Something like a phenomena

I started playing soccer on the East Zone of town, the tough side, with some nice guys. We play late at night and the field is alongside one of those big transit arteries where the two sides of the street are separeted by a hundred yards of boulevard. Both times that we've played, in the middle of the game I suddenly heard strange music coming from the blackened boulevard, a twisting, sinuous, seemingly horn-based music that sent my imagination to one place- gypsylandia. Did the gypsys, whom I have seen camping in the circular spots of grass formed by curling exit ramps, gather here in the darkness of the east zone and blast their music out of the trunk?

During the first game I was afraid to ask, mainly because of the old school nature of the tough guys around me. My friend, Silvio of the fishing expedition, was the only one I could imagine asking, but he was on the other team and far away. Most of the other players were his uncles, nice but supremely tough guys, and more than anything not the type of guys that you ask in imperfect portugues about the possibility of an illicit gypsy presence on the boulevard.

On the second game I got the courage up to ask one of Silvio's friends, a guy nicer than tough, who always plays in full São Paulo gear. He told me,

No, no, I know it sounds like it, but really it's just a regular bar, way on the other side of the street. It's that there are a lot of cars....

Oh.

From then on, when I tried, I could almost make out the brazilian accordian-based pagoda music that must have been leaving the speakers on the far side of the darkness, but I needed as much imagination to put it back together as I did to invent the gypsys. And still, it's pretty cool that typcial music, when cut to ribbons by perpendicular traffic, sounds just like those ribbon-clad masters of the road.