“That’s not true,” Ronnie says, grabbing one of the cold green beer bottles from Mouse, chugging, mulling the idea that Mouse is probably right. Yes, probably.
“Mouuuuse,” Icy Filet whines a scold to her newish boyfriend of two-and-a-half months, who looks as hangdog as a guy who looks like Charles Manson can look. She turns to Ronnie, puts her arm around him. “It’s ok. I believe you’re a writer. Do you believe I’m a rapper?”
Ronnie smiles. He can’t say “No,” no matter what he really thinks. “Yes. I do.”
“Thank you,” Icy Filet says, hugging Ronnie before grabbing the beer from Mouse’s outstretched arm. “You look hungry, Ronnie. Let me order us some pizza. How does that sound?”
“Of course!” Mouse laughs. “Ronnie doesn’t eat much, and he needs to.”
Ronnie could not disagree. The money is gone. He would be four months behind on rent, if Alvin bothered collecting the rent, to say nothing of the other bills. Ronnie tends to blow the plasma money as soon as he gets it—on beer, on eating out, on enough gas to get to some party and back. He is tired, hungry, exhausted, can’t think of tomorrow, or the day after that, and definitely not next week, and don’t even mention next month. In the Sweat Jam life, you take whatever resources are at your disposal at that immediate moment and use them to your fullest advantage, to suck the most fun you can out of that moment, because, tomorrow? You will be tired, hungry, exhausted.
When the pizza arrives, Ronnie’s hunger pangs temporarily retreat. He finishes the beer and eats his fill, walks into the living room, finds the cassette case dangling at the edge of the dirty underwear pile, removes the tape, places it in the stereo, hits play, then stretches out across the long-unvacuumed floor, falling asleep to the music of his friends, deep in the sleep of one who is exhausted doing absolutely nothing with his life, and having a wonderful time doing so.
WHAT PART OF “DON’T LOOK BACK”
DON’T YOU UNDERSTAND?
Kelly stands in the threshold of the opened front door, watching the sprinkler’s jets slowly rise, prismatic droplets refracting the sun before splattering across his crunchy parched brown lawn. He lives in the back of a 1950s subdivision in a tiny, pastel blue cinderblocked one-story house in a large corner lot. Across the street, a massive water tower hovers over everything like a UFO on the verge of shooting lasers at unsuspecting earthlings in some long-forgotten drive-in movie. High fences topped with barbed wire thick as bass guitar strings cordon off the opposite side of the street, separating the construction workers, plumbers, and mechanics who live in the neighborhood from the University of Central Florida Research Park on the other side.
Under the driveway’s silver awning, a gray Volkswagen Rabbit is parked with its hood opened, perpetually awaiting whatever repair it needs to return to life. Next to the Rabbit is a brown Chevy Celebrity, jack propping up the left front tire side, also perpetually in wait for the repairs that will/might return it to the roads. In front of these on the driveway, Kelly’s still-functioning rusted maroon Nissan truck. A blandy apple green four-door sedan rolls up and stops inches from the truck’s downward angled rear bumper.
Ronnie shuts off the car, steps out, awaits the inevitable “Told ya so” from Kelly.
Instead, without taking his eyes off the withered brown grass, Kelly sighs, announces, “Take what you want to make sandwiches. There’s beer in the fridge too.”
Ronnie nods, fifteen footsteps a brittle crunch across the grass, stepping around Kelly, then entering the house. Over the sprinkler’s spray, Kelly hears the opening of a beer can, the frantic rattling of glass containers, the rustling of wrapped deli meat. Shortly after this, the sounds of The Incredible Shrinking Dickies album on the stereo. Loud.
Kelly continues watering what remains of his lawn, wondering if anything will ever change, or if life will always go on like this, surrounded by friends living a hand-to-mouth existence filled with one or all of the following: beer, dope, acid, Xanax, roofies, mescaline, ecstasy, heroin. Time measured between shows, the once or (if we’re lucky) twice a month wait, filled with work, sleep, then any or all of the preceding. Kelly watches Ronnie step out the door, a beer can in each hand, draining the first, opening the second. He is much thinner. Disheveled hair, not in the fashionable sense, but in the “two weeks in a Greyhound Bus terminal” sense. The pungent, musty smell of unwashed clothing.
“Jesus, Altamont,” Kelly says, stepping back. “What the hell up and died on you in Gainesville?” He takes another step away, scrunching his gaunt face in disgust. “Besides your soul?”
