I say nothing to this. We’re approaching my front porch and I can’t shut up about the day, “And Daisy. What’s she doing dating somebody outside of ‘the scene,’ man?” Boston Mike laughs and says, “It isn’t right. Maybe she got sick of us.”
We step up the three wobbly steps to my gray porch. I hand Boston Mike a beer and keep one for myself before unlocking the front door and tossing these in the fridge and taking outside two pink beer koozies with light pink flamingos raising their left legs at 90 degree angles as the orange-lettered word “FLORIDA” curves around the bottom. Now, we’ll sit in lawn chairs and kick back and forget about the day . . . without the background noise of music . . . because, after eight hours of forced music, you want silence.
I can usually go about an hour before wanting to throw on a record. Usually, by this point, the beer has obliterated the bad points of the day . . . that, coupled with me and Boston Mike making fun of all of our stupid customers . . . and honestly, I get sick of hearing Boston Mike’s accent. And again, I’m not gonna do the accent, but—and this is going to sound stupid, and by stupid, I mean Florida-stupid—I didn’t think people really talked this way. Shows you what I know about the world outside of my little slice of the Sunshine State. English Degree aside, sometimes I think all I really know about is this town, my friends, and the unceasing routine that is SUNDAY! SUNDAY! SUNDAY! at the record store. By now, we’re getting pretty llllllloaded . . . and I’ll throw on some record . . . on this fine evening, Jailbreak by Thin Lizzy . . . why not? . . . you know those dudes knew all about heartbreak, and shitty jobs, and the highs and lows of love and lust among bros like us . . . party bros! . . . post-work brews, sitting in lawnchairs, and all I know is that the night will eventually take us to Gatorroni’s for slices and however many free pitchers William can send our way, and by then, Boogie Dave and Daisy the Canary Babe will be long out of my Old Hamtramck-soaked mind.
I live in one of these crumbling old one-story houses in the student ghetto where everything’s falling apart beautifully . . . built in the pre A/C Floridian style of practicality, of southern charm . . . patio and house upraised five feet . . . and from this vantage point, you see everyone passing by on foot, on bike, in cars . . . everyone you want to see and everyone you don’t want to see. After living here for five years—believe me—it’s easy to have plenty in both camps.
It’s starting to get really good out here, man . . . Phil Lynott is singing, I’d come runnin / I’d come runnin back to you again and you know he means it in ways all these emo shits will never understand . . . and speaking of (even if he is more, you know “hardcore” than “emo,” but whatever) . . . here comes Max, riding up to us . . . Max, who I lived in the dorms with so long ago . . . and since those days, he’s become this vegan straightedge kid, which—and I hate to say it—basically means he’s figured out a way to deal with his dad being a violent abusive drunk . . . these soy-eating nondrinkers come on all pious and sanctimonious, but really, that’s what it’s about . . . I mean, not to generalize too much here, but you know . . . since he’s vegan he now weighs about a buck oh three, and most of that weight’s from his big brown beard . . . and the money he saves from not buying three dollar six-packs of Old Ham-town go right into tats and piercings, and fuck if he doesn’t already have more than he needs of both.
I want to hide as he rolls up, because I know he’ll probably wanna engage in, you know “tat talk,” because it’s probably the only thing left all three of us have in common (Boston Mike lived down the hall back in the dorm days . . . ), our tat sleeves and shin ink. I don’t need the piercings, but Boston Mike sure has them. Except for the dirty-ass Sox cap, and Max actually has half-dollar sized spacers in his lobes where, like I was saying, Boston Mike’s lobes flap in the breeze all disgusting like—and oh yeah, except for how Mike talks and how Max has this Michigan rust belt emigrant timbre—these two could be identical twins. I want to hide because I hate how humorless Max has become. Back when we’d sneak booze into the dorm, when he wasn’t totally averse to eating the occasional cheeseburger, the dude actually had a sense of humor. He had this thing where we would get completely lllllloaded before going to parties, and he’d bring a package of saltine crackers hidden in his bookbag with the booze . . . when he’d see a group of uptight-looking girls standing around at the party, he’d take out a saltine, approach the girls, unzip his fly, pull out his balls, stick the cracker underneath his balls, and say, “Pardon me, ladies, but could I interest you in an hors d’ouerve called Nuts on a Cracker?” The girls screamed and we laughed. He’d do this until he’d throw up in a corner and me and Boston Mike and whoever else was around that we were friends with would have to drag him back to the dorm before fights broke out. Seriously, Max was a lot more fun when he drank.
