Losing in Gainesville (9781940430331) (12 page)

“. . . But I guess you never know what you're gonna get when you come out to Reverend B. Stoned's Open Mic Eclectic Jambalaya Jam! Am I right?! Am I right!” The Reverend B. Stoned raises his arms in triumph, “Number One” index fingers pointing to the ceiling painted to resemble puffy white clouds on a bright blue day. Enthusiastic woo-hoos, all around. “And hey,” the Reverend continues. “Thanks to Turn Your Head and Coffee for giving us a space to exercise our First Amendment rights, because? If we didn't have the First Amendment? We'd have a lot of problems, and we couldn't do what we're doing tonight . . . like, uh . . . rapping about
Pop Tarts
.”

Laughter. “Don't listen to him,” Mouse says, hands on Icy Filet's shoulders. “I'm nervous to have to go after you.”

Before Icy Filet has a chance to ask, “You're doing something tonight?” the Reverend calls Mouse to the open mic to, “Do whatever it is Mouse does, because I don't know if I understand it myself.”

Polite applause, over which Mouse yells, “Thank you! Thank you!” and blows kisses to the audience like a venerable Hollywood starlet waving to fans before climbing into the limousine. He runs to the darkness to the side of the stage, grabs an amplifier and electric guitar, carries them to the stage, plugs in the amp, slips the hot pink strap through his head, connects the cable from the guitar to the amp, connects a distortion pedal to the mic cable, connects another cord from the pedal to a coffeehouse amplifier ill-equipped for much beyond the quiet poetic intensity of the average singer-songwriter. Mouse turns everything on. The guitar shrieks violent open-string vibrations, and the distorted microphone howls painful white noise. Mouse shimmies in place to these sounds for five seconds before screaming into the microphone, voice modulated into monstrous distortion. He drops his pants, tosses the guitar in the air. The guitar lands on its body, clanging layers of noise into the tortured amplifier, neck thwacking into the worn red duct-taped stage floor. Under his smudged blue thrift-store pants are diapers. Pants around his legs, he hops like a leprechaun around an Irish spring. He slips out of his teal flip-flops, dances out of his pants. He reaches into the diaper and pulls out a knife. The guitar still howls and Mouse still screams. He grasps the knife handle, extends his arm, stabs his chest repeatedly. The audience screams. It's too dim to know for sure that it's one of those toy knives that sink into the handle with contact. Half the audience, circled around the tables closest to the stage, use this as an opportunity to leave the room post-haste. Mouse screams another psychotic howl—no, um, “lyrics” to any of this, simply extended shrieks and howls—then steps to the amplifier, reaches behind it, removes two bags of flour, a large red bag of Bugles snacks, and three packages of bologna. He tears into the flour bags, shakes them across the front of the stage as the guitar clangs shrill feedback from the vibrations of Mouse's steps. White dust clouds reflect candle light, overhead stage lights. Through the thick flour flying and landing everywhere, Mouse opens the Bugle bag, grabs a handful, smashes them into his plain white t-shirt, stuffs some down his diaper, chews some, spits them out on stage, hurls handfuls at anyone he can make out through the darkness and the low-visibility flour. He opens the bologna packages, wipes his brow with the slimy gray meaty circles, flings them up and out like tiny Frisbees. Now out of food, Mouse removes the microphone from the stand, falls to the stage and rolls around, screaming a sustained guttural banshee screech, body crunching over Bugles, skidding over bologna, flour sticking to damp skin, guitar sustaining an endless rumbling white howl through the long-suffering amplifier.

The audience has long fled the room. Only the employees, the Reverend B. Stoned, and Icy Filet remain. Icy has never seen anything like this in her nineteen years, insides an adrenalized mix of terror and exhilaration.

The Reverend B. Stoned runs to the stage, screaming, “That's enough, man!” as three of the bigger members of the kitchen crew run up to the stage, turn everything off, pull him away and drag him outside by his knotty long Manson hair as Mouse yells back, “C'mon, Reverend, it's all in fun, heh heh—it's freeeeedom, maaaaaan, heh heh heh!”

“Don't come back here, ya fuckin' weirdo!” the Reverend B. Stoned yells after him. In the empty room, the Reverend stands in front of the stage, kicking at the mess on the floor, kicking up flour clouds. He curses, shakes his head, finally walks off.

Icy Filet approaches the stage, grabs the pants, the guitar, the effects pedal, the amplifier, the cables. It's a cumbersome two-handed carry job, made that much more difficult by general performance-art sliminess caked on everything. She limps like a bag lady out the front door, in time to see the kitchen crew storm past, calling Mouse all kinds of names, and Mouse himself, supine on the curb as the University Avenue foot traffic glares and mumbles as they walk by.

