Losing in Gainesville (9781940430331)

by Costello, Brian

  “Are you staying?” Portland Patty asks.

  “Is that ok?” Ronnie asks through the narcoleptic groan of wine-sleep.

  “Sure,” she says, trying to sound unconcerned, noncommittal. She stares into the darkness, a long way from home. “I mean, I don’t mind, but what are you going to say to Maux?”

  Portland Patty looks to her left, to Ronnie. His answer is a snore, a phlegmatically redundant inhale and exhale. In her own wine-spiral, Portland Patty remains unsure of what, if anything, she can possibly do with a boy like this.

  •

  “Roger says you’re sleazy,” Portland Patty says, the next morning, as Ronnie stretches out his legs and yawns, trying to piece together how he ended up here in this bed, an actual bed, off the ground and everything, grateful for the Saturday morning and its lack of merciless snooze buttons. Portland Patty reclines to his right, hand propping head up. “He also says you drink too much, and you’re moody. Other than that though, he says you’re a nice guy.”

  “That so?” Ronnie laughs. “He told me you were an acid casualty.” He turns to face Portland Patty. Green eyes peeking out of lower back-length straight blonde-brown hair. He had forgotten what it was like to be with a girl with long hair. Lanky-long, with tattoos covering all the skin from the right wrist to the right shoulder, swirls, patterns, reds, blacks, blues. “He says you’re weird and kind’ve a hippie and that you’ve done too many drugs and they scattered your brain.”

  Portland Patty laughs a hearty insincere “Oh ho ho then!” and adds, “Must have. Why else would I have ended up waking up next to you?”

  “Hey-ohhhh!” Ronnie says, in his best Ed MacMahon bellow, tossing the thin red blanket over her head, this blanket that had provided unneeded warmth as they slept off the drink through another night of Florida’s endless late summer.

  “But he also said you were nice,” Ronnie added.

  “With friends like these . . . ”

  “Um, who needs dildos?” Ronnie finished.

  Portland Patty laughs, sincerely laughs this time, at the stupid-strange joke. There is a refreshing lack of awkwardness to this morning-after. In bed, unclothed and hungover, talking in a leisurely back-and-forth.

  “So why do they call you ‘Portland Patty?’ ”

  “Why do you think?”

  “You’re from Portland?”

  “That’s right, Ronnie Altamont. I am from Portland.”

  “Oregon? Maine?”

  “Oregon.”

  “That’s a long way to go. School?”

  “I had to get out of Portland,” she says, conspiratorially. “I had a lot of trouble in that town. ”

  “Really?”

  Portland Patty laughs. “No. It was school. I wanted to live someplace different. And it doesn’t get much different than this.”

  “Fine, but why not just Patty?”

  “There’s already a Punk Rock Patty, a Puking Patty, a New Orleans Patty, and a Heroin Patty. Having a Portland in front of my name separates me from these. It makes it easier to gossip, as people like to do here, as I’m sure you’ve noticed.”

  “Yeah. Totally.” Ronnie leans forward, shakes his head. “Sleazy? My roommate called me sleazy?”

  “What’s this I hear about you and Maux?”

  “He told you about her too?” Ronnie rolls his eyes, blurts out “That fucker!” before he can stop himself.

  “No. He didn’t. She’s crazy.”

  “She’s not crazy. She’s ludicrous. How do you know about it?”

  “I’ve seen you two around. At parties. At shows. She’s crazy. If she’s not crazy, she’s mean.”

  “Nah, she’s just ludicrous. And I should break off whatever it is we’ve been doing. It hasn’t been much.”

  “Do what you want,” Portland Patty says.

  “Right now? I want to go back to sleep,” Ronnie says. Instead, he stretches out in bed once more, still trying to piece together what happened yesterday, and how he ended up here.

  Portland Patty leaves the bedroom, steps into the kitchen to make coffee, too sleepy, too hungover, too soon, to decide if Ronnie Altamont is different.

