PRAISE FOR BRIAN COSTELLO
“If Joyce was right that you could rebuild Dublin by reading Ulysses, you could definitely reconstruct a very specific American village of dive bars, record shops and drugstore cowboys from this slab of post-punk tragicomedy [ . . . ] [Losing in Gainesville] traces the emotional arc (or lack thereof) of superslacker Ronnie Altamont, the lead singer and guitarist in his low-rent Florida rock band, The Laraflynnboyles. Set in the mid-1990s, the story captures in intimate detail the wilderness years experienced by many American males of a certain class, age and background. The desolate outlooks of Ronnie and his buddies are weighed down by crap jobs (asbestos removal, pizza delivery, etc.), fueled by the massive and constant intake of drugs and alcohol, and soothed only by the likes of Charles Bukowski, Lou Reed, The Kinks and The Replacements [ . . . ] It’s a big, messy, uncomfortable story but one that captures its milieu [ . . . ] [I]n the end, the book's real question is whether this beautiful loser is capable of being saved from himself. A rock-and-roll fable about the secret lives of the unsatisfied.”
—Kirkus
“A bittersweet, twenty-something, rock-and-rolling tale of angst and longing, riffing on art and the meaning of it all amidst the banality and beauty of ’90s Florida in a fever dream portrait of the artists as not-so-young punk rockers.”
—Eric Charles May, author of Bedrock Faith
“Costello describes suburban absurdities in teeming detail, approaching the self-aware gross-out humor of Tromaville: tumbling forward with the rushing momentum of Kerouac’s prose. Nineties counterculture—emo bands, riot grrls, shit jobs, sleeping on floors, warm beer and cold pizza—often provides the punch line. Though funny and poking fun, Costello remains sympathetic to the awkwardness and ambivalence that drives young people, feeling trapped, to struggle to express themselves: that beautiful, life-affirming cycle of broke kids starting bands.”
—Tim Kinsella, Joan of Arc frontman, author of Let Go and Go On and On and The Karaoke Singer’s Guide to Self-Defense
CURBSIDE SPLENDOR PUBLISHING
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except in the case of short passages quoted in reviews.
This is a work of fiction. All incidents, situations, institutions, governments, and people are fictional and any similarity to characters or persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.
Published by Curbside Splendor Publishing, Inc., Chicago, Illinois in 2014.
First Edition
Copyright © 2014 by Brian Costello
Library of Congress Control Number: 2014948799
ISBN 978-1-940430-31-7
Edited by James Tadd Adcox
Cover art by Ryan Duggan
Designed by Alban Fischer
Manufactured in the United States of America.
www.curbsidesplendor.com
“He who has never failed somewhere, that man cannot be great.”
—Herman Melville
ONE: SPRING
“The trouble with doing nothing is you can’t quit and rest.”
—Alfred E. Neuman
A REGRETTABLE INCIDENT INVOLVING A GRANOLA BAR
. . . And that’s when Kelly leaps from the dumpster, screaming as the red ants bite his tongue.
He tosses the half-eaten granola bar he’d found buried in the rancid smorgasbord of discarded food onto the sizzling black of the minimart parking lot. The granola bar plops between Ronnie’s brown hand-to-hand-to-hand-me-down wingtips.
“How could you miss seeing them?” Ronnie asks, bending over to inspect the granola bar, squinting at dozens of red ants swarming over the oats, the raisins, the green wrapper, as frenetic as those vast totalitarian mounds they’re always constructing, the bane of the Floridian teenage lawnmower’s existence.
Kelly lands, hops, fingers scraping at his tongue. Teary-eyed from the pain, sweat flees his thick brown flat-top, stains the yellowed gauze wrapped around his forehead, gushes down his gaunt face, settles into damp miniature Lake Okeechobees spotting the green medical scrub top he had purchased for a dime in some thrift store back home in Orlando.
“Ow! Ow!” he moans like a novocained dental patient. “Because I’m hungry.”
“Buy some food then,” Ronnie says, entranced by the ants’ movement, still shocked that Kelly somehow missed seeing them. “Please. You’re hungry. I’m hungry.”
“No!” Kelly winces, face turning that popular Crayola color Food Allergy Red. “It burns, bro. Get me some ice!”
“It costs a quarter.” Ronnie finally looks away from the cruel, cruel granola bar, to Kelly’s wiry, twitchy form. He wants to laugh at the idea that this could be the proverbial straw to break the proverbial economical bastard’s cheap-ass back.
