“Never again,” you say before smoking, and that’s all you want to say right now. You think of the fifth of Floridian Comfort in your car, and you want it now, but you wait, because you know, once you get started, you’ll elaborate on “Never again,” and the elaborations on the ultimately monotonous hurry-up-slow-down nature of touring, interspersed with the occasional weird and sometimes even wonderful adventures far from home will continue past closing the kitchen tonight and lead you to the usual impromptu front porch party somewhere around here, and there will be no shutting up. The pot keeps you in the moment, heightening the smells of frozen dough and cold sauce, preserved vegetables and damp pasta. Stoned now, you say, “It’s weird being back here,” and that part of it is even harder to explain—to be back in this tiny walk-in cooler in your black Gatorroni’s by the Slice work shirt, dough-stained black work slacks, red bandana soaking up the Florida kitchen sweat—so you don’t.
“I’ll tell you about it later.” You’re now high enough to get through the dishwashing, table-wiping, food-serving shift. You pass the manager what remains of the joint, and step out into the hot parking lot and into the hotter kitchen—a five-second change of eighty degrees.
Your ex-girlfriend, now dating your ex-best friend after finding out you hooked up with his ex-girlfriend, stands by the dishtank holding a red plastic tray with two veggie slices. She works the registers with your ex-ex-girlfriend and your current girlfriend.
“Take these to the outside tables,” she says, hostile yet noncommittal. Deliberately, she’s looking to the front of the restaurant and away from you. She has dyed red streaks in her short black hair now, the circle-plus female symbol newly-tattooed on her inner left arm. You’re trying real hard to not laugh at these latest developments.
You relieve her of the tray, knowing your streak of going nine days without wishing for the horrific death of your ex-girlfriend has snapped. “The dumbass who ordered them is too drunk to come back to the counter,” she says. She flashes a Florida-trademarked mean-grin, passive-aggressive rudeness couched in the faintest of barely polite smiles. “Even makes you seem sober.”
“It’s great seeing you again too.” She rolls her eyes, returns to the counter. Yes, it’s great to be back in Gainesville, back in the kitchen of Gatorroni’s by the Slice. Picking up where you left off.
You walk past the counter, smile at your current girlfriend—who smiles back in that nineteen naïve-teen way of hers—all teeth and wide green eyes and dyed blonde short hair with a barrette in the front of the left part and granny glasses and still untattooed and still unjaded. You brood on how long all of this will last until she gets tired of your moods, your personality. You. It’s a busy, all-too-familiar night. The booths along the front windows are full, students hunched over text books, half-eaten slices temporarily set aside, families bunched around the tables, moms rocking strollers while dads try to keep their four year olds from kneeling or standing on the chairs in potentially dangerous poses as they reach over to sip from their Cokes. Some cheap hippie spent fifty cents to subject everyone to all thirty-plus minutes of the Allman Brothers’ insufferable “Mountain Jam” on the jukebox. The grease-laden underbelly of these red plastic trays, and the burnt cheese/sweaty meat stench of all these pizza pies in and out of the oven to the hungry Gainesville dining public. Outside, dozens of crusty-punks, indie-punks, emo-punks, hardcore kids, so on and so forth, all the little sub-genres too small to hang in their own little cliques, acknowledging each other in the Gatorroni’s outdoor dining area—pitcher after pitcher, often on the house thanks to their friends working inside. The humidity that never seems to go away, heightened by the kitchen’s heat, red bandana around your forehead not enough to soak the sweat.
It’s almost like the tour never happened. You set the pizza down at the drunk guy’s table—some Gatorroni Loser who’s always out here in his finest street punk leisure wear. He doesn’t see the pizza because he’s too busy arguing that The Clash isn’t “punk enough” for his standards.
Your drunk-ass friends, yelling and bouncing around the farthest outdoor dining table, call your name and wave you over. “We-heh-hell, Bill Collector himself, back from the worldwide tour,” Neil says, stepping off the barstool to face you and doff his New York Yankees ballcap—temporarily exposing the stubbled black hair receding higher and higher along the forehead. His brother Paul stands to his right, at the head of the table, pouring their fourth free pitcher into his cup, Neil’s cup, and the cups in front of the aptly-named Drunk John and Boston Mike. You know it’s the fourth pitcher and you know it’s a free pitcher because you’re the one who’s been walking them over to the table.