Icy Filet cautiously approaches him. He's covered in flour, Bugle Bits, bologna strands in his beautiful scraggly hair. He still wears the diaper. His face has the purple chubbiness of the recently punched.

“I couldn't find your flip-flops,” she says, standing over him now, unsure of what else to say.

Mouse, fetally positioned facing the street, rolls onto his back, moans, looks up, recognizes her—the rapper!—and a slow smile creeps across his face, lips widening, opening to what Icy thinks are two rows of gorgeously mismatched teeth. “Why thank you, Pop Tarts.”

Icy Filet looks away, flushed face, sweaty palmed. “That was really amazing,” she says.

Mouse smiles, pulls himself up. “Glad you liked it.” He stands, plucks a piece of bologna out of his chest hair and tosses it onto the street. “Let me call you sometime.”

“What?” Icy Filet says, and it's not that she didn't hear what he just said, but more like all she can think is that if this is his way of meeting girls, it's insanely elaborate.

“Let me call you.”

Naturally she's a little hesitant. But then she remembers Mouse, pre-performance, running up to congratulate her after her sucky (her word) attempt at freestyle rapping. “Do you have any paper?”

Mouse gestures at the mess he's made of himself, his pantlessness, and chuckles. “Don't seem to, ah, have anything on me, heh heh heh.”

Icy Filet unzips the white vinyly MC Hamtramck pen pouch she found at an Orlando thrift store—her favorite late
'
80s/early
'
90s rapper himself, in his trademark crushed velvet purple jumpsuit, big glasses, pulse beats shaved into his scalp, with the thought cloud above him (which he points to) that reads, “U Push It Real Good, Wild Thang”—pulls out a notecard and a pen. “Mouse, right?” she asks, handing him the card with her phone number.

“That's right, Miss Icy Filet, my favorite rapper. I'll call you soon, and we'll dance a' dance, take a chance, look askance, you know what I'm saying to you?'

Icy Filet does not, or isn't clear on the details maybe, but says she does anyway. “Bye,” she says, waving, walking westbound on University, back to the dorm, SK-1 jutting out of her UF totebag.

“Thanks for getting my stuff,” Mouse yells after her.

“Word, yo,” Icy Filet says, head and heart spinning in the afterglow of first-times.

 

 

FIVE YEARS

 

Another Amateur Sunday here at fucking Electric Slim's Used and New CDs and LPs . . . me and Boston Mike standing here behind the counter dealing with lazy illiterate cocksmacks who couldn't find the new Celine Dion CD if you led them by the hand to the “D” section, removed the new Celine Dion CD from the bin, placed the new Celine Dion CD in their germ-ridden unwiped hands, raised said germ-ridden unwiped hands two inches in front of their cattle-blank eyes and said, “Here. Here is the new Celine Dion CD.” Sundays at the record store . . . it's like an endless parade of cretinous twats marching in and out through our glass front door . . . me and Boston Mike watch them walk outside along the plaza sidewalk and we see them and pray “Please, please don't come in here” . . . but God ignores us . . . laughs at our petty requests . . . it's the cattle march of the UF student body getting their nose rings—figuratively, but might as well be literally—yanked by our beloved music industry towards whatever insufferable dogshit they've seen fit to mass produce and ship our way . . . it's the ox-dumb rural-ass mouthbreather country folk waddling into town to do their “big city” shopping—fat fucks in NASCAR t-shirts ogling the poster racks in the corner . . . you know, like thong-clad women bending over rows of Camaros as the flame-fonted caption reads, “Haulin' Ass!!!” or the one where the caption reads “Your Tub or Mine?” in watery lettering as the feathery peroxide blonde with the shapily body emerges from a wooden tub painted in the Stars and Bars, all naughty bits strategically covered in soap suds . . . it's old drunks stumbling into the store to stand by the counter and talk loudly at us about how they were fortunate enough to see whatever played-out-not-that-great-to-begin-with classic rock garbage live in concert and everything back in 1979 . . . and speaking of garbage, Sundays are for some reason the big day when the nasty garbage pickers like to come in dragging crates of records with more scratches than grooves, shredded covers reeking of rotten leftovers and roach droppings . . . and then these jerks have the nerve to get all flabbergasted because we won't pay like top dollar for their precious finds . . . real rarities like Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass's
Whipped Cream and Other Delights
, Fleetwood Mac's
Rumours
, and
Reader's Digest Presents: Sounds for Easy Listening, Volume Three
 . . . in the middle of all this wheezing farting monument to human ugliness, egg-shaped moms stroll in thinking if they hum off-key renditions of the hit song they want to buy for their kid's birthday (on the cassingle format, natch), we'll get all “Name That Tune” with it and help them out . . . our friends who make up our customer base on every other day of the week are nowhere to be found . . . sleeping off last night's parties . . . bicycling from one barbeque to the next . . . but not me and not Boston Mike because somebody's gotta work this counter on Amateur Sunday, and the bills—oh, the damn bills!—never go away, so fuck it, fuck these asshole customers, and fuck me.

