“Not today. I feel the need to go into a more commercial direction.” Ronnie, Kelly, and Meghan laugh at this.
“Ok,” Meghan says, free hand’s long fingers moving the sides of her hair behind her ears, stands, arousingly perfect nineteen-year-old breasts jutting out against the cotton of the green, yellow-lettered “LARRY’S PAWN SHOP ALL-STARS” softball thrift store t-shirt she wore. The tic fades. “I’ll do my best.”
“Can we get a pizza first?” Kelly asks, looking up from the engrossing, engorging magazine. “You should order us some pizza for helping you out. C’mon, Phil Spector. Your workers are hungry.”
“Didn’t you guys just eat? You were at Gatorroni’s!” Mouse looks to Ronnie, to Kelly, back to Meghan, regretting the invite extended to the males in the room, but they happened to be there, seated outside at the front patio of Gatorroni’s by the Slice—Meghan, the nnnnnugget from the pointless Gen Ed class he was getting through in order to graduate, and the next table over, the study in contrast that heightened Meghan’s, well, everything—Ronnie and Kelly—who looked lost, more than a little pathetic—Kelly with the bandaged yellowed forehead, holding an iced-napkin to his tongue, Ronnie, as disheveled as Mouse had ever seen him, picking at the final crumbs and sauce dollops of what had been a mammoth sausage calzone. Mouse was on his bike, pedaling home from the library, saw Meghan sitting there, pulled the bike off University onto the sidewalk and bellowed a goofy “Helll-luuuuuuu” to her, and she smiled that overbitten smile, and—shee-yit gotdamn! The things Mouse could do with her!
The right side of Meghan’s face tic’d and tic’d. Mouse noticed the flute case she had there on that greasy gray table, and the plan for the rest of the day formed instantly. (Chance encounters like these happened all the time in Gainesville, part of the thrill of never knowing exactly what kind of youthful adventure you’d get up to.) “A flautist!” Mouse exclaimed. “I need your help recording the greatest song ever made.” Mouse flashed his false-tooth smile, and the scraggly knotty brown hair hung to his shoulders . . . and the moustache is bushy-big and his goatee grows to a Satanic point, but that smile! Meghan finds it sooooo disarming, while Ronnie, who watched from six feet to her right, smiled because he knows all-too-well Mouse’s m.o. with the nnnnuggets, the way he smiles and will soon rhyme when he says things he knows girls might find creepy. “Yes, that’s right!” Mouse continued. “The greatest song ever written, and I’m feeling good, you know—heh heh heh and not just because my friend Ronnie here . . . ” (Mouse pointed to Ronnie, who looked up from the calzone’s remnants long enough to mumble a “Hi,” and that was their introduction.) “. . . just moved to Gainesville, but—and we all need to do this—I was going to go to the tittie bar today for the all-you-can-eat buffet?”
“Oh God,” Ronnie said, licking the grease off his fingers. “You’re still going on about the tittie bars and the buffets.” When Mouse lived in Orlando for two years, a half-hearted student at the University of Central Florida, it was a focal point of many a conversation, and the women around him either laughed or groaned or both, but they never walked away, “creeped out,” as Jan Brady might have said.
“But you know how great it is, Ronnie! You’ve gone!”
“Whatever,” Ronnie said, still hungry, looking for any piece of uneaten calzone on the red tray, no matter how small. “It’s just boobs.”
“Just boobs,” Mouse said. “No no no! It’s too late today—shit!—but if we could have gotten there before 4 p.m . . . ”
“. . . And get only one of their watered-down drinks,” Ronnie interrupted, having heard this spiel countless times.
“. . . Yes, that’s right, Ronald, and around 4:30 they get the buffet going, and . . . ”
“. . . And it’s all-you-can-eat buffet food on plates in front of you and jigglin’ titties and . . . ”
“Yes, yes, Ron—heh heh—and then we go home, and it makes it sooo wonderful when you go home to bang the gong on the ding dong, sing song whack a doodle-doo, hmm?”
“And by that, Meghan, our friend Mouse means masturbate.”
Meghan laughed at Mouse’s refreshingly weird honesty. Oh, college! Oh, Gainesville! They don’t make boys like this back home in Fort Myers! “I wanna sing it!” she lisped through her retainer, smiling. “Let’s make something crazy!”
