Losing in Gainesville (9781940430331)

by Costello, Brian

  So Ronnie, he tells me that Stevie’s takin’ advantage of me—pfff—but I say to him—ok, but how do I get rid of him? He stands there like he’s thinking and then says I should write a note, but I tell Ronnie, you write the note—aren’t you supposed to be the writer? But he says it should be in my writing and he’ll tell me what to say, so he tells me, I write it, and tape it to the door and hope Stevie’ll just read it and not knock, and Ronnie leaves me there to deal with him, because when that’s done Ronnie says he’s gotta leave, and I ask him if I can go with him but he says no because he wants to meet girls, so that’s what happened, Mouse.

  Pffffffff. Do you need any help, Mouse?

  Mouse has been setting up the four track this whole time, plugging in cables and setting up microphones in the dark living room’s late afternoon ripe squash sunlight shooting through the old-ass blinds as dusty laser light show beams. Alvin follows him from the living room to the bathroom, where Mouse has a mic stand with a microphone plugged in in front of the toilet and leading back to the four track set on an old red dairy crate. Mouse hasn’t caught much of what Alvin’s been saying, throwing in “Oh sure!” and “Right!” and “Oh no!” and “Heh heh heh” at times that feel instinctually appropriate. Icy Filet is coming over (!!!), and Mouse is setting up the bathroom for her to bust out her latest rhymes as Mouse takes a slide and plays the upper cosmic frets of a detuned guitar that’s plugged into reverb and delay pedals. Mouse wants to record this, put it out on a seven inch, or barring that, a cassette to sell at the shows.

  “Well—heh heh heh—that’s too bad, Alvin,” Mouse says, walking through the kitchen, to the front door. “I was hoping the three of you would all be friends, you know, like—partners in unemployment? But we’ll talk soon,” and Mouse opens the door, and Alvin wants to say something, but all that comes out is “Pffffff.”

  Mouse closes the door. Stevie no longer lives there. That much, Mouse knows, and that much, Mouse can almost care about, even as he’s getting everything together for the big date, because Icy Filet will be knocking soon. Among the things that Mouse doesn’t care about, and wouldn’t have even if he’d known, is what had already happened to Stevie, the night he’d had at Grandfather’s Olde Tyme Good Tyme Pizza Parlour before getting thrown out of the trailer.

  Mouse had never met Dale Doar, who was in his office that night, that office which also serves as a tiny storage room for dry goods, the time clock, spare aprons, shirts, and hats, and stacks of those orange and yellow Grandfather’s Olde Tyme Goode Tyme Pizza Parlour Employee Handbooks, with their thick three ring binders that can’t quite stack perfectly. Dale Doar, at his desk, punching a calculator with his left hand, then scribbling numbers into end-of-the-business day forms with his right. Scribbling in the yellow triangle of light from the desk lamp (everyone is ugly under overhead fluorescent lighting after hours of intense restaurant work), smells of marijuana and dish detergent filtering in from the kitchen. The Smiley Service Liaisons had been sent home, The Table Removal and Replenishment Coordinators lined up to punch out—the large figure of Brooks Brody temporarily blocking the white bright of the kitchen as he slid his time card into the clock, said, “Later, Dale, don’t work too hard.” Dale nodded, didn’t look up and didn’t lose the rhythm of tapping the numbers on the calculator, scrawling them into the forms. Like every night, he would soon fax these forms to corporate, drop off the money in the bank, then it’s home to Arthur the cat, the bong, to Gina next to him on the couch—green Publix uniform unbuttoned but not removed, a white t-shirt underneath untucked, and oooo-mmmm those big ol’ . . . and then like David Lee Roth says, in the song “Panama,” . . . reach down, in between her legs . . . see that pus-say . . . Soon, but never soon enough, he would get to that, and beyond tonight, this was another day closer to getting out of the store, going corporate for Grandfather’s—Assistant Regional Director of Quality Pizzarifficness—and up up up the ladder. Not bad for a D student.

