Losing in Gainesville (9781940430331)

by Costello, Brian

  “Oh God,” Andy groans, flings the page out the window. He swigs the vodka, rescrews the top, tosses it to the passenger seat, grabs another page at random and reads aloud.

  “. . . ‘The beer tasted like warm piss and it was hot as hell, but these minor and meaningless obstacles would not stand in the way of what we wanted to do. There, in the frat house, I wanted to get Lauren in bed so we could screw all night like rabid and fierce animals in heat . . . ’ ”

  “Out the window!” Andy howls, laughing at the bad joke his life had become these past two years since learning he would not be getting the first tenure track position offered by the Department in several years, laughing at this self-pity and bitterness brought to the surface from one-too-many stories of zombie narcs eating brains in the passive voice. In front of him, the empty white beach and the Atlantic Ocean washing ashore in the choppy gray-green-blue waves under a beach-bright, beach-hot early afternoon. Andy parks in the free dirt lot, finishes the vodka, sees the final twenty odd pages he hasn’t thrown out of the Bug, and has an idea.

  He takes off his black socks, slips off his brown dress shoes, unbuttons his pink Oxford shirt, tosses each article into the backseat, grabs a large swirled red white yellow and green beach towel with the words CLEARLY CANADIAN in white lengthwise letters, hides the bottle in the towel, grabs the pages, and steps out of the car. In the light dizzy rage of an increasingly savage vodka buzz, he steps quickly over the burning rocky sand of the parking lot, descends the precarious wooden steps onto the beach, and as always, when face to face with the ocean, he recalls Ishamel’s lines about people standing by bodies of water, staring to the horizon lines on their lunch breaks with so much wanderlust. The beach and the ocean conspire to give you a proper perspective, to leave you less jaded than you were when you arrived, to remind you that you’re a small but necessary part of something bigger, that there’s more than these tiny little worlds we’ve constructed out of money and stress and desperation. So Andy thinks, always reminded of the past when here, of all the great times with girls, with friends, whether overnight in motels or beach houses—days and nights living the Great Floridian Dream of E-Z beach access. It’s an empty Tuesday afternoon at Crescent Beach. Along the grainy white sand, strands of seaweed wash ashore. Andy stumbles away from the house and the beach shacks, lurching along to the sounds of the waves and the water. Andy spreads out the towel over soft dry sinking sand, steps to the water as it rolls in on his feet, his ankles, up the cuffed khaki slacks (and these outfits, man, these outfits I gotta wear teaching, I mean, how would these kids not know I was—am, am, I mean, am—punk rock if I didn’t tell them!), the waves splash the always jarring crotch region—in a dizzy spin, Andy swings the bottle and sings what he can remember of a long ago Kinks song: “The tax man’s taken all my dough / and left me in my stately home / all I got’s this sunny afternoon . . . ”