“A quarter?!” Kelly steps backwards, leans against the rusty brown dumpster until the heat of the metal compels a shrugged shove forward. “I ain’t paying a quarter!”
“This minimart charges you for a cup of ice,” Ronnie continues, standing there with nothing but an ant-infested granola bar between them in the already muggy April air. “There’s a sign by the door and everything.”
Kelly weighs the pain of the bites versus the pain of spending any money on soothing cool water. The tiny hot welts feel like he’s been biting his tongue repeatedly while cunnillinguisting a habañero.
“Fine!” he huffs, pulls a quarter from the front pocket of his multi-stained white painter’s pants, flips it to Ronnie before hunching over in agony. “Hurry!”
Ronnie trudges to the front of the Floridian Harvest minimart, feels with each pinched step in those wingtips the swamp-assed taint-chafe particular to being in the afternoon sun dumpster diving in jeans, in Florida. Anemic, sweaty, disoriented from not eating in the two days since escaping to Gainesville, he’s delirious enough to mutter semi-coherent ramblings on the order of, “Stupid. Mother. Cock. Shit. Ass. Hot. Food. Dammit. Sucker. Fucker. Cheap. Ass. Hung. Grrrr.”
Ronnie pulls open the door, steps inside, hears the welcoming synthetic Ding!, the A/C a respite from Out There’s heat, humidity, and ant-bitten friends, all of whom tagged along on what Ronnie is starting to think might have been a hasty, ill-conceived move.
Only three nights ago, Ronnie was in his home—a tiny old white shack in the shadows of downtown Orlando’s skyscrapers (tall and vulgar and new, breeding and multiplying like the Samsa-sized bugs always lurking in the kitchen, the bathroom, the living room walls)—in A/C like this—not a sprawling Kennedy compound of wealth, space, and luxury, but better than the double-wide trailer he has just moved into off 34th Street—typing away at his soon to be completed 536-page tour-de-force entitled The Big Blast for Youth, when the phone rang.
It was Ronnie’s friend Mouse, who lived 100 miles north, in the college town of Gainesville—a Charles Manson doppelgänger with penchants for naked performance art, avant white-noise music, and compulsive masturbation. “Ya partyin’?”
“They fired me or I quit at the restaurant tonight. So, no. I’m not.”
“You lost your dishwashing job, brah?” (Mouse enjoys aping the Spicoli-tones of the typical Floridian surfer burnout party dude.)
“Don’t brah me, brah.” Ronnie yelled. “This is serious. I walked out. I can’t live here anymore.”
Ronnie rose from his desk, turned away from the gray computer screen, stretched with his free right hand, scraped the knuckle against the jagged bumps in the popcorn ceiling. “And the girl I was dating? Maggie? Decided she would rather date other girls. Or guys who aren’t broke. Or her cat. Anyo
ne, or, anything, but me.”
“Sounds like you should move.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” Mouse started chuckling, not unlike some sadistic social scientist conducting an experiment on the verge of turning horribly catastrophic. “My old friend Alvin? He needs a roommate. You want to leave Orlando. Sooooo.” The sadistic chuckle returned. “He’s weird and you’re weird and it’ll be rad.”
By “weird,” Ronnie imagined someone who listens to noncommercial music, dabbles in marijuana, and knows a thing or two about foreign films. An unconventional haircut. Some tattoos. You know. Weird.
