hours before the online auction ended. That way, if we liked the RV, we would be there to put in the final bid right at the last second.

  Right before hanging up, windycity420 told me, “Bring cash.”

  On the final day of the auction, the bid was still under $3,000. I was thinking how great it would be if the thing wasn’t a piece of junk and we could get it that cheap. With high hopes and forty C-notes in my pocket, we headed off to Chicago.

  The RV was parked in Mr. 420’s driveway, so I gave it the old once-over before we knocked on the door. She was an old gal, a 1983 Chevy, but looked well cared for. So far, so good.

  Windy opened the door, and we were knocked back by an old familiar aroma. There is no possible scenario in which a person can spend thirty years in the music business and not know that smell. I don’t care if it’s rock, blues, bluegrass, jazz, opera, classical, country, gospel, or whatever, I guarantee that even the guys who played on Barney and Friends’s “I Love You, You Love Me” theme song would know with one whiff what was going on inside Windy’s house.

  “Dude, Windy’s a stoner,” Veronica whispered out of the side of her mouth. We hung back, fearing a contact high.

  Windy grabbed his hoodie and proceeded to give us the nickel tour of the RV. It smelled of reefer and German shepherd, but no dampness. The inside was in good shape, everything was in working order, and nothing was wrong that a little Febreze and a thorough cleaning couldn’t fix. Veronica dubbed it “cute” and covered a giggle with her hand. Had she inhaled too much of the vapors?

  Then we fired it up, the motor home that is, and it leapt to life. Always a good sign. As we took it for a spin around the neighborhood, there were some squeaks and rattles, but nothing out of the ordinary considering its age. I was getting kind of buzzed about it—it seemed perfect—but wait, was that the secondhand smoke talking? Well, in any case, I decided then and there that I was going to make a bid.

  Then out of the blue Windy says, “I want you guys to have it.”

  “Huh?”

  “Yeah, you remind me of a couple of old hippies. You should have it, man.”

  Um, okay.
r />   “Well, we like it, but let’s see what the bid gets up to.”

  “Screw the bid, dude, I want you to have it. Give me thirty-two hundred and we’ll just put in ten grand as a final bid. No one will out-bid that.”

  “Uh, yeah. What do you think, honey?”

  Veronica was making herself at home, checking in the fridge for munchies. There was no way we weren’t buying the thing.

  “Let’s do it.”

  So we rolled back to Windy’s place. Did a little business. Got offered a toke for the road. Declined. And drove off in twenty-three feet of rolling luxury.

  Our first stop was at a store to buy some Lysol. Maybe that would throw the dogs off the scent if we got pulled over.

  12

  BAMF

  The drive back from Windy’s place gave us a pretty good idea of what needed to be taken care of with the motor home before we took off on any transcontinental excursions.

  David was dealing with the outside stuff—replacing screws, tightening belts, and talking to mechanics. He would slide out from under our new rolling house covered in grease, grime, blood, and the waterproof caulk he was using to seal everything in his path. He was in hog heaven.

  I was relieved that he was happy outside, where his bull-in-a-china-shop tendencies would do less harm.

  But not for long.

  We had ownership of our new toy just one day when the bull charged inside and broke the main overhead light fixture with a broom handle. It wasn’t a major deal, nothing that a skillfully placed dab of superglue couldn’t fix, and I am a master supergluer. So we agreed that I would run over to the store for some glue while David promised to confine his work to the exterior of the RV. That way I could get the fixture fixed and things more organized indoors before the bull stampeded again. No telling what other broom handle–like destructive implements could be lurking about.