  Empty bottle in one hand, pages in the other, Andy rolls up the pages, untwists the cap, stuffs the pages inside the bottle. The pages cling in parts to the bottle’s insides, but they’re in, and Andy replaces the cap, turns to his right, faces the ocean, pulls back his right arm and flings, watching the Absolut bottle’s sensual curves flip end over end, the white pages rolled up too tight to move except for those stuck to the insides, vodka/sea water moisture where the black print becomes a blue smudge, it flips end over end in a Saint Louis Arch flight pattern, plopping into a tiny splash a hundred feet away. He stares at that point of impact for a long time, scratches the developing paunch across his abdomen, reflects on the paunchiness of all of this—that gaping chasm that grows with the start of every fall semester, as more eighteen year olds come in as they always do; as Andy once did, way back in 1977. The flabby decision to stick around—the college, the town—part-time professoring, more out of habit than anything else. This life is familiar and comfortable and easy. Two years ago, when the Chair of the Department told him he would not be getting the full-time position, Andy did not want to leave. When people left Gainesville—like his friends had been doing, more and more—so many inevitably returned within the year, tail between legs, wondering what they missed while they were in New York, San Francisco, Chicago, LA. Seeing their returns was a living breathing testimonial to the unstressful simplicity of staying put. The onset of middle-age. Maybe, initially, in the backs of all the minds of creative writing teachers—like touring musicians, bartenders, baseball coaches—you think you’ve found a fountain of youth, and it means you don’t have to give up this life that made you so happy when you were 21, that you don’t have to give it up now and go out and sell the proverbial insurance to pay bills. But, at 37, after years of teaching, that cycle of the academic calendar becomes a kind of Sisyphean nightmare of Twilight Zone proportions. You grow up, you try and mature and evolve, but the students always, always stay the same, and right when Andy connects with these kids and starts making real progress, the semester ends. The students’ comments, concerns, observations, reactions, to the assigned reading, are unvarying. Standing in the ocean, Andy foresees a bleak future of thankless cheerless unappreciated unrespected decades passing by like nothing. On auto-pilot, spouting the same old tired and obsolete platitudes trying to masquerade as wisdom. For a time, the students will believe it, until they see him for what he is: A failed writer. Chills in the bloodstream as his feet feel the sand tugged away from the undertow. A chill, thinking of this future, his future. A shell of a manchild. Around all this youth, stunted. A writing teacher who does not write. Andy teaches writing, and he stopped writing. The vodkabrain poses the obvious question—So why did you want this, then? And the vodkaanswer is just as stripped away from distraction, with added help from the perspective-giving ocean: He didn’t want the job. He only wanted a little office to store his favorite books—Agee to Vonnegut—dusted nightly by the custodial staff—framed posters on the wall of old show fliers and readings he’s done (so the students see he’s not some typical tweed jacket English teaching stuffed-shirt pipe smoking pedantic bore)—and on the opposite wall his nice little desk with a top-of-the-line Apple computer (because the school knows that if you’re going to have quirky artists, you’ve got to give them Apple computers) stuffed with his short story and novel work, and a file cabinet to the left of the desk to stuff all the student work and in the cabinet of the desk drawer a bottle of scotch to sip with colleagues or alone when the work day is done and to the right a window overlooking the bright campus. To say nothing of the summers to travel, sabbaticals to be left alone, benefits to provide security.

  Instead, it’s reading 500 pages of student work each week that feels more and more like a massive steaming turd he’s required to eat, every single week, living in the same house he has rented for the past ten years. Rented. Now, renting instead of owning seems like a big deal. There are no surprises to the ocean today. Andy remembers being a student—and he’d be in the Student Ghetto with friends as some house party was winding down, and he wanted more, but you shoot out all this energy, and it simply dissipates in these sad southern days and nights. Like his ambitions and hopes. The energy shoots around in meaningless circles, and you want to explode. His old friends would feel this way, and reach the point where they would have to move, and yet they came back. “So burned out,” Andy mutters to no one, stepping forward, drunk enough to do it, to walk until the waves rise and fall over his head, drunk enough to pass out, drunk enough to not swim ashore. The chill in knowing Anderson “Andy” Cartwright could be exactly the same person in ten years, in the same house, reading the same stories, dispensing the same tired advice students still—most of them—somehow took so much from—but to him, the words are tedious platitudes, and as a writer (a writer who didn’t write, so what did that make him?), he wonders if he believes what he says anymore.

  “To pee or not to pee, haw haw haw,” he laughs, drunk enough to drown, but sober enough to turn around to push through the water back to the shore, to fall down and get up with each strong-enough wave smacki
ng him in the back, hands breaking each fall digging into the wet sand. In the trip-and-fall out of the ocean back to shore, just another lush singing, the vodkathought, the seaperspective You could just leave enters his thoughts. It’s the 1990s, and there’s prosperity. Work a job, punch out, go home and forget about it, instead of adjuncting two classes a semester, struggling to pay off bills, never really off the clock, or becoming just another tenured asshole with some tiny office, just another dickhead academic on a sabbatical who accomplishes nothing because he’s accomplished nothing with his life—like one of those professors who dabbles with the same novel for thirty years. He could leave. Andy smiles at the prospect of this as he reaches the spread-out CLEARLY CANADIAN towel in the dry sand, falls onto the thick cotton, passes out.

  Two hours of a dreamless konk-out later, Andy wakes up sweaty, sunburned, and dehydrated. The high tide rolls in, up to pink shins, ankles and feet, the burn not in the painful stages yet, but by tonight . . . Andy’s grateful that many of the vodka’s toxins have been flushed out from the heat, and the hangover is little more than a disoriented sluggishness. He carries the sandy wet towel to the VW Bug, trying to piece together the afternoon’s dance along the edges of a blackout. Wind gusts in short bursts, from all directions, stopping and starting. Sandpipers scurry across the sand along the surf. Seagulls swoop in for trash kills, pelicans float overhead. Rides home from the beach are always damp, sandy, and silent. There’s no music when Andy leaves the beach, the little beachy surf shacks and t-shirt shops along the main roads in and out of every beach town, into the jungle again as afternoon turns into evening. It’s the Briggs and Strattonesque lawnmowery rumble of the VW’s engine and the no-thought of an as yet unprocessed unbrooded upon day.