  •

  Yesterday. Ronnie was relaxing across the larger of the two beige couches in the living room, reading some book about the seven habits of highly effective Celestine Prophets. As the perfect fusion of the self-help and pop mysticism genres, this was a popular book in the mid-1990s. Not that Ronnie wanted to be like a highly effective Celestine Prophet; one of Ronnie’s co-workers at some point (in one of the dozens of jobs he blew through at the time) lent it to him upon finding out that Ronnie Altamont enjoyed reading. These are always the books co-workers lend you when they find out you like reading. It was an otherwise boring Friday afternoon. With the semester underway, the temp job at the used college bookstore was winding down. Ronnie was reduced from a high of 60 hours three weeks ago, to 20 hours this week, with ten next week, and it’ll be five after that, before a somewhat sad parting, as it’s been one of the better gigs Ronnie has held.

  On the smaller of the two beige couches, Roger leaned into his handheld tape recorder, communicating valuable insights, as some Finnish film played on television.

  “As a metaphor for nuclear holocaust, Djkajollskjoldj’s masterful use of taxidermied animals in an abandoned hunting lodge suggests the indomitable force that is life itself, even in the midst of such large-scale annihilation. Furthermore, when—”

  “We gotta go,” Ronnie said, closing the book, flinging it behind him into the open space between the front door and the couches.

  “You made me lose my thought, Ronnie,” Roger said, setting the microphone onto the coffeetable, turning off the tape recorder. “I have a paper due.”

  “It was a bad thought anyway,” Ronnie says, standing. “Let’s go to Orlando.”

  Roger paused the VCR, freezing the Finnish film on the split image of a mushroom cloud and a stuffed grizzly bear towering over a crying little girl with blonde braids. “Orlando. Why?”

  “It’s Friday?” Ronnie said.

  “That’s not a good reason,” Roger answered, moving to unpause the remote.

  “I need to pick up a final check I never received from the asbestos gig. If I pick it up today, I can cash it. I’ll buy you dinner.”

  Roger stopped the VCR; the TV screen changed to blue. “Let’s go. Whatever. That was a dumb movie anyway.”

  “There ya go, dude . . . That’s the stuff, the spirit, the ol’ whathaveyou,” Ronnie said, grabbing his keys off the mantle.

  They stepped out of the house. Ronnie locked the front door. This girl with long brown-blonde hair, a black t-shirt with the stark fundamentalist white lettering of a local hardcore band, and frayed black pants cut off right above the knees pedaled up to them on her bike. There were always people like her in the Gainesville Student Ghetto, riding down these streets, looking for something to do, people to talk to, conspirators in the time-killing.

  Roger waved. “Hey Portland Patty,” he said. “We’re going to Orlando for the afternoon. Ya wanna go?”

  “Ok,” she said. With that, she locked her bike to a post holding up the roof’s overhang above the front door.

  “Don’t think about it,” Roger muttered to Ronnie as Portland Patty moved ahead of them.

  “Think about what?” Ronnie said, already running to the car to unlock it for Portland Patty, to open it for Portland Patty, to turn on the charm and introduce himself to Portland Patty, who smiled and shook his hand before climbing into the back seat of the blandy apple green sedan.

  “Good,” Roger said.

  Southbound. Gainesville gives way to Payne’s Prairie, and the immense prairie gives way to the horse farms. Through the rear view mirror of his blandy apple green sedan, Ronnie steals glances at Portland Patty. The omnipresent Florida sun has given her complexion a brown-freckled tint around her green eyes. Freckles dot her long narrow nose, and the lips . . . the lips the lips the lips . . . neither thick nor
thin but with a kind of citrusy juiciness, exaggerated perfectly by an overbite and two slightly bucked front teeth.

  Portland Patty stares out the window at the passing scenery. All three of them are silent, lost in the reverie of the trafficless road winding through the jungles, the open spaces, the giant skies, the hotels, the motels, the timeshares, the billboards, the swamps, all the wonders of an almost-homeland viewed through dirty windows, their silence layered by the sounds of the full-blasted air-conditioner, and the Arizona-echo of the Meat Puppets’ second album, its cavernous country-punk ricochets bouncing and rolling through the hiss of an old cassette, always the perfect soundtrack to the Florida countryside.

  Not until they enter Greater Orlando, as the hypnotic tranquil countryside is broken up by the spectacle of the endless commercial districts, does anyone speak.

  “So. How do you like Orlando?” Ronnie asks, looking at Portland Patty through the rear view mirror as they wait at the 87th stoplight at State Road 436.

  “I feel like a part of my soul has been stripped away,” she says, as off-handedly as if she were discussing a slight change in the weather. “Not to sound too dramatic or anything.”