“Aw, c’mon,” Paul says, finishing the angled pour into Boston Mike’s plastic cup. “You know William goes by William now. Bill Collector was PUNK”—and here, Paul punches the table and rattles the cups and the pitcher—“but William, and just William? That’s hardcore, dude . . . ”
You smile at this. In high school back in Orlando, you were in this band called The Dicks, and your “stage name”—you never played on any stages—was Bill Collector. The band was very short-lived, and not only because there was already a well-known, highly-regarded band from Austin, Texas called The Dicks that you had somehow never heard of.
Drunk John punches you on the right shoulder, a light smack from a scrawny tattooed arm. “We heard all about Bloomington, Indiana, haw haw,” he says, and all you can do is shake your head from side to side and say, “Never again,” to which everyone at the table laughs at what you can only laugh at from a safe distance. You, curled into a corner of the typical punk house, reeking of post-show sweat and smoke, in clothes long unwashed, rolled into a mutli-stained off-white blanket like a filthy unhealthy burrito on the hirsute hardwood floor—pillowless, but whatever. The post-show party was there, full of denim-clad males mostly who wanted to talk about this record and that band as meanwhile the smattering of women present were surrounded by, on average, five men all going after the same thing—and boy, do the women in these towns know it—and what gets you is how disinterested they were in anything but their stupid town—their stupid towns, because everybody wants to talk about where they live like it matters. You don’t think it matters, not anymore. After enough shows like these, all you wanted was a good night’s sleep for a change, not another night of listening to the denim dudes talk about the punk rock all night. So at this particular Bloomington, Indiana post-show after-party, you drank enough to find a relatively quiet corner to pass out, pulled the blanket over your head so the music, some hyper-distorted scream you’re already overly familiar with, seeped into your hearing slightly less obtrusively . . . As you fall into an unconsciousness on the border between drunkenness and the morning’s hangover drain, you sense someone standing over you. You hear sniffles, a conspiratorially whispered, “Yo! Hey!” The only way to get your head out of the blanket is to unroll your body completely from the blankets wraparound, so you roll and roll into this person’s steel-toed black boot. The light is on, the records are off, and there is no sound except for the buzzsaw-to-a-swine’s-throat snores of your bass player who you can see scored the shredded green couch on the other side of the littered living room. “Look at my face!” the singer of the local band, the headlining band, whispers, standing over you. He wears trash-stenched jeans and a sleeveless jean jacket with CRASS written on the back in black permanent marker. He has Jaggerish facial features, if Jagger had that weird kinda-inbred look some people in Indiana have. A red droplet falls from his face, lands on your blanket, and you now understand why his voice is phlegmatic and novocained as he says, “They broke my nose. We’ve been backyard fighting!” He smiles—one lead singer to the next—“And you gotta see this shit!” he adds, and you’re like, “Fuck it, when will I ever be in Bloomington, Indiana again?” So you step out of the blanket—still in your Docs, but whatever—and you step over discarded beer cans, whiskey bottles, pizza boxes, vomit, gum, clothing, show fliers, records, cd
s, kitty litter, kitty kibbles, blue red and yellow pieces to the “Sorry” boardgame, the bodies of the other members of your band, MOE GREEN’S FUCKING EYE SOCKET5, are too-frozen in that way people get when they’re trying to pretend to be asleep. Are they your friends anymore? You try not to look too closely at the fliers on the wall of show after show after show after band after band after band—shitty drawings of mohawked