  Well into the jungle-forest, halfway to Gainesville, Andy sees the pages he has tossed. Some are stuck to the road, flattened by traffic, others clinging to high weeds sprouting through the cracks along the shoulder.

  He pulls over, parks the Bug, steps out, walks to a stack of the pages scattered by the weeds and a guardrail, bends down to grab one, starts reading:

  “. . . They called us ‘Sandwich Artists.’ Like Picasso with paint, like Coltrane with the saxophone, so Beth worked with the bread knife, and so I worked with condiment bottles. Artists of the sandwich. On our breaks, one of us would steal a cookie and walk to the far end of the minimall, sitting on the curb in front of the blacked-out windows where the tanning salon used to be. We split the cookie, split a cigarette, held hands, and laughed at ourselves, laughed at our customers, laughed at our ludicrous corner of the world, counting down each day closer to graduation. This was only a year ago, but the path seemed straighter, more clear-cut, than it is now that we’re in college. Graduate, one last summer in town as Sandwich Artists, then we’re off. For good.

  “ ‘We’re not going to be like them, right?’ Beth would say on those breaks, pointing out our regular customers, screaming overweight families voiding packed minivans . . . ”

  There is no name on this page, only a handwritten “Page 3” in the top right corner. For once, Andy cannot guess who wrote this. And he wants to know who wrote it, he wants to know what happens next. His head is a stabbing post-vodka skullache, the jungle a stultifying mix of insects and sweat, roadkill and exhaustion. Andy gathers as many pages as he can find—almost optimistic, nearly hopeful—walks to his car, straightens the pages into as close an approximation to a stack as he can make these dirty torn crumpled pages, climbs in, drives home.

  THE MODERN DAY WARRIOR’S JOB INTERVIEW

  Jeremy Moreland, seventeen years old, wunderkind Assistant Director of Partytyme Pizzatyme Anytyme Affairs for Grandfather’s Olde Tyme Goode Tyme Pizza Parlor (the 34th Street location, between Larry’s Reasonably Priced Furniture Rental and Le Chandelier Hut, in Patton Plaza) holds in his freckled hands a grease-smudged application where the only information given is the first name: Stevie. No address, no phone, no social security number, no employment history, no references.

  “He must figure we already know him so he don’t gotta put nuthin’ else down,” Brooks Brody, the unwunderkind Table Removal and Replenishment Coordinator says to Jeremy when handing him the application. “He just told me to hand this to you when I walked by his booth.” Brody stood in front of the counter, holding the gray bus tray filled with yellow plates and clear red plastic cups, in a sweat-soaked, sauce-stained yellow apron covering a uniform middle-scale and lower department stores would call “husky.” Brody plays right tackle on the Junior Varsity squad at Buchholz, where Jeremy would soon graduate with a 4.96 GPA. Not that their paths crossed much at school—Brooks Brody being good for little besides plowing open spaces for running backs to sprint through, or parting the overcrowds in the hallways between classes, or lifting heavy objects like free weights or bus tubs. Besides this, he tended to stand there in his short-cropped blond jock mohawk (funny how it was always perfectly acceptable when the o-line or d-line of the football team got mohawks for superstitious reasons or whatever in the middle of the season, but God help anybody else who did it) awaiting his next orders with that blank look of his.

  “You did the right thing, Brooks,” Jeremy says. “Go finish the rest of the tables.”

  Brooks grunts an affirmation, swivels a 180 to the unbussed tables. “So, Stevie wants a dishwashing job?” Dale Doar, Director of Partytyme Pizzatyme Anytyme Affairs for Grandfather’s Olde Tyme Good Tyme Pizza Parlour, says, removing the yellow, red-lettered regulation work cap (the Employee Manual calls it a “party chapeau”) and running a hand through receding brown hair he used to comb back into a pony tail. He steps away from the counter, laughs his just-had-his-first-post-work-hit-off-the-one-hitter heh heh heh. “I’ll let you handle this one,” he says to Jeremy while walking to the kitchen, to the back door. “Just give him an interview while he’s eating. Make up whatever excuse you need to.”

