Losing in Gainesville (9781940430331)

by Costello, Brian

  In Orlando, they recorded on 4-tracks in Magic’s apartment, and continued playing shows, and everything leveled off and that was fine even if the band wasn’t really going anywhere. But where was it supposed to go?

  Realistically, there were only so many places to play, and only so much you could do in Orlando. Graduation loomed. Willie-Joe Scotchgard graduated first. He moved to Cleveland to study the viola in a conservatory. They found another drummer—high school friend Andrew “Randy Macho Man” Savage—and soldiered on, but there was a decline in effect here, magnified by Orlando’s omnipresent drug culture. Roofies were big that year—1995—and they weren’t used by The Laraflynnboyle’s circle of UCF friends for date rape, no matter what the papers say is its use in the uberculture. They made mean, surly, loudmouthed drunkards out of everyone, no matter how kind and considerate you normally were. Magic found roofies a fine way to numb the empty afternoon and evening hours. They magnified his already profound bitterness. For his part, Ronnie drank more and more, unsure of what to do with himself, especially after graduation, and his newspaper column—this column he had come to rely on so much as his identity—was no more once he graduated and received the diploma he didn’t know how to use. Ronnie washed dishes so he would have time to write The Big Blast for Youth, and continued practicing with The Laraflynnboyles even if too many gigs ended badly from Ronnie’s overindulgence of malt liquor, and Magic’s nasty borderline violent (lots of fights broken up at this stage) roofie glaze. In this cloud of post-college uncertainty, as his behavior grew more and more erratic, as the smile on his face disappeared, as he floundered from job to job, Maggie left.

  At some break in the clouds, Ronnie took a good look around. The only girls left were bisexual raver junkies. All the dudes he knew were content to be high all the time. He felt Orlando closing in on him. He was back to sitting around in his room, in the house he lived in with Chris Embowelment, playing Who records all night, trying desperately to avoid the thought that it was time to grow up and get a regular job and spend the rest of his days in comfortable, expected middle class, forever nagged by some variation of the question “What if?”

  The only thing Ronnie could think to do was to flee for Gainesville. Ronnie and Magic weren’t exactly best buds by this point—having little to connect over anymore besides what remained of the band—but Ronnie assured Magic the band would continue, somehow. They had always wanted to tour, and now Ronnie would get them more shows in Gainesville because it wasn’t really that far away from Orlando (just far enough), and the music scene seemed better, what with all the punk rock you could shove down your spiky-haired throat and all. A stopgap, anyway, until they could get it together to move to Chicago. But Ronnie needed the change, needed the stimulation of others who weren’t all about shitty drugs anymore, to a place that had more going on. Gainesville was all Ronnie could afford.

  All of this swum around in Ronnie’s quixotic brain as he played his unplugged electric guitar in his room after getting off the phone with John “Magic” Jensen. The tour would make things right again. Getting shows in Gainesville would make things right again. And then, soon enough, packing up and leaving for Chicago would make things right again.

  It would be a beautiful and triumphant summer, and Ronnie couldn’t wait to jump into it.

  RONNIE AND SALLY-ANNE ALTAMONT

  Ronnie calls his parents to share the good news.

  “A tour,” Sally-Anne Altamont repeats, when presented with said good news.

  “Yeah! Definitely!”

  “You have no money, Ron. You have no job. You’re not even in the same town anymore as those other guys, who never exactly struck me as hardworking and dedicated musicians. None of this strikes you as, I don’t know, problematic?”

  “It’ll be awesome.”

  “Awesome.” After a three mile run on the beach, always, a focus, clear candor, often lost in the lazy days of retirement, misplaced in the vagaries of meditation. “It’s like you’ve lost your mind ever since we moved to South Carolina and you went off to college.”

  “That was six years ago.”

  “Exactly.”

