Losing in Gainesville (9781940430331)

by Costello, Brian

  •

  “Steal the cue / achieve succeed / place in line / position it in time / make the effort / hey it's worth the effort / sure it's worth the effort / A conversation / a contradiction / you make no sense / you got no position / what you need is a validation / go ahead you got my permission”

  —Minutemen, “Validation”

  “No no no, look: It’s like, because of last night, I figured it out. What I need to be doing,” Ronnie says, as Ronnie plus you, Neal, and Paul plow through your fifth pitcher of Old Hamtramck, in the middle of a twelve-hour all-you-can-drink Happy Hour at Unknown Pleasurez, a New Wave-themed danceclub on University east of Main that has, for today, transformed into a sports bar, because the Florida Gators football team are winning . . . something? The SEC? The National Championship? You don’t know nor care, and of your friends, only Mitch is interested. And he’s

  off watching it at a real sports bar with his jock-tendencied Tommy Hilfiger-shirted friends from back home. But for today, because business is business and so on and so forth, the TVs here at Unknown Pleasurez that are normally tuned to static—because that’s, as any UCF fraternity lad in the early 1990s would tell you, alternative and like . . . post-modern?—are tuned to the channel broadcasting The Big Game.

  “Ok. What?” you moan, sigh, can barely hide your annoyance with Ronnie. Not so much with Ronnie, but with so much talking-talking-talking right now. After all, it has been a twenty-four hour binge of—what?—beer, whiskey, Jaeger, pot, coke, hash, Xanax, Vicodin, with maybe a quick nap on a couch along the way—to Happy New Year Dude, to more of this, to bloody marys, to here, the twentieth bar or party you’ve been to since getting off work at 4:00 p.m. yesterday.

  “What what?” Ronnie says.

  Sigh. “What do you need to be doing?”

  “William’s a little bit tired,” Paul says. “In case you haven’t noticed.”

  “I think we’re all pretty spent here, Ron,” Neal says. “So tell us why today is different from any other day in your life . . . ”

  Ronnie, in the shaky gray twitch of an acid hangover, isn’t any less exhausted than the rest of you, but in the mania of no-sleep, coupled with the recent addition of Old Hamtramck on draft, he begins talking and talking and talking, as the dozens at the bar and the surrounding tables cheer and slow handclap the touchdown on the screens.

  Like so many, Ronnie exaggerates and romanticizes the insights and epiphanies he claims to have had while on acid, either forgetting or refusing to discuss the nightmarish aspects to it—the dark thoughts, the insufferable paranoia, the joyless hallucinations. You’ve heard variations of this story for so long now. Some drug “cleaned the slate”—and Ronnie will use that expression no less than five times in this spiel. From what you can gather, last night Ronnie figured out that he really-really wants to be a writer, that, once again, he feels the possibilities of life, of what can still be accomplished as they face down baby New Year 1997. He woke up his roommate Roger to tell him this very important news, but Roger (sensibly) moaned and went back to sleep.

  Even if it’s a cloudy pale gray day, all the colors in the spectrum are so much brighter in Gainesville today, because Ronnie has finally figured out to move on from his past in Gainesville, and his past in Orlando, and it’s a new day, and it’s time to do it, time to go for it, this is it, it’s time to be a writer, blah blah blah blah blah, because that’s why he’s on this earth—to write—he needs to write and write and . . .

  “Well go then!” you say.

  “Go where, William?” Ronnie says.

  “Go write,” William says. “I like you, but all you’re doing is talking right now. You’re not writing. You’re wasting time. With us. You’re wasting time. Here.” And as you extend your hands, gesturing, Ronnie gives a confused look around, like he doesn’t know if you mean Unknown Pleasurez, or Gainesville. “You don’t even have a pen with you, do you?”

  Ronnie doesn’t even bother with putting his hands to his pockets. Shakes his head.

  “Ronnie. Go. Go write.”

  •

  Ronnie walks down University, crazy University where, like all over Gainesville, cheers are erupting. Cars line up and down the street, honking their horns, drunks hanging out of windows screaming “WE’RE NUMBER ONE!” as the cars swerve close enough for the passengers to high-five each other. Seems like the only ones who don’t care about this game are the crusties outside Gatorroni’s by the Slice, who seig-heil the honking cheering cars or give them the finger, one with the words GAY GOATERS written on his ass cheeks in black Sharpie large enough to be viewed across the street, which gets even funnier when the police grab him and hustle him off, presumably to jail. Ronnie turns right down 13th towards the Myrrh House, doubting he explained himself very well as he starts muttering to himself, lost in thought, lost in validation—William told him to go but Ronnie would have should have left anyway.