  “No,” Roger says. “There’s a lot of nothing in this everything.”

  Ronnie takes in the intersections, the gas stations and churches and plazas and parking lots. “I can’t beat it up anymore,” he says. “I’ve lived here. I know what it is. It’s a city of cheap salesmen, of swampland realtors who pitch their mission statements like eighth graders bullshitting their way through book reports.”

  Traffic scoots forward, ever-so-slowly. “Yikes,” Portland Patty says.

  “Not to sound cynical or anything,” Ronnie adds, smiling, fearing he’s blown it.

  “Can I use that in one of my screenplays?” Roger asks. He turns around to face Portland Patty. “You know I write screenplays, right?”

  “No, I didn’t,” Portland Patty says.

  “Yeah, I’ve written several so far. Mainly, I’m concerned—perhaps even obsessed to a fault, with the struggle of the individual in a consumer-driven . . . ”

  “Yeah, you can use that in your next screenplay,” Ronnie interrupts, turning up the Meat Puppets. Portland Patty laughs.

  Ronnie finds the asbestos removal office, located in the back of an industrial park. There’s no one there he recognizes. AQ is on a site. Tommy and Bassanovich are in college now, presumably learning the truth about the pussy in the great Middle Western college towns.

  Ronnie cashes his check, takes Roger and Portland Patty to an appalling Mexican restaurant on 436 called Jalapeño Larry’s. Roger sits across from Ronnie, Portland Patty to his right. Jalapeño Larry’s was close enough to UCF, and Ronnie would often take Maggie there for dinner. They basked in the ridiculousness of it. Mexican restaurants are always bad when they have a Spanish name every gringo can understand. Ronnie loves the idea of taking Portland Patty and Roger here. So bad, it’s great.

  The server is one of those insanely unreal polyethylene types you find in almost every restaurant in Orlando, trained to pretend like the very idea of serving you your food and reading lines from the script dictated from Corporate is putting her on the verge of the greatest orgasm of her life. Hot sauce on the table with names like “Sandman Unsane’s Tex-Mex Weapon of Ass Destruction” and “Colonel Capscium’s Dirty Dawg Poblanogeddon.” Lite alternative rock on satellite radio. Walls of televisions, literal walls of televisions making laser noises as they go from one sports highlight to the next, reported by some smug douche from the Northeast. This dining area, one of countless autopiloted nightmares masquerading as a good-time party atmosphere here in Central Florida.

  On the back of the menu, “El Statement del Mission.” Ronnie flips his menu over, points, says, “Here. Read this. Everything you need to know about Orlando is right here.”

  The chips and salsa are served. Ronnie, Portland Patty, and Roger read “El Statement”:

  “Jalapeño Larry’s is an Acapulco-style cantina del fiesta specializing in distinctive frozen drinks. These drinks are created by an expert team of experienced bar operators and are hand mixed with pride.

  “The décor of Jalapeño Larry’s is designed to inspire laid back thoughts of an amazing tropical environment. The beautiful faux roof around the bar is reminiscent of sitting on the porch of a Mexican bungalow, and the mix of tropical colors and light woods creates a relaxing and welcoming feeling. Tongue and cheek warning signs about the potency of Jalapeño Larry’s frozen drinks add humor to the walls, along with photographs of partygoers of the past and present. Lighthearted Acapulco-inspired artworks cover the downstairs dance floor walls as well as the balcony upstairs. With over 55 televisions, a sound system, and a state-of-the-art intelligent light show, Jalapeño Larry’s is the perfect location to have some drinks and dance until morning.

  “For lunch or dinner, la cocina at Jalapeño Larry’s can’t be beat. Our tacos, burritos, and quesadillas are made-to-order, and for the health conscience [sic], there are many vegetarian options, including our world-renowned Caeser [sic] Salad.

  “While you are sitting at the bar you will notice the famous wall of frozen drinks. Perhaps the most well-known (and well-consumed) of these celebrated concoctions is something we call “The Suicide.” With five liquors and five fruit juices, you have never experienced a frozen drink like this.

  “Although Jalapeño Larry’s is an easygoing hangout spot, by nightfall the nightlife party atmosphere in Jalapeño Larry’s can rival any local entertainment venue. Whether it’s “fantastico” food, “loco” DJs, drinking games, talented local musicians, unique frozen cocktails, famous drink specials, titillating servers and bartenders, or just a place to have a drink, Jalapeño Larry’s is what you’re looking for.”

