JUST like you and me: katrina prow on crystal waters

On April 28th 2018, I saw Crystal Waters perform at The Precinct, a gay bar in Downtown LA. It was a small stage, crowd level. The whole club screamed, “She’s homeless, She’s homeless,” when Waters held the microphone out. She did box step choreography with two male back-up dancers and performed two other songs: “100% Pure Love,” and a track that I hadn’t heard before. I don’t think we paid any money for tickets, but it was LA, so perhaps a cover charge, well drinks in the double digits, a thirty-minute Uber ride there and back to Long Beach. She sang the beginning of “Gypsy Woman” in acapella. In a video archived from my Instagram stories that night, my friend and I screamed lyrics into the front-facing camera, subtle filter. She’s homeless. She’s homeless. The Precinct is a fifteen-minute walk to edge of Skid Row, a 50-block neighborhood with the largest stable population of unhoused people. La da dee la dee da la da dee la dee da. We bopped in the club to the song’s iconic bassline with everyone else. We didn’t think twice about the lyrics. 

I met Spencer when we were coworkers at a chain restaurant, the most rigorous and intense job I’ve ever worked. Before I could start making money on the floor, I endured a month-long training program. I took a daily written test, and if I didn’t pass, I couldn’t continue the shift with my trainer. Two failed written tests meant you were fired before you were even hired, and there was always a line out the door during weekly open interviews, so finding a replacement wasn’t an issue. We had to know every ingredient on every dish, which ones were garnished chive sticks and which were garnished with chive batons—batons half the size of sticks. There were 30 flavored martinis, we had to write the list on our final test along with three beers in each category (over 200 on tap). The menu was a thick book, and I studied harder for this job than any test in college, with notecards and a binder to organize my information. Tardiness wasn’t tolerated, and clocking in one minute after a shift started earned a write up. If you were caught looking at your phone on the floor, it was a final written notice. If you didn’t card someone, and they were under 30 years old, you’d be fired immediately. If you didn’t have your nametag, five pens, a $20 bank, and a wine key at pre-shift, you couldn’t work. If you couldn’t describe the dish offered at pre-shift for education, you couldn’t work. Each server needed exact change for their nightly check-outs, down to the penny, and we all carried coin purses that jangled in our aprons with a container of mints (no gum!) while we walked the massive space from table, to kitchen, to table, to bar well, to dish pit. There was no downtime, unless you were on your mandatory 30-minute lunch, because all servers had to run all food and all drinks for all tables, so we were required to constantly help each other in the name of teamwork. With so many rules and restrictions, the front of the house developed a strong trauma bond, and it remains only job I’ve had where teamwork made the dream work, as they say. Spencer was an incredible teammate: resourceful, present, a shift lead and closer. He made great tips, and tables loved him. We had apronfuls of jokes that made an eight-hour shift feel fun. He wasn’t a fuck up.

My first memory of Crystal Waters is from her second album, Storyteller (1994), because my neighbor had the CD, and I listened to “100% Pure Love” on repeat from Walkman headphones while rollerblading in the backyard. I don’t remember any other songs from that album, but I can see it—crystal clear. White backdrop, turquoise lettering, Crystal Waters like a mirage materializing from the background in a white outfit with her white kitty cat wig, the album title in orange print below: Storyteller. I even remember the CD itself—a crystal blue that I slipped around my index like a ring as I bladed four houses from my neighbor’s to my own—if I were lucky, she’d let me borrow it, and I’d listen for a few days before I skated back to return it.
Crystal Waters released her debut album Surprise a couple years before in 1991. This record sold better than Storyteller, with “Gypsy Woman” as the standout hit, the only track to break the top ten on both UK and US charts, reaching #2 on the UK Singles and #8 on Billboard. Crystal Waters (surprise, not a stage name!) was born into music legacy: her great aunt was actress and singer Ethel Waters, her father also a jazz musician, her uncle a saxophonist. Waters began writing poetry as a child; at fourteen, she was inducted into the Poetry Society of America, and she remains the youngest writer to ever receive this honor. In college, she followed a more dependable path, studying Business and Computer Science at Howard, finding work as a probation officer after graduation. While in city government, Waters was fortunate to have a coworker whose cousin knew the Basement Boys, house-music producers looking for a background vocalist. Overnight, it seems, her path shifted, and she went from issuing arrest warrants to living her dream of writing jazz-inspired house music, which became the first of two demo tracks with the Basement Boys: “Makin’ Happy” and “Gypsy Woman.” The latter, written with the help of Neal Conway, was originally developed for another dance artist, Ultra Naté. Mercury heard the demo and immediately created a recording contract for Waters, the road unfurling before her.