  Jeremy stands behind the counter holding the application, in this all-too-familiar perspective of the gold peppermint candy dish and the red plastic “take a penny/leave a penny” tray next to the register, the Elton John/Kiki Dee duet “Don’t Go Breakin’ My Heart” that the adult contemporary station feels necessary to share with North-Central Florida at least five times a day coming over the paneled ceiling’s speakers, the red and white checkerboard-topped tables in the middle, the red vinyl booths—ducttape covering the tears and containing the inner foam—lined along either side of the room, the walls, like everything here, the colors of pepperoni and extra cheese, Polaroids of kids celebrating their birthdays with candles in pizza slices pinned in rows of twenty above friendly posters of “Grandfather Fredo,” the jolly cartoon mascot for all three hundred and seventeen Grandfather’s Olde Tyme Goode Tyme Pizza Parlour locations, offering litigious-proof advice like “MAMA MIA! BE CAREFUL EVERYBODY! THAT PIZZA! SHE GETSA SO HOT WHEN OUTTA THE OVEN IT COULDA BURN YOUR FACE OR THE ROOFA OF YOUR MOUTHA! OOF MADON!” while spinning flattened circular pizza dough on his index finger like a basketball. The placemats offer the sole nod to the Old Country—between mazes challenging children to “Help Grandfather Fredo ride his gondola through the Venice canals to his Olde Tyme Fun Tyme Pizza Parlour!”—and drawings of mozzarella stix that need coloring—some Italian fun facts underneath the heading “Did You Know?”, e.g., “Italy is a country in Europe,” “Rome is the capital of Italy,” “Dante, an Italian, sent all of his fellow countrymen to Hell in his book The Inferno!” and so on. Through the front windows, through the credit card stickers, the “Now Hiring Dishwashers” sign and two-of-these-for-only-one-of-those sales, beyond the compact parking lot, 34th Street leads to Newberry Road which turns into University Street and that leads to Waldo Road to 301 North to Interstate 95 North which gets you to New York. For two perfect seconds, Jeremy Moreland dreams of that day in August when he’s clocked out of here for good and walking out that front door, never again having lousy tasks like these pawned off on his scrawny teenage back. Doar had seven years seniority and career amb
itions far beyond afterschool/summertime employment, and that’s all he had. Doar was a lifer. Jeremy Moreland scored a 1590 on the SAT (only temporarily forgetting that cadaverous: sarcophagus :: billingsgate : Oakland Raiders, a mistake which haunted him for weeks), had effortlessly ascended Grandfather’s ranks in just eighteen months—from Dish Machine Operator to Yummytizer Preparation Specialist to Smiley Service Liaison to Assistant Director of Partytime Pizzatime Anytime Affairs. During this part of the lunch shift, when Dale leaves, Jeremy often feels like a virtuous Caesar—the benevolent rulers Gibbon immortalized—as he overlooks what he thinks of as his store and the aftermath of another busy All-You-Care-to-Load-Up-On-Your-Plate-And-Eat-And-Try-To-Enjoy-Because-It’s-Yummy-Five-Dollar-Lunch-Buffet, as the Table Removal and Replenishment Coordinators—his Table Removal and Replenishment Coordinators—clean off the tables, and the Smiley Service Liaisons—his Smiley Service Liaisons, are sent home at his behest. Only one customer left. Stevie, who’s hunched over stacks of plates, pizza slice in right hand, marinara-tipped breadstick in the other, alternating bites from one to the next. Unshaven and doughy, in a black bulbous Misfits t-shirt covered in crumbs and sauce, working the food like a cud-chewing cow, always in the same booth in the corner, every weekday lunch. And now, evidently, he wants to work here. Jeremy inhales, exhales, indulges in one brief vision of putting all of this in the rear view mirror, grabs fistfuls of the bottom of his red regulation polo shirt with the yellow “GRANDFATHER’S OLDE TYME GOODE TYME PIZZA PARLOR: WHERE EVERY PARTY IS A PIZZA PARTY,” with Grandfather Fredo kissing the tips of his fingers, tucks it into his black regulation work slacks, steps up to Stevie’s usual booth.

  “How we doing today?” Jeremy says, trying not to look profoundly disturbed by Stevie’s ravenous eating. “You applied here and I’d like to ask you a few questions?”