Losing in Gainesville (9781940430331) (15 page)

“So what do you think?” I ask Boston Mike, feeling the familiar gravel of these barely paved roads.

“About what?”

“In five years. Where'll you be?”

Boston Mike laughs. “Jesus, dude.” He punches me in the arm. “I don't know. I don't gotta know. You don't gotta know. We're young. Wicked young.” I say nothing, eyes trying to focus on the traffic one block ahead on University.

We turn left onto University Avenue, away from the campus towards the bars and restaurants. The sun sets behind us, the afternoon heat replaced by an easy warmth. The streetlights turn on up and down the street. The lights inside gas stations, the hotel, the restaurants and shops . . . they're bright beacons . . . and all I can ask myself is: Why can't it always be like this? Everything here and now is perfect and comfortable, and why can't it always be like this? Me and a friend after work walking somewhere to get even more llllloaded with more friends, to relax in this relaxing place that feels more like home than anyplace I've ever been . . . because, even if Boogie Dave is a total dick, and Daisy the Canary Babe will never grace my bedroom . . . that's alright, because we're still young—and every moment—every flip of a record, every girl I pass, every waking moment, has so much incredible possibility, and that's life here, and I don't ever want that to change.

And that's the fucking problem . . . it never stays the same—not when you're in the womb, in the house the morning of your first day of school, graduations, college, after college, and on and on until death. This moment is everything, so who gives a fuck about five years? It's another perfect night in a town I never want to leave.

Up ahead at Gatorroni's, Neil and Paul are at an outside table, a pitcher of dark beer in front of them, sipping from plastic cups then spitting out the beer in a long comical mist.

“We're practicing our spit takes,” Paul says when I sit to join  them.

“Let me try,” I say, as Boston Mike goes inside to score two free pitchers from our friends behind the counter.

 

 

LIKE STEPHEN KING

 

“It's all really ok,” Ronnie says to no one, walking back to the trailer from the Kwik-Mart, down a side street with the kinds of forlorn little office buildings that always house short-lived nondescript small businesses with names like “KDM Systems Inc” and “Southeastern Solutions.” On the right, before the trailer park, two one-level houses, collapsing on themselves in a kind of abandonment most often seen in whole sections of Detroit. “The book will be published soon, and that's that.”

Ronnie runs into the trailer long enough to grab the disc holding all 536 pages of
The Big Blast for Youth
, carries the disc—this blue 3” square disc that is his eternally bright and lucrative future—to the car, holding it tight in both hands like the valuable object it is. He hides it in the glove box, drives away, and within minutes is reclined in a gray plasma donation chair by the plasma center's front windows—facing a row of six similar gray chairs occupied by everyone from collegiate ravers, looking blissfully emaciated in shiny track suits, to the black and white poor of this and nearby counties (Alachua, Putnam, Marion, Union, Gilchrist, Bradford, Levy). A four-inch needle drains the, as Lou Reed might've called it way-back-when, mainline in the middle of Ronnie's right arm, and Ronnie squeezes his right hand, sitting there under fluorescent lights as the TVs in the corner play MTV videos of 1990s musicians making money off their perceived problems . . . Ronnie kills the time by imagining how it's all going to go down, because, after all, Ronnie is familiar with that film Drinking is a Really Big Deal When You're a Writer, you know, the one about the poet who liked drinking, so Ronnie knows how these discoveries happen.

It's only a matter of time, Ronnie thinks, sitting there dreaming about how great it will be, once he mails off the manuscript. All that is left to do is to print it out and mail it, once he is done filling this IV bag with amber colored plasma. Soon this whirring machine to his immediate right will stop whirring, will stop separating Ronnie's blood from Ronnie's plasma, and he will get the needle removed from one of the perpetually stoned orderlies who work here, will get the crook of his arm wrapped in gauze from same perpetually stoned orderly, will collect his money, and leave for this friend of a friend of an acquaintance named Chloë, this girl he kinda new back in Orlando who in a chance encounter in a Publix parking lot, told Ronnie she would be more than happy to share her computer, printer, and paper for the cause of
The Big Blast for Youth
getting into printed form and mailed to the lucky editor who would get to read this.

