More than two years have passed since my last Poc-Rrrom (III) and today, inspired by a story I've just read, I've decided I'll go through with this one.

The story published by the Journalist House is about Stela, a lesbian thief who spent a few decades in prison and is HIV positive (a Romanian Orange is the New Black). The ABC story is about Michael Pollara, a thief who may have stolen more than $1 million and spent about two years in prison. I will not comment on the differences, but I’d suggest you have a look at the Baia Mare wall and the “romi” category on this blog.

So far, in this series, I started with “PocRrrom I” where I contextualized a bit, “PocRrrom II” starts to flesh out the story, but in Romanian, and then branches out in Bamo I, while Poc-Rrrom III introduces Salome Blaser. The most recent reboots are The BM Wall and Home Alone in Bucharest.

Here’s a summary of PocRrrom II, mostly for me to get back into the story grove.

• my primary school was “protocol”-designated
• funny story with high-ranking visit and Ceausescu’s portrait as well as a pirate flag (Panu’)
• interactions with the Roma (Gypsy) minority at and around the school – especially on the soccer (football / fotbal) field; they were skipping most classes and repeating years
• my encounter with Scarlat: he’d spit on me randomly when I was rushing to get to school

My attempts to erase Scarlat’s DNA from my hair would cause it to look awful. Subsequently, a girl in my class started to call me “palm tree licked by a cow” which only added to my irritation and irascibility. It didn’t take long until I talked to Bamo, my best friend with some kind of German education. (By which I mean that his parents, who were surgeons healthcare workers, had sent him to live in Germany for a while.)

I was pretty much a lone wolf when it came to conflicts (and this goes all the way back to hRadu). However, any fight with a Gypsy, even a little one, always had the potential to devolve into a clan fight and I had no such affiliation. Together with most of my friends, we were going to school to study and socialize and have fun, clan fights were simply unimportant for others or the movies. Though I often fought against older guys, I never fought against a group of people – that was something strictly for the movies and the potential to end up severely beaten, in a coma, was enough to give me cold feet. I needed Bamo to at least be present when I confronted Scarlat, so that he wasn’t going to return with his clan after I’d beat him or at least stare him down.

So I explained to him that I wasn’t afraid to beat up Scarlat, but I did not want that to become an epic saga of constantly hiding and running away from any darker fellah. Yet Bamo had a different solution. His idea was to grin and bear it until the end of grade 8, when we’d graduate, at which point we’d go and raid the Gypsy base.

I was at first underwhelmed and a bit betrayed, but in the end I warmed up to the idea. Sure I could ask others for help and some would have maybe offered it, but I simply could not count as much on others as I could count on Bamo. So I resigned to getting randomly spit every now and then for the next couple of years, with my eyes focused, with zen-like detachment, on the future.

Next part in Poc-Rrrom V.

Until then, here’s a few links to elucidate where “poc-rrrom” is coming from (and they may also hint to why I find it so hard to tell this story).

• Kielce 1946
• Mława 1991
• Sloviansk 2014
• San Francisco (cultural?)
• Hadareni 1993 (Nov 29)
• Hungary 2012
• Lety (1940s)
• Italy (2012)
• Historical Dictionary of the Gypsies (Romanies)
• The Gypsy Menace
• The East European Gypsies: Regime Change, Marginality, and Ethnopolitics
• Roma in Europe: The Politics of Collective Identity Formation

Sources / More info: cj-smardoaica, inbo-pollara