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I was born the son of a Benedictine monk and a gipsy girl in Pelhrimof, Moravia in 1898. The gipsy, whose name I never knew, died giving birth to me, but not before laying a gipsy curse on the monk. He went on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem but lost his mind and burned himself to death on Golgotha's peak. The gipsies took care of me and I travelled with their caravan around Europe and the Middle East until they forgot me in Istanbul in 1907. I became a pickpocket until an orthodox priest caught me in the act and took me as his disciple. I ran away from him five years later to follow a greek girl named Minerva. She betrayed me in Cyprus for an Italian so I joined the Turkish army. I was captured by the English in the battle of Akaba and joined their ranks, being mistaken for a Russian. I followed T.E. Lawrence to Arabia where I became a muslim and settled down in Mecca. After five years I became restless and rode a camel to India. There I met Bruno, my monkey, whom I taught to dance as I played gipsy songs on my accordion. We were discovered by an English circusmaster who took us on a world tour in 1926. We were such a success that the tour never seemed to end and eventually Bruno developed a drinking problem. From the first time I gave him a drink he never seemed to go without. The last time I saw him was in Quebec in 1929. He beat the shit out of me and left with a bottle of vodka, three hundred dollars and all my cigarettes. Without him I was a nobody so I became a whisky smuggler during the prohibition years since there was no work to find in the midst of the depression. I never got caught, made a fortune and when alcohol was legalised I founded a brewery. I made millions of dollars in the thirties but lost all my money gambling one night. I had to sell the brewery and then World War II broke out. I joined the army and when the Pacific war began I was a captain in the battle of Guadalcanal. I was marooned on a tiny island in the South Pacific for seven years which I spent writing modernist poetry. Then I was discovered by an Australian transport vessel and moved to Sydney where I got my poems published under a false name. Despite their popularity I was through with poetry and became a boxer. After fourteen fights and fourteen knock-outs I had enough and moved to China to join the Communist revolution. During the purges of the sixties all foreigners were in danger in China so I escaped to Hong Kong on a fishing boat and sailed from there to San Francisco. There I became a florist and sold thousands of flowers daily in the flower power days of the mid-sixties. Despite my experience of the communist experiments of Mao I was still a revolutionary thinker and a leading political activist and my flower shop was always under FBI surveillance, being the center of the counterculture and anti-Vietnam movement. While doing time for violent demonstrations in Seattle I lost my faith in socialism and became a pacifist anarchist. When I was released I found myself a seventy year old man in Seattle so I spent my last money on a new accordion, which I had not played since Bruno left me in 1929. I became a street musician, or beggar if you will, earning enough cash for one day at a time, moving from town to town by freight trains. It was in Tulsa, Oklahoma, that I met Miguel. He was a twenty-two year old gardener, flaming gay, with long hair and impeccable taste. I soon grew tired of him so I stole his car and drove to Guatemala where the car broke down in the middle of the jungle. From there I tried to make my way back north, surviving for months on insects and small animals, learning the secrets of the jungle from the Quatzelcoaqueco indians of the Amazon. They led me to a sacred herb in the heart of the jungle that reversed the process of aging, so from then on I have been growing younger every year and will soon become a teenager for the first time since before World War One. When I had made my way to Panama I was kidnapped by guerrillas but after seven weeks in captivity I overcame them with a small fork and hitched a ride on a freight ship to South Africa. There I worked as a mercenary , a gun for hire to various governments and revolutionaries but when I had earned enough cash I bought a huge balloon and travelled with the Atlantic wind to Iceland, where the balloon lost its flight and crash-landed on a volcano. Here I still am, working on a way to start growing old again before shrinking into nothing. Thomas' Myspace Editor V4.4