The answering machine message: “Ronnie! Where are you?!” Maux. “Call me. Fucker.”
Ronnie: “Naw naw naw . . . haw haw haw . . . just my crazy friend . . . you know.”
They kiss: Tobacco tongue. Booze breath. Long. Lithe. Nineteen. Hey Nineteen.
She unsmooches her lips: “Wait a second,” she whispers, smiles, trots off across the living room.
The Who: On the stereo. Pictures of Lily . . . Lily oh Lileee . . . Lily oh Lileee . . . pictures of Lily and that fucking French horn solo that slays him every single time he hears it.
Kelly and Caroline: That’s her name. Caroline. She was the girl who was “older.” Twenty-one. That’s how they all met. They bounce up and down on couches, trying to match the rhythm of the songs.
Kelly: A frenzy of sweat and rolling eyeballs. Chemically-induced happiness.
The fifth: Floridian Comfort. The bottle is on the coffeetable. The girl—hey, nineteen—she weaves around Kelly and Caroline, reaches for the bottle. Glug, glug, glug.
That’s how they met: Kelly took the weekend off. Fled to Gainesville with a wafer of ecstasy and a dot of mescaline. Fueled accordingly, he charms—and later, he quite literally charms the pants off of (hey-oh!)—Caroline, who’s in the XYZ Liquor Store buying a fifth of whiskey for her underage friend, who waits outside in the car. Kelly tells her there’s a “party” at Ronnie’s, and she believes him. (Later, in less-trusting environments, Ronnie will think back on moments like these, when you could simply talk to a couple girls at a stupid liquor store and somehow get them back to your house on the flimsiest of pretenses, and maybe it isn’t even the environment, but the age, because the immediate shame of the next day will pass, and years on, it’s a fond memory of capital-Y Youth.) Ronnie and Kelly, they walk back with the twelver of Old Hamtramck, Kelly going on and on about “That Nnnnnugget!” Ronnie didn’t get a look at whatshername, and what is her name? At Gatorroni’s, as Kelly still goes on and on about the different things that happened—this antic, that antic—her name comes back to Ronnie.
Her name: Laney. Of course! Laneylaneylaneylaneylaneylaney! Oh, of course! Yes.
Anyway: Laney skips (yes, skips) back to Ronnie, stops in front of him, raises the bottle to her lips, drinks. She tells Ronnie how much she actually likes the burn of the Floridian Comfort. People are always talking about how they hate the burn. They can’t drink the way Laney drinks. To which Ronnie, drunk and giggly, replies, quote, “Haw haw haw yeah!” She’s back on his lap, and Ronnie, who doesn’t really have an opinion one way or the other about the burn of Floridian Comfort, glug glug glugs, sets the bottle on the end table, stares at the blinking light on the answering machine, and Maux and her message contained therein, burps, mutters the common Floridian axiom, “Fuck it, dude,” kisses Laney’s neck, up to the side of her face, and then she turns, opens her lips, and again, the tobacco tongue, the booze breath.
As The Who mixtape plays on: spiders named Boris, pictures of Lily, teenage wastelands, squeeze boxes, and whoooooo are youuu, who-who who-who, who cares, because this is it—too easy, too perfect, too Gainesville—and it’s Ronnie and Laney there on the loveseat—Mwah! Mwah! Mwah!—her tongue the sour ashy taste of bilish alkeehal and too many cigarettes and Ronnie loveloveloves it, his brain spinning “Wheeee!”, “Yeeeessss!” his heart pumping “Goooooooooooooooo!” and The Who calls it a bargain, the best I ever had, and Moonie’s drums crash and smash and pummel.
Kelly: Tells Ronnie how this was one of the best nights of his life, no shit, dude, as Ronnie sits there in a throb-stab hangover and “Take it to the Limit” still bouncing around in his head, unable to comprehend how last night was that big of a deal. This is how it goes anymore. Kelly tells him how it seems like “amazing” things are starting to happen for Ronnie here in Gainesville, noting that he even bought the food today, and Ronnie has to acknowledge that, yes, it’s better than it was, but still.
