Losing in Gainesville (9781940430331)

by Costello, Brian

  They walk past Gator Plaza, with its salons and drug stores and University t-shirt shops and generic Floridian “cabanas” of watered-down tropical drinks and bikini-clad waitresses carrying plates of oysters. Ronnie recalls the morning, sitting on the front steps of the trailer, strumming his guitar and crooning the words to The Kinks’ “This is Where I Belong” in his best Ray Davies intoxicated timbre, “Well I ain’t gonna wander / like the boy I used to know / He’s a real unlucky fella / and he’s got no place to go,” and he can’t help but wonder right about now—broke and starving with a friend nursing antbite wounds on his tongue—if Gainesville’s where he belongs, but a part of him, past all of the right-now troubles, sees the potential—Ronnie already loves how people actually use the sidewalks here, contrasted with Orlando, where everything is so spread out and muggy, the sidewalks are like adornments—future friends everywhere—boys and girls wearing t-shirts of bands he likes, of writers he likes—just that they share these interests at all—if only he could look less, you know, bummish right now. But Ronnie’s here for a reason. He has plans, big plans. He recalls strumming the guitar while Kelly told him, “I’m still not going to pay for your food,” leaning against his truck, looking at the thick canopy of pines and palms and live oaks that made Ronnie feel he had just moved to the poor part of Sherwood Forest. “I know you want me to pay for your food right now, but it’s not going to happen. You need to learn about cause and effect. You need to learn not to self-indulge to oblivion.”

  Ronnie laughed, strummed, sang, ignored.

  “I’m serious, Ronnie,” Kelly continued. “We’re gonna dumpster dive, and you’re going to have to figure out how to live, if this is what you’re choosing to do.”

  Ronnie laughed then, and he still could laugh about it now, Kelly’s forays into stern parental life-lessons. They cross University and limp onto the University of Florida, and the poverty and self-inflicted misfortune of the day is replaced by the welcome banalities of a college campus Thursday afternoon. Ah yes, college: the parent-sanctioned, government-approved method to get your child’s ya-yas out in just four years before inheriting a bounteous suburban existence. Youth on bicycles, rollerblades, skateboards, rolling up and down the walkways winding between the brick academic buildings, everyone and everything with a purpose, a direction, and in the commons, students sit in clusters doing all the boring-ass activities collegiates do between classes—highlighting textbooks, tossing Frisbees, various permutations of nothing, and Ronnie already feels a mixture of boredom and self-loathing as they step around all these clusters and approach the Krishna food tables. In purple and saffron flowing gowns, blissed-out Krishnas (are there any other kind?) slop fluorescent curried potatoes and peanut sauce from giant pots onto soggy paper plates. Ronnie and Kelly find a patch of grass in the middle of the commons to sit and try not to look too ravenous, trying to pass for two college students living the life.

  “I need to wait until this cools,” Kelly says. “My tongue can’t take it.” He mashes the food, wipes the potato remnants off the clear plastic spork with his hospital scrub, and forces the tines underneath the gauze to scratch his itchy forehead. “What are you going to do about Chris Embowelment?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Ronnie says, trying to ignore Kelly’s violent arm motions as the spork scratches deeper and deeper into the dead skin. The food is at once spicy and bland, a mushy warm gruel that burns the digestive tract. Ronnie doesn’t mind it. He’s grateful to have something to fight the hunger.

  “He might come up here and find you,” Kelly says before easing backwards until flat in the crunchy grass, looking/not looking at the cloudless sky above.

  Ronnie would laugh if he was less exhausted, less frustrated with Kelly’s frugality. (If Kelly would break down and order a large pizza, there would be no problems.) He actually did laugh when, back at his house in Orlando, Ronnie made a final dummy check before leaving for the last time, and Kelly yelled from his jittery maroon Japanese pickup truck, “Nothing you own is worth taking with you. Chris Embowelment is on his way and he’s gonna kill you! He’s gonna disembowel you with his bass, then he’s gonna kill you. You don’t want to be here when he discovers you’re skipping out on the rent, you dumb dick!”