But it’s too late. “Hey,” Max says, stepping off his bike, voice weighed down with brooding drama, like he’s on the verge of writing some stupid emo song about this meeting, or that he’s gonna go off and make a zine about it . . .
“Yo, bro!” I beckon, in full-on party dude voice . . . only a semi-ironical thing for me . . . I mean it’s funny to talk that way, like you’re one of those dudes who hangs around kegs all night talking shit . . . but at the end of the day, I basically am that guy . . . I raise my can in the air, so very very comfortable in this old lawnchair, on this patio, in this neighborhood. “What’s going on?”
He approaches the steps, shows us his right arm wrapped in clear plastic. Through the plastic, three fresh black Xs, circled by the words “STRAIGHTEDGE FOR LIFE.” “I got more work done on my arm,” he says, as if we’re blind or something.
“Aw, pissa,” Boston Mike says, and inside, that sinking feeling of pointlessness, like those first fifteen minutes of an eight hour Sunday at Electric Slim’s. That everything and everyone is a stale joke, and I’m the anticipated punchline.
“Oh ho ho, the talk of the tat,” I say, laughing, then standing up to run inside the house to throw on some record, something Max’ll dislike because it’s “ironic,” and the worst thing in the world for these jerks is irony. Irony is a fucking war crime, but sanctimony is godliness to these depressing jerkoff puritans. Fucking liars. All they joke about is Satan or being gay. Seriously. These people are so unfunny, so tiresome in their ponderous pompous piousness . . . how everything in life is such a be-all-end-all big deal. In the old days, they’d go off to be monks. Now, they show off their tattoos. I hate my tattoos. I don’t even know why I have them anymore. To think of all that money I wasted that could have gone to beer, records, and pizza. They’re embarrassing because everybody has them now. Everybody.
So I sneak off into my bedroom, throw on Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust album, and the first song, “Five Years.” There was a time when Max and I would sit in our dorm getting high while listening to Bowie when we should have been studying. Ridiculous—I know—but you do a lot of stupid crap when you’re eighteen, trying on everything to figure out what fits you.
I strut out the front door, trying to move like Ziggy Stardust—like some kind of androgynous alien robot—and it’s that sloppy blissful apathetic-over-all-the-right-things kind of actions—where that part of your self-control that you didn’t really want to develop in the first place is gone—and you feel alive again . . . this is why I bother with the beer. I mouth the words and smile, pointing at Max . . . “Pushing through the market square / so many mothers dying / news had just come over / we had five years left to cry in . . . ” I drain what’s left of the beer and remove it from the koozie. Max glares at me at the bottom of the steps, still standing there holding his bike with his non-new-tat-armed hand.
“What, dude.” I say, sick of looking at this sadsack emo kid who used to be my friend. “C’mon man, you used to be fun . . . ”
“Where do you see yourself in five years, Drunk John?” Max asks me, and my nickname sounds strange coming out of his mouth—and not because he says it like a joyless pompous straightedge kid—the question makes m
e pause. I mean, I guess I drink a lot—but everybody does here, so whatever. It’s just that my name is John, and it’s such a common name they had to separate it from Straightedge John, Psycho John, Goth John, Short John. Whatever. I’m not especially proud of my nickname, but it could be a lot worse. Slut Chrissy. Roofie Steve. You get a nickname here, and you’re stuck with it. For life.
I answer Max’s question with a long, sustained, guttural belch. Boston Mike chuckles at this. I mean—I could lie like everybody else does around here when asked questions about their futures. Say I’m moving to some big city up North. Share some lofty dream of pursuing this or that. We all know how that ends. Those people come back within a year, when the temperature in their new city first drops below freezing. Honestly, right now, I don’t want to think about what I’ll be doing in five years, or even five months. Five years . . . it will be 2001. I’ll be twenty-nine. I don’t want to think about it. I unleash a second belch, equally as long, sustained, and guttural as the first one.
