Losing in Gainesville (9781940430331) (20 page)

Unconsciously, they were trying to link (and reconcile) Kiss with The Minutemen, a Promethean-enough endeavor had they actually known how to play, but by falling way short of either mark, they had their own thing going, no matter how sloppy and ill-conceived. It was funny. It was cathartic. And the music, for its time, wasn't half bad.

They played gigs all over Orlando—living rooms, backyards, coffee house open-mics, any bar or club that would have them. In Gainesville, they played a kitchen where the show ended with Ronnie tackled by all his new/old friends—the kids he never got to know in high school like William, Neal, Paul—as they stole the mic and screamed along to “Sweaty Hands.” Friends, old and new, got into the spirit of the jokes, the spectacle, the seriousness of the joke. As for the rest, as Magic was still fond of saying, “They're fuckers man, fuck
'
em.”

The music and the writing liberated Ronnie. Everything was really coming together—ladies, parties, tons of friends, fan mail about the column he wrote. Quite often, the days and nights spent in that blissfully naïve corner of the world called the University of Central Florida were blissful, languidly blissful. It was around this time when Ronnie met Maggie—who was three years younger, three times more attractive, and three times sweeter than Ronnie—and it was the closest thing you can get to “love” in the emotional immaturity of the late-teens and early twenties. In the middle of winter, Ronnie and Magic visited Chuck Taylor (who moved to Chicago after a year in the band to pursue dreams of improv comedy), and the city felt right, comfortable, even if it was 80-degrees colder than what they were used to. The action and the energy appealed to Ronnie as much as the music scene and his passing familiarity with Touch and Go, Drag City, Thrill Jockey . . . but really, so much of his love for Chicago and his desire to move there was projection, pure and simple, where Ronnie took everything Central Florida did not have—everything Ronnie wanted in a place to live—and tacked it onto Chicago. Besides, in terms of big cities, Chicago at the time felt like the only viable option. Atlanta was too southern for Ronnie. New York never came up. It was in transition from the Snake Plissken nightmare of the past to the Walt Disney nightmare of the future, and no one was moving to Brooklyn in those days. The West Coast was too far away . . . it didn't seem real. There was something about the Midwest that appealed to Ronnie. Pragmatic. Level-headed. Honest. Direct. Tellin' it like it is! Surrounded by people who think they've cornered the market on sanity and reality. He had heard of Lounge Ax in passing, hadn't heard of Empty Bottle or even Wicker Park . . . it wasn't so much about the music scene of that time as it was the idea of a city with so much possibility. Where Orlando felt hopeless, and Florida felt stultifying, Chicago felt and seemed inexhaustible, and Chuck Taylor, through his actions, his talk, his changed demeanor (urban, fast, smart) seemed to confirm all these projections. Drunk on tequila from the bar Chuck worked at, Magic and Ronnie agreed, while sobering instantly from the below-zero windchill on the cab ride back to Chuck Taylor's half-built loft space, that they would move there when they graduated.

In Orlando, they recorded on 4-tracks in Magic's apartment, and continued playing shows, and everything leveled off and that was fine even if the band wasn't really going anywhere. But where was it supposed to go?

Realistically, there were only so many places to play, and only so much you could do in Orlando. Graduation loomed. Willie-Joe Scotchgard graduated first. He moved to Cleveland to study the viola in a conservatory. They found another drummer—high school friend Andrew “Randy Macho Man” Savage—and soldiered on, but there was a decline in effect here, magnified by Orlando's omnipresent drug culture. Roofies were big that year—1995—and they weren't used by The Laraflynnboyle's circle of UCF friends for date rape, no matter what the papers say is its use in the uberculture. They made mean, surly, loudmouthed drunkards out of everyone, no matter how kind and considerate you normally were. Magic found roofies a fine way to numb the empty afternoon and evening hours. They magnified his already profound bitterness. For his part, Ronnie drank more and more, unsure of what to do with himself, especially after graduation, and his newspaper column—this column he had come to rely on so much as his identity—was no more once he graduated and received the diploma he didn't know how to use. Ronnie washed dishes so he would have time to write
The Big Blast for Youth
, and continued practicing with The Laraflynnboyles even if too many gigs ended badly from Ronnie's overindulgence of malt liquor, and Magic's nasty borderline violent (lots of fights broken up at this stage) roofie glaze. In this cloud of post-college uncertainty, as his behavior grew more and more erratic, as the smile on his face disappeared, as he floundered from job to job, Maggie left.