“The trailer tub is covered in mildew. Mold. Dirt.” Ronnie says. He walks the ten steps towards the sprinkler. He takes off his t-shirt, drops it, sets his glasses on top of it. He falls on all fours on the wet grass, leaning directly over the sprinkler, the water shooting his face and hair, wetting his hands, washing the dirt away. In the midst of all the idleness—the parties, shows, general drunkenness—the money ran dry. Therefore, reluctantly and temporarily, Ronnie went back to Orlando. He survived three and a half months without steady work, but after the pizza with Mouse and Icy Filet, he didn’t eat for three days. On the third day, he made the two hour round trip walk, from the trailer off 34th Street to Mouse’s first floor student ghetto apartment in that gray three story dilapidated house, to borrow twenty dollars, enough for gas money and a meal. Not even Mouse could laugh about it, or say much beyond, “Hurry up and get back here. We’ll miss you, buddy,” shaking his head as he stood in the living room listening to his latest recordings made with Icy Filet. Ronnie took the money, bought a double cheeseburger and fries at the Checkers behind Mouse’s place, on University Avenue, ignoring the glares generated by Ronnie’s smell (he stunk like the trailer now, like summer at the season’s sweatiest worst) and general demeanor. From the payphone outside the Kelly’s Kwik-Stop, Ronnie talked to Kelly long enough to tell him he was coming back for a little while, hung up, packed a few clothes, some books, and a journal, threw them in the car, filled up the gas tank with the money he had left, and kept the speedometer at 80 mph, forsaking the sentimental journey of olde-tyme Florida southbound 441 for the touristy blur of Interstate 75 to the Turnpike.
Ronnie crawls, even with the sprinkler’s trajectory so he is always getting wet. His khaki pants turn green at the knees from the grass stains. Between the payphone call two hours ago and now, Kelly secured Ronnie a job. His neighbors own an asbestos removal business. The work is at a school near the beach. Ronnie will sleep in Kelly’s spare bedroom for the next month, work the asbestos job, earn and save money. The pay is $7.50 an hour, more than Ronnie has ever been paid for anything.
Kelly goes into the house, returns with a bar of soap and a towel. “Here,” he says, tossing him the soap. Ronnie lathers up.
Oh, to be clean again! Kelly tosses him beer cans as the others are drained and tossed. Drunk and drenched in the blazing summer sun, as the Dickies’ cover of “Eve of Destruction” howls from the living room and out the open doors and open windows, Ronnie stands, smiles, raises a beer to the great water tower in the sky, because Florida—Central Florida—is at this moment everything it is allegedly cracked up to be. An escape. A new start. Another chance.
•
Friday night. Ronnie borrows a twenty from Kelly before Kelly leaves to his new job, night auditor at some hotel, only this time he’s working in relatively safer Lake Mary—where the worst things he will deal with are one-night stands and sloppy drunk insurance salesmen unwinding after long hours of teleconferencing. Ronnie takes the twenty—promising to pay it back when that first asbestos-removal paycheck comes in—and drives off to downtown Orlando, hoping to run into anyone he knows.
Downtown Orlando in 1996 is a five block unvibrant stretch of Orange Avenue, rave clubs and meat markets populated with the most vapid people this side of southern California. Oppressive booty bass and the macho growling of scruffy alternative rock fill the desperately festive atmosphere. Bike police ride in slow predat
ory packs, shrieking whistles and writing tickets to jaywalkers. The homeless are cordoned off into approved “Panhandling Zones.” Douchebags with Mardi Gras beads in July, screaming for no discernible reason.
Ronnie parks on a sidestreet, steps into the anti-carnival of Orange Avenue. The good times from the past attack in the unlikeliest of places: furtive makeout sessions at that ATM machine, holding hands while serenading passersby with Dead Milkmen songs on that sidewalk, fits of laughter over “you had to be there” jokes on that corner. It didn’t really start to suck until this past year.
He crosses Washington Street, passing bars that used to be decent enough, past venues for live music that were now gross dance clubs. Too many memories here, and many of them good.
“Ronnie Altamont?” A familiar girl’s voice yells as he waits to cross another street.
He turns around, sees his ex-girlfriend Maggie. Everything inside him spins, falls. She is with her best friend Lauren, and Lauren’s boyfriend Karl. The four of them used to spend most of their waking non-working hours together, sometimes in these downtown bars, other times in each other’s apartments around the University of Central Florida.