  SIOUXSANNA SIOUXSANNE GOES BOWLING

  It’s “Rock and Bowl Ain’t Noise Pollution Nite” at the Gainesville Bowl-O-Rama. Siouxsanna Siouxsanne (an unfortunate nickname, lingering from high school during the peak of a Siouxsie and the Banshees obsession) is here tonight, throwing her sixth consecutive empty frame over on Lane 15. She is a terrible bowler. Most gothic bisexuals are.

  The Run DMC version of “Walk This Way” pounds over bowling shoes squeaking across the wood. Swirling jade, black, and vermillion AMF boulders spin down the lanes, thundering like tympanis before grand old school showbiz introductions, until the percussive woodblockish rattle of the overturned pins break the tension, as the ball lands with a mechanical plop into the great unknown/unseen of its mysterious journey beneath the lane to be gracefully unfurled from the gaping maw of the retriever. From the game room, spasmodic videogame queefs. Across the lanes, strobe lights flicker. Black lights glow tubesocks and lint. The disc jockey is Sweet Billy Du Pree, legendary 1970s FM DJ back when Gainesville had a hard rock station called BJ 103: The Tongue.

  “This one’s goin’ out to all the real rock and bowlers who still remember quality rock and roll,” the venerable Du Pree rasps through the crackling speakers of the public address system, voice worn low and raspy through a life of whiskey and Quaaludes. The elegiac opening strains to “Magic Power” by the Canadian power trio Triumph fade in and set sail across the lanes on a sonic odyssey of magic. And power.

  “Shit! Shit! Shit! Turn right, you stupid goddamn dick ball!” Siouxsanna Siouxsanne yells over the din after yet another ball veers left well before having a chance to knock over any pins. She turns, straightens her posture, recomposes, and all inebriated clumsiness and aggression in the toss evaporates. She is tall, in a long black dress and black stockings, a slinky slide in the walk in faded red white and black bowling shoes unaccustomed to supporting this much grace. There’s a relatively austere use of makeup (We can’t look like we did in high school now, can we?) across the cheeks, eyelids, and lips of her art school features, a dyed-black salon cut somewhere between a page boy and a bob. Pale. So pale. It takes effort to get skin like this in Florida.

  Siouxsanna Siouxsanne loses her footing, unused to the lack of traction as her right heel skids sideways. She flails to the floor in what seems a comedic pratfall, hurriedly rises, mutters, “I’m too llllllllloaded to be here!” over the not-quite-mocking laughter of friends.

  Ronnie Altamont is impressed.

  He silently observes the bowling and the good time laughter of this distinctly middle class college crowd in their ironed thrift store tees and unholey back-to-school mall pants. Ronnie leans forward against the bowling ball racks, standing on the unfashionably brown plaid printed carpeting on the three steps above where the bowlers sit changing shoes, keeping score, chugging brews. Here are the easy smiles and burdenless leisure of summer vacation, a jarring change from the dismal poverty Ronnie had grown accustomed to, those long muggy hours in his bedroom in the trailer alone, listening to The Stooges and trying to write. School is over, but only temporarily for them, but for Ronnie, he’s reminded of how he felt like an interloper that first day he and Kelly set foot on the UF campus to score free Krishna food.

  After a sweat jam at Paul’s, Ronnie drove William and Neal to the Gainesville Bowl-o-Rama—where some nnnnnnnnugget William was trying to hook up with would be with a few of her friends. They would all be Ronnie’s friends soon enough—all twelve of these amateur summer vacationing bowlers—but only Siouxsanna Siouxsanne stands out to Ronnie, in her mix of post-goth grace and sloppy belligerence. Ronnie, not the grown-ass man he thinks he is, still young enough to treat every crush like he is the first person to ever have these feelings. So charming! Siouxsanna Siouxsanne, stomping up to the line to try yet again to knock over a pin—any pin—falling over the line as she
flings the ball “granny style,” long lithe arms pulling and spinning the rest of her forward until she loses her footing, spins, plops backwards while the ball—chipped and yellowed with white streaks like a dusk thunderstorm—bounces over the first lane to her left and continues rolling two lanes over, sabotaging the very serious play of a muffler shop’s weeknight bowling team—where it knocks over four pins. Her friends cheer at this, they clap and congratulate her for finally getting on the scoreboard. The muffler shop’s weeknight bowling team6 has to smile, no matter how jaded they’ve become to the general misbehavior of college students. It helps that the interference in their very serious league play is from a girl who would be real pretty if she didn’t wear so much makeup, if she didn’t dress like she was leaving a funeral, if she laid out in the sun once in awhile and got herself a tan. Not that they would kick her out of bed or nuthin’. They’re just sayin’.