I drop the koozie, throw up my hands and say, “OK, Maxie. I’ll bite.” I spin my hands in a forward motion and affect a dumb guy voice asking “Why do you ask where I’ll be in five years?”
Max straddles his bike. “I don’t know. It’s like, you’re doing the same shit you did five years ago.”
I pick up the pink koozie and toss it at his pierced, bearded, soy-stuffed head. It bounces off his forehead, lands in the dirt. Boston Mike laughs at this, and Max picks it up, looks at the flamingo and the “FLORIDA,” smiles this smile more in line with the old Max, tosses it onto the porch. “Same old John,” he says.
“And you?” I gotta ask. “Your big change since the dorms, as far as I can tell, is that you don’t eat animals and you got your arms covered in tattoos. What’s 2001 look like for you, big guy?”
Max looks right at me, and it’s that look he had on mornings after parties where he’d do the “Nuts on a Cracker.” The way he’d look when we’d be at Denny’s the next morning, eating hangover omelets and trying to look adult by smoking in our booth and brooding over coffee. Like he wants to know something, what he did the night before, and if it was funny, sure, but not just that. Something more.
“I don’t know. I’m trying to figure it out.” With that, Max pedals away, back towards University, as if he just rode over here to bring me down, and now that he’s accomplished that, he can go return to whatever vegan straightedge tattoo parlor he was being all angsty in before he stopped by.
It’s a minute of me and Boston Mike in silence broken only by Bowie going on about five years before the world ends.
“Fuckin’ sanctimonious prick,” I finally mutter. I stumble (I’m stumbling now, but I don’t care because I’m drunk so fuck it), into the house, back to the kitchen, grab two more beers, muttering in the self-talk of the drunk, “Five years . . . who cares . . . why can’t it stay like this, man? Why . . . the fuck . . . not?”
“Five years from now’s gonna be 2001,” Boston Mike says, grabbing the beer from me and moving it slowly to his face like the black monolith in that movie while singing the opening notes to “Thus Spake Zarathustra.” He pounds tympani notes on his right thigh, sings “Dun-dun, dun-dun, dun-dun, dun-dun, duuuuuuuuun.”
“I thought we’d be on a Martian colony by now,” I say, trying to forget, trying to laugh it off. “Like we’d be eating protein pills for lunch in zero gravity.”
“Yeah, no shit, right?” Boston Mike says. “We’d be time traveling to the Roman Empire for orgies, or to 1965 to see The Who.”
We pshaw at the future we were promised at Disney World. “Let’s shotgun these and get outta here,” I suggest. “To the Drunken Mick, to Gatorroni’s . . . shit, anywhere, man.”
We both keep our keys looped on the right side of our pants. We unloop the keys, turn our beers sideways, poke a hole, stick it in our faces and try not to choke as the Old Ham-town gushes straight down our throats. Five seconds later, we toss our cans to the side. I run into the house, turn off the lights and the Bowie, lock up. We descend the stairs, walk down this street I know so well, and these old homes I know so well. I know who lives inside these houses now, who lived there before them, and who lived there before them.
“So what do you think?” I ask Boston Mike, feeling the familiar gravel of these barely paved roads.
“About what?”
“In five years. Where’ll you be?”
Boston Mike laughs. “Jesus, dude.” He punches me in the arm. “I don’t know. I don’t gotta know. You don’t gotta know. We’re young. Wicked young.” I say nothing, eyes trying to focus on the traffic one block ahead on University.
We turn left onto University Avenue, away from the campus towards the bars and restaurants. The sun sets behind us, the afternoon heat replaced by an easy warmth. The streetlights turn on up and down the street. The lights inside gas stations, the hotel, the restaurants and shops . . . they’re bright beacons . . . and all I can ask myself is: Why can’t it always be like this? Everything here and now is perfect and comfortable, and why can’t it always be like this? Me and a friend after work walking somewhere to get even more llllloaded with more friends, to relax in this relaxing place that feels more like home than anyplace I’ve ever been . . . because, even if Boogie Dave is a total dick, and Daisy the Canary Babe will never grace my bedroom . . . that’s alright, because we’re still young—and every moment—every flip of a record, every girl I pass, every waking moment, has so much incredible possibility, and that’s life here, and I don’t ever want that to change.