“Uh . . . hey!” Ronnie manages, followed by a strange awkward cackle that has never left his mouth before or since. “How are you guys doing?”
“I’m fine,” Maggie says, tone a perfect blend of suspicion, nervousness, happiness. “What are you doing? Here, I mean.” She looks around at Orange Avenue, the almost-skyscraping bank buildings, the near-bustle of the foot and car traffic, the Orwellian sounds of prefabricated leisure. “I thought you moved away finally.”
God, she looks so good. The song “Little Doll” by The Stooges pops into his head, like it used to whenever he was with her. She has grown out her black hair to her shoulders, bleached the bangs, gentle waves he never had the chance to see before (she had always kept her hair short in the two years they dated, Ronnie’s last two years in college), and that smile matches the suspicion, nervousness, happiness, in the voice, but it’s a self-assured smile—Ronnie can contrast the smile to the anti-depressant smile of late-morning weekends—the teeth she would always try and hide because of their lack of symmetry—hated her whole body, actually—she thought her breasts were too small, her ass too bony, legs too skinny—to get pictures back from the Eckerd Drugs Photo Lab was always an ordeal of self-loathing and Ronnie’s constant assuagement that she was, in fact, beautiful, because she was, goddammit. And she is. Only, now, she knows it. Purple combat boots, short plaid skirt, a tight pink t-shirt exposing a bare midriff (and a navel piercing, another new development) where between the small yet proportionate breasts there was a drawing of a retro looking female cat with long eyelashes, womanly cheeks, a jeweled necklace, a coquettish smile. Karl and Lauren stand to either side of Maggie, glaring at Ronnie—Karl in all black, and the kind of all-black that can’t even be considered post-goth anymore, but the kind of all-black waiters wear at restaurants that aspire to urban chic; and Lauren, well, she has armpit hair—two black cotton candy tufts emerging from a white tank top, and that’s all Ronnie notices about her—but they are no doubt remembering the last time they saw him, drunk and on roofies at some party, stumbling around in a KISS t-shirt and purple hair, Ronnie loudly, obnoxiously hitting on Lauren as they sat on the couch—awkward gropings, lunging kisses, lewd suggestions as Maggie seethed to his right and Karl seethed to Lauren’s left—culminating in Ronnie yelling for a ménage à trois, or, as Ronnie called it that night, a “double-team.” As in: “C’mon Lauren, double-team us! It’ll be awesome! We’re hip! Let’s do it!” An ugly scene ensued—Karl lunging at Ronnie over the couch, Lauren running off to cry, Maggie somehow separating the two before relatively sober heads prevailed. Ronnie passing out shortly afterward was the only thing that saved him from a deserved ass-whipping. Sincere apologies and pathetic pleading accomplished little; their friendship was never the same. Ronnie and Maggie broke up less than a month later, as Ronnie fell into a foul attitude upon meeting the real world after graduation—a real world that cared nothing about his opinions or the opinion column he wrote back in school—and at the same time, Maggie, just turning 21, was beautiful enough to try anything with almost anyone, because almost anyone was nicer and newer than Ronnie was anymore.
“What am I doing here.” Ronnie sighs. Throws up his hands. “I don’t know.” There is so much he wants to say, wishes he could say. With all the sincerity of his being, he adds, “It’s great seeing all of you again.”
Karl looks at his watch. Lauren yawns. “We gotta go,” Maggie says, starting to walk away. “Bye, Ronnie.”
“Wait!” Ronnie smiles. “Let’s go to the Holy Goof Lounge. Like we used to. We’ll get caught up.”
Karl and Lauren are already walking away, Karl holding an upraised left middle finger behind him.
Maggie steps back. “Take care of yourself, Ronnie.”
“Heyyyyyy,” Ronnie says in his best Fonztones, holding out his arms. Maggie tries not to smile, hurriedly bounces the few steps needed for the hug. It isn’t as long as Ronnie wants and needs, but it is long enough. The smell and the touch are so familiar, so warm and welcoming, so why can’t it be like it was?
“Be good in Gainesville,” Maggie says, stepping backwards, smiling at Ronnie—an unexpected smile, a tolerant, indulgent smile to their past—before turning around to catch Karl and Lauren.
“I’m trying,” Ronnie yells after her. Maybe she hears him, and maybe she even believes him.
