He isn’t sure he wants to do this, but he isn’t sure he has a choice, and not only because the process is already underway. He isn’t coming back. Not for a long long long long time. Maybe never . . . but . . . he has always imagined he would end up in the same retirement home with his friends . . . somewhere in what’s left of Florida after the glaciers melt. Shuffleboard with Neil and Paul, followed by late-night panty and/or girdle raids. Arthritic hands strumming a guitar, teaching Rae side two of Kinda Kinks. Ronnie and Mitch will find a way up onto the roof, with a six-pack of Futro-Hamtramcks (or whatever they’ll be called in the 2050s) and a Boombox 2000 playing all the 20th century rock and roll of yestercentury. Movie night, curated by Roger, who will hate the snoring. Mouse and Icy Filet, recording in the Rec Room, drafting the other residents, the nurses, the doctors, to play kazoos, recorders, and detuned electric ukuleles. Kelly . . . Magic Jensen . . . Willie Joe Scotchgard . . . Chuck Taylor . . . Macho Man Randy . . . everyone will be there.
Bingo with William, and as they half-pay attention to the caller’s announcements of letters and numbers, they will think back on it all, all those frivolous times in Gainesville, 50 years ago, in those last years when you still had the time space and distance to fuck up and fuck up royally without a Mr. Google to hold your hand and tell you no, Internet Buddy, you’re not as alone and confused as you think.
Ronnie, in the retirement hot tub, watching the elderly nnnnuggets practice their water calisthenics. Maggie will be there, and so will Maux, and Siouxsanna Siouxsanne, and Portland Patty and Julianna, and the distant past will be funny to everyone, almost forgotten, and with the warm jets on his achy old limbs, Ronnie will fall asleep, and then he will die in the hot tub, smiling, with no one noticing for a good half hour, at least.
THE GOING AWAY PARTY
Earlier that week, Roger had gotten word that the owners of the Myrrh House—a glass company the next street over—were going to tear it down for a parking lot once their lease expired—or Roger left, whichever came first. Bulldozers will crash and topple these flimsy walls, the neighborhood itself will become another high-density, high-profit bland-ass nothing. You can vandalize, you can set the buildings on fire, you can scream your angry songs, but the Floridian developers march on, and on, and on, and on, and all you can do is dance this one night away before leaving the state of Florida behind.
On NW 4th Lane, bottle rockets whiz and explode everywhere. On opposite ends of the street, Neil and Paul hide behind cars, taking careful aim at each other, shooting, firing, missing. Laughter.
A dizzying array of near friends gather to say goodbye. Ronnie is in constant motion, trying to talk to everyone but too drunk, too overwhelmed, to express how grateful he is.
“You know you’re fucked, right?” Kelly says to Ronnie during a short break between Ronnie giving his goodbye “Gonna miss you guys . . . c’mere, gimme a hug” spiels to anyone and everyone who stopped by to see him off. Kelly, who spent the entire day debating whether to show up—because, after all, Ronnie will be back here by Thanksgiving. Even if he somehow stuck it out in Gainesville, Chicago is something else entirely. Kelly had work, but after some internal debate, he called in sick, jumped into his car, and made it to the Myrrh House.
“Yeah, I know,” Ronnie says.
“Good,” Kelly answers. “As long as we’re clear on this . . . ”
Ronnie runs off, returns to the keg, cup after cup after cup, emerges from his bedroom with an acoustic guitar, ends up somehow on the roof screaming and strumming “Real Cool Time” by The Stooges, yelling the words at the groups of people clustered up and down NW 4th Lane, and the jungle trees towering over the streetlights will soon be no more, and neither will the street, these friends and near-friends, and Ronnie Altamont could end it—right now—he really could—he could run off this roof and dive headfirst and save the trouble, but so much remains unanswered, and all of this is simply a beginning (when he thought the whole time that this was the end) for better things to come.
Mitch joins him on the roof, followed by Rae, followed by Paul, by Neil, by Mouse, by Icy Filet, by Kelly, by Roger, by Siouxsanna Siouxsanne . . .
“Hey Rahhn,” Mitch says. “Play ‘Lola.’ ”
And so Ronnie plays “Lola” on the acoustic guitar, and in the sea-shanty chorus, he and Mitch and Rae and Paul and Neil and Mouse and Icy Filet and Kelly and Siouxsanna Siouxsanne, along with the dozens spilling out of the Myrrh House, sing along—“Lola / Luh-Luh-Luh-L-Lola / Luh-Luh-Luh-Luh-Low-Luhhhhh” on repeat, and that’s the way that Ronnie wants to stay and always wants it to be that way. He will remember this, and over time its meaning will grow, playing music on the roof with friends, this, what it meant to live in Gainesville for thirteen months in the mid-to-late 90s . . . Later, he will go skinny dipping in some apartment complex pool with 30-plus equally intoxicated revelers, but the apartment pool skinny dip is nothing, and the abundant late-night and early morning antics are nothing, and the going home with the blue-haired tat-sleeved nameless one-night stand, while definitely not-bad, that too will be nothing . . . compared to that roof, that street, that town . . . Compared to youth.
Singing with friends, Ronnie basks in the treacherous ecstasy of transition.
12/26/2005—9/3/2013
Longwood, FL—Chicago, IL
12 Battle of the Bands,ˮ first broadcast on NBC, January 31, 1982
13 “Alachua County Residentˮ
14 Will future generations know the joys and sorrows of packing and unpacking hundreds—if not thousands—of LPs and books? Of knowing that the place you live isn’t really your “home” until you’ve unpacked the LPs and books? This was one of the reasons why the double-wide trailer was never quite a home for Ronnie, but the Myrrh House was . . .
APPENDIXES
APPENDIX A:
Ronnie Altamont’s April 23, 1995 column in the UCF Unicorn: “Fired again..Another Lazy Boss, This One with Obvious Apartheid Sympathies . . . The Differences Between Being a Cocksucker Who Does’t Suck Cock and a Motherfucker Who Doesn’t Fuck His Mother . . . Nasty Winds Blowing in From Alafaya and Lake Underhill . . . ”
So I got fired from my job. I don’t know if you, gentle reader, have ever been fired by a racist South African cocksucker (not that he literally sucked cock, and even if he did that’s not what made him a cocksucker and if he was a bona fide real-deal cocksucker that wouldn’t matter to me because hey: to each his own, right?), but lemme tell ya, bro: NO FUN.
I’m not really sure why I lost this particular job. I know he wasn’t exactly a fan of all the stuff I was writing about for your delight and edification here in el column for el papero.
“Your language is disgusting,” he informed me at the start of one shift, shortly after the staff got wind of what I was doing (writing about my nights behind the front desk, the drunks, the quickie sex of our customers, the sleaze, the found porno mags, the junkies, the flunkies, all of it . . . c’mon, you remember, right?), because Geoff (his name was Geoff, if that’s any ‘ndication) (and sorry if your name is Geoff) (not apologizin’, just sayin’ sorry your name is Jeff with a “Geo”) is obviously, from his lofty vocation as live-in manager of that fleabag hotel, a man of Belles Lettres, gettin’ down to your Dostoevskis and Camuseses and the like.
Geoff did this high-larious imitation of the Latino workers he had back when he was working some other blow-tel down in Miami, where he would talk about it by saying stuff like “You tell them to get to work and they say, ‘Iss not my yob, mang.’ ”
Hey-ohhhh!
What. A. Fucking. Asshole.
And, in hindsight, I should apologize for showing up drunk from parties for my 11:00 p.m. - 7:00 a.m. shift. But I had my trusty compadre Kelly to co-work with through the night, and he could cover for me while I slept it off in a vacant room. And sure, there were plenty of times when Kelly wasn’t around and I didn’t know what I was doing, didn’t know how to fix the printer when it jammed, would forget to enter in all the informatio
n into the ol’ computadora, but seeing how he’s the Live-In Manager, you’d think he’d come down to help out when his assistance was required. But no. Didn’t want to be disturbed. Can you believe it: Men and Wimmin? To get the motherfucker (because that’s what he was, I mean not literally, but unlike if he was a literal cocksucker, if Geoff had sexual relations with his mother (and who knows, when you get right down to it . . . ) I would hold that against him) out of bed to do his job was such an or-fucking-deal. Oh, Geoff. The buck never does stop with you does it? You are the “Slack Motherfucker” Superchunk warned me about.
My former boss is a very sweaty man. This Central Florida climate does not suit him. He smells like rancid eggs. Sweat stains crescentmoondampturd across his shirts. Our guests hated the very sight of him. And I hated the very sight of all of them. I just wanted to go home . . . at the end of the shift, I would look out the front windows and there (there!) would be Maggie’s car, waiting to take me home. Through the dew drenched windows as the sun rose over the good ol’ smothered and covered Waffle House we shared the parking lot with. And speaking of Camus . . . I’m glad this sysiphusian nightmare is finished, once and for all, and I can go back to doing what I want to . . . which hey, by the way, my band—The Laraflynboyles—have ourselves a sweet li’l ol’ (as they say in the music biz) “gig” at Coffee Creamerz, which is in the Alomarod Plaza next to Palm Frond Steve’s Oyster Emporium, so you know it’s gonna get p-u-n-k so rock on, homie!
. . . OK, I know there was more I wanted to say about my former boss before calling this a column and going off to drink a couple quarts of Brain Mangler malt liquor . . . but really, all you need to know is that he’s just your run of the mill cheating lying lazy ass scumbag, as good a representative of “the dark shattered underbelly of the American dream” that good ol’ HST warned us about as anyone.
So (Maggie don’t read this) if the wind blows from the vicinity of Alafaya and Lake Underhill, and should you detect a smell redolent of a retarded abortion, with hints of diarrhea from a llama’s leaky asshole, know that that smell you smell comes from my former boss, who should do the world the humble favor of putting a gun to his mouth and pulling the trigger, eliminating his horrid presence on this horrid planet once and for all.
OK. Sorry! I’ll try and write something funnier and nicer next time. Until then . . .
This column is finished.
APPENDIX B: KELLY’S RESIGNATION LETTER
MARCH 30, 1996
GEOFF:
I am writing this letter to inform you that, effective immediately, I am terminating my employment as Night Auditor and Front Desk Clerk of this hotel you allegedly operate.
In the two years I have been employed here, I have known you to be nothing but a thoroughly reprehensible and incompetent boss. Your verbal abuse of the cleaning staff leads me to believe that you have Nazi sympathies, and if the opportunity had presented itself to you, you would be leading any number of oppressed minorities to their gruesome deaths in concentration camps, willingly, gladly, and unreservedly. Your demeanor around the women who work at the Front Desk and in the office is just this side of prosecutable sexual harassment, and while you no doubt fancy yourself to be a suave and debonair member of male humanity, I can assure you that no one else—women, in particular—sees you this way. You are vile and corpulent, a malodorous pervert, a cheap hustler all-too-typical here in The Sunshine State.
Had you any shred of human decency, any sense of compassion or empathy or sympathy for anyone or anything, your first response to finding me pistolwhipped and bleeding would not be, “How much did they take?” but, rather, oh, I don’t know, “Are you ok,” perhaps? Did that thought ever cross your mind? No. You know and I know that I am expendable here in this service economy state in this service job, so why even make the attempt to trouble your nonexistent conscience? I cannot and will not work for someone of your ilk. You embody everything wrong with capitalism, with America, with the world. The feces you void each morning, the waste of your Big Gulps, your KFC, your nonstop diet of fried everything for breakfast, late breakfast, lunch, late lunch, dinner, dessert, and late night snack, has better qualities than you will ever have.
You think you are charming. You think when you crack your corny and hateful jokes with your ripped-off customers, with your overworked and underappreciated staff, that you are amusing. You think you are enjoyable to be around. You are not. No one likes you, Geoff. No one working for you, no one paying to lodge in that filthy squalored vermin infested pit you call a hotel, no one you meet here, there, and everywhere, from Florida to South Africa and back again, thinks you are anything more than an arrogant fool, the kind people instinctively know to tolerate to the best of their abilities. This is why you live alone in a hotel halfway around the world. No one likes you.
Go ahead and rationalize these words, but know that when you look in the mirror, my words are the truest words you will ever read. Scoff, huff, and ignore it. But I can assure you that Ronnie Altamont was right about you, and as inarticulate and as self-absorbed as he was and is, he got you right to the best of his limited abilities. Your delusions are pathetic and sad, and you will die lonelier than any man who has walked this earth.
Have a nice day,
Kelly
Cc: Ronnie Altamont
APPENDIX C: NICHOLAS J. CANBERRY’S SHORT STORY ‘ZOMBIE NARC’ (WHAT HE HAS TURNED IN “SO FAR”)
When anybody asked him, Smokey most defiantly would proclaim that he and Stoney had become the best of friends. At their houses they would get each other high and hang out and tell jokes. Smokey grew hydroponic bud in his closet. One day, after they got high together, Smokey showed Stoney the amazing surprise he had stashed away in his closet.
“I got a surprise for you,” Smokey said.
“Yeah?” Stoney asked. “What is it?”
“You’ll see,” Smokey said, smiling like he was high. Smokey was high. So was Stoney. “It’s over their, man,” he said, pointing to his closet.
Smokey lead Stoney to his walk-in closet. Inside, Stoney couldn’t believe his eyes. That is, if he even has eyes. Because, Stoney had a secret or two of his own.
“Check it out!” Smokey said.
“Wow! Is that what I think it is?” Stoney curiously asked.
“Yup, it defiantley is” Smokey triumphantly exclaimed. “It’s a closet filled with hydroponic bud!”
“Oh, man,” Stoney rubbed his eyes. His eyes were bloodshot because they were so high. “What if we smoked all of that at once? We’d get so high and shit.”
Smokey laughed. “Most defiantly, bro. I’m gonna keep enough for me to get high, but I’m gonna sell the rest in the park to all the little kids playing in the playground. I always taught that was a good idea, right bro?”
Stoney laughed. “Yeah. Except there’s just one problem.”
“Problem?” Smokey asked questioningly. “What are you talking about.”
“Oh nothing,” Stoney said but the way he said it sounded different like he was lying or had something more. “I need to go to the front door real quick. Then, let’s smoke out some more from this mary jane in the membrane.”
“Cool,” Smokey said as Stoney made his way out of the walk in closet and moved his way to the front door.
Suddenly, there were lots of footsteps that Smokey could here in his apartment. He seemed to be hearing sirens and walky talkys. The next thing Smokey new, the police were in his walk-in closet. They told him to freeze and that he was under arrest.
“Oh no.” Smokey said.
“Oh yeah.” Stoney said.
“I taught you were our friend, man!” Smokey cried sadly as the cops put the cuffs on him and took him away. “We did . . . drugs together. Remember?”
“I am your friend, man!” Stoney pleaded insistently. “But there’s one thing, you don’t know.”
Smokey spat at the ground as the cops led him away. “I know everything I need to know, man. You’re nuthin’ but a narc! You’re ju
st a narc!”
“Not so fast, Smokey!” Stoney announced menacingly. “Watch this!” The skin of Stoney’s flesh was ripped by Stoney’s hands. His hands tugged at his face, revealing . . . A ROTTING SKULL UNDERNEATH!!!
“I’m a ZOMBIE NARC!!!” Stoney yelled loudly. “And I’m hungry. FOR BRAINS!”
“What the? No! No!!! Please!” Smokey begged as the top of his skull was being chewed by Stoney’s mouth. Blood shot everywhere, and the cops shot their guns. They had no affect on Stoney. He grabbed the cops and ate them up too.
“Stoney’s brain tastes like chicken!” Stoney reflected calmly to himself. “But these cops’ brains taste like pigs!” Stoney proceeded to eat his way through all their brains, ralishing each volumtous bite. The fact is, Stoney was hungry, hungry for brains.
[I didn’t finish this because I had other work I needed to get done and when I tried to get back to it I lost the flow and my mind wasn’t in the right place any more. But I want to finish it soon. I have some ideas about how I want it to end, but I can’t decide if I want Stoney to stay a zombie or not. I also can’t decide if I want him to stay a narc or not. I think that maybe Stoney will feel guilty for killing his best friend and try to give up drugs. Except pot. That can’t. What do u think I should do? Your the teacher. Can somebody not be a zombie if they don’t want to be. Any way I no this is passed when it’s do but if you can give me an extra days Ill promise to get this to you and it will be somethig Id want too publish. Later, NJC]
Losing in Gainesville (9781940430331) Page 44