And now that everyone’s here, Mouse hates that he felt sorry for Ronnie and Kelly, and wishes he had left them at Gatorroni’s as he stands in front of Meghan, handing her the microphone directly plugged into the 4-track. “We’ll eat something soon, after we record this.” To Meghan, he rolls his eyes, and shakes his head, unable to apologize more for the cockblocking beer drinking free loading rejects he brought along to this elaborate ruse of seducing young Meghan into his bedroom. “So I’ll play you the song in the headphones, and you start singing it whenever you feel it.” His hands, her shoulders, a soft too-brief squeeze. “You’re gonna be great! Here we go.”
Mouse turns to the 4-track, presses the record button, the play button. Through the headphones, audible by everyone—synthesized white noise, low-end keyboard burps and farts, guitar sounds high in the treble range, layered and layered, backed by a mid-90s techno beat (or what passed for a techno beat in Mouse’s anti-techno mind—this arhythmical quarter note low-bounce that would clear a dance club faster than live grenades dropping out of the disco ball), all of it working together into an absurd chaos.
“Dancing girrrrrrl,” Meghan begins, singing in a creep soprano, headphones burrowed into her hair, big dark eyes looking into Mouse’s for encouragement, validation. “Won’t you give me a whirrrrrl, won’t you make a man out of meeeeeeee . . . ”
Mouse laughs at this, standing to her left as she sings—so happy and horny he is to be here—waving his hands and mouthing the word, “MORE!”
“Dancing girl,” Meghan continues, the initial nervousness abated, “like a whippo-whirl, won’t you hum to me, sensual-leeeeeeeeee . . . ”
Mouse smiles his smile and hops up and down, like everything in the world has surpassed his optimistic expectations. Unsure where to go from here, unable to come up with any more lyrics about dancing girls, as overwhelmed as she is with laughter that distorts the recording, she la-las sopranically, ooing and ahing until the beat ends and the song collapses into white noise tracks.
“Was that ok?” she asks. Mouse shushes because the mic is still recording, but he knows he will keep the question in the final mix.
Meghan removes the headphones, and the first thing she hears is Mouse shout “Yes! You’re a genius!” He steps up, pulls her in to give her a hug, and he holds her one second longer than the hugs of a friend, and Meghan knows that look, the dude look of “I’m going to kiss you now,” that intent, determined, vulnerable glaze they get. She still hasn’t made up her mind—this strange, strange boy with his strange, strange friends—she pokes him gently in the ribs with her flute, says, “Let’s record this now, hmmmm?”
He’s rebuffed, and she’s relieved, even if Mouse looks less jovial than before. He forces a laugh. “Yes, the flute! I’ll hold the mic, and I want you to play freely.”
“Freely?” Meghan holds the flute to her mouth in the horizontal position. “What do you mean?”
“Just follow your gut, your instinct—play it like you don’t know the rules. Like a dancing girl, spinning on the pole!”
Meghan nods, the 4-track’s tape spins once again, and over the noise and ridiculousness of her lyrics and the singing, Meghan breathes into the flute crazy puffs of swirling bird calls as Mouse holds the microphone, pretending like he’s trying to get the perfect spot for the microphone while he stares at her ti-tays, so close to the hand, like the dancing girls who pinch the folded dollar from his fingers and capture it in (Mouse calls it) their Lee Van Cleave. He will try again.
“Now can we order the pizza?” Ronnie asks, still standing in the kitchen’s threshold, a newly opened beer in his right hand by his side. Kelly tosses the magazine into a pile of
dirty clothes, paces around, eyes downward, scanning the filth and the trash for a magazine he hasn’t looked at yet.
“Yesyesyes,” Mouse says, not hiding the annoyance in his voice. “Ronnie, since you know how to work the 4-track, on the last free track there, I want you two to sing “Dancing Girls,” over and over again while Meghan and I take a walk to the ol’ Floridian Harvest Minimart for a 24-pack of Dusch Light and Partini’s Party Pizza.”
“That’s it?” Ronnie says, not hiding the disappointment in his voice. “No screaming? No hooting and hollering? No guitars played through pedals?”
“Just sing it,” Mouse says, already out there, Meghan in front of him, right hand across her lower back. “Then you’ll get your pizza.”