“Sure. Why not?” Tomorrow would be April Fool’s Day, 1996. No job. Most friends had moved away. Five years of college had ended last summer with an English degree Ronnie had no interest in pursuing. He would call his parents and inform them of his decision once he was settled in. He would do the same with the other two guys in his band, The Laraflynnboyles. Mouse laughed his laugh, and Ronnie concluded the call with a “See you tomorrow night,” hanging up the phone and returning to The Big Blast for Youth, and now, stepping into the maternal A/C that makes Florida habitable in the eight month summer—air-conditioning like this why the state skyrocketed into the Top 5 most populous states, hordes of Rust Belted-exiles taking it from the Crackers and Cubans and Seminoles and Mafioso as the latter half of the 20th century ticked away—Ronnie thinks, Yeah, I shouldn’t have moved here without any money. Because deprivation and delirium have heightened senses that were, until then, always satiated, so it isn’t just the glorious sweat-drying A/C inside the Floridian Harvest Minimart, and not just the theme song for every dude with a Bondoed Firebird—Loverboy’s “Workin’ for the Weekend”—piped in over the store’s speakers, it’s the smells of the juice-glazed foot-long franks rotating under heat lamps, it’s the jalapeño y carne chiliquitos con quesos rotating like overstuffed egg rolls under the neighboring heat lamps, the sausage and egg breakfast biscuits, croissants, and muffins lined in slots, the burnt coffee puddled in caf and decaf pots, even the gnat-clouded bananas, and to see the two aisles of canned goods stacked four rows high—of soups and sauces and vegetables—the boxed and wrapped pastas and ramen and Cheetos and peanuts and ding-dongs—to say nothing of the frozen foods and beer (oh! beer! in cases, in packs, in rings of six, in 12 or 32 ounces. what Ronnie Altamont wouldn’t give for just one of you! Cold to the touch, cold down his throat, Spuds Mac Kenzie and the Swedish Bikini Team and Billy Dee Williams and his malt liquor bull all magically appearing before his eyes to help Ronnie forget that he has no food, no money, and no employment in this new town recently awarded “Best Place to Live in America” by the good people at Money magazine). The quick gag of the Coke dispensers before gushing Mountain Dew into thirty-two ounce orange and blue (the University’s team colors) plastic cups held by skater kids, boards fulcrumed under checkerboard Vans. Ronnie waits for these three 8th grade-looking kids in their requisite black Misfits/NOFX/Pennywise t-shirts and clam digger shorts with the chain wallets dangling below their knees on their left sides. Around the store, sun-fried construction workers punched out for the day enter surrounded by drywall dustclouds, grabbing twelve-packs of Old Hamtramck or Dusch Light, square-shouldered, big boned middle-aged women enter in their blue Wal-Mart uniforms and buy Newports, frizzy hair wet from excessive product and rushed late-for-work showers, college girls in UF leisure wear who will never be more beautiful pump high-octane fuel in their white Honda Civics then pay at the counter and everyone’s Finehowreyew, and Ronnie knows this because when the balding brown-haired mustached nicotine-skinned skinny Confederate-flag-shirted gentleman behind the counter asks “Hahhowreyew?” in that uniquely Floridian way, expressing most of the politeness and civility of regions more southern than this one coupled with a bland unenthusiasm betraying utter disinterest in the person’s well-being, “Finehowreyew?” is the inevitable answer. The door incessantly Ding! Ding! Ding!s with each entrance and exit. Ronnie fills the small cup with ice, turns around, and as always, there’s that disconcerting vibe of everyone looking, pointing, laughing, even if they’re doing none of those things. It’s not just from being what they used to call “punk” way back in 1996, Ronnie Altamont’s wingtips the only real difference from the inevitable black Chuck Taylor high-tops, but he wears black jeans, a well-worn white t-shirt with the words NAIOMI’S HAIR across the front in black silkscreened in early-90s squiggles and fingerpaint fonts (“It’s a band!” Ronnie yells, when strangers ask, as they often do, “Who’s she?”), stained with the gunk of today’s foraging, an average less-thin-with-each-passing-year body (the never-popular “Depression and Poverty Diet” doesn’t halt this) and a scowling face with black-framed glasses in front of self-consciously bugged out Lydon/Rotten blue eyes making him look even more pissed off, apprehensive, pensive, surly, and less-than-thrilled to be here than he actually is, topped off with some unnatural hair dye (now, a truly stupid faded purple Manic Panic job) on a shaggy short bristle of unkempt crazy. No, it’s not the usual discomfort Ronnie feels from living in this strange, strange state, and it’s not the oh-so-nonconformist fashion sense of aligning yourself with the most recent counterculture, it’s like these people know Ronnie’s story right now. They see the stains, the sweat, the general unemployed dishevelment and the cup of ice, and they know he’s up to nothing wholesome. (What Ronnie fails to realize is that any stares, smirks, and hostile undercurrents sent his way have little to do with him and everything to do with how everyone in the minimart has seen Kelly, writhing by the dumpster, both hands gripping his tongue, and the sense they have that Ronnie must be involved.)
You want a piece of my heart? You better start from the start. You wanna be in the show? C’mon baby let’s go! the store’s speakers command, and Ronnie walks to the counter, ice cup in one hand, a quarter in the other.
“You can tell your friend with the mummy tape on his forehead he’s got five minutes to leave the premises before I call the police,” says the minimart clerk. No Hahhowreyews for Ronnie.