skeletons and the graffiti everywhere of DK, Circle As, pot leafs, malt liquor bottles, straight edge Xs, swastikas with NO signs, and echoing through your beat-up skull is that line from “Salad Days” by Minor Threat, the core has gotten soft—and the thing is—when the singer said, “you gotta see this shit!” you didn’t think he was being literal. In the middle of the kitchen—the once-white linoleum kitchen with the once-teal space age cabinetry and space age appliances, everything now smudged with grime, trash and rodent droppings—you recognize the rhythm guitarist of the headlining band, he who proudly told you at the 6:00 p.m. load-in into the club, “I’ve been drinking since ten a.m.!” who by 2:00 a.m. was a not-that-interesting mix of whiskey-blackedout belligerence, nudity, and inarticulate, unreasoned arguments on the college kids in this town, the relative pros and cons of assorted pornographic magazines, and how much better society would be if cops weren’t around to fuck with everybody—this rhythm guitarist is now passed out in the middle of the kitchen as the lead guitarist and bass player stand on either side of him five feet apart holding a stretch of Saran Wrap. The lead singer grabs a video camera, yells “Go!” to the chunky drummer—one of those too-many-Midwestern-meals-from-Dutch-peasant-stock-already-with-a-tendency-towards-bigness type dudes—who squats over the passed out rhythm guitarist, unbuttons his jeans, unzips his fly, drops the jeans and the boxers, and deuces on the Saran Wrap. You’re on the border between the kitchen and the living room, feeling nausea right down to your balls as the turds drop and weigh down the Saran Wrap and the lead singer holds the camera, laughing, asks the rhythm guitarist if he feels something warm on his face. Turd one landed on his septum; turd two on his right cheek. It’s a short stumble, steering way clear of the laughter and the bodies in the middle of the kitchen, to the back screen door. You narrowly avoid puking all over one of their girlfriends—some attempted Bettie Page doppelgänger—and hunch by the fence and cough and spit and gag and ask yourself what the hell you’re doing so far from home. Not-Bettie Page smokes in a lawnchair, is kind enough to inform you upon your emergence from the pukey darkness that “They don’t mean nuthin’. It’s just what we do here when we drink too much.” You nod, and right about here, you decide to leave the back porch, walk around the side of the house, knock on the van doors until someone lets you in, find space to sleep, hope to remember the blanket in the morning and not forget about it the way you forgot about the pillow in a house much like this one, in Cleveland.
“. . . Some people have a weird idea of fun,” is all you can say about it to Neal, Paul, Drunk John and Boston Mike. They laugh at this; you turn to walk away. “Get us another pitcher or we’ll shit on your face!” Boston Mike yells behind you, and you have to laugh.
For now, you won’t tell them, or anyone, that MOE GREEN’S FUCKING EYE SOCKET is finished. From the drive from Louisville to home, no one spoke to anyone excepting the absolute necessity of communicating stops for bodily functions and gas money for the van. You’ve never been happier to see your own bed, but the rhythms of touring—the drive, the load-in, the hang out, the drink, the finally play, the other bands, the load-out, the search for a place to stay, the after-party everyone insists on throwing, the pass out, the wake up from not sleeping is its own routine, and it’s difficult to shake, even if the whole time you missed Gainesville, your house, your girlfriend. But then you’re back and here you are again at Gatorroni’s by the Slice and realize, you don’t miss a thing.
Back in the kitchen, you make more pizza, sneak more pitchers to Neal and all them. The dinner rush tapers off. The students finish their slices and take their textbooks back to the dorms. The families leave their tables unbussed and go home. With an hour to go until closing, your girlfriend with her bleach blonde barretted hair and giant too-young smile who’s working to save money so she can have as many tattoos as everyone else working here, grabs you by the arm in the dishtank while you’re trying to scrub burnt minced garlic from a skillet, says, “Let’s go to the walk-in.”
You grab the mop and follow her out the back door, into the hot parking lot and into the walk-in cooler, thinking, Well, there are worse ways to be welcomed back to town. You wedge the mop into the inside door handle to prevent any unwelcome entry.
“I missed having you here,” she says, leaning in for a long kiss before grabbing you by the hips and gently pushing you backwards until you’re against the cold shelves. She squats down, unzips your pants, grabs, strokes, sucks. Stacked on the opposite shelves are white plastic gallon-sized cylindrical bins where some prep cook lackey wrote “MARINARA 4/16.” Your head rolls backwards and your eyes land on these bins. One hand rolls over her hair, over the barrette, and the other hand grips one of the frosty vertical beams of the shelving. You moan. Someone pulls on the cooler and you yell “Go away!” The mop rattles with the violent pulls on the door but does what it was put there to do.