As Ronnie and Kelly (unsurprisingly) nail their contribution to “Dancing Girls” in one take, Mouse and Meghan walk down narrow student ghetto streets, sidewalkless cracked little straight paths the width of the average car. The houses have old white gray porches, subdivided into two to eight apartments, or they’re tin-roofed shacks plopped in the far end of the property lines with mulch driveways leading to the inevitable cul-de-sac of parked cars and trucks. No two buildings are ever the same. The trees canopy the streets and shade the sun, which now leaves nothing but a violet twilight.
“How do you know those guys?” Meghan asks, as they walk back, each with a frozen pizza and a twelve-pack of beer, turning left to face University. “They seem a little, I don’t know, out of it?”
“Yeah,” Mouse laughs. “They’re a little shell-shocked moving here. I lived with Kelly when I lived in Orlando, and we all went to UCF together. Ronnie and I ran for Student Government President and Vice-President.”
“Did you win?”
“No, but that wasn’t the point. It was a dumb college prank, I guess, but one of the ideas of the platform—Ronnie’s idea—was to have a holiday called “Big Lug Day.”
“Big Lug Day?”
“Yeah! It was like—” and Mouse sets the case of Dusch Light in the middle of the sidestreet leading back to his apartment. “Put the pizza and the beer down,” he adds.
“So on Big Lug Day,” Mouse continues. “You get to go up to anyone you want and ask for a hug, and they have to give it to you. You have to do it like this.” Mouse outstretches his arms and says, “C’mere, ya big lug.” Meghan stands there.
“Sooo, what do I do now?”
“You give me a hug because it’s Big Lug Day!”
She laughs through the overbite and the retainer, looks down, looks up and to the right, at the bug-swarmed streetlights over the darkened houses and trees, takes one step forward and they hug, and she laughs again, adds, “Happy Big Lug Day, Mouse,” and it’s the sound of Meghan saying that into his unwashed shirt that really gets him, makes him think, in the second before the lean in to kiss that this is really and truly better than the sounds of the dancing girls, those strippers looking Mouse in the eye like they actually like him as those black ladies croon No you’re never gonna get it / no you’re never gonna get it through the mammoth strip club PA speakers as they spin away on the poles and slap their asses while he eats practically flavorless barbeque ribs and sips from a watered down vodka tonic. No, this is much much better than those dancing girls in the tittie flop—through the tongue swirls and puckers and his tongue’s brushings with that hott-hott-hott retainer, Mouse sings in his head Happy Big Lug Day to me / Happy Big Lug Day to me, and while he must eventually thank Ronnie for coming up with the holiday, he must also get them out of the house. Ronnie will sense what’s up even if Kelly’s too obtuse to understand; as a parting/get-the-hell-out-of-here gift: half of this Dusch Light 12-pack and both Partini Party Pizzas, and it’s out the door with those two brokeass brokeasses, so Mouse and Meghan can, you know, do it, while listening to “Dancing Girls” on an endless loop.
ZOMBIE PROSTITUTE
When Nicholas J. Canberry (goes by Nick in class, but uses his full name in the heading to his stories because this is what he wants to go by in the literary world, kinda like Hunter S. Thompson, ya know?) sat down to write the short story “Zombie Narc”3 for Adjunct Professor Anderson “Andy” Cartwright’s Introduction to
the Short Story creative writing class, it surely never occurred to him that the final product would be the catalyst that would send Cartwright swerving eastbound beachbound on FL-20, chugging straight Absolut from a frozen bottle while throwing stacks of student work out the window of his rusty yellow VW Bug.
Nicholas J. Canberry was actually quite proud of his latest in a semester-long series of zombie-themed stories, among them: “Zombie Cop,” “Zombie Prostitute,” “Zombie Frat Boys from Hell,” “Zombie Sluts,” “Zombie Dope Dealer’s Revenge,” “Zombie Dope Dealer’s Revenge Part II: Unkind Bud Strikes Back,” “Zombie Librarian,” and now, “Zombie Narc.” The assigned book for this class—some bullshit short story anthology that was like $70 or something—has not been moved nor opened since he'd tossed it on the window sill by the dorm room bed. (“I don’t see the point in reading if you’re a writer,” is what he tells the ladies at parties. “I mean, movies are the books of today anyway, you know?”) One muse is enough, thank you very much, and Nicholas J. Canberry’s muse is named Janis—a pink bong he found at a Daytona Beach head shop in the middle of last year’s Spring Break (Spring Break!) he christened one night while trying to write a poem about what the Atlantic Ocean means to him4 for some blowoff poetry class he took last fall and as he sat there at his dorm room desk listening to Janis Joplin’s Greatest Hits from the CD boombox on the desk’s upper shelf, he had the really fantastic magical epiphany that Janis Joplin made the greatest music of all time. (Even better than Bob Marley.) Henceforth, Janis never left the right side of Nicholas J. Canberry’s computer (an
off-to-college gift from his realtor parents back home in Newport Richey), and he must have put at least half a sack into Janis’s nug-hungry bowl the night he wrote “Zombie Narc.” When he’d half-finished, Nicholas J. Canberry knew he had something good, something that would blow Cartwright’s farty-ass old punk rocker mind. This was confirmed as he read each page, fresh from the whirring dot matrix printer:
“I taught you were our friend, man!” Smokey cried sadly as the cops put the cuffs on him and took him away. “We did . . . drugs together. Remember?”
