Losing in Gainesville (9781940430331)

by Costello, Brian

  “Do you want to go out sometime, like, uh, to the museum or something?” Ronnie. So articulate.

  “No,” she said.

  “No?”

  “I can’t,” she sighed. “Sorry.”

  “Oh.” Ronnie stepped back, aware of every drop of sweat, every wrinkle in his clothes, the smells. “Ok. Why?”

  “Because,” Siouxsanna Siouxsanne said. She extended the arm not holding the bottle and the haiku, palm-up hand moving from side to side to take in the yard and its little groups of talkers. “You’re just like them. Even if you’re not like them, you’re just like them.”

  Before Ronnie could say anything else, she walked away, disappearing into the party, into the Gainesville night, and Ronnie now sits at the booth, brooding on what the hell she meant by that. He feels so out of place in Gainesville, especially amongst these people who are supposed to be so different from everyone else. And Magic’s telling him to go back to Orlando.

  “It ended up being a good show,” Ronnie says. “We hadn’t played here in a while. Next time we play, it’ll get even better.”

  “When we play in Orlando, people just have fun and don’t take this shit so serious,” Randy Macho Man says.

  “I don’t get so disgusted I smash my bass,” Magic says, and the mere mention of his now destroyed bass makes him look down, ashamed. Ronnie looks at Magic. Really looks at him. Everything sags anymore. Self-medicated. Severely depressed. A tremendous sadness in the eyes, hidden behind the glasses. “Just waiting to die” was his typical answer to “How are you doing?”

  “That was kinda awesome though,” Macho Man Randy says. He can’t wait to get home, to tell everyone about it.

  The discussion is interrupted by the egg-shaped waitress, who brings their order—Grand Slam Breakfast for Randy Macho Man, Deli Dinger for Magic, Moons Over My Hammy for Ronnie.

  “Just come back, dude,” Randy Macho Man continues. “Orlando’s not as bad as you think.” Every time he comes to Gainesville, Randy Macho Man has a good-enough time, but the complexity of it all, in the way people are always around to tell you what they think and what they heard, when all you need is some friends, a paycheck, a place to go home to with a bong and some records and the Orlando Magic winning on TV.

  “It’s worse than I think, and I’m staying,” Ronnie says. “It’s a stupid place, owned and operated by stupid people.”

  “Here we go,” Magic says.

  “It’s the worst of LA and Altanta,” Ronnie continues. “Seriously. Orlando wants to be Atlanta and LA rolled into one. What kind of an aspiration is that?”

  “You’re always complaining,” Randy Macho Man says.

  “Totally,” Magic agrees.

  The arrival of the food is a relief for Ronnie. The smells of cigarettes and bottomless coffee are joined by scrambled eggs, butter, syrup, cooked meat. Ronnie doesn’t have to fill the silence. He doesn’t have to fill the air with forced conversations no one wants to have anyway.

  When he finishes, Ronnie continues, “Look, it’s cool you want me back, but it ain’t happening. I know I’m broke and all that, but I’m . . . ,” and here, Ronnie surprises himself with the word, “. . . happier.”

  Happier. Yeah. Happier. “Yeah, you’re happier,” Magic sneers. “You don’t seem happier.”

  “I am.” Through the hazy torpor of the late morning hangover, Ronnie smiles. “We can come back and play again, and it’ll go better. People are talking here. It’ll be better. And then we’ll tour. We’re a good band. Good things are going to happen.”

  This is met with a collective shrug from Magic and Macho Man Randy during the final bites of yet another post-show Denny’s breakfast. “I’m still getting the tour going. It’ll be fun to get out of the state for once.” Another collective shrug.

  They pay the bill, walk out into the heat, to Macho Man Randy’s car.

  “Alright, well, we’ll talk soon,” Magic says, getting into the car.

  “Yup,” Ronnie says.

  “Later,” Macho Man Randy says, and that’s it.

  I.D. 4: THE HOLIDAY (NOT THE MOVIE)

  In the early morning hours of the 5th of July, Ronnie, passed out in the backseat of his car, awakens to the sounds of tremendous farting, like stubborn old lawnmowers refusing to kickstart.

  Ronnie opens his eyes, disoriented, unsure of where he is, and then he sees—no, it can’t be that—two pairs of hairy white ass cheeks, pressed against the windshield as Neal screams, “Ronnie Altamont! Wake up, dude!” while his brother Paul laughs maniacally on the passenger side of the windshield.

