Gypsy
by Jon Doughboy
I am in the break room making a hot cocoa because the packets are free and I'm bored and the little radio that’s always playing in there, an old Sony boombox from the early 2000s that lives on top of the fridge like a dusty little ghoul, starts playing Gypsy by Fleetwood Mac and I start singing along—softly, mind you, with consideration and, not to toot my own horn, but I have a good voice, a soft baritone that my high school choir teacher said had, and I quote, “considerable promise,” though, I'll admit, whatever promise he found considerable went unfulfilled. And as the first stanza ends, when Stevie and I are lamenting about the gypsies we once were, Anna walks in to nuke a breakfast burrito and freezes in the doorway as if, as the expression goes, she’s seen a ghost.
I say, “No ghosts here, just us gypsies,” and point a thumb at the boombox.
“No,” she says, emphatically, as if I'm supposed to know what she’s negating.
“Not a Mac fan?”
“You can't say gypsy.”
I stir my cocoa, ponder the modal. “Can’t or shouldn't?”
“Can’t.”
“But I didn’t.”
“Yes, you did. I heard you.”
“No, Stevie Nicks did. I just copied her. But I would say it, hypothetically. Because I don't think there’s anything wrong with it.”
“I’m not playing word games with you. You said it. Sang it. And it’s offensive. It’s a slur.” She points at me with her plastic-wrapped burrito as if her whole generation’s indignation is in there with the beans and the guac and the cheese.
“But it’s the name of the song.”
“It’s a slur.”
“Who towards?” I sip my cocoa, lap up a clump of powder with the tip of my tongue.
“Me, for one. My grandmother was Romany.”
Now I should clarify: Anna has worked with us for six months and spearheaded at least a dozen initiatives to make our work culture more sensitive, equitable, inclusive and so on and none of us, as far as I can tell, feel any additional equity. We’ve seen no raises. But she has managed with miraculous speed and thoroughness to transform what had been a fun, jokey, easy-going office, into a place of timidity, strained silence, and outright fear. This is just to add some context for the curtness of what I next say:
“Who gives a fuck about your grandma?”
If my insensitivity had frozen her at first, now she’s completely thawed and, with a look combining triumph with disgust, she drops her burrito on the floor, turns, and leaves the breakroom. Though I can't see her, I know where she is headed.
I listen to Stevie finish her song, humming along in my once promising baritone in between bites of cold burrito washed down with sips of warm, chalky cocoa. Then I clean out my desk.
So now I'm on the job market again, sleeping on friends’ couches again, wandering from place to place like—well, like you know what.
Jon Doughboy is the writer and director of “Christmas in Cuckistan” which won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance last year. The film follows four cuckolds who are visited by Santa Claus on the final Christmas Eve of the American Occupation of Afghanistan. Santa Claus is played by an AI-generated Lionel Barrymore voiced by an AI-generated Gilbert Godfrey. In select theaters now. See showtimes @doughboywrites