 

•

 

“Do you want anything to drink?” Chloë asks, standing in the doorway to her feng-shuied bedroom, smiling. Smiling at Ronnie.

Ronnie sits in a black office chair crammed to the brim with what Ronnie believed to be spaceage polymer plastics form-fitted to practically massage the asses of anyone so fortunate enough to sit down upon it. What a chair; what a chair! Ronnie contrasts this with that rickety wooden chair of Chris Embowelment's, painted black with red pentagrams (of course) that creaked and shifted like it would break at any moment as Ronnie had proofread the novel on Mr. Embowelment's computer (“I wonder how he's doing, or if he's forgiven me?” Ronnie thinks to himself) in the early morning hours of the day he was to move to Gainesville. Before leaving, Ronnie wanted to be sure no revisions were needed. None were needed. It was a masterpiece.

“What do you have?” Ronnie asks, staring at the gray monitor screen on the dust-free white desk, the paper-stuffed off-white printer to the right of the wide and dense monitor with a menu awaiting orders to print the novel that would change the world, as Ronnie makes one last dummy check for any mistakes.

“Beer. Wine.” The way she stands there, smiling. Ronnie had always considered Chloë to be like this overweight gothy broad (Yeah, Ronnie thought it was hilarious to say “broad”) with the requisite fixations on Morrissey. Here she is now, living in Gainesville, in the Duckpond neighborhood—this relatively upscale neighborhood of professors and graduate students—standing there, smiling.

“Wine.” Ronnie had learned that having a drink or two after donating plasma was the equivalent of three or four drinks.

“What kind?”

“Whatever.”

She returns with two long-stemmed wine glasses half-filled with chardonnay (Ronnie guesses), sets his to the left of the keyboard. “Have you ever had a spritzer?” she asks.

“Spritzer?” Ronnie repeats, not taking his eyes off the screen.

“It's wine and Sprite.”

With his left hand, Ronnie lifts the glass. With his right hand, he clicks the “print” button with the mouse. The printer screeches, then whirs. The glasses clink.

“Cheers,” Chloë says. She makes a big production out of sniffing the wine before sipping it, sounding to Ronnie like someone trying to breathe with a bad cold.

She wears too much eye make-up, Ronnie thinks. It's a painful purple, thick, layered on with a trowel. Same with the lips, the blush, the purple streaks in the bangs of her dark hair, framing her fat pale face, wrapping around the beginnings of that double chin. Still fat, but less gothy, Ronnie decides. Goth-casual? Sure. He decides Chloë is one of those girls who act thirty the moment she obtains a driver's license. That thirtiness only grows worse with each new rite into adulthood. She has one month left in college, and she acts and behaves like Ronnie's idea of somebody's mom. The depleted plasma levels and the lack of food help the wine kick in immediately.

The manuscript prints, one slow page at a time. This house. The interior decoration is straight out of an interior decorating magazine. Color-coordinated walls match furniture, match plates, match curtains, match clothes. Not green: Avocado. Not purple: Plum. But you strip that away, you have these worn hardwood floors, thoughtfully planted Spanish moss dangled shade trees (in Central Florida, they never considered the importance of shade trees as they were tracting out their own take on suburbia—keeping a palm tree or two (and those don't shade shit) for decorative purposes only), and the distinguished venerable overall charm to the place, with its front porch and soft yellow exterior paint, a house that had weathered more during the past fifteen years than those Central Florida homes had. Ronnie can ignore the feng-shui and all the obnoxious color-coordination, and dream of someday living in a Gainesville house like this, should he ever be fortunate enough to escape the trailer. He tries and fails at recalling the other time he was here, loaded on roofies after The Laraflynnboyles played a chaotic houseparty in the student ghetto, three years ago.