Boston Mike stands there on these typical Sundays and calls everything “retarded” in that accent of his that I'm not even going to try to do because I guess it's just—whatever, right?—I mean, Boston's where he came from so of course he's not going to sound like those of us around here who were oh-so-fucking-lucky to be born and raised in the South—and when it gets really fucking unbearable here—he'll elaborate and call the day “wicked retarded.”

“Wicked retarded,” he says, tongue ring clicking every time his tongue touches the roof of his mouth, standing there in that faded black stink-ass Assuck t-shirt, that smudged-up Boston Red Sox ballcap he wears to cover up his receding hair he thinks women actually care about, spacerless earlobes drooping and sagging like elephant balls, same old piercings across his bearded face, same old tattoo sleeves covering his arms, normally beady brown eyes squinting into that look of hatred fear desperation and annoyance you only see on the faces of jerkoffs like us deep in the existentialist pit of retail hell . . . “Wicked retarded,” Boston Mike says . . . and with that, it's the cue to give up on any hope of getting to kill the rest of the afternoon by sneaking a sixer of Old Hamtramck tallboys poured into coffee mugs . . . at least for another hour and a half of this shit . . . and I look over to where Boston Mike's looking, to the front door, and of course that's the source of the “wicked” in his sentence . . . I mean, what else could make this snail-drag of a Sunday afternoon worse?

Boogie Dave.

Boogie Dave is my boss, the owner of the store, a fecal-breathed troll of a man, a pathetic lumpy-dump troll-turd . . . like if a snaggle-toothed crackwhore had sex with one of the larger
Fraggle Rock
muppets, this is the thing that would be shat out in trollbirth . . . he never asks us how we're doing . . . shuffles in in fatguy sweat pants, simian back hair poking out of a sleeveless black Johnny Thunders t-shirt that is given the impossible duty of slimming Boogie Dave's ample man-tittied torso . . . shoulder-length black hair that probably looked alright back when he opened the store during the dusty-denimed/pub glam era of 1973-1974, but now what's left of his mane hangs there around the back of his tumor-bumpy skull like frayed tassels from the curtains of a dying pimp . . . he glares at us as he steps past, sniffles, says “It smells horrible in here!” and I want to say “Great to see you too, Boogie Dave,” but all you can do is stand there and look around and make sure your ass is covered and make sure there's nothing under your control that he has to whine about . . . because Boogie Dave is a total whiner . . . if the jerkoff finds one tiny mistake he'll harp on it and harp on it and mutter and complain until you wish he would drop dead . . . he climbs the steps to the upraised front counter slash register area, says “Look out” to me and Boston Mike, who step sideways into what little space we have back here, pulls out—yes, of course—about a dozen sticks of New Age Writer's Retreat incense sticks . . . soon the store will reek of wheatgrass deodorant and tenured patchouli . . . the funny thing is, it never succeeds in covering up the dusty attic smell of all those old records alphabetized in bins in the middle of the store as the CDs and VHS tapes loop around the walls and these fat stupid customers somehow squeeze their fat stupid asses in the narrow spaces between while Boston Mike and I wait for the inevitable Boogie Dave whining about whatever's wrong today with the store before Boogie Dave leaves, now that his twenty minute task of showing up at the store long enough to make his employees feel completely inadequate has been accomplished . . . such a cranky, cadaverous weirdo . . . clinging to this record store even though he hates it, because it's all he has . . . if it's not this . . . it's retail . . . and I sometimes fantasize of going into the electronics department of some large department store and there he is in the regulation blue dress shirt/khaki slacked uniform of the corporate retail gig . . . actually having to earn a living by dealing with customers for a change . . . and not just customers who normally come in here on non-Sunday days, but the vast unwashed morons who make this record store gig a total can of corn by comparison . . . Sundays times a million . . . he fits the incense sticks into their strategically placed holders on different shelves by the walls . . . pushing through customers who are in the way . . . more likely to say nothing than to say “Excuse me” . . .