I worked at that chain restaurant with Spencer for almost four years until I moved out of state for graduate school. Five years later, when I returned to Long Beach after my degree, Spencer was bartending at a neighborhood restaurant with a real chef, and he helped me secure a weekend job waiting tables. We worked together for another two years until he graduated from restaurant hospitality and earned his dream gig as flight attendant, paid to explore new cities and countries instead of making drinks. Spencer savored his new life, and despite being gone for stretches of overnights and weekends, our friendship deepened as we spent more time together off the clock, where he spilled his best adventures and secrets. Some of my favorite memories from that time are Spencer and I at the gay bars after he landed and I clocked out, usually at The Falcon on Broadway: talking shit, performing music video choreography on the corner, eating tamales purchased from someone’s trunk after last call, peeing in the parking lot next door when the bathroom line was too long, toppling into 7/11 two blocks down for taquitos.
Our code for a night out: Catch fish? In 2018, the song of the summer was Calvin Harris, Katy Perry, Pharrell, and Big Sean’s “Feels,” which Spencer and I misheard as “Fish.” Instead of singing “catch feels,” it sounded like Perry was crooning, “Don’t be afraid to catch fish.” Being fishy is queer code for looking feminine, or passing, and though Spencer was a gay man, he passed as straight in most situations outside of The Falcon, so the double entendre in our made-up lyrics became addicting. Religiously, the bar played the music video for “Feels” each night, along with other booty shakers from the early 2000s and classic 90s house music: the gay staples. Sometimes Spencer would text a fish emoji, and I knew that meant he wanted to meet at The Falcon after he landed. Sometimes we would send the Spotify link for the song, or tag each other in Instagram lip syncs that happened while driving to work. When my shift was over, when Spencer’s shift was, I’d Uber to The Falcon and meet him on the corner, where he’d be smoking a cigarette, waiting, because there was always new tea to spill and shit to talk.
I left Long Beach again during the pandemic. I lost my jobs and unemployment wasn’t enough to sustain the rent, so I took my stimulus check, returned to the Central Coast, and moved in with my parents to start over. I saw Spencer once before I left, when they lifted quarantine and we met at The Falcon, talking shit about the whole situation over a tequila. In an archived Instagram video, you can hear me repeating, yes yes yes, as Spencer struts toward me with a smoke for the first time in months. After I moved, we still sent each other memes and emojis—a link to “Feels,” even though we were in different area codes now and I couldn’t just Uber for one after work. I reposted old Instagram videos, all our bar friends, tagged him, typed the words: I miss this, Missing you, Miss you so much.
Our remote friendship continued until one night I received a text: Can you talk? it read, and I answered immediately, yes. On the phone, Spencer told me he had bad news, and given the aftershocks of the pandemic, I felt worried—though I knew Spencer was a good, smart person, I can remember my instincts flaring, a palpable fear that he had somehow gotten himself into trouble. There were times when he was apprehensive about drug testing with the airlines: Weed can still show up after a few days, he had said, and I understood that he was responsible enough to only smoke on his days off. Most people I knew smoked weed, did drugs recreationally, and it didn’t make them a fuck up: it was normalized in restaurant culture, in gay bars, in Long Beach social life. My intuition, however, was offbeat. Instead of bad news about his life, Spencer was calling because the chef we worked for passed away from a sudden heart attack. He was a young, good chef, gone too soon. Spencer didn’t cry, but I could tell he had taken it hard. We talked for another twenty minutes or so, told each other, Love you, and promised to be better at keeping in touch. He told me he wanted to visit with another former coworker, and we made tentative plans to make it happen, the way one does in their late 30s, without any actual drive to follow through.
But a few weeks later, Spencer texted again: he was planning on visiting, he had decided on dates without telling me, he read about an outdoor light show and thought we should take mushrooms for the experience. I wasn’t sure if he was serious, but then he sent a group message with our other coworker to continue the itinerary. My father was going through chemotherapy and radiation, but the center of the truth was that I had been away from Long Beach for too long, and my own path had shifted as I was becoming a different person. I wasn’t drinking, or Ubering to any bars anymore. Worse: I sorta liked my new life. I didn’t feel as depressed. I had no tea to spill, or gossip to spread. I was using the solitude to work on myself, to work out, to finish my novel—yielding into a kind of productivity, a fork in the road that wasn’t visible before. The visit from Spencer would be a distraction, and I didn’t want the past to come and sleep in my guest room. I blamed it on my family: My dad’s sick, this isn’t a good time. I muted the group message so I couldn’t see their response, but Spencer understood: Keep me posted about your dad, he wrote. We’ll visit soon, love you.
A month or so later, another text from Spencer illuminated my silenced iPhone. It was 10pm. The message started with our usual jokes, but then he wrote, as embarrassed as I am to ask this, is there ANYWAY you can spot $40 until I get paid tomorrow morning? The message continued for a few lines about how he promised he would pay me back, and he trusted that I would hold him accountable. I didn’t think twice and replied, Can I Venmo you? I viewed his hesitancy to ask for help as a tenant to our friendship because I didn’t always have money to spare since I worked as an adjunct. I knew Spencer respected me, so his overly thankful response felt genuine: OMG! Katrina!! Thank you thank you thank you!!! We continued the conversation a few more messages, Spencer promising to pay me back the next day, without any details on why he needed the money, though I didn’t press. He mentioned he would call soon, and I joked, Don’t spend it all in one place! to which he replied, So go to a few Mobils is what you’re saying. We lol’d and hahaha’d until I wrote: I’m glad I can help, and he responded, You have NO idea.
Spencer didn’t pay me the next day, and I didn’t hear from him, but I did hear from another friend who supposedly received the same message until Spencer unsent it (likely after my Venmo). On the phone, that friend said Spencer must have been texting for drug money, but I didn’t believe him. My friend didn’t let up about his theory, detailing erratic messages and Instagram stories, one about zit cream and a sore that didn’t make sense, but I still wasn’t sold—I’ve had acne sores from picking, and we all act strange on social media, especially post-pandemic. I maintained that Spencer needed the money for gas.
Two days later, though, I decided to check in. Spencer replied that he was not okay with a litany of metaphors: our mind as lockers and his anxiety like one sloppy packrat kid. He promised it was not drugs, and he was not suicidal. This time, I wanted to believe. I urged him to stay true to himself: remember who you are, remember how much people love you.