  Ronnie had to laugh, then, thinking, Yes, Kelly is definitely right, on this account, anyway. Chris Embowelment was built like one of those defensive tackles you see on Sunday afternoon television, if said defensive tackle wore green Medusaesque dreadlocks and homemade tattoos covering all skin except the face and played in a touring death metal band called Infestation of Leeches. He had been a practicing Satanist, but lapsed because he found the Church of Satan’s canons—such as they were—to be “too tame.” From there, he naturally gravitated to a full-throated endorsement of Nietzschean existentialist glory-seeking coupled with a black Randian interpretation of self-interest best summarized in his favorite phrase, “Get the fuck out of my way or I’ll rip off your eyelids.” In spite of these quirks and the inevitable funereal pallor he brought to his side of the tiny house, Chris was a clean roommate who paid the bills on time. (Which just goes to show that not all guys surnamed “Embowelment” are bad.) Ronnie owed Chris a note of explanation, at the very least.

  “Dear Chris,” Ronnie began, scribbling in purple marker across the back of an electric bill. “Hey man, I’m sorry, but I walked out on the dishwashing gig, and I can’t afford to and I don’t want to live here anymore. I think I’m going stark raving batshit, and I need something these surroundings are not giving me. Anyway, sorry I didn’t repaint the walls of my bedroom . . . ”

  (The walls of Ronnie’s closet-sized bedroom were covered in permanent marker graffiti. Somewhere between his seventh and eighth domestic beer, he enjoyed scribbling the logos of favorite bands, the Black Flag bars, the blue Germs circle, The Boobs, The Uncool, The Jerks, The Uncooked Weiners, Butt Butt Butt, Dildos Over Somalia, The [insert anti-social adjective here] [insert anti-social noun here] . . . and so on and so forth, and in the middle of the largest wall was this quote from Richard Hell:

  “Rock and roll as a way of turning sadness and loneliness and anger into something transcendentally beautiful, or at least energy-transmitting.”

  Since graduating college, Ronnie had taken solace in this quote the way friendless Amway distributors find solace in testimonials from Double Diamonds.)

  “Anyway,” Ronnie continued scribbling, “I’m truly sorry to be sticking you with the rent, for whatever that’s worth. I guess what I’m trying to say is, if our paths ever cross again, I would appreciate it if you didn’t disembowel me—”

  Outside, the b-flat trumpet of Kelly’s truck horn. “He’s coming up the road!” Kelly yelled. “I’m leaving!”

  Ronnie dropped the marker—cold fear flooding his skin, tingling his balls. He ran out the door, left it open, hopped into his dinged-up blandy apple green four-door sedan. Squealing into reverse, Ronnie could almost hear the Flatt and Scruggs car chase bluegrass music as he pulled out of the driveway, shifted the car to Drive, floored the accelerator down the residential street, as Chris Embowelment, fresh off an East Coast tour, passes in his tour van in the opposite direction, about to find the house half-empty, stuck with all the bills. In the rearview mirror, Ronnie saw Chris Embowelment step out of his van, stare at the open door, figure it out, and—holy shit!—punch the front of the house, putting a fist-sized hole in the grimy old aluminum siding. He looked to Ronnie's car, but Ronnie had already turned left towards Highway 441 North, out of town.

  Now he’s here, in the middle of a university he did not attend, surrounded by dormitories and riot-proof architecture. Hippies of all ages, excessively tanned South Floridian rich kids, the NYC hipsters-in-training with their tattoos-in-progress snaking down their arms, the winter-hating loudmouthed students from the Eastern Seaboard’s megalopolises, the unceasing buzz of youthful optimism and energy, and Ronnie, well, eventually, he will go home to a double-wide trailer with a roommate rumored t
o have two buttholes.

  As Ronnie falls asleep/passes out in the commons, leaving Kelly to sit there and scratch his bandaged forehead with a clear plastic spork, he will reflect on how it did not go like this:

  At the end of the foolish move, it’s Alvin at the front door of the trailer—after a two-hour drive where US 441 North finally escapes Greater Orlando somewhere outside Apopka (You know: Apopka? “The Indoor Foliage Capital of the World?”), and Ronnie actually always loved and will always love this part of the drive—the rundown melancholic old Florida of roadside tourist traps, citrus, moccasins, sweet corn, burned out motels, the violent purple orange sky of the sunsets over undulating pony farms, the live oaks and scrub pines mixing with the palm trees. Driving north in those parts really meant driving South, culturally, and Ronnie, in the car, listening to T-Rex on a worn cassette (The Slider on one side, Futuristic Dragon on the other), he enjoyed the schizophrenic polyglot of his homeland—of handpainted “REPENT! THE END IS NEAR!” signs nailed to posts holding up billboards advertising “TOPLESS BOTTOMLESS GIRLS 24 HOURS!” Alvin waits in the trailer as the sun sets, as Ronnie and Kelly ride through a vast prairie with tall grasses in all directions into the darkness as the stars and satellites appear overhead. Beyond the prairie, a slow immersion into Gainesville—holistic yoga house here, junk yard there, student apartments, Chinese buffets, the teenage wasteland backdrop of fast food and liquor stores mixing it up with seedy motels and crackwhores . . . and then it’s the University, and a westbound turn down Archer Road through vast commercial districts, to the trailer park—a right on 34th Street, then a turn down a lonely little half-lane that crumbles into a dirt path.

  No, it did not go down like this—Alvin, welcoming Ronnie into his trailer with one of those three-pump handshakes like the kind employed by Governor Willie Stark in All the King’s Men. Ronnie climbing the four creaky wooden steps to the white steel door opening into the ʼ70s-muff shag brown living room. Wood paneling covering the walls. Dim yellow light bathing the mess below. Against the far right wall a faded gray cushioned chair with a gaping indentation, giving the sitter the sensation of sitting in a moldy barrel. On the opposite wall—a TV, VCR, and stereo, with a shredded green lawnchair and a punctured red beanbag plopped three feet away. Garbage—used tissues, yellowed Q-tips, discarded fast food wrappers, and crinkled porno—covering most of the dusty carpeting.

  “Well. Uhhhhhhh,” Alvin did not begin because this never happened, arms outstretched like a realtor in the midst of a hard sell. “As you can see, I never pick up after myself.” Alvin stood five feet five inches. He was squat and barrel-chested, with stubby arms like uncooked hotdogs hanging at his sides. He was buck-toothed. Double-chinned. His curly blond hair was short, greasy, and matted, like the pubic hair of a Swedish wino. He wore primary-colored t-shirts decorated with drawings of big fish and captions reading “I’M OUT FOR TROUT.” Faded gray sweatpants and velcroed white tennis shoes finished the outfit. Somewhere at UC Berkeley, there was a supermodel astrophysicist, and she was the yin to Alvin’s yang, righting the precarious balance of the universe.

  Alvin never led Ronnie Altamont forward through the living room and into the kitchen, where the fluorescent lighting heightened the variety of smells, now increased to include rotting food and the earthy stench of an unwashed gerbil cage. The white linoleum was yellowed and sticky. The counters were covered in old newspapers, more discarded microwave dinners, unwashed dishes, glasses, silverware. The sink was filled with the kind of sludgy water you see in the dying industrial towns of the Midwest or Eastern Europe.

  “I guess you probably notice that other smell too, pfff!” Alvin never said. Alvin ended most of his sentences with “pfff!” as if to say, “Please disregard everything I just said.”

  Ronnie would have nodded, if given the chance, sniffing in furtive inhalations, as if to assuage the assault on his middle-class sensibilities from all the mold, mildew, and feces. “What is that?”

  “Um, the thing is,” Alvin never drawled, “I got two buttholes? And one of them? Well, it’s not an anus, but more of a crevice on my backside? Where filth collects? The doctors say I’m supposed to wash it? But I never get around to washing it, pfffff.

  “And, just so you know,” Alvin did not continue, leading Ronnie out of the kitchen with a gracious “after you” windmill of his stubby left arm, down the dark hallway to the Alabama truckstop bathroom facsimile on the right, where Alvin’s stained underwear encircled the rim of the sink, “I never get any women, obviously, so I masturbate pretty much all the time. I’m always watching videos in the living room, pfff!”

  “Yeah,” Ronnie would not remark. “I noticed that 500 Oral Moneyshots tape sticking out of your VCR.”

  “Take a peek into my bedroom, pfffff.”

  The bed was in the middle. Around it, an island of spread-beaver pictorials from thirty different porno mags.