  Back in his room, on the floor, journal in his lap, he stares at the minutes ticking away on the digital alarm clock. Will it always be like this? What is he doing here? He stretches, thinks WHAT DOES THIS MEAN? To live this way, to talk to people about your dreams of being a writer or a musician or whatever it is Ronnie wants to do with his life—and the world keeps spinning and it is 1997 and pretty soon the decade will be done and Ronnie if you’re going to give up, give up, but if you’re going to live, you better live and live right. You better start scribbling something, anything.

  On that unhinged January 1st evening, Ronnie takes a deep breath. He laughs, he smiles, and then, Ronnie writes everything that enters his mind, no longer caring if it is good or bad, publishable or un-.

  Maybe you expect the climax of this big mother of a book to be something like Ronnie puking all over a girl, or deciding to stay or leave Gainesville, or getting published, or getting a band to some level of success, but really, here’s your climax, folks, completely lacking in titties or whatever else you might prefer. It’s Ronnie scribbling words into a $1.99 composition pad.

  It’s Ronnie in his room every morning and most evenings for the remainder of the so-called winter, and onward into the spring and the beginnings of that long Floridian summer, writing whatever comes into his head, not caring that it’s awful, filled with missteps and failed experiments and worth nothing but the inevitable rejection slips, year after year. But it doesn’t matter. Forgetting everything else and sitting down to write, that is the important thing. To have the joy of that voice in his head, of these characters, of thinking of what needs to happen in the worlds he creates. To jettison ambition in favor of workman effort.

  The pages and the journals stack, some better than others. The ratio will improve over the years. Ronnie thought he was a writer before this winter, but really, “aspiring” hung over him like the specters of favorite writers he wanted to emulate so badly—in lifestyle as well as prose talent. As he really writes for the first time, Ronnie thinks of how ass-backwards he had had it before, thinking he was going to be successful the way he was in college, effortlessly barfing out caustic opinion columns as too many gave him more credit than he deserved. The real world—Thank God—didn’t work out that way. It would be a slog through February Chicago blizzards rather than the can of corn that was the Floridian winter.

  But for now, in his room with the stacked mattresses and the cowboy couch and the desk with the typewriter and the haiku wall and Lara Flynn Boyle poster, all he needed to do was laugh and write, laugh and write, and try and enjoy the process as much as possible.

  11 Over the course of six and one-half hours, Ronnie Altamont listened to the Flipper song “Life” eighty-one and a half times. Not sure if that’s a world record. Of the song, the Trouser Press has this to say: “. . . Flipper can be uplifting. Underneath the tumult you’ll find compassion, idealism and hope, best represented by “Life” (“the only thing worth living forˮ). That kind of moral statement takes courage.”

  SIX: HEY! IT'S SPRING AGAIN

  “Whenever spr
ing comes to New York I can’t stand the

  suggestions of the land that come blowing over the river

  from New Jersey and I’ve got to go. So I went.”

  —Jack Kerouac

  AT THE PAWN SHOP

  “Ronnie? That you?” the Gainesville scenester-looking dude standing to Ronnie’s left asks as he’s checking out the electric guitars hanging from the greasy walls of the pawn shop.

  Ronnie turns away from a black Les Paul worth much more than what he has made in the eleven months he has lived in Gainesville. Each guitar has its own story—old, new, expensive, cheap, dinged, shredded, unplayed, missed, unmissed, covered in stickers, covered in Sharpie-scrawls, hollow-bodied, f-holed, whammy barred—these six-strings, hanging by their necks, unloved and quivering in the air-conditioning.