The first time I watch the music video for “Gypsy Woman” is while I’m writing this essay, though it’s possible that the video played in the bar at The Falcon, and I’d been too busy talking shit to notice. It’s a time capsule for 1991: white screen, Crystal Waters in a black suit with big silver jewelry, an Ankh cross necklace and matching earrings. The vibe on screen matches the Basement Boys beat snaking in the background: stark and simplistic and haunting. If there is any question whether “Gypsy Woman” is a sad song, a resounding yes comes from the hypnotic visuals of a masked protagonist dissenting into madness. First there’s a glove, gold lame holding a tube of fuchsia lipstick. Then, a hand mirror. Both props for the figure who appears in a white, drama mask, dead eyes lined in make-up. Objects swirl into focus and fall behind Waters as she sings: dollar bills, detached mannequin hands, a spinning umbrella looped with a cursive la da dee la dee da, labyrinthian designs, a single storybook home, and at one point, the masked protagonist begins to grind around a light fixture, a makeshift street corner with trash in the background. The objects continue to cycle on screen as back-up dancers in colorful shirts use a slinky as a choreography prop. Toward the end, the camera crawls over the masked protagonist sleeping on a park bench, a same made-up face on the white, frantic hair, gold gloves. Is she dead now? More mirrors, more dollars, more lipstick, more white homes spinning to the beat, so sick in its disturbing spiral, enough to drive someone insane, the repetition of it: la da dee la dee da la da dee la dee da.
Waters began writing the lyrics with that riff, layering it over the beat, until she realized that a character in the song must be singing it. The woman in question was someone that Waters used to see in Washington D.C., singing for money outside The Mayflower Hotel on Connecticut Avenue. In a 2016 instalment of VICE Magazine’s “The Story Of,” Crystal Waters explains the background of her lyrics: “[That woman] always had a full face of makeup and black clothes and she'd be singing these gospel songs.” Waters had no idea that the woman was living on the streets until she read a newspaper article about how she had just lost her job and was down on her luck. “And that changed my idea of homelessness,” Waters continues, “It could happen to anyone. Before that, I just had the hook down. Then […] the lyrics came to me. Like she was singing it.” After the track became a huge dance hit, reaching the top of the charts, Waters urged her label to add the parenthetical (She’s Homeless) to the title because she wanted listeners to know the story behind the song they were dancing to.