  “Wow,” Ronnie would have gasped, a little impressed.

  “And here’s your room, pfff.” Ronnie Altamont’s eventual bedroom was at the end of the hall. It was a square, whitewalled room with a closet and a backdoor. It was the only empty and almost clean room in the entire trailer. Rectangular windows lined the top of the far wall. The floor was a white linoleum like the kitchen, only unyellowed.

  “I’ll take it,” Ronnie would have said, adjusting his glasses, running his fingers through the badly dyed hair. “However,” he would have loved to have continued, “since we’re putting our cards on the table, I should let you know that I have no money, will pay you no rent, and will seldom leave my room, where I will sit and brood while listening to music, drinking malt liquor while trying to write. I won’t say much to you when we’re here at the same time, and I intend to move out of this dump as soon as a better offer comes up. Sound good? Roomie?”

  Here, Ronnie would have extended his hand. Another three-pump handshake. Deal. No surprises.

  In the in-and-out of half-sleep, Ronnie compares how it should have gone down with what really happened. The visual part of the tour was essentially the same, without acknowledgements of the garbage, the porno island encircling Alvin’s bed, and the rumored second butthole—and that was mere speculation on Mouse’s part, a legendary rumor from when Alvin and Mouse attended high school together. Mouse told Ronnie and Kelly about it after the real tour of the trailer. Mouse had followed them from room to room, snickering with every registered look of discomfort from Ronnie and Kelly. In the middle of the living room, a rotund pasty man in his late teens wielded a broom, swinging and jabbing the air with it, yellowed stalks swishing above his head as he yelled the inevitable “HI-YAH!” He was shirtless, wearing only a pair of short, unflattering navy blue soccer shorts.

  “Don’t mind Stevie—pfff!” Alvin said as they walked past him in the living room. “He’s teaching himself karate.” Ronnie tried not to laugh at this bit of information, coupled with Stevie’s flabby flailings; Mouse laughed, and Kelly squealed as the broom brushed inches from his bandaged head.

  When the tour was completed, Ronnie, Kelly, and Mouse stepped outside the trailer, “To talk things over,” as Ronnie told Alvin.

  “So. What do you think, bro?” Mouse asked, followed by, “Heh heh heh . . . ” In the horror-movie night-time silence of the trailer park, Mouse looked criminally insane. Shoulder-length unwashed escaped convict brown hair, satanic facial hair, sagging earlobes from deflated holes that until recently held two cut tubes of garden hose, a sinister face with a false-tooth smile (from when Alvin accidentally knocked out Mouse’s front teeth with a golf club back in high school) dark eyes, black eyebrows at 45-degree angles, a white dress shirt with narrow blue pinstripes dotted with multi-hued splotches and blotches, black slacks cut off above the knees, teal flip-flops.

  “We’re leaving,” Kelly said. “This place is disgusting.” Kelly, Ronnie was sure, saw nothing but the dark shadows of the live oaks, heard nothing but silence from the surrounding trailers.

  “C’mon man.
It ain’t that bad,” Mouse said, picking at the point of his goatee, smiling that smile.

  “Fuck that,” Kelly said. “Itʼs worse!”

  Ronnie turned around, looked up to the dim yellow light inside the forlorn trailer. This didn’t feel like Gainesville. Rural Florida, yes, but not the college town Ronnie was hoping for.

  “The rent’s freee-eeeee.” Mouse sang “freee-eeee” like Luther, the leader of the psychopathic gang in that movie “The Warriors” singing “Warriors! Come out to . . . playyy-yayyyy!” “You get started here, join some bands, get a job, finish that book, meet some girls.” Mouse laughed and sang, “Girrr-rurrrrrlllls.”

  “Free?” Kelly said.

  “The trailer’s 100% paid off.” Mouse said. He held out his arms, shrugged. “You don’t have to stay in the trailer forever. Get a foothold, brah—a foothold!—and you’ll find someplace better.”

  “Or, you can go back to Orlando and stay with me and do this move right,” Kelly said. “Get another job and save up money. Skip this dump altogether and move to Chicago like you’ve been talking about.” Kelly was one of those twitchy-skinny guys who never looked anyone in the eye when he spoke. He was looking Ronnie in the eye.