Meh: Ronnie, he wants to shake Kelly and scream, “So what!?” Maybe it’s the “come down” The Who are always singing about in Quadrophenia, or these things you slowly learn over time that have to be experienced over and over again before one can actually question the heretofore foregone conclusion that getting lllllllloaded and getting into some sexual (to use the clinical term) hanky-panky is innately fascinating and worthy of so much of your time. Because Ronnie, he feels like the wild oats, maybe they’re finally sewn. And this is the age when one should be fighting the good fight, you know? Join up with the Anarchists in the Spanish Civil War. Teach and inspire a class of underprivileged children. Manage a ragtag scrappy underdog little league team and take them to the championships. Something. Anything. To put ideals into action. To put aside whatever the Bible said about “childish things.” Hedonism. Guilt and shame over this bandless, novelless floundering, of having lived this kind of life several lifetimes over, sweating and groaning in the stupid pointless hungover imbalance of the late afternoon after.
What Ronnie doesn’t tell Kelly: How, much later in the night, well past the time the condom performed its final float and bob in the toilet water before being spiraled away forever, hours into the curled away post-coital pass out, Ronnie wakes up to the sounds of Laney’s violent heaving and vomiting of the Floridian Comfort. So much for loving the burn.
Something else Ronnie doesn’t tell Kelly: How the early morning sun shone through his windows like a tawdry blue leisure suit.
And another thing: Her tattoos suck. Same with the nose ring. They mar this otherwise beautiful girl. Hey, Nineteen.
And: When Ronnie shut off the tape that had been flipping back and forth all night, she asks, in a soft voice, not worn ragged and haggard—yet—from one-too-many nights likes these, “What is this we’ve been listening to?” He told her. Flipper on one side. Television on the other. “Never heard of them,” Laney said. “Of either of them.” Yup. Hey, Nineteen.
Actually: The morning ain’t that bad, really. They mumble smalltalk. Some laughs. She writes down her phone number on a piece of scrap paper on his desk, but they know, they both know.
Ronnie’s bedroom: It reeked of everything wrong and everything stupid about last night.
Kelly: After pizza, they walk back to Myrrh House. Kelly goes back into his truck and drives off, away, back to Orlando, still so so so stoked about everything.
Ronnie: Stretched out on the couch, waiting for the hangover to pass, cursing the meh of it all. Ok, maybe not profound acts of heroism, but the unrelenting thought that he should be giving something back to the world, already. This life in Gainesville, it can’t last. As good as it is, as good as it can be, too much of it is downright purgatorial. It can’t go on like this. There’s too much to see and do and be.
CLOWN VILLAGE
Ronnie wants to be left alone. He wants to hide in his room and read this Henry Miller book. He wants to stretch across this old brown musty cowboy couch, listen to Flipper and Television, crack open the novel, get to the part when ol’ Hank goes off on wild tangents on the cosmology of vaginal desire, or whatever. His room is the only place to hide; to even set foot in the living room means having to hang out with Roger; to even set foot onto NW 4th Lane means running into neighbors; and don’t even think about walking down 13th Street or University. The acquaintances are everywhere, and they will distract Ronnie from Serious Business. Ronnie considers himself, at his core, to be a Very Serious Person, with Very Serious Concerns. He needs more quiet nights. Instead, he wastes time with strange women, goes with the flow, passively follows along for the ride.
Ronnie Altamont is undisciplined. No shit, Sherlock.
The people who surround him now, many a year or two away from college graduation, never seem to do anything—sitting around for hours and hours watching movies, talking about nothing much at all besides this little world and the people who populate it—but they still pull off straight As and keep near-4.0 GPAs. Ronnie was never that kind of smart. Only by shutting himself off from the world could he get anything
done. When he thinks of all the writing he needs to do, but not only that, all the necessary reading he needs to do, the imagined work takes on the shape of a mammoth, stratospheric pile, because he must read, to figure out how he can tell his stories and what he should tell about his stories and even if the stories are worth telling. Nights like these, Ronnie regrets not following Kelly’s initial advice, and moving straight to Chicago instead of this Gainesville detour, because, really, what can Gainesville teach him that five years at the University of Central Florida hasn’t already? And to even think about what is really worth telling, because nobody thinks goofs like him ever have anything meaningful to say about the world. This life in Florida, it lacks depth, importance, what DH Lawrence called “le grand sérieux.” It’s a sheltered life in a part of the world many consider to be “paradise,” where his only true escape and source of adventure has come through playing in bands, which in itself is a kind of luxury many in the world don’t get. There is nothing to see here, nothing to tell. Ronnie has been giving serious thought to giving it up. “It has all been said before,” he thinks, and laughs to himself because “It has all been said before” has been said so many times before.