“I am your friend, man!” Stoney pleaded insistently. “But there’s one thing, you don’t know.”
Smokey spat at the ground as the cops led him away. “I know everything I need to know, man. You’re nuthin’ but a narc! You’re just a narc!”
“Not so fast, Smokey!” Stoney announced menacingly. “Watch this!” The skin of Stoney’s flesh was ripped by Stoney’s hands. His hands tugged at his face, revealing . . . A ROTTING SKULL UNDERNEATH!!!
“I’m a ZOMBIE NARC!!!” Stoney yelled loudly. “And I’m hungry. FOR BRAINS!”
“What the? No! No!!! Please!” Smokey begged as the top of his skull was being chewed by Stoney’s mouth. Blood shot everywhere, and the cops shot their guns. They had no affect on Stoney. He grabbed the cops and ate them up too.
“Stoney’s brain tastes like chicken!” Stoney reflected calmly to himself. “But these cops’ brains taste like pigs!” Stoney proceeded to eat his way through all their brains, ralishing each volumtous bite. The fact is, Stoney was hungry, hungry for brains . . . ”
. . . These words, one after the other, written by one Nicholas J. Canberry, provide the unintended catalyst pushing Adjunct Professor Anderson “Andy” Cartwright to run out of the house with the keys, the stack of student work, the bottle of Absolut from the freezer, and into the car, sputtering down the road, screaming “What am I doing?! What the hell fuck shit am I doing?!” punching the steering wheel, swerving along as the cassette deck plays what it always plays, songs from local legends Roach Motel, circa 1982—young and angry and fun and stupid and great. So long ago. “What am I doing!” Andy (the Department of Tireless Literary Derring-do at the Gainesvi
lle College of Arts and Crafts fancies itself cutting edge and insists on the students calling the teachers by their first names. It’s very egalitarian that way, lest the students get on bummer authority trips) yells again, not fully aware that he is yelling. He used to be a decent writer—a novel published to not-bad reviews five years prior, some short story credits—before he faced down these mammoth stacks of student work (twenty-five students averaging twenty pages a week—the four students who turn in nothing are counterbalanced by the four engaged in Trollopian, Oatesian prolificness—equals 500 pages per week) day after day, to the point that all this bad, bad writing—stories of dorm room dope smoke, of back seat blow jobs, of unicorns and faeries and mawkish breast cancers and battlefield glory and sci-fi robots out of control and kung-fu peasants avenging their honor and wizards and spell books and all the fear and loathing at the kegger fogged up his brain to the point that working on his own writing was out of the question.
He passes into the next county, the road a perfect emptiness, bisecting undeveloped Florida jungle-woods. He drinks the straight vodka, the sticky cold in his hands and mouth, winces then smiles, grabs a handful of pages of the student work stacked on the passenger seat, flings them out the driver’s side window. In the rear view mirror, Andy watches as the pages flip and land onto the pavement.
The stack is smaller now, but Andy lifts what’s left and yells “Not small enough!” over the din of the VW engine and Roach Motel. He grabs a page from the middle of the stack and reads aloud as he keeps the wheel mostly straight along the unbending eastbound beachbound road.
“. . . ‘Just because I’m a prostitute from the ghetto doesn’t mean I can’t have feelings for you!’ Angela said, crying like a baby who wants a pacifier.
“ ‘But you don’t get it!’ Chas said knowingly. ‘I’m a banker, and I’m rich. I preside over the country club! This love just isn’t meant to be!’ ”
Losing in Gainesville (9781940430331) Page 4