  The plates and glasses clanked as they were replaced, the silverware rattled in their respective slots, the plastic racks shoved through the dish machine’s conveyor now pushed and scooted into what Dale hoped were neat stacks, and then the abrupt unsettling silence of rooms that had only moments before been filled with noise. It was a silence profound and jarring enough for Dale to stop punching the calculator and to stop scribbling figures into forms. The silence lasted only two seconds, long enough for Dale to tap, tap, tap the desk with his index finger, to sigh if only to make a sound, because Dale hated silence for any duration. The radio was loud, the TV at home was loud, the apartment complex was loud, the traffic, the ceaseless chatter of customers and employees, everything. Especially Stevie—Stevie!, he thought, with disgust—was loud, but in his case, Dale preferred silence. Dale could hear Stevie stepping closer to the office, whistling circus music, pounding on the wall or the steel of the kitchen’s counters while saying “Hi-yah!” in a loud whisper. Dale heard him, talking to himself (he never shut up, that was the biggest complaint from everyone . . . he’s a dishwasher, and the motherfucker never stops talking), “Dammit, man, this day is done, done, done, done, done, done, done” (and with each “done,” Stevie would hi-yah a new part of the kitchen as each step was closer to the timeclock) “and I want to have fun, fun, fun, fun, fun, fun, fun, because if it ain’t five o’clock here, it’s five o’ clock somewhere, and that’s what they say, anyway, right boss?”

  Dale found the silence, as Stevie walked into the room, blocking the lights from the kitchen, to be even more jarring and discomforting. It heightened how the only people left were Dale and Stevie, and that made what Dale was about to do that much more unpleasant. He wanted to have the boy genius—Jeremy—take care of it, but he already caused enough problems by hiring this chatterbox weirdo.

  “I need to talk to you for a minute,” Dale said, filling out one last column before rolling back and swiveling towards Stevie.

  Stevie punched out, replaced the time card in his slot, held up his hands and announced, “Look at these things!” He wiggled his fingers. “Pruny!”

  “So. Stevie. You’ve been here two weeks,” Dale began, leaning back, folded hands behind head.

  “Yeah, buddy,” Stevie interrupted. “And I ain’t gonna lie, it gets tough back there by yourself washing all those plates and pans, those utensils. I’m always sayin’ to the crew ‘Y’all! When ya gonna go easy on me back here? You don’t want me to karate chop the next person who brings back too many plates. Best believe I’ll swing these arms and—” and here, Stevie flailed his arms in opposite circular directions, culminating in two hands pushed out while yelling in a high pitched shriek—“HI-YAHHHHHHHHHHH!”

  “That’s the problem,” Dale yelled over the “HI-YAHHHHHHHH!” rolling backwards as Stevie’s hands pushed inches in front of Dale’s head. “You’re scaring everyone.”

  “What do you mean?” Stevie asked, lowering his hands, straightening up.

  “I mean, you’re scaring the crew. You’re scaring customers. And,” Dale scrunched his nose and rolled back two inches, the wheels grinding over the dirt and cracks in the concrete floor. “I’m not sure of how to put this, but, you smell. Bad. You really need to figure out a way to do laundry.”

  “Oh!” Stevie laughed, sniffed, then said, “That!” as if it was a trifling thing. “I’m stayin’ with Alvin, and he don’t have laundry in the trailer so I’m waitin’ to get my first paycheck from y’all so I can launder these clothes, so there really ain’t nuthin’ to worry—”

  “Do you bathe?” Dale asked.

  “Well, Dale. That’s the thing.”

  “So no? You don’t?” Dale rolled closer, leaning in, face scrunched into dismay.

  “It’s part of my training,” Stevie said, crossing his flabby-beefy arms.

  “This modern-day warrior act?”

  “It ain’t an act, man! Once some money comes in, it’s like I told Jeremy, I’m gonna get trained to be a modern-day warrior, a real bad-ass. In the
meantime, I’m training myself how to do this, and—”

  “You’re training yourself?” Dale asked, followed by a short sharp, “Ha!”

  “You gotta start somewhere, man! Ya think those Chinese peasants sat around waiting til they had the yen to pay the sen-say to learn how? Ya think they told their friends, ‘Sorry about my luck, y’all, but I can’t be no martial artist ‘til I can af-FORD it? No, man! I’m trainin’ myself, and I need to have a stink on me. It’s in all the movies. You think animals bathe before they hunt? No! They gotta smell like the environment around them, but I keep my hands and arms clean if you want to smell them, because I know we can’t have germs gettin’ on everything.”