  “I was thinking about maybe getting a distinctive frozen drink from the famous wall—and maybe even having the unique experience of drinking ‘The Suicide,’ ” Ronnie says, “But that sign over there says, ‘Slippery When Wasted,’ and I don’t want to hurt myself.”

  “Relax, Ron,” Roger says. “It’s a tongue and cheek sign. That means you won’t—really—get slippery when wasted.”

  “Yeah, Ronnie,” Portland Patty adds. “Relax. You should be inspired to have laid back thoughts by the design.”

  “You’re right,” Ronnie says. “I’m a little worked up here, but who can blame me? I’m in anticipation of the intelligent light show. I’m so sick of light shows that are a little bit on the dumb side, if you know what I mean.”

  “Who isn’t?” Portland Patty says. She’s never been to Orlando before. It seems like the type of place where irony was your best defense. “For my part, as a vegan and therefore health conscious, I want my only option, the, uh, See-zer Salad.”

  “But the dressing probably has anchovies,” Roger says, “and it has paramesan--”

  “Yeah, I know,” Portland Patty says. “Guess I’m guacin’ it.”

  As they talk like this, their “titillating server” arrives, announcing, in the loud sportscaster tone of the Very White, “Alright, Señors y Señorita! Here are your implausibly extreme frozen drinks!” Ronnie receives his plastic cup of Rebel Yeller, described in the menu as “A muy loco blend of FloCo, SoCo, Margarita Mix, with a dash of casselberry juice.” Roger receives his plastic cup of Fun y Spontaneity, described in the menu as, “Jalapeño Larry sez: ‘Me gusta this intoxicating mix of Everclear, Lime Gatorade, and Absolut Nectarine vodka!’ ” Portland Patty receives her plastic cup of Hace Mucho Calor y Frio, described in the menu as “So cool, it’s hot, so hot, it’s cool, this certifiably awesome blended drink combines Crème de Menthe, Crème de Cacao, vermouth, tequila, and a few secret ingredients from our ‘Instituto del Bebido’ that is guar-olé!-teed to leave you in an ecstasy of sweats and shivers.”

  Ronnie raises his plastic cup, smiles. “To Gainesville,” he says.

  “Cheers,” Roger and Portland Patty say, pressing their cups into his.

 
“So why did you take us here?” Portland Patty asks after a wincing sip from her Hace Mucho Calor y Frio.

  “What?” Ronnie extends his arms, looks around. “You don’t like it?”

  “It’s fine, I guess,” Portland Patty says. “I don’t know, I’m thinking there has to be better places. Does this have sentimental value for you?”

  Ronnie looks away, to one of the unavoidable TVs. What he doesn’t want to talk about is, how when these stupid drinks kicked in, how hard they would laugh, how every volley back and forth between Ronnie and Maggie was some kind of comedy gem in a language only they could understand. They were the kinds of inside jokes where they would choke and howl and snort and cough and gasp, so funny to them and only them. Ronnie isn’t going to discuss it.

  “Ronnie hates Orlando,” Roger says. “He thinks he’s some kind of dissident, or like an exile, living in Gainesville. There are plenty of places we could have gone. There’s a strip of Vietnamese restaurants here that are awesome, but Ronnie would rather find a place that proves his point.”

  “Oh, touché,” Ronnie says, sneering, booze already kicking in. He grabs a handful of tortilla chips, throws them at Roger’s head. Roger laughs, tosses the chips aside, combs out his hair.

  “You think you’re an exile?” Portland Patty says. “Try living here when you’re from Portland.”

  “People always come to Gainesville from Portland,” Roger says. “It’s like a whistle stop on the Trustafarian circuit.”

  “Whatever,” Portland Patty says. “Anyway, none of this,” and here, she extends her hands out to the décor of Jalapeño Larry’s, out to the concrete beyond the restaurant, “is Gainesville. We can agree on that, right?”

  “No,” Ronnie says. “It isn’t.”

  “I’ve been everywhere,” Portland Patty continues. “Not much out there is better than Gainesville.”

  “That’s fucking depressing,” Roger says.

  “Maybe it is,” Ronnie says. “I mean look at this.” Ronnie points at the menu. “Even these menus. This desperate striving idiocy of these United States.”