Ronnie says nothing, too lethargic from hunger and heat to sneer the appropriate caustically witty retort people are supposed to say in moments like these. He drops the quarter, steps out of the A/C, sweat instantly beading his skin. He pops two ice cubes in his mouth to feel some semblance of hydration, before approaching Kelly, who swipes the cup from Ronnie’s hand and crams his mouth with ice. Kelly sits by the dumpster, elbows on thighs, eyes closed, moaning with relief. Ronnie wants to tell him how the clerk called his gauze “mummy tape,” but thinks better of it. Last week, Kelly was held up by robbers at the dumpy east Orlando hotel he worked at as sole Front Desk clerk of the 11:00 p.m.-7:00 a.m. shift, duct-taped to a chair in the hotel owner’s office, pistolwhipped to the back of the head, knocked over, his left ear pressed into thick red carpeting made redder and thicker with his soppy blood. Hence the gauze around the forehead. When discovered by the morning staff, the owner, a racist South African cocksucker, expressed more concern for the stolen money than for Kelly’s life. Ronnie had also worked at this hotel, but was fired shortly after calling the owner a “racist South African cocksucker” in the popular opinion column1 he had written as enfant terrible of the University of Central Florida’s student newspaper. Upon checking out of the hospital, Kelly, as they say, tendered his resignation, but there was nothing tender about what he wrote, a rant of such acidic fury, it made Ronnie’s student column a Victorian declaration of love by comparison.2 He mailed it off on the way out of town, most of Ronnie’s possessions packed in the cab of his truck.
“We need to leave,” Ronnie says. “You’re causing a scene. I should just leave you here to get arrested for being such a cheap-ass jerkoff.” Ronnie turns and starts walking. “I’m going to campus. I think Mouse said something about there being free Hare Krishna food.”
Kelly nods, water dribbling out his mouth and off his chin, stands, catches up to Ronnie. From the minimart to the campus
is a fifteen minute slog down
13th Street, your basic four-lane main thoroughfare—Gainesville’s stretch of US 441—past a surf shop, a dry cleaners, and all the restaurants with dumpsters in the back that bore no fruit, only inedible refuse, flies, and the expected smell, your Zesty Glazes and Viva Tacos and Szechwan Gator and McDonald’s and Denny’s, all through their hour-long tour of Gainesville’s finest fast food dumpsters, Kelly rolling around black and white Hefty bags, tearing into the contents, as Ronnie kept lookout from clerks, customers, kitchen crews, police. Kelly wasn’t as hungry as Ronnie; at McDonald’s, he sipped from a large chocolate shake, at Viva Taco he dipped at a half-eaten basket of nacho cheese covered tortilla chips. But the crème de la trash, at the top of a filled garbage can between the pumps at the gas station on the corner of 13th and University: a Ziploc bag stuffed with barbequed chicken.
“Oh, no,” Ronnie had said when Kelly plucked it out of the dumpster. “Please—no, man—don’t eat that.” Ronnie was hungry, but he wasn’t dumpster-chicken hungry, not yet.
Kelly tore open the bag, pulled out a chicken leg, put it to his mouth and bit down. “It’s good,” he said, after swallowing the first bite, then licking the sauce off his filthy fingers. “You should try some.”
Ronnie backed off, laughing from the heat, the hunger, everything. “You’re gonna be so sick.”
“Actually,” Kelly said after picking the bone clean, tossing it back into the trash, sealing up the Ziploc bag (still with two legs and a breast), “the food I eat out of dumpsters from people I don’t know tastes better than the food in dumpsters of people I do know.” He stuffed the Ziploc bag into his pink fannypack—yeah, Kelly walks around with a pink fannypack he found on a curb on Alafaya Trail back in Orlando. He washed it. Good as new. It makes his generally fetching ensembles of stained pants and hospital scrub tops that much more fetching. He’s 25, has owned a house since he was 21 due entirely to always (until now) working and living as frugally as possible—saving, never eating out, only going to the once-a-month good shows that came to Orlando and opting to shotgun a six-pack in the parking lot before the show instead of buying drinks at the bar, and it goes without saying that the ladies weren’t exactly lining up to give the man a blowjob; in spite of how genuine Kelly was, of how genuinely kind and generous he, well, usually was (years of friendship having exhausted Kelly’s generosity towards Ronnie, especially in a move as poorly planned as this one), it was impossible for most women to get past the “schizophrenic homeless guy/gay orderly” image he had cultivated.
Losing in Gainesville (9781940430331) Page 1