At some break in the clouds, Ronnie took a good look around. The only girls left were bisexual raver junkies. All the dudes he knew were content to be high all the time. He felt Orlando closing in on him. He was back to sitting around in his room, in the house he lived in with Chris Embowelment, playing Who records all night, trying desperately to avoid the thought that it was time to grow up and get a regular job and spend the rest of his days in comfortable, expected middle class, forever nagged by some variation of the question “What if?”

The only thing Ronnie could think to do was to flee for Gainesville. Ronnie and Magic weren't exactly best buds by this point—having little to connect over anymore besides what remained of the band—but Ronnie assured Magic the band would continue, somehow. They had always wanted to tour, and now Ronnie would get them more shows in Gainesville because it wasn't really that far away from Orlando (just far enough), and the music scene seemed better, what with all the punk rock you could shove down your spiky-haired throat and all. A stopgap, anyway, until they could get it together to move to Chicago. But Ronnie needed the change, needed the stimulation of others who weren't all about shitty drugs anymore, to a place that had more going on. Gainesville was all Ronnie could afford.

All of this swum around in Ronnie's quixotic brain as he played his unplugged electric guitar in his room after getting off the phone with John “Magic” Jensen. The tour would make things right again. Getting shows in Gainesville would make things right again. And then, soon enough, packing up and leaving for Chicago would make things right again.

It would be a beautiful and triumphant summer, and Ronnie couldn't wait to jump into it.

 

 

RONNIE AND SALLY-ANNE ALTAMONT

 

Ronnie calls his parents to share the good news.

“A tour,” Sally-Anne Altamont repeats, when presented with said good news.

“Yeah! Definitely!”

“You have no money, Ron. You have no job. You're not even in the same town anymore as those other guys, who never exactly struck me as hardworking and dedicated musicians. None of this strikes you as, I don't know, problematic?”

“It'll be awesome.”

“Awesome.” After a three mile run on the beach, always, a focus, clear candor, often lost in the lazy days of retirement, misplaced in the vagaries of meditation. “It's like you've lost your mind ever since we moved to South Carolina and you went off to college.”

“That was six years ago.”

“Exactly.”

 

 

SIOUXSANNA SIOUXSANNE GOES BOWLING

 

It's “Rock and Bowl Ain't Noise Pollution Nite” at the Gainesville Bowl-O-Rama. Siouxsanna Siouxsanne (an unfortunate nickname, lingering from high school during the peak of a Siouxsie and the Banshees obsession) is here tonight, throwing her sixth consecutive empty frame over on Lane 15. She is a terrible bowler. Most gothic bisexuals are.

The Run DMC version of “Walk This Way” pounds over bowling shoes squeaking across the wood. Swirling jade, black, and vermillion AMF boulders spin down the lanes, thundering like tympanis before grand old school showbiz introductions, until the percussive woodblockish rattle of the overturned pins break the tension, as the ball lands with a mechanical plop into the great unknown/unseen of its mysterious journey beneath the lane to be gracefully unfurled from the gaping maw of the retriever. From the game room, spasmodic videogame queefs. Across the lanes, strobe lights flicker. Black lights glow tubesocks and lint. The disc jockey is Sweet Billy Du Pree, legendary 1970s FM DJ back when Gainesville had a hard rock station called BJ 103: The Tongue.

“This one's goin' out to all the real rock and bowlers who still remember quality rock and roll,” the venerable Du Pree rasps through the crackling speakers of the public address system, voice worn low and raspy through a life of whiskey and Quaaludes. The elegiac opening strains to “Magic Power” by the Canadian power trio Triumph fade in and set sail across the lanes on a sonic odyssey of magic. And power.