I’m not sure how I learned that Spencer was homeless, but someone relayed the message. Another friend texted, DO NOT SEND HIM ANY MORE MONEY, and I felt silly for believing he bought gas that night. The timeline of events is fuzzy, but somehow, he lost his job at the airline. Without steady income, he drained the bank accounts of his close friends until he was evicted from his apartment (I heard the landlord put all his things in the alley, and he grabbed what he could carry before the city eradicated it). Without a place to stay, he shacked up with a man he was seeing in San Bernardino, allegedly the spark to all these problems. When the relationship with that man ended (he had a wife), Spencer was kicked out of the home and left to fend for himself on the streets. Two friends drove out to San Bernardino, stalking the riverbed until they found him, but Spencer refused to leave. During the second rescue, he acquiesced, returned to Long Beach to stay on a friend’s couch while he looked for work. The road ahead was long, but we felt collective relief that he was away from that man and the desert.
This wasn’t a lasting solution. Spencer was paranoid: afraid of the pet cameras in her apartment, unwilling to drop off resumes, sleeping through the afternoons, chattering all night. She kicked him out, and other friends pulled away too, texting things like, I can’t be a part of this mess, and, I have my own child to raise. With nowhere else to go, he started staying outside a grocery store Downtown, the same grocery that I regularly shopped at when I lived in Long Beach, the same grocery that Spencer liked when he had an apartment nearby, a place where I would frequently run into him after work. It was open 24 hours, and it had a free parking lot, so it became a hot spot for transient people. A former manager said that he followed her down several aisles begging for his job back, any job, I’ll wash dishes, he told her. Another former coworker saw him walking around Downtown in a suit. He told her that he was on his way to an interview, and she wished him luck having no idea that he was homeless. He looked exactly the same, she told me while serving lunch at the chain where we all met ten years ago. The restaurant looked the same too, albeit more polished and modern from the upgrades, but it didn’t feel as rigorous and intense as I remembered—more mediocre, less special.

