Losing in Gainesville (9781940430331) (21 page)

Sweet Billy Du Pree turns down the Billy Squier, announces, “Ladies and gentlemen, you know I used to party hard, but I also used to party safe. Let's keep it street legal out there at the rock and bowl, yadig? Here's another song that could never get old: ‘Whole. Lotta. Luuuuuuuuv.' ”

Siouxsanna Siouxsanne lollygags her head rightward, yells “You suck ass!” to the DJ booth. Friends shrug at Sweet Billy Du Pree, mouth the word, “Sorry.” Ronnie looks to Sweet Billy Du Pree, up in the DJ booth. He wears a red bandana on his upper forehead. A faded black “The Ultimate Ozzy” tourshirt, swollen from the beerbelly. Aviator sunglasses. He nods his head in rhythm to the “du-nuh, du-nuh, nuh” of the “Whole Lotta Love” guitar intro. The rocking and bowling resumes.

Ronnie trails behind