Ronnie closes the Henry Miller, closes his eyes. He starts to fall asleep when he hears a pounding on the front door, followed by squeals from a recorder, maraca shakes, clanky pots and pans, and Paul’s voice, singing in the same melody as Andy Williams’ “Moon River,” “Clowwwwwwwwwwwwn Villlllage!” Feminine laughter. Cacophony from the recorder, the maraca, the pots and pans. Paul’s voice, again, only this time, imitating Luther from The Warriors, “Alllltamahhhhhhhhhhnt. Come out to . . . play-yayyyyyyyyyy!”
“Why does everybody imitate that guy in that movie?” Ronnie thinks.
“Please don’t open it,” Ronnie whispers, staring at the plaster cracks in the ceiling, hearing Roger’s heavy-fast trod to the front door.
The door opens. “Where is he? Where is he?” Paul yells, stepping through the Myrrh House front door. He knocks, opens, steps inside Ronnie’s room, flanked by Icy Filet on one side, who shakes an avocado-shaped maraca, and Siouxsanna Siouxsanne, blowing into a recorder.
“He’s reading!” Paul says, pointing at Ronnie. “Reading!” Paul steps to the couch, stands over Ronnie. “Altamont! There’s no reading in Clown Village! We’re getting you out of here.” Paul pulls at Ronnie’s left arm, sings, “We’re taking you back to . . . Clooowwwwwwn Villllllage.” He bends over, picks up the Henry Miller book off the floor. “Reading!” he scoffs. Paul tosses the book to his left, where it plops onto the loveseat between the closet and the bathroom.
Ronnie sits up, stands, sighs. “There better be beer in Clown Village,” he says.
“Rrrrrronnie Altamont, we’re lllllloaded,” Siouxsanna Siouxsanne says, punctuating this with shrill free jazz recorder squeals. She takes Ronnie by the right hand. “You have a fun name to say, Rrrrrronie Alllllllllltamont. It’s as fun as singing Clowwwwwwn Villlllllage! I’m llllllloaded.”
Shaking off the sleepiness and the solitude, Ronnie follows them into the living room. Roger stands in the middle of the room, looking through a video camera. “I think I need to document Clown Village,” he says.
“You fucking better,” Paul says, then sings yet again, “Clowwwwwn Villlllage!”
“Clowwwwwwwn Villlllllllage!” Ronnie repeats.
“That’s it, Altamont! That’s the stuff,” Paul says, and the five of them step out of the Myrrh House.
“I llllllllike you,” Siouxsanna Siouxsanne says, still holding Ronnie’s hand.
Clown Village is two blocks east of the Myrrh House, and it bears a striking resemblance to Paul’s house. In a tiny dingy living room with white wallpaper made out of 8½ʺ by 11ʺ show fliers from the six years Paul has lived in Gainesville, fifteen people—among them, Neal and Mouse—smoosh around a battered coffeetable crowded with several large jugs of cheap wine. Randomly, people yell-sing “Clowwwwwwwn Villlllllage!” in different keys, different tones, over the din of maracas, pots and pans, crash and ride cymbals on stands, drum sticks, tambourines, kazoos, slide whistles.
Ronnie steps up, joins in, bellowing “Clowwwwwwwwwwn Villlllliiiiiiiiidge” in the falsetto timbre of Jello Biafra from the Dead Kennedys.
“Best Jello Biafra imitation in town,” Neal announces, running to Ronnie, raising his right arm in the air like a cham-peen prize fighter.
Everyone cheers. Ronnie is sincerely honored by this.
Siouxsanna Siouxsanne is seated to Ronnie’s left. She wears a green knee-length dress, barefoot. Ronnie turns to her, smiles.
“I’m lllllllloaded!” Siouxsanna Siouxsanna announces, holding a glass coffee mug filled with red wine in her non-recorder holding hand.
“Oh yeah?” Ronnie says, stepping closer, standing over her.
“Yeah, Rrrrronnie! I am!”
“Good! Because, tomorrow, I’m taking you to Long John Silver’s for brunch!” Ronnie grabs a jug off the coffee table, hoists it in a “Cheers.”
Siouxsanna Siouxsanne stands, wraps her arms around Ronnie’s neck, kisses him on the left cheek. “I lllove this guy!” she announces. “At first, I wasn’t sure, but now?” She falls backwards onto the couch. Her eyes close, her head bobs up and down like somebody’s uncle trying not to fall asleep on the couch watching the sixth inning of an unremarkable baseball game.