“Welcome back,” she says when finished. You smile, catch your breath, say nothing. She removes the mop, hands it to you. “Bye,” she says, opening the walk-in cooler as you wipe up with the white towel you keep in your back pocket for wiping down counters and tables. You pull up your boxers, your pants, zip, button. Open the walk-in and step into the heat once again, but instead of going back into the kitchen to start closing up for the night, you run to your car, open the passenger door, unscrew the Floridian Comfort fifth and chug. The booze squeegees and muddles your head. You spin around and look to the clouds and the sliver of a moon and wish you could be ten different places at once and ten different people at once and you want to laugh at this finite life and dance away the unshakable anxiety that keeps you up nights and leaves you a puddle of boozy drool—that this is as good as it will ever be.
You walk back into the kitchen. Your manager asks if you wanna spark another one. You smile, turn around, and it’s back into the walk-in cooler, only, this time, you think you can actually start talking about the tour—all of its good/bad unboring/banal glory/futility.
SCENES FROM THE REVEREND B. STONED’S
OPEN-MIC ECLECTIC JAMBALAYA JAM
The wait. The insufferable wait to perform at Reverend B. Stoned’s Open-Mic Eclectic Jambalaya Jam here at Turn Your Head and Coffee, an off-campus coffeehouse on the University Avenue entertainment strip. Icy Filet (neé Chelsey Anne Cavanaugh) studies her carefully prepared notecards by candlelight in a far corner of the tiny square room, periodically sipping a soy Americano from a large green mug—this wait a nerve-wracking ordeal of hot and cold flashes, sour stomach nausea rumbles, a general itchiness. Maybe she should cross her name off the sign-up sheet. She looks away from her notecards, mouths the words, and always—always—forgets everything past the first four lines. This is no way to be a freestyle rapper, she thinks, breathes in, breathes out. I need to leave.
“Greetings, to all my brothers and sisters of this funktified congregation,” the Reverend B. Stoned bellows in a voice that is one-third televangelical preacher, one-third game-show announcer and one-third stoner-whispering-some-conspiracy-theory-about-the-government (Icy Filet recognizes him from his picture on all the fliers around campus—black beret with the two short black braids sticking out the back, black priest shirt and white clerical collar, pink-tinted John Lennon sunglasses, black fu-manchu rounding his round face, the tie-dyed kilt and the knee-high combat boots), and the dozen-odd patrons seated in the wobbly round candlelit tables in front of the stage clap politely. “Are you ready to hear gospels of nonconformity and antidisestablishmentarianism?” The applause increases, and two of the rowdier audience members Woo-Hoo! to this.
It�
��s too late now to take her name off the list, or so Icy Filet believes—too anxious, brain increasingly manically feverish with each sip from the soy Americano, to listen to the Reverend B. Stoned’s opening monologue in which he preaches the virtues of marijuana legalization. Unsurprisingly, no one disagrees; Turn Your Head and Coffee is an inevitably lefty/libertarian coffeehouse. Icy Filet could leave. Why does she want to do this in front of strangers applauding platitudes like “Don’t let our dreams for marijuana legalization go up in smoke! Legalize, don’t criminalize!”?
As the enthusiastic applause begins to fade, the Reverend B. Stoned preaches into the microphone, “Brothers and sisters: Lift up your hearts and open your mind, soul, and ears to the righteous tirades of my sister in spirit, Miss Hillary X!”
Miss Hillary X steps onto the six inch high stage, approaches the mic stand—a waifish young woman of seventeen with bright blue short hair, a white t-shirt with the word RESIST! screenpainted across in Courier New font. Spiky wristbands on both wrists. Red plaid pants with suspenders between the legs. Combat boots wrapped in chains so they dramatically clunk with each step. A practice-makes-perfect scowl with a Sid Vicious sneer. She glares at the crowd, removes the mic from the stand.
Losing in Gainesville (9781940430331) Page 8