  Ronnie sees, hears, and processes what is happening, yells “Oh Gahhhhhhd!,” the bile rising in his chest. He opens the car’s back door and runs to the backyard of the barbeque he had been at since noon yesterday, puking into shrubs two bottles of Strawberry Kiwi Boone’s Farm (Strawberry Kiwi Boone’s Farm? What is he, thirteen?!), vomit like yogurt and power steering fluid. Behind him, laughter, growing closer, louder.

  “Altamont!” Neal hollers, rounding the corner of the house. He sees Ronnie, bent over, coughing and drooling. “What are you doing?”

  Ronnie rises, stupidly drunk but sober enough to know how stupidly drunk he has been. “I didn’t move here to have the banal college experience of puking at some party,” he announces, an attempt at sounding smart. Only the thing is, he believes it. Because the college aspects of life here, to interact with college people as they do their college things (and not the music things, the art things, the you-know punk rock things) fills Ronnie with a cold desperate desire to leave immediately, and to puke like this reminds him that his time in Gainesville is limited, because this simply cannot go on.

  On the other hand, Ronnie isn’t sure if a pair of brothers farting with their naked asses smooshed against a windshield constitutes “banal,” but his cheap-wine-soaked mind isn’t really up for such fine distinctions. He falls to the ground again, retches.

  “Seriously!” Neal yells, then repeats, “What are you doing?”

  Paul follows his brother, watches Ronnie bent over the shrubs, says, “Alright, Altamont. Get the last bit out. You’re better now. Let’s get back to the party and get you a beer.”

  Ronnie stands, wipes his mouth, nods. He looks away from the shrubs, to Paul and Neal. Neal is completely naked. It’s that time of the night for Neal to be completely naked, Ronnie thinks. Paul readjusts his pants. Ronnie wants to throw up again, but merely dry-heaves. That image. Two pairs of asscheeks pressed against the windshield. Oh Gahhhhhd. Half-awake, with the brain ache where the lost inhibitions used to be.

  He walks back around the house with Paul and Neal, past his car, to the front yard, as Paul and Neal laugh heartily. From the rest of the party, Ronnie is greeted by tipsy applause from the people who remain—names Ronnie learned and unlearned in a matter of seconds, sitting around the faintest embers of the grill, pulling out fireworks from backpacks.

  “Lesser men have died seeing what you just saw,” William says, handing Ronnie an ice cold Dusch Lite. Everyone laughs. Ronnie manages a smile. Ronnie opens the beer. That is the closest he gets to drinking it.

  Later he sits in a lawnchair and tries piecing together what happened as almost everyone else runs out onto the street to do battle with bottle rockets. Five to a side, they crouch behind mailboxes, cars, trees, light the wick, the seconds of waiting, the scream, the whiz, the explosion, the laughter, the screams of pain, of triumph, the smoke trails, that acrid firework Independence Day stench. In out-of-sequence images, Ronnie recalls showing up thinking it would be funny to be the guy with two bottles of Strawberry Kiwi Boone’s Farm, drinking them from the bottle, quickly, because he is nervous, surrounded by all these people he does not know, who circle the grill with beer and whiskey and the kind of languid summertime conversation you hear once all small talk and latest news has been exhausted. There was Siouxsanna Siouxsanne, as drunk then as she is now, not at the bottle rocket fight but walking around yelling “We’re not friends anymo
re, assholes!” to the warriors fighting on the street, no one listening because she says this every weekend and they find it endearing, somehow. In a social scene filled with quirks, kinks, and eccentricities, this is what Siouxsanna Siouxsanne does. Oh, and Ronnie remembers William, at one point, taking Ronnie aside and asking, “You all right? You seem a little quiet today.”

  “Uh, yeah,” Ronnie managed, numb, not fully there. The alcohol shut him down, rather than animating him.

  “You should eat something, dude,” and William pointed to a blackened paper plate next to the grill, piled with charred soy hot dogs. “Cool,” Ronnie answers, yawns, and shuffles off to the back seat of his car where, on the floor, an old copy of the school newspaper, where Ronnie studies the cartoon from Maux (he tries remembering where he had heard that name) of a pantsless hillbilly straddling the Florida panhandle as the rest of the state dangles between his legs like a limp penis. Inside the state penis are tiny drawings of New Yorkers fighting Cubans fighting tourists fighting surfers fighting rednecks fighting state troopers fighting the elderly. As an added touch, the Florida Keys drip like urine from the bottom. Everyone holds a pointed gun. The caption reads, “Greetings from Florida,” drawn in postcard lettering. “Try not to get killed!” The postcard was tilted sideways to look like it was pinned off-kilter to a bulletin board. Ronnie smiled at it, thinking of how unpleasantly funny—and uncollegiate—such a girl must be who would draw something like this.