  On the floor of the small and inevitably dingy pawn shop, black bulky amplifiers stacked everywhere you turned—faded knobs, knobless, some speakers look razored, some speakers unused. Ronnie is transfixed, making up the stories behind each instrument, the people who pawned their gear and what they bought with the money. Like Frank here, who pawned this electric blue BC Rich when his band, Hollywood Trix, broke up, and used the money to buy a suit for a job interview with the Barnett Bank on University, where they were hiring bank tellers, and he’s trying to figure out if the THC has left his system (it has been six months, maybe? Since he last got high? He thinks?). Or Karl, who pawned the red Hagstrom next to the BC Rich after his wife left him for his best friend and he took the money to buy a shotgun because he never played the guitar anyway and besides—what did he have to live for anymore? Somehow, these bleak imaginary tales made the story of Ronnie, who pawned his black and white Squire Fender, his Crate amp, and his gray Smith-Corona fifteen minutes ago, easier to stomach.

  “It’s amazing what you find here sometimes,” the scenester-looking dude says to Ronnie, not taking his eyes off the guitars. What was his name again? He wears the old black denim cut-off below the knee that everyone wears here—soiled blue-black Chucks that get that beat-to-hell look only from miles on skateboards, the wallet chain looped from the side of the cut-offs, the lanky-black-haired pale skinned kid you see in the far corner of every suburban parking lot, sitting on his board, sipping from a Big Gulp cup filled with the contents of a Brain Mangler malt liquor quart.

  “Yup,” Ronnie says, running his right index and middle fingers across the open strings of the off-white Ibanez Flying-V to the left of the Les Paul. On the opposite side of the room, the pawnbrokers, inevitably orange-skinned, paunchy, and loud, discussing the fish they’ve caught in their lifetimes, as Rush sings of flying by night away from here on the classic rock radio station playing through the boombox next to the cash register.

  It is the afternoon of March 1st.

  Ronnie decides to tell him. Out of the three, Ronnie hates mentioning the typewriter most of all, as it was a gift from Kelly before Ronnie left for Crescent City.

  The scenester turns away from the guitars, looks at Ronnie. “Damn. Really?” Then, an expression of fearful condescension, of concern mixed with guardedness, his look essentially screaming, Is this guy a junkie?

  “Had to make rent, ya know?” Ronnie shrugs, looks down, feeling the hatred and frustration of being here to his bones, the bulge of bills in his wallet going straight to Roger, folded cash for the moment pressing against the left ass cheek of his dirty denim.

  “Oh,” the scenester says, looking almost relieved, shifting his slouch from the right foot to the left. “Aw dude, you can always get another amp and guitar if you want, and what was it, your typewriter?”

  “I feel like I just sold off my limbs,” Ronnie oh-so-dramatically puts it.

  “Limbs?” The scenester pshaws. “People do this all the time. Our friends do this all the time.” He points to the guitars. “Look around. You’re not the first.”

  This is something Ronnie loves about Gainesville. Poverty here is temporary, a condition everyone goes through from time to time, rather than a horrible affliction worthy of scorn.

  “It’s rent. You gotta pay it,” the scenester continues. “It’s better than . . . I mean, think of all the guitars here pawned for heroin . . . ”

  Ronnie nods, knows this guy is right, but not over the hurt of having to pawn off his most-valued possessions. He thinks of that old chestnut on TV shows, those trips to the pawn shop, when the hardluck protagonist pawns some treasured object—his watch, saxophone, diamond ring—and gets a pittance from the conniving pawn broker, who will not negotiate any better deals, the poor guy having no choice but to take the spare change he’s offered, and as he leaves the pawn shop, putting the coins in his pockets, the pawn broker immediately sets the prized possession in the display window with a price tag twenty times the amount he paid the poor bastard for it.

  The thing about it was that he used the typewriter only to write haiku. Since receiving it from Kelly, he was more inspired to sit and write haiku than to write short stories or anything else publishable. Instead of that proverbial Great American Novel people were always making jokes about when Ronnie told them what he did (“So, ya writin’ that Great American Novel, heh heh heh?”), Ronnie wrote haiku about the cast of What’s Happening!! A disgrace, in light of all the things he imagined he would write when he first lugged the machine to the car. Ronnie brooded, often, on what kind of muse he was stuck with that was never around when he had something he was aching to say, but was always there to come up with silly, unpublishable horseshit.

  And the amp, well, maybe the scenester was right about that one. After all, The Sunny Afternoons had broken up the day after playing another party where they were well-received, but not as well-received as they had been earlier. (There is a law of diminishing returns at work with cover bands.) Besides, Bradley the drummer needs to graduate, wants to spend more time on his finance book. Rae has found a boyfriend, prefers getting high and watching movies with him in her living room over learning new Kinks songs. Ronnie can’t blame her. She has done enough for Ronnie, and he is grateful. This leaves Ronnie and Mitch free to sit on Ronnie’s roof to drink beers, but even that is infrequent these days as Ronnie opts, more and more, to scribble whatever thoughts are in his head.