Ronnie Altamont hangs around the Holy Goof Lounge with its cavernous walls and predictably beatnik décor as the jukebox plays the soundtracks to various spy films. He stays at the empty bar long enough to guzzle three beers in ten minutes. He steps back onto Orange Avenue, into the sea of Cat and the Hat hatted, pacifier sucking, raver youth. He finds his car, drives back to Kelly’s, eastbound through all the empty miles of Colonial Drive, to that subdivision on the opposite side of the UCF Research Park, where he will climb into a rickety guest bed, think, and not sleep.
•
John “Magic” Jensen opens the door to his first floor apartment, sees Ronnie and Kelly standing there, the traffic of four-lane Alafaya Trail whizzing twenty feet behind them.
“We-heh-heh-heh-heh-hell,” Magic says. “We-heh-heh-heh-heh-heh-heh-heh-heh-heh-hell. We-heh-heh-heh-heh-heh-heh-heh-heh-heh-heh-heh-heh-heh-heh-heh-heh-hell.”
“Shaddap,” Ronnie says, smiling.
“The prodigal son returns,” Magic says, arms akimbo. “We-heh-heh-heh-heh-heh-heh-heh-heh-hell . . . ”
Ronnie and Kelly step around him, into the living room. Saturday night. Beers at Magic’s before leaving for a collegiate party. A left turn from the entryway, and it’s the familiar smells of old cigarette smoke and stale junk food matching up perfectly to how Ronnie remembers this hazy long rectangle of a living room. Stained uncleanable brown carpeting, flashing Christmas tree lights running around the top, MC Escher prints on the walls everywhere you turn, broken up only by the collage art poster from the Dead Kennedys album Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables. The L-shaped blue couches—sagging, cat-clawed and burn-holed. The stereo plays The Flaming Lips. The television plays Saved by the Bell.
A right turn from the entryway, and it’s the fluorescent kitchen, with its gray walls covered in thrown pasta strands stuck like flat yellow hairballs, the unintentional science projects lurking in abandoned pots and pans on the stove, the case of Dusch Light in the fridge. Ronnie and Kelly go straight to the otherwise empty white Kenmore.
“To old time’s sake,” Kelly toasts, one cold damp easily-dented can into the other.
“To a regression to blissfully banal college weekends,” Ronnie toasts.
Magic stops laughing, steps into the kitchen, opens the fridge. “To dreadful parties filled with South Florida rich kids in striped Tommy shirts playing drinking games around coffeetables until someone inevitably throws up.”
“Ah, college memories,” Kelly says, and ev
eryone laughs.
Andrew “Randy Macho Man” Savage sees Ronnie and Kelly from the opposite side of the rectangled apartment, sets aside the whizzing Spin Art machine and the yellow paint he’s been glooping into it, runs towards them.
“Ronnie!” he yells, kissing Ronnie on the lips. “Oh wow! It’s so great you’re here! This is going to be the best night ever!” He grabs a glass from the cabinet, pours water, drinks, runs back to the Spin Art machine.
“Ecstasy,” Magic says. “But he didn’t buy enough to share.” Ronnie laughs, watching Randy Macho Man as he follows the splotchy yellow circles the Spin Art machine makes with each drip and drop, sweating even more than is normal on a Florida summer evening, eyes involuntarily rolling upward, but smiling, always smiling.
“So. Yeah,” Magic says, standing in the kitchen, hunched like he’s too tall for the kitchen’s short ceiling. “You better get ready, Ronnie. This party is going to be so great, you’ll move back here, post-haste.”
The three of them move to the L-shaped couch. “So did you find a job up there yet?” Magic asks.
“No,” Ronnie says, feeling the familiar contours of the couch, cushions that rewarded slouching.
“That’s great, man!” Randy Macho Man says, running from the kitchen and back every two minutes, filling and refilling a green glass of water. Ronnie sits between Kelly and Magic, Randy sits on the small part of the L-shaped couch, twitching with joy.
“So basically you’re the same brokeass you were before, only now you’re doing it a hundred miles away?” Magic asks. Kelly laughs at this. “And this is why the band is over? And this is why you’ve moved back?”
Ronnie sighs, chugs five greedy gulps from the silver Dusch Light can. “I can’t stand it here. Gainesville’s better. By far.”
Losing in Gainesville (9781940430331) Page 19