 

•

 

It was a tiny little house—Paul's house at the time—so small that the bands played in the kitchen and only about fifteen people could cram into the living room to watch the performance. It's one of those houses in punk rock lore where everyone figures quite rightly that they're going to tear it down in a couple years, so there's really no need to clean anything, to mop away the sticky black grime on the linoleum floors, and if there are cracks or outright holes in the plaster on the walls—why, it's nothing a flier from some enjoyed Nardic Track show from the recent past won't fix. Wille-Joe Scotchgard's drums are pressed as far into the kitchen as possible, with his back to the oven where he has to consciously avoid brushing the knobs that turn on the gas stove's burners. John “Magic” Jensen plays the bass, wobbling from side to side—head a dumbed-down mix of stooge pills and stooge drink—bleach blond glam metal rockwig atop his head—and Ronnie, without the wine now blocking the vision—if his mind at the time hadn't been filled with stooge pills and stooge booze—one little prod from someone there who does remember—and Ronnie could see the view from the floor, underneath about ten bodies who dogpiled him gleefully after he made one comical/not comical leap into those who had packed into the room to see them—guitar face-up on the dirty floor, open detuned strings plucked by random hands, as random voices sing into the microphone and mic stand that have also fallen to the floor—the sweat dirt old beer smoke stench—and through the gaps in the legs and arms, Ronnie looks to the rhythm section, who look back—Magic peeking through the feathered-metal bangs of the wig, and Willie-Joe leaning up over the drums to make sure Ronnie's alright, and he's actually better than alright, because his girlfriend is somewhere in here, and his friends are everywhere, and he's in a band, and outside in the front yard, they stand in groups of three, four, or five, as the Gainesville Police cars are parked along the edge of the yard, officers waiting for anyone to take one step off the property with an open container. Ronnie often forgets about this, forgets about catching a ride (with whom?) to the Duckpond to stay at Chloë's, and they sat in a circle of eight or nine or ten, Ronnie in Maggie's lap, Maggie wiping the kitchen floor grime off his face with a borrowed dishtowel, softly asking, “Why do boys with big brains do such dumb things?” to which Ronnie can only smile because he said everything he had to say in the performance and is ready to pass out like this.

 

•

 

Three years later, and Maggie's gone, the band is on a downward spiral, Ronnie has graduated, and here he is in Gainesville, printing a manuscript he feels he has no choice but to believe is his ticket out of this rut. “What's your book about?” Chloë asks, leaning into Ronnie, one fat boob brushing his back.

“Aw, man, I don't know,” Ronnie says, leaning away from the fat boob, not taking his eyes off the gray screen showing the novel's title page. He loathes this question. “It's about a lot of things.”

Chloë leans in closer, boob brushing his back again, face inches from his right cheek. She smells like the perfume counter at the mall. “That's not a very good answer, Ronnie.”

“Yes, Chloë. I know.” When sober, Ronnie doesn't entirely dislike Chloë, but now? “It's about Orlando, basically,” Ronnie manages.

“Oh. Can I read it?” Chloë asks, wide hips already swiveled to the printer, hands already reaching to the twenty printed pages.

Ronnie moves his hands to block Chloë's. “When it's published, you can,” he smiles.

The phone rings on the opposite side of the bedroom. “Be right back,” Chloë says, patting then squeezing Ronnie's shoulder.

“Oh hi!” she says—too loudly, too loudly—into the phone removed from its cradle on the nightstand next to the bed. She plops onto the bed, left hand holding the phone, right hand running fingers through her hair. “Ronnie Altamont is over here. Yeah! He's printing out a book! Yeah, he wrote a book! Me neither . . . ”

Ronnie sits in front of the computer wishing the book would print already, wishing he could mail it away, ready to flee Florida for the small press that would easily get his work out there. This Orlandoan notoriety, its final residue manifested in the first and last namedrop, was tiresome, because—really now—he was less than nothing. Some bum, knowing little except not to trust any social acquaintance who speaks of him by his first and last name, because the “glory days” of three years ago, or even one year ago, when his name mattered to anyone, are over.