  “No,” Dale said. “Look. Stevie. Dude. At the end of the day, between all the hi-yahing in the dishtank, your practice chops by the dumpster behind the store, it’s just . . . not working out.”

  Stevie lowered his arms, slouched. “You firin’ me?”

  “Afraid so, buddy.” Dale extended his hand, to shake. “We’ll mail you your check. Good luck.”

  Stevie stepped forward, as if to shake Dale’s extended hand.

  “HI-YAHHHHH!” he screamed, shifting into a quasi-Bruce Lee position, right arm pulled back, left arm held in front of him, open palms in both hands.

  And Dale, he sure did flinch, rolling backwards in his chair, the scream such a horrible contrast to the near silence of the buzzing fluorescent lights in the rest of the kitchen, to say nothing of the fact that, dude, a couple of the guys in the crew did smoke Dale out as the dinner rush was starting to die down. His face winced, turned rightward sharply in the anticipated shot between the eyes.

  “Just kiddin’,” Stevie said, dropping his arms. “Just wanted to see you flinch.”

  When Stevie told him it was all one big ha-ha just kiddin’, Dale stood, adrenaline shaking him out of the thc torpor.

  “Out!” Dale yelled. “You’re fired! Out!”

  Stevie backed out, turned around, walked towards the back door, leaving Dale there to regain his composure, to straighten up, to look down at that desk calendar with all the Xs through all the days that are done, all the days still in the way of getting out of here. Dale cursed, grabbed a black Sharpie, drew an X through today’s date. If it ain’t drunks in the dishtank, it’s crackheads, and if it ain’t crackheads in the dishtank, it’s— fucking modern-day warriors. Dale will laugh about this eventually, over after-work drinks with the others in corporate.

  Stevie’s voice faded away, a steady spiel of, “Alright, man, well, no hard feelings, I guess, I mean—I did like working for all y’all even if you didn’t think I was Grandfather’s Olde Tyme Goode Tyme Pizza Parlour material, I mean, it is hard to balance the balance between that and my trying to be a modern-day warrior, so I’ll let myself out the back here and that’s that and I’m sorry if I scared ya Dale with my modern-day warrior chops, but it was funny watching you panic that way . . . ”

  •

  . . . So I don’t gotta tell you the rest, Mouse, you know how it went down with me and Alvin. He never gave me no chance to explain nuthin, but that’s ’cause Ronnie made him think bad about me. I keep hearing how you can only use the martial arts I’m trying to learn in like self-defense, but I’m like, “Y’all, I wanna kick some ass!” but if that’s the way it’s done, I guess that means I can never go after Ronnie.

  I miss living in Gainesville, even if it’s only been a few days, but I grabbed my shit off Alvin’s front steps, threw it in my truck, and I had just been fired, so I’m sitting there in my truck thinking, ‘The hell I’m supposed to do now?’ and, thanks to Ronnie, my only option is to go back to my parents, who’re gonna wanna make me go back to school if I’m to live under their roof. High Springs ain’t that far away, but I do miss Gainesville.

  Maybe it’ll be alright, Mouse. I’ll go back to Santa Fe Community College—I mean, I’m only nineteen, so I’m sure I’m not that far behind. Besides that, maybe they got free karate classes there.

  So that’s it, Mouse—I was goin’ to town today and thought I’d stop by and see what you were up to, and it looks like you’re busy with your girlfriend here in bed, so let me just walk out of here and let y’all get back to what you were doin’ before but thanks for lettin’ me in and hearin’ my side of the story because I guess if I learned anything, I need to make sure I have plenty of room to do my karate choppin’, and maybe I shouldn’t go around braggin’ that I’m tryin’ to be a modern-day warrior so I’ll just let myself out here and y’all stay in that bed, oh-kay.

  WILLIAM AND MAUX

  A third shot of some foul-ass octane burn later—some cheap well shot to go with the cheap beer—and your mouth finally liberates the throbbing numb of your thoughts, a steady drooling alkie-babble to Ronnie on your left and Paul on your right as the bar you’re seated at rotates and the old wave music buzzes out the speakers hanging in the four corners of the room . . . “All I’m sayin’ here—all I’m tryin’ to say here—is that it can’t go on like this. You know? My band’s done, and is that tour as good—as, like, adventurous, I should say—as it’s ever gonna be, from here on out? If so, why am I here? Who, in this town, ’s gonna settle down with me? And do I even want to settle down. I mean, it’s the same as it’s been, and it can’t go on forever like this. Can it?”