And that’s the fucking problem . . . it never stays the same—not when you’re in the womb, in the house the morning of your first day of school, graduations, college, after college, and on and on until death. This moment is everything, so who gives a fuck about five years? It’s another perfect night in a town I never want to leave.
Up ahead at Gatorroni’s, Neil and Paul are at an outside table, a pitcher of dark beer in front of them, sipping from plastic cups then spitting out the beer in a long comical mist.
“We’re practicing our spit takes,” Paul says when I sit to join them.
“Let me try,” I say, as Boston Mike goes inside to score two free pitchers from our friends behind the counter.
LIKE STEPHEN KING
“It’s all really ok,” Ronnie says to no one, walking back to the trailer from the Kwik-Mart, down a side street with the kinds of forlorn little office buildings that always house short-lived nondescript small businesses with names like “KDM Systems Inc” and “Southeastern Solutions.” On the right, before the trailer park, two one-level houses, collapsing on themselves in a kind of abandonment most often seen in whole sections of Detroit. “The book will be published soon, and that’s that.”
Ronnie runs into the trailer long enough to grab the disc holding all 536 pages of The Big Blast for Youth, carries the disc—this blue 3” square disc that is his eternally bright and lucrative future—to the car, holding it tight in both hands like the valuable object it is. He hides it in the glove box, drives away, and within minutes is reclined in a gray plasma donation chair by the plasma center’s front windows—facing a row of six similar gray chairs occupied by everyone from collegiate ravers, looking blissfully emaciated in shiny track suits, to the black and white poor of this and nearby counties (Alachua, Putnam, Marion, Union, Gilchrist, Bradford, Levy). A four-inch needle drains the, as Lou Reed might’ve called it way-back-when, mainline in the middle of Ronnie’s right arm, and Ronnie squeezes his right hand, sitting there under fluorescent lights as the TVs in the corner play MTV videos of 1990s musicians making money off their perceived problems . . . Ronnie kills the time by imagining how it’s all going to go down, because, after all, Ronnie is familiar with that film Drinking is a Really Big Deal When You’re a Writer, you know, the one about the poet who liked drinking, so Ronnie knows how these discoveries happen.
It’s only a matter of time, Ronnie thinks, sitting there dreaming about how great
it will be, once he mails off the manuscript. All that is left to do is to print it out and mail it, once he is done filling this IV bag with amber colored plasma. Soon this whirring machine to his immediate right will stop whirring, will stop separating Ronnie’s blood from Ronnie’s plasma, and he will get the needle removed from one of the perpetually stoned orderlies who work here, will get the crook of his arm wrapped in gauze from same perpetually stoned orderly, will collect his money, and leave for this friend of a friend of an acquaintance named Chloë, this girl he kinda new back in Orlando who in a chance encounter in a Publix parking lot, told Ronnie she would be more than happy to share her computer, printer, and paper for the cause of The Big Blast for Youth getting into printed form and mailed to the lucky editor who would get to read this.
•
“Do you want anything to drink?” Chloë asks, standing in the doorway to her feng-shuied bedroom, smiling. Smiling at Ronnie.
Ronnie sits in a black office chair crammed to the brim with what Ronnie believed to be spaceage polymer plastics form-fitted to practically massage the asses of anyone so fortunate enough to sit down upon it. What a chair; what a chair! Ronnie contrasts this with that rickety wooden chair of Chris Embowelment’s, painted black with red pentagrams (of course) that creaked and shifted like it would break at any moment as Ronnie had proofread the novel on Mr. Embowelment’s computer (“I wonder how he’s doing, or if he’s forgiven me?” Ronnie thinks to himself) in the early morning hours of the day he was to move to Gainesville. Before leaving, Ronnie wanted to be sure no revisions were needed. None were needed. It was a masterpiece.
Losing in Gainesville (9781940430331) Page 11