  “FUUUUUUCK YEWWWWWWWW!” Siouxsanna Siouxsanne brays to the paneled ceiling’s spinning multi-colored disco lights. She’s on her back, brain floating in and out of booze-fueled, med-soaked half-dreams of car trips with her parents—the only child in the backseat staring out the window from Orlando to St. Pete or Fort Myers or wherever they would go to see family—watching the lakes and swamps and bays and gulfs and oceans—pretending she was some kind of superfast manatee diving in and out of the sharp glittering waters (no matter the color—the pea soup of

  the swamps or the worn concrete of the ocean or the choppy blue of the bay) keeping pace with the off-white wood-paneled Country Squire station wagon and flying out of sight above them when the waters ended until another water body appeared to the left or right as Billy Squier sings “my kinda lov-uh/my kinda luv-uh/my kinda luuv-uh . . . ” Two hands wrap around damp armpits and pull Siouxsanna Siouxsanne upright. She tries walking, but her legs are not taking any orders from her brain. Two friends—William and Neal, actually—lift her along on either side like she’s a running back carried off the field after a knee injury to the gracious applause of the audience, only there is no applause, just snack bar stares and beer bar glares. Even the lanes are silent, as these twelve (plus Ronnie—transfixed and fascinated and in love) move en masse toward the exit.

  Sweet Billy Du Pree turns down the Billy Squier, announces, “Ladies and gentlemen, you know I used to party hard, but I also used to party safe. Let’s keep it street legal out there at the rock and bowl, yadig? Here’s another song that could never get old: ‘Whole. Lotta. Luuuuuuuuv.’ ”

  Siouxsanna Siouxsanne lollygags her head rightward, yells “You suck ass!” to the DJ booth. Friends shrug at Sweet Billy Du Pree, mouth the word, “Sorry.” Ronnie looks to Sweet Billy Du Pree, up in the DJ booth. He wears a red bandana on his upper forehead. A faded black “The Ultimate Ozzy” tourshirt, swollen from the beerbelly. Aviator sunglasses. He nods his head in rhythm to the “du-nuh, du-nuh, nuh” of the “Whole Lotta Love” guitar intro. The rocking and bowling resumes.

  Ronnie trails behind this group as Neal and William keep Siouxsanna Siouxsanne from falling to the ground, passed out and dreaming of childhood manatees. In and out of consciousness, she yells expletives, mumbles unintelligible moans between drools. So beautiful, Ronnie thinks. In the parking lot, two more friends join in and hoist her into the back of a Volvo station wagon—one of those relaxed boyfriend and girlfriend couples you know will be married shortly after getting their degrees—and off they go, Ronnie watching the Volvo’s boxy red taillights fade away across the mammoth parking lot. In the midst of the parking lot talk—the shrugs and the “That’s Sioxusanna Siouxsanne for ya’s,” the ride back to William and Neal’s where they will have one more beer while listening to CCR (and still talking about Doug Clifford like it will really happen), Ronnie wants to ask about Siouxsanna Siouxsanne, but he knows no one will tell him what he wants to hear, knows no one will say, “You and her, you’d be great together, Ronnie!,” knows no one will claim that she isn’t as crazy as she was acting at the Gainesville Bowl-O-Rama for “Rock and Bowl Ain’t Noise Pollution Nite.” So he holds it in, “it” being whatever passes for “love” in his heart, mind, and other, less noble, body parts.

  QUASIMODO IN THE DISHTANK

  Alvin knocks on Ronnie’s bedroom door—three soft, unassertive taps.