What haunts me still is relentless wondering how this could happen to someone I shared so much life with. We were two similar people, traveling in the same direction, during identical timelines, the synchronicities and coincidences like something predestined. I was not prepared to learn that my friend was suffering the way I used to watch strangers suffer on Intervention. I’ve seen many episodes: I used to watch during my worst hangovers as a self-serving reminder that I was not a fuck up. The toughest episodes showcase people battling an addiction with no discernable root cause, and now I search for clues I missed like the friends during the retrospective, stuck in a loop of what came first: the chicken or the egg? The man or the depression? The substances or the lost job? The death of Chef? Problems with his family? Had he been dabbling all along? Was I too naïve to notice? Since 2020, pandemic-induced mental health crises resulted in exacerbated abuse of substances, some data showing an increase in over 30% of adults suffering from addiction. I’ve known so many people with the same struggle: family members, friends and coworkers, even my childhood neighbor with the Crystal Waters CD. It could happen to anyone, but I never would’ve predicted this outcome for Spencer.
In hindsight, 2018 was a horrific year, though it seems like I was having fun when I search the archives. I was also involved with a toxic man, and he also had another woman. I was foolish to believe this man would leave her for me, and when he left both of us for someone else, I lost my mind too, descending on a warpath to destroy whatever life I had built with drugs and alcohol. My own secret afflictions masked any agony I felt, not from missing the man, but from being so stupid in the first place. One desperate night, deadened by my own grief, I called a 24/7 therapist hotline, and the woman who answered said, Breakups can be really painful, as if consolation. Hot tears pushed past my swollen eyelids as I paced a grimy apartment at witching hour, gripping the phone like a life raft. I took a swallow deep enough to choke out, Yeah, before I hung up, still feeling like I was on the edge, teetering too close to oblivion.
While writing a short story about phobias, I discovered that the fear of heights has nothing to do with the distance from the ground or tall buildings, that it’s about our own human urge to fall when we get that far up, the knowledge that we could plummet, we could go, if we wanted. When I think about Spencer, I wonder why I didn’t choose to fall with him, why I didn’t go down the same alley, though it was right in front me, and I had every opportunity. Why hadn’t I ended up alone in the desert, la da dee la dee da. What stopped me from surrendering to a park bench, la da dee la dee da. Why didn’t I chase that high? My favorite television Interventionist, Candy Finnigan, might say that I was predisposed to the disease because my family had also been sick, because I was around a bunch of sick people. A coworker once told me, We are all one decision away from radically altering our lives, and while I think that was supposed to be inspirational, I peel the memories, trying to see if I can pinpoint the decision Spencer made, though I know it was probably simple, a moment he didn’t think twice. I wanted my life to be over the night I called that hotline, but I felt so pathetic and full of shame knowing I was too much of a coward to really fuck up. I decided to keep moving, one foot in front of the other, a trail materializing simply because I walked it. Frost was right: there are two paths in the woods. Somehow, I found the right one.

Since writing this essay, stalking Spencer’s social media handles for activity and revisiting clips from Intervention, my algorithm is contaminated by addiction: #WEDORECOVER, Soft White Underbelly interviews, multiple before and after split screen images. In one reel, a couple discusses why they choose to stay unhoused instead of receiving help. They are in Las Vegas, and the woman seems like someone I might have known when I was younger, a coworker or a classmate. She tells the interviewer what most people don’t understand about “street people” is that they like the rush of having to find shelter and money and food each night. She calls each day an adventure, and tells the camera, “I love it,” smiling as she describes her life like an action movie, her second addiction to the high of survival.
This idea of a “gypsy” lifestyle was once a romanticized millennial concept, especially in Southern California, being a vagabond felt cool, and maybe that’s why so many people willingly go to Burning Man. Back in our wild and free twenties, one friend used the Instagram handle @gypsyinareddress after a line from Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, posting both her faraway and local escapades. I had a short-lived blog titled “Back to the Velvet,” a nod to Stevie Nicks’s version of drifter life, where I wrote about my own wandering ways until my mother googled me and sent an email of her disappointment. While the dream of spontaneous travel still seems attractive today, I can’t think of a single luxury greater than coming home.
In 2025, no one uses the idealistic “gypsy” anymore as it's widely understood to be a slur for the historically nomadic Romani people. We avoid the term homeless, too, in our more conscious most-pandemic society, opting for the qualifier “unhoused” instead, which returns emphasis to the people surviving just like you and me. In a 2010 documentary, Lost Angels, a woman named Detroit echoes this sentiment by screaming into the camera while trapezing through Skid Row: I’m not homeless baby, I’m less a home, lessa home.