  This is all Ronnie remembers before waking up to Paul and Neil’s asses and thunderous farts.

  “I absolutely hate these people,” Siouxsanna Siouxsanne says, stumbling around the grill. “Farting on windshields? Shooting each other with bottle rockets? I don’t know why I bother trying to be friends with anybody here.”

  “Yeah,” Ronnie says, rubbing his temples, thinking of his bed, or the stacked mattresses in the tiny trailer bedroom that passed for his bed.

  “Why are you here?” Siouxsane Siouxsanne asks.

  Ronnie looks up at her. “You kinda look like Nico. Anybody ever tell you that?’

  “Yes,” Sioxusanna Siouxsanne says. “Now answer the question.”

  “Aw, man,” Ronnie says, in a weary way, like Dylan in an imagined press conference. “Because it’s the Fourth of July, and . . . ”

  “No,” Siouxsanna Siouxsanne stops, stares at him. “Here. Gainesville. You’re not going to school here. So why bother?”

  Ronnie looks away, throws up his hands, mumbles, “Aw dude, I don’t know.” He shifts in his chair, drunk enough to throw out, half-serious, to the empty windless air, “To meet girls like you.”

  Surely, in this giant world where all possible outcomes have already occurred, there have been plenty of moments of ill-timed vomiting, but Siouxsanna Siouxsanne, not triggered by Ronnie’s words, but by all the drinking, those pills (whatever what’s-his-name gave her), this all-encompassing weariness and wariness with Gainesville and these parties and these people, moans and moves, scurrying to the back of the house to throw up in the very same suffering shrubs covered in Ronnie’s violent earthtoned regurgitations.

  “Jesus,” Ronnie mumbles, over the steady din of the unceasing bottle rocket war, “When I tell women I like them, they puke.” He leans forward, regains his footing in that awkward precarious way people do when they rise from lawnchairs, trudges to the backyard, where, thankfully, Siouxsanna Siouxsanne has found shrubs past Ronnie’s defiled shrubs, seemingly free of what Kerouac once called “sentient debouchments.”

  “This isn’t about you,” Siouxsanna Siouxsanne says between violent retchings. “You’re ok . . . Just don’t ask me out anymore.” She coughs, spits. “See you later.”

  Ronnie needs to leave. He walks back to the side of the house, to his car, to the front seat this time, Siouxsanna Siouxsanne’s puke-cough fading away, the moon and stars spinning, trapped in the eyeache of a cheap wine hangover. Ronnie pulls out into the street, honking, smiling, waving at near-strangers as he weaves through one side of the bottle rocket war. Fireworks bonk the trunk and rear window, faded laughter decrescendos into the silence in the emptiness of the student-ghetto streets, and Ronnie drives home, listening to Gary Numan sing “Me! I Disconnect from You,” and Ronnie wants to feel alive, and he could almost turn around and tell Siouxsanna Siouxsanne that that is the reason he lives in Gainesville now. Not to feel younger, or to extend the first taste of adulthood freedoms via the college lifestyle, but to feel alive. He could turn this car around and tell her this, but Ronnie knows this isn’t a pressing concern for Siouxsanna Siouxsanne right about now, assuming she even remembers the question.

  EATING BAKED POTATO WITH A JELL-O STRAW

  Mouse stands before Ronnie Altamont and Icy Filet, wearing a tattered brown and green bathrobe, holding a cassette tape, smiling that smile, preparing to speak. Ronnie has just met Icy Filet, having come to Mouse’s to escape that depressing trailer, where maggots collect on the rotting food left in the kitchen before transforming into dozens and dozens of flies, where the summer smells have taken on a humid raunch, where the shade of the Sherwood Forest trailer-trees cool nothing.

  “Icy as in, you know, cool, and Filet, as in, you know, our state’s abbreviation?” Icy Filet had explained to Ronnie when she greeted him at the door in an oversized faded green button down long-sleeved shirt, stained and torn and obviously belonging to Mouse, shirt hung low like a miniskirt, exposing squat legs and bare feet tromping through the dirty kitchen to the perpetually cluttered living room, where they sit facing the mammoth speakers ten feet away, with Mouse in between, preparing to speak.