  “Yeah what?” Ronnie grunts, annoyed, because he’s thinking about maybe doing some writing as he rifles through his compact discs for something to listen to. He’s busy, you understand.

  “I got my first paycheck from Otis’s Barbelicious BBQ, and I was wondering if you wanted to go out for Chinese food. My treat, pfffff.”

  All thoughts of busyness, of thinking about writing while listening to music, vanished from Ronnie’s mind, replaced by a massive steaming mountain of pork fried rice. Ronnie hops off the mattresses, leaps to the door, opens it. “Let’s go.”

  The restaurant—The Ancient Chinese Secret—is a two-minute drive down 34th Street. Alvin drives, narrowly avoids sideswiping two cars, honking blurs in the myopic haze beyond the range of his thick glasses. “Pfff. Guess they didn’t see me,” Alvin says. Ronnie laughs at this, trying not to look at the murderous glares from the narrowly avoided cars, thinking how absurd it would be to die in a car crash simply because he wanted to score a free meal.

  They sit in a cool dark dining room in a booth by the window overlooking the broiling blinding plaza parking lot. Alvin talks about his job. And talks. And talks.

  “So I wash the dishes, the forks, the knives, the spoons, the spatulas, the bowls, the plates, the storage bins, and whatever they want me to wash, really—pffff!—but that ain’t all I do there. I stir the beans, butter the bread, take the clean plates to the bus boys, take out the dirty linen at the end of the night. It ain’t bad really, pfff.” Yes, Ronnie is aware of the job description here, and not only because he has prior experience in the dishwashing field. Alvin has told him all about the routines of his work several times already. Butter the bread. Stir the beans. Take out the dirty linen. Wash what they take back to me. Pfff. Ronnie is too hungry to listen, to care, to bother with trying to respond to anything Alvin says, because Alvin doesn’t respond to what you say, he simply continues talking about whatever the hell he wants to talk about. As Ronnie waits for his food, Pluto orbits around the sun in one complete rotation, empires rise and fall, Ice Ages come and go and come and go again. Still, no food. Alvin keeps yammering. Pfff. But it’s a free meal, and if Ronnie can eat something, he can go to Gatorroni’s, where he’ll score free beer from William and drink all night. If only this food would get here already.

  “. . . So yeah, they call me ‘Quasimodo’ at work, pfff.” Alvin mentions in the middle of this nonstop yak.

  Ronnie snaps back in the booth, jarred from his impatient reverie. Ronnie huffs. Ronnie is offended. “They call you ‘Quasimodo?’ ” Ronnie huffs once more. Ronnie is offended. “I can’t believe that, Alvin. That’s so mean.”

  “Well, it’s nothing I ain’t used to, pffff.” Today, the “pfff” sounds especially resigned, like a deflated tuba.

  “No, man . . . that’s not right,” and Ronnie, he actually tries imagining that there is someone inside Alvin that’s real, someone suffering an endless series of slights, guilty of nothing but being born with Swedish wino pubic hair scalp, acne, buckteeth, that smell. Everything is off about him, and he knows it and has to live with it. Ronnie could look around town, could look at himself and those around him, and at the end of the day, no one was stranger, no one was a bigger nonconformist than Alvin. He didn’t even try. He was born into it. Everyone else magnifies their nonconformity just enough to get laid but not enough to adversely impact the quality of life they are accustomed to. Beyond a heightened sensitivity and artistic inclinations, they didn’t suffer daily the way Alvin suffered daily.

  Ronnie manages an “I’m sorry, man.”

  “Pfff.”

  Finally, the food arrives. Sweet and sour chicken for Alvin, pork fried rice for Ronnie. After subsisting on li
ttle besides Little Lady snack cakes and microwave burritos, Ronnie relishes it all—the taste and the chew, the swallow and the downward movement, the warmth and the fullness. All thanks to Alvin. Shit, Alvin’s the entire reason Ronnie’s even here in Gainesville. Who else would let him live this way? Rent-free. Bill-free. And all Ronnie does is make fun of him.