  “Look at these nnnnnuggets,” Paul says. “Everywhere!” He swivels his bar stool, leans in behind you to say to Ronnie, “You want to be in a room full of nnnuggets, you don’t go to the punk rock shows. You come here to the Rotator, to Old Wave Night. They love this shit! Love it!”

  “That’s all you can say, man?” you moan, and you know you’re sounding like a grade A buzzkill, but still—Paul’s still calling girls “nnnnuggets.” Is this life always going to be one big joke to him, and what happens when that black Caesar haircut turns gray and that black Bauhaus t-shirt paunches out?

  “Aw dude, I don’t know, man,” Paul says, sips his beer, adds, “Just trying to have some fun tonight, unlike you.”

  “Who’s she?” Ronnie asks. You watch him point through the darkness beyond the bar’s slowly rotating circle. You like him—he’s Central Florida and you’re Central Florida—and you want to warn him about what and who to avoid, and you see where he’s pointing, and it’s no good. This can be a small, childish town, and not everybody wants you to be happy.

  “Her name’s Maureen, but she spells it M-A-U-X.” That name feels so empty in your mouth. When was that? Two years ago? Took her home after some house show. Lately, memories are constantly ambushing you into realizing how much time has passed, how much has changed, between then and now.

  “Did you date her, like, in a relationship?” Ronnie asks.

  Relationship. “He had a relationship with her poon hole,” Paul says, and you try not to laugh. You fail.

  One fifty cent mug of beer after the next. The Rotator skirts the border between the college town and the rural hinterlands. It’s an XYZ Liquor Lounge officially named JP Mc Jelloshotz. The buzzing sign above the front entrance is a white-light background with a drawing of a bow-tied penguin wearing sunglasses shaped in the odd-angled style of the 1980s. Some impoverished punk rocker discovered they had mugs of beer for fifty cents, and here you are. The stools around the circular bar—and the bar itself—spin a complete orbit in one hour. The more you drink, the faster the room spins. Or so it feels. Aside from the lack of sawdust on the floor, the large square room around the rotating bar looks like a roadhouse in a 1970s film about renegade truckers with CBs riding around the country with precocious chimpanzees. The place oozes with seventies gimmickry; you sense the ghosts of mechanical bulls past upon entering. “The scene” took it over from the old day laborer rent-a-drunks who used to sit in these stools and spin after a hard day of scrapping drywall or whatever the hell they did all day, and your generation will devote their lives to supporting whatever you perceive to be a kind of authenticity rooted in recent history.

  “So many nnnnuggets tonigh
t,” Paul says. Then, he switches into the clipped cadence he affects when moving into pure sarcasm. “Oh! The nuggets! The nuggets!” His squinty brown eyes dart from one girl to the next—seated at the bar, dancing on the dance floor.

  “What’s a nugget?” Ronnie asks.

  “Aw, you know, dude—cute girls!” Paul says.

  “It’s a porno mag,” you say, facing ahead, an offhand comment to stir the pot.

  “William, you know it’s more than that.” And here, as he has so many times before, Paul holds forth on the nuances of nuggetry, “as opposed to mere hotness” he declaims to Ronnie, that “je ne sais quois” he repeats less like someone with an air of pretension, but more as someone with the air of one-too-many 50-cent beers who has come across a phrase he finds funny. You half-listen—having heard this so many times before—and you think of quitting MOE GREEN’S FUCKING EYESOCKET, of quitting music altogether and moving on. To what? A wife? Kids? Thoughts inconceivable only one year ago. Ronnie, he asked about Maux. She sits on a stool by herself, in the corner under neon signs suggesting you drink beer, as if anyone who would come into this place would need prodding in that regard. A pint of Fancy Lad Irish Stout (you know her drink habits—Fancy Lad beer, Van Veen vodka) is wedged between her cream-dream thighs exposed from that short shiny indigo skirt.