  “Welcome, Ronnie. Now, as you know, I’ve been trying to write a hit song, something that will get on the airwaves. Something commercial. Something lucrative.” Between right index finger and thumb, Mouse raises the cassette to his face. “This, my friends—this!—is the song.” He steps to the stereo, left hand holding the cassette outward, right hand behind his back, looking down like a professor reaching the apex of a lecture he knows is brilliant. He dramatically turns to Ronnie and Icy Filet, points to Icy Filet, who sits “Indian-style,” tugging at the shirt she wears. “But with this here lovely lady,” and Mouse steps to her, leans down, kisses her on the barrette holding the frosted highlights of the ruby-dyed left-parted short hair; Icy Filet smiles, a ruby lipstick smile stretching across her face, and looks away, adjusting her cat-eye glasses. Mouse returns to the stereo, bookended by the mammoth speakers, “. . .we have the makings of a hit song, something with what they call in this business of music, crossover appeal. So without further ado, let’s hear our song, and Ronnie, I look forward to seeing you blown away by this, and I look forward to hearing your thoughts.”

  Mouse turns, inserts the cassette, presses play. Foreboding tape hiss, then screeching white noise, followed by a slow synthetic 4/4 hip-hop beat—bass drum, snare, closed high hat cymbals opened on the eighth note after three then closed at four—repeated. A simple four note bass line on an endless loop, and then Icy Filet’s voice, an awkward, lurching, talk-speak that doesn’t quite lose the rhythm no matter how hard it tries:

  I’m in my room watching Sanford and Son

  faking heart attacks, Elizabeth it’s the big one

  drunk like Grady workin’ power saws

  eatin’ baked potato with a Jell-O straw

  we got astrophysicists down the hall

  German swimmers and people throwin’ Nerf balls

  aphrodisiacs circled on my plate

  do I have free will or is everything fate?

  As the verses stop, the beat continues—the bass line, the white noise guitar—as Icy Filet interjects “Word” and “Aw yeah” here and there. The next verse:

  Floridian Wizard of the rhyming scheme

  Icy Filet is everything she seems

  sortin’ it out in a laundry bag

  chicken fried rice and a can of Black Flag

  roaches on the ceiling fishing for the sounds

  of Icy Filet, Mouse, and
the Get Downs

  candy apple bottom with a tig ol’ bittied face

  like a Sharpie in your mind that can never be erased

  The song soldiers on for five more seconds until the beat stops. The white noise of the guitar fades away into the tape hiss. Mouse stops the tape.

  “Well?” Mouse asks, leaning in towards Ronnie, that insistent smile and subtle nod simply begging Ronnie to say it was anything less than completely brilliant.

  It is ludicrous, awful, stupid, terrible, cheesy, moronic, sub-par, puerile, painful, insufferable, not-good. Ronnie clears his throat. “Completely brilliant!” he proclaims, smiling. “It sounds a lot like Beck.” (In Gainesville, it is always important to tell everyone what you think everything sounds like. It shows you know what you are talking about.)

  “Beck?” Icy Filet leans backwards, lightly pounds Ronnie with her tiny right fist. She pshaws. “That’s bogus, yo. I mean, I like him, but that’s not what I’m going for. I want to be whiter than Beck, if that’s possible.”

  Mouse removes the cassette from the stereo, places it back inside its case, tosses the case aside, near a stack of yellowed underwear. “We’ll go back to it. It has potential. Ronnie thinks so. Right, Ronnie?”

  Ronnie smiles a charming used-car-salesman smile. “I do.” Yes, Ronnie believes the song is horrible, but he also believes that, in a perfect world, songs as amateurishly strange as these would be the staples of commercial radio and played with the same unceasing regularity as Pink Floyd.

  “Good,” Mouse says, readjusting his bathrobe, a wavy flick of the wrist preventing encroaching nudity.

  “What do you do, Ronnie?” Icy Filet asks, as they rise to stretch, to step out of the slovenly living room.

  “He does nothing!” Mouse says, stepping into the kitchen. “It’s why he has no money!”

  “I’m a writer,” Ronnie says. “I’m also a musician.” They follow Mouse into the kitchen, where Mouse opens three green-bottled beers while howling and laughing, “He doesn’t write! His band is a hundred miles away so they never play anymore!”