Crystal Waters continues her family legacy as “Gypsy Woman” remains a house music staple thirty years after its release. That Basement Boys beat is timeless, and recent comments on the music video read: this could come out today and still be fresh, and, who’s listening in 2025 almost 2026?! There are too many remixes, samples, and interpolations to mention, including one on SoundCloud that I’ve used in a spin class I teach, the la da dee la dee da part in perfect 8-count rounds for power jumps, though I don’t scream the lyrics anymore. In 2023, a DJ L BEATS mashup of British R&B artist Jorja Smith’s “Little Things” with the “Gypsy Woman” bassline received millions of streams on Spotify, reaching the top of the house/dance charts. The original track, too, is still talked about: Rolling Stone ranked it #58 in their list of “200 Greatest Dance Songs of All Time.” Just this year, Billboard placed the song even higher: #24 in their list. The scholars at Pitchfork agree, featuring “Gypsy Woman” in their top 30 Best House Tracks from the 90s. The song stays universally celebrated, aside from the In Living Color skit, a parody by Kim Wayans titled “My Songs Are Mindless,” though one could argue this imitation is rooted in more flattery. Beyond the countless remixes to “Gypsy Woman,” Waters hasn’t released any new house music aside from a couple of singles, the latest in 2020 titled, “Party People,” which didn’t chart.
The last message I received from Spencer was on July 21, 2023, though I’ve texted him since, but the messages go green. I still share my location with him though under the list of people in Find My, his email reads: No location found. In 2024, a sleepless urge led me to check my Twitter (X) account, and I was surprised to see my feed overwhelmed by a barrage of likes from Spencer’s account, all pornographic images and videos from other users. In some posts, he commented too, which feels uncharacteristic, though I know many people use the platform this way, just perhaps not publicly or on an account that states their full government name. Another friend mentions that he uses a burner phone when he can find one, He doesn’t have his number anymore, she says but I can’t bring myself to delete our text thread, stop sharing my location, or unfollow his accounts. During a recent visit to Long Beach, we drove around Downtown, back and forth on the main drag, passing the grocery again and again and again. From the passenger seat of my friend’s car, I saw the flock outside. Each time, a sharp crane from my neck, the way those people shrank in the side mirror, an avalanche of guilt that I refused Spencer’s visit, knowing the call in 2022 was the last time I’ll ever hear his voice.
On Spencer’s birthday in December, seventy-two Facebook friends post on his timeline, many messages seeming to know he won’t be checking his account, sentiments like, Still wishing you birthday joy, and, Love You with a heart. The others seem too casual for his current situation, and I wonder if that’s because people don’t know what’s happened, or perhaps Meta wrote them. Spencer hasn’t been active on Instagram since 2023, so I don’t make my usual birthday repost, sharing a video of us from The Falcon, snapping a giant black fan that reads SHADE. This year, I send another text, green like the ones before, a link to “Feels,” and

I miss this
Missing you
Miss you so much

la da dee la dee da
la da dee la dee da

Katrina Prow lives and writes in San Luis Obispo, California. Her work has recently appeared in Off Assignment, The Boston Review, Taco Bell Quarterly, decomP, The Journal, Pithead Chapel, Redivider, Passages North, and elsewhere. She holds a PhD in Creative Writing, Fiction from Texas Tech University, and she currently teaches Creative Writing at Cal Poly, SLO and in the Creative Writing Program at UC Berkeley Extension. This is her fourth essay about popular music, three of which have been March Xness extracurriculars, and she's holding hope to win the lottery next year for the tournament proper. Beyond her literary activities, Katrina works as a spin instructor and curating a perfect playlist gives her life. You can find her online @katprow.