Ronnie laughs, steps through his friends yelling “Clown Village!” meanwhile making an unlistenable cacophony of percussive clanks and honky squonks. He finds the tiny bathroom. The mirror is above the toilet. He catches his reflection as he empties his bladder, and the thought—wine-fueled as it is—hits Ronnie so hard, he has to say it aloud:
“This is our music.”
Ornette Coleman said it, and Galaxie 500 said it, and now Ronnie Altamont is saying it, and while he always knew what it meant—now, he really and truly knows what it means. He squirts out the last of it, flushes, zips up, washes his hands, keeps repeating, “This is our music . . . this is our music!” loving how you can vary the accented word, and it always works.
He rejoins the party, screams “Clowwwwn Villllage” still in a Biafra timbre, because he accepts that this is his role in this mess. The song has taken on a dirgelike quality now that everyone is beyond drunken stupor. What is the point of it? No one knows, nor cares. When Ronnie asks Paul a couple nights from now over at Gatorroni’s what he thinks Clown Village meant, he shrugs and says, “I was bored. It sounded like a funny idea at the time.”
Ronnie is so taken with this idea running through his head and what it means, he doesn’t care that by the time he returns to the couch, Siouxsanna Siouxsanne and Neal are kissing, fooling around. He needs to leave Clown Village, walk back to the Myrrh House, and ponder the epic possibilities of “This is Our Music.”
Which he does, wine-drunk and beyond happy, as the shredded voices and worn-out arms fade with each step away from Clown Village. The fog, the angst, the self-doubt disappear like the deep dark puddles on the roads those Florida summer afternoons when it rains for one hour and one hour only, and just as quick, the roads are dry again. In the Sweat Jam life, the stories are here. Right here. This is what he has and this is what he knows. Our music is the racket of Clown Village. Our music is the way Siouxsanna Siouxsanne says the word “llllllllloaded.” Our music is Maux’s studied misanthropy, Paul’s slacker buffoonery, Icy Filet’s hip-hop ambitions. It’s these flailing, brooding, self-absorbed, jovial, worry-free, generally happy motions up and down this good-enough purgatory along the one-lane streets of the student ghetto of Gainesville. Our music is All of This, and while none of it seems the stuff of Great Literature, it’s Our Music, and here is the time and place. They have their music, and Ronnie has his.
It’s this. It’s All of This.
One would think Ronnie, upon entering his house, would immediately run to the typewriter and begin to try and tell his stories, liberated as he believed he was from all litmag ambitions and English Departme
nt hang-ups on Big Lives and Big Themes. And indeed, inspired as he was, he ran to the kitchen, grabbed an Old Hamtramck tallboy from the fridge, took a seat at the desk in his bedroom, turned on the typewriter, opened the beer, drank the beer, and typed
“THIS IS OUR MUSIC”
in all-caps, because it was very important and should be typed as such. Unsure of what to say next, he turned on the Flipper/Television dubbed tape on the stereo, walked to his mattresses, plopped over, and passed out.
SHIT FROM AN OLD NOTEBOOK
“September 9, 1996. 9:30 p.m.
“There is no future in rock music; writing is where it’s at. I don’t want to be 35, with my life over, reminiscing about a tour, some records, etc. Reminiscing and living in the past is not the way I want to live. The past, and the people who were a part of it, tend to go their way, and I go mine.”
PORTLAND PATTY
Portland Patty wants to believe Ronnie Altamont is different as she watches him roll out of her bed and shuffle across the creaking hardwood floor on bare feet, out the bedroom into the hallway light, used condom between thumb and index finger like the tail of an unwanted fish on the verge of getting tossed back into the lake. She hears the toilet flush, the spray of the faucet, on, then off. Squeaking footsteps returning. His naked silhouette does not reveal the crumpled, unwashed clothing, the dirt eating into the sides of his glasses, the stubbly short black hair, the wine stains and condiment flakes caked around his mouth. What can she do with someone like this? So typical of Gainesville, but then again—maybe, she hopes—not at all.
Ronnie climbs back into this queen-sized bed that has been half-empty for far too long. While this little house and this little patch of dirty flat front yard conspire with the palm trees and the sunshine to remind her she is a long way from home—in distance, in time—here in bed, she can almost believe she’s back home in Portland, but only if Ronnie Altamont is really and truly different.
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