“Shit! Shit! Shit! Turn right, you stupid goddamn dick ball!” Siouxsanna Siouxsanne yells over the din after yet another ball veers left well before having a chance to knock over any pins. She turns, straightens her posture, recomposes, and all inebriated clumsiness and aggression in the toss evaporates. She is tall, in a long black dress and black stockings, a slinky slide in the walk in faded red white and black bowling shoes unaccustomed to supporting this much grace. There's a relatively austere use of makeup (We can't look like we did in high school now, can we?) across the cheeks, eyelids, and lips of her art school features, a dyed-black salon cut somewhere between a page boy and a bob. Pale. So pale. It takes effort to get skin like this in Florida.

Siouxsanna Siouxsanne loses her footing, unused to the lack of traction as her right heel skids sideways. She flails to the floor in what seems a comedic pratfall, hurriedly rises, mutters, “I'm too llllllllloaded to be here!” over the not-quite-mocking laughter of friends.

Ronnie Altamont is impressed.

He silently observes the bowling and the good time laughter of this distinctly middle class college crowd in their ironed thrift store tees and unholey back-to-school mall pants. Ronnie leans forward against the bowling ball racks, standing on the unfashionably brown plaid printed carpeting on the three steps above where the bowlers sit changing shoes, keeping score, chugging brews. Here are the easy smiles and burdenless leisure of summer vacation, a jarring change from the dismal poverty Ronnie had grown accustomed to, those long muggy hours in his bedroom in the trailer alone, listening to The Stooges and trying to write. School is over, but only temporarily for them, but for Ronnie, he's reminded of how he felt like an interloper that first day he and Kelly set foot on the UF campus to score free Krishna food.

After a sweat jam at Paul's, Ronnie drove William and Neal to the Gainesville Bowl-o-Rama—where some nnnnnnnnugget William was trying to hook up with would be with a few of her friends. They would all be Ronnie's friends soon enough—all twelve of these amateur summer vacationing bowlers—but only Siouxsanna Siouxsanne stands out to Ronnie, in her mix of post-goth grace and sloppy belligerence. Ronnie, not the grown-ass man he thinks he is, still young enough to treat every crush like he is the first person to ever have these feelings. So charming! Siouxsanna Siouxsanne, stomping up to the line to try yet again to knock over a pin—any pin—falling over the line as she flings the ball “granny style,” long lithe arms pulling and spinning the rest of her forward until she loses her footing, spins, plops backwards while the ball—chipped and yellowed with white streaks like a dusk thunderstorm—bounces over the first lane to her left and continues rolling two lanes over, sabotaging the very serious play of a muffler shop's weeknight bowling team—where it knocks over four pins. Her friends cheer at this, they clap and congratulate her for finally getting on the scoreboard. The muffler shop's weeknight bowling team
6
has to smile, no matter how jaded they've become to the general misbehavior of college students. It helps that the interference in their very serious league play is from a girl who would be real pretty if she didn't wear so much makeup, if she didn't dress like she was leaving a funeral, if she laid out in the sun once in awhile and got herself a tan. Not that they would kick her out of bed or nuthin'. They're just sayin'.

“FUUUUUUCK YEWWWWWWWW!” Siouxsanna Siouxsanne brays to the paneled ceiling's spinning multi-colored disco lights. She's on her back, brain floating in and out of booze-fueled, med-soaked half-dreams of car trips with her parents—the only child in the backseat staring out the window from Orlando to St. Pete or Fort Myers or wherever they would go to see family—watching the lakes and swamps and bays and gulfs and oceans—pretending she was some kind of superfast manatee diving in and out of the sharp glittering waters (no matter the color—the pea soup of

the swamps or the worn concrete of the ocean or the choppy blue of the bay) keeping pace with the off-white wood-paneled Country Squire station wagon and flying out of sight above them when the waters ended until another water body appeared to the left or right as Billy Squier sings “my kinda lov-uh/my kinda luv-uh/my kinda luuv-uh . . . ” Two hands wrap around damp armpits and pull Siouxsanna Siouxsanne upright. She tries walking, but her legs are not taking any orders from her brain. Two friends—William and Neal, actually—lift her along on either side like she's a running back carried off the field after a knee injury to the gracious applause of the audience, only there is no applause, just snack bar stares and beer bar glares. Even the lanes are silent, as these twelve (plus Ronnie—transfixed and fascinated and in love) move en masse toward the exit.