  The amp was taking up space in the corner of the living room by the front door. It was good to have around when the mood struck him, as was the guitar, but eviction looms, once again. The part-time gig at the restaurant is conducive to a hand-to-mouth existence, but it didn’t make rent this time—Gatorroini’s in SoHo has been in a down time between major sports seasons, the cold, and the students hunkering down to study.

  “Well, I’m gonna go pay the rent now,” Ronnie says to the scenester, extends his hand. They clasp at the fingers, pull away, snap. “Take it easy.”

  “Hang in there, alright?” the scenester says. “Hey wait,” he adds. “If you’re around this weekend, my band Marcus Aurelius is playing at the Righteous Freedom House.” He pulls out a small flyer from his pocket, hands it to Ronnie. The flyer artwork is all Mondrian lines and lower-case Helvetica fonts.

  “Sure, dude,” Ronnie says, knowing he isn’t going.

  Walking to the front door, Ronnie takes a passing glance at that gray typewriter on the glass counter between the two pawnbrokers who still talk of fish in this lake versus fish in that lake. It’s what he already misses the most.

  Out the front door, Ronnie feels the warmth of the spring sun, the breeze. The depression lifts. Ronnie has a notebook and a pen. He wants to go home and work. He will drive his dying car through this perfect weather, leave his share of the rent money on the kitchen table for Roger, then retreat to his bedroom, open the windows, listen to Chuck Berry, and write.

  RONNIE FINDS A SECOND JOB IN THE ELECTRONICS DEPARTMENT OF THAT ONE DEPARTMENT STORE THAT IS QUITE OFTEN THE SOURCE OF CRUEL JOKES AMONGST THE PRE-TEEN SET AT THE EXPENSE OF THOSE BELIEVED TO BE OF A LOWER SOCIOECONOMIC STRATA

  Into the whoosh of the automatic front doors, that fir
st kiss of stale A/C air, past the wet-moussed cashiers, through the racks of prismatic t-shirts, shorts, blouses, pants, slacks, dresses, and Florida Gator leisure wear, past the cologne and perfume cases, mixing with the lotions to add that chemically floral tinge to the air, and contrast that smell with the automotive aisle (keep walking, keep walking) with its stench of the various automotive lubricants stocked in rows six feet high, and head straight to the cacophony of sixty televisions—five down, twelve across—showing, on an endless loop, the films Space Jam and Independence Day over and over as the CD sampler machine plays ten-second snippets of the same ten songs—Young Country numbers about girls with hearts as big as Texas and drinking establishments where the domestic beer is served cold mixed with alternative rock and roll songs about relationship troubles and stuff. In the middle of this squared-off section of this department store—part of this nationally-known chain notorious for being the butt of so many jokes among kids, the very idea of kids’ parents shopping there the epitome of cheap poverty—rows of compact discs, cassingles, VHS tapes, even movies in the exciting new DVD format arranged alphabetically, more or less, and shrinkwrapped. At the entrance to the territory marked off as the Electronics Department, two employees in matching red vests, black slacks, white Oxford shirts, and black ties stand behind the glass display cases containing wristwatches and beepers stand and pretend to look busy amidst this cacophony—the one on the right seemingly studying the pages of a clipboard, and the one on the left standing behind the register while holding a broom.

  The employee on the left has clipper-shaved stubbly black hair, patchy in some parts and overgrown in others because the person working the clippers was on her seventh glass of boxed wine. His glasses take up a large amount of facial territory—two squared circles above the eyebrows rounding downward to above the cheeks. When he scowls, he looks like he could be insane, definitely weird, as he says to his co-worker, “I can’t believe you’ve never seen the punk rock episode of CHIPS.12 Pain is one of my all-time favorite fictional bands. No, they are my favorite. Let me sing it for you again: “I dig pain . . . the feelin’s in my brain . . . ” and here, the employee sounds more aggressive and, well, barky, with each new lyric. “the scratching, the bashing, the clawin’, the thrashin’, the givin’, the gettin’, the total blood lettin’ drive me insane . . . ” and here, the employee bellows out, “I DIG PAIN!”