Losing in Gainesville (9781940430331) (10 page)

“He ain't comin' back, is he?” Travis says, rib sauce drying around his mouth and on his fingers, still standing three steps in from the doors.

“Doubt it,” Kim says, taking one step to the register, humming along to the Young Country music. “You seen his hair?”

Ronnie's blandy apple green domestic sedan squeals into reverse. He shifts to drive, zooms out of the parking lot, cuts off a dirty white lunchwagon whose driver almost honks her horn. At the next light, Ronne reaches down, pulls out the “IF GIRLS ARE MADE OF SUGAR AND SPICE . . . ” hat. He smiles at his reflection in the rear view mirror. He drives towards the University, to the saffron and purple gowned Krishnas doling out free food. He will eat, then drive across town to donate plasma, then buy a real dinner at Publix with the money, try to write something, fall asleep.

 

 

WILLIAM RETURNS FROM THE TOUR

 

Fourteen states, twelve days, three narrowly averted inter-band fistfights, one unaverted inter-band fistfight, one cancelled show, one set cut short because no one showed up and the barstaff wanted to close early, one guitar amp dying a smoky death mid-way through another set, one instance of the drummer waking up naked with a missing suitcase and no idea where in Columbus he might be, and the final three days and nights spent subsisting on nothing but wonder bread and bologna stolen from a corner store near the Fireside Bowl in Chicago later, you're back in the walk-in cooler behind the restaurant getting high with your equally tattooed and pierced dinner-shift manager, who asks you “So how was the tour, bro?” after exhaling the skunkweedy joint and passing it to you, and you're either not sure or not willing to answer the question, even if your manager asks this because he plays bass in Salo's Children—another band in the hardcore scene—and wants the vicarious thrill of actually playing outside Florida, because you figure your bass playing manager must know, deep down, that Salo's Children suck and will never get the chance to leave F.L.A.

“Never again,” you say before smoking, and that's all you want to say right now. You think of the fifth of Floridian Comfort in your car, and you want it now, but you wait, because you know, once you get started, you'll elaborate on “Never again,” and the elaborations on the ultimately monotonous hurry-up-slow-down nature of touring, interspersed with the occasional weird and sometimes even wonderful adventures far from home will continue past closing the kitchen tonight and lead you to the usual impromptu front porch party somewhere around here, and there will be no shutting up. The pot keeps you in the moment, heightening the smells of frozen dough and cold sauce, preserved vegetables and damp pasta. Stoned now, you say, “It's weird being back here,” and that part of it is even harder to explain—to be back in this tiny walk-in cooler in your black Gatorroni's by the Slice work shirt, dough-stained black work slacks, red bandana soaking up the Florida kitchen sweat—so you don't.

“I'll tell you about it later.” You're now high enough to get through the dishwashing, table-wiping, food-serving shift. You pass the manager what remains of the joint, and step out into the hot parking lot and into the hotter kitchen—a five-second change of eighty degrees.

Your ex-girlfriend, now dating your ex-best friend after finding out you hooked up with his ex-girlfriend, stands by the dishtank holding a red plastic tray with two veggie slices. She works the registers with your ex-ex-girlfriend and your current girlfriend.

“Take these to the outside tables,” she says, hostile yet noncommittal. Deliberately, she's looking to the front of the restaurant and away from you. She has dyed red streaks in her short black hair now, the circle-plus female symbol newly-tattooed on her inner left arm. You're trying real hard to not laugh at these latest developments.

You relieve her of the tray, knowing your streak of going nine days without wishing for the horrific death of your ex-girlfriend has snapped. “The dumbass who ordered them is too drunk to come back to the counter,” she says. She flashes a Florida-trademarked mean-grin, passive-aggressive rudeness couched in the faintest of barely polite smiles. “Even makes you seem sober.”

“It's great seeing you again too.” She rolls her eyes, returns to the counter. Yes, it's great to be back in Gainesville, back in the kitchen of Gatorroni's by the Slice. Picking up where you left off.

You walk past the counter, smile at your current girlfriend—who smiles back in that nineteen naïve-teen way of hers—all teeth and wide green eyes and dyed blonde short hair with a barrette in the front of the left part and granny glasses and still untattooed and still unjaded. You brood on how long all of this will last until she gets tired of your moods, your personality. You. It's a busy, all-too-familiar night. The booths along the front windows are full, students hunched over text books, half-eaten slices temporarily set aside, families bunched around the tables, moms rocking strollers while dads try to keep their four year olds from kneeling or standing on the chairs in potentially dangerous poses as they reach over to sip from their Cokes. Some cheap hippie spent fifty cents to subject everyone to all thirty-plus minutes of the Allman Brothers' insufferable “Mountain Jam” on the jukebox. The grease-laden underbelly of these red plastic trays, and the burnt cheese/sweaty meat stench of all these pizza pies in and out of the oven to the hungry Gainesville dining public. Outside, dozens of crusty-punks, indie-punks, emo-punks, hardcore kids, so on and so forth, all the little sub-genres too small to hang in their own little cliques, acknowledging each other in the Gatorroni's outdoor dining area—pitcher after pitcher, often on the house thanks to their friends working inside. The humidity that never seems to go away, heightened by the kitchen's heat, red bandana around your forehead not enough to soak the sweat.

It's almost like the tour never happened. You set the pizza down at the drunk guy's table—some Gatorroni Loser who's always out here in his finest street punk leisure wear. He doesn't see the pizza because he's too busy arguing that The Clash isn't “punk enough” for his standards.

Your drunk-ass friends, yelling and bouncing around the farthest outdoor dining table, call your name and wave you over. “We-heh-hell, Bill Collector himself, back from the worldwide tour,” Neil says, stepping off the barstool to face you and doff his New York Yankees ballcap—temporarily exposing the stubbled black hair receding higher and higher along the forehead. His brother Paul stands to his right, at the head of the table, pouring their fourth free pitcher into his cup, Neil's cup, and the cups in front of the aptly-named Drunk John and Boston Mike. You know it's the fourth pitcher and you know it's a free pitcher because you're the one who's been walking them over to the table.

“Aw, c'mon,” Paul says, finishing the angled pour into Boston Mike's plastic cup. “You know William goes by William now. Bill Collector was PUNK”—and here, Paul punches the table and rattles the cups and the pitcher—“but William, and just William? That's hardcore, dude . . . ”

You smile at this. In high school back in Orlando, you were in this band called The Dicks, and your “stage name”—you never played on any stages—was Bill Collector. The band was very short-lived, and not only because there was already a well-known, highly-regarded band from Austin, Texas called The Dicks that you had somehow never heard of.

Drunk John punches you on the right shoulder, a light smack from a scrawny tattooed arm. “We heard all about Bloomington, Indiana, haw haw,” he says, and all you can do is shake your head from side to side and say, “Never again,” to which everyone at the table laughs at what you can only laugh at from a safe distance. You, curled into a corner of the typical punk house, reeking of post-show sweat and smoke, in clothes long unwashed, rolled into a mutli-stained off-white blanket like a filthy unhealthy burrito on the hirsute hardwood floor—pillowless, but whatever. The post-show party was there, full of denim-clad males mostly who wanted to talk about this record and that band as meanwhile the smattering of women present were surrounded by, on average, five men all going after the same thing—and boy, do the women in these towns know it—and what gets you is how disinterested they were in anything but their stupid town—their stupid towns, because everybody wants to talk about where they live like it matters. You don't think it matters, not anymore. After enough shows like these, all you wanted was a good night's sleep for a change, not another night of listening to the denim dudes talk about the punk rock all night. So at this particular Bloomington, Indiana post-show after-party, you drank enough to find a relatively quiet corner to pass out, pulled the blanket over your head so the music, some hyper-distorted scream you're already overly familiar with, seeped into your hearing slightly less obtrusively . . . As you fall into an unconsciousness on the border between drunkenness and the morning's hangover drain, you sense someone standing over you. You hear sniffles, a conspiratorially whispered, “Yo! Hey!” The only way to get your head out of the blanket is to unroll your body completely from the blankets wraparound, so you roll and roll into this person's steel-toed black boot. The light is on, the records are off, and there is no sound except for the buzzsaw-to-a-swine's-throat snores of your bass player who you can see scored the shredded green couch on the other side of the littered living room. “Look at my face!” the singer of the local band, the headlining band, whispers, standing over you. He wears trash-stenched jeans and a sleeveless jean jacket with CRASS written on the back in black permanent marker. He has Jaggerish facial features, if Jagger had that weird kinda-inbred look some people in Indiana have. A red droplet falls from his face, lands on your blanket, and you now understand why his voice is phlegmatic and novocained as he says, “They broke my nose. We've been backyard fighting!” He smiles—one lead singer to the next—“And you gotta see this shit!” he adds, and you're like, “Fuck it, when will I ever be in Bloomington, Indiana again?” So you step out of the blanket—still in your Docs, but whatever—and you step over discarded beer cans, whiskey bottles, pizza boxes, vomit, gum, clothing, show fliers, records, cds, kitty litter, kitty kibbles, blue red and yellow pieces to the “Sorry” boardgame, the bodies of the other members of your band, MOE GREEN'S FUCKING EYE SOCKET
5
, are too-frozen in that way people get when they're trying to pretend to be asleep. Are they your friends anymore? You try not to look too closely at the fliers on the wall of show after show after show after band after band after band—shitty drawings of mohawked

skeletons and the graffiti everywhere of DK, Circle As, pot leafs, malt liquor bottles, straight edge Xs, swastikas with NO signs, and echoing through your beat-up skull is that line from “Salad Days” by Minor Threat, the core has gotten soft—and the thing is—when the singer said, “you gotta see this shit!” you didn't think he was being literal. In the middle of the kitchen—the once-white linoleum kitchen with the once-teal space age cabinetry and space age appliances, everything now smudged with grime, trash and rodent droppings—you recognize the rhythm guitarist of the headlining band, he who proudly told you at the 6:00 p.m. load-in into the club, “I've been drinking since ten a.m.!” who by 2:00 a.m. was a not-that-interesting mix of whiskey-blackedout belligerence, nudity, and inarticulate, unreasoned arguments on the college kids in this town, the relative pros and cons of assorted pornographic magazines, and how much better society would be if cops weren't around to fuck with everybody—this rhythm guitarist is now passed out in the middle of the kitchen as the lead guitarist and bass player stand on either side of him five feet apart holding a stretch of Saran Wrap. The lead singer grabs a video camera, yells “Go!” to the chunky drummer—one of those too-many-Midwestern-meals-from-Dutch-peasant-stock-already-with-a-tendency-towards-bigness type dudes—who squats over the passed out rhythm guitarist, unbuttons his jeans, unzips his fly, drops the jeans and the boxers, and deuces on the Saran Wrap. You're on the border between the kitchen and the living room, feeling nausea right down to your balls as the turds drop and weigh down the Saran Wrap and the lead singer holds the camera, laughing, asks the rhythm guitarist if he feels something warm on his face. Turd one landed on his septum; turd two on his right cheek. It's a short stumble, steering way clear of the laughter and the bodies in the middle of the kitchen, to the back screen door. You narrowly avoid puking all over one of their girlfriends—some attempted Bettie Page doppelg
ä
nger—and hunch by the fence and cough and spit and gag and ask yourself what the hell you're doing so far from home. Not-Bettie Page smokes in a lawnchair, is kind enough to inform you upon your emergence from the pukey darkness that “They don't mean nuthin'. It's just what we do here when we drink too much.” You nod, and right about here, you decide to leave the back porch, walk around the side of the house, knock on the van doors until someone lets you in, find space to sleep, hope to remember the blanket in the morning and not forget about it the way you forgot about the pillow in a house much like this one, in Cleveland.

“. . . Some people have a weird idea of fun,” is all you can say about it to Neal, Paul, Drunk John and Boston Mike. They laugh at this; you turn to walk away. “Get us another pitcher or we'll shit on your face!” Boston Mike yells behind you, and you have to laugh.

For now, you won't tell them, or anyone, that MOE GREEN'S FUCKING EYE SOCKET is finished. From the drive from Louisville to home, no one spoke to anyone excepting the absolute necessity of communicating stops for bodily functions and gas money for the van. You've never been happier to see your own bed, but the rhythms of touring—the drive, the load-in, the hang out, the drink, the finally play, the other bands, the load-out, the search for a place to stay, the after-party everyone insists on throwing, the pass out, the wake up from not sleeping is its own routine, and it's difficult to shake, even if the whole time you missed Gainesville, your house, your girlfriend. But then you're back and here you are again at Gatorroni's by the Slice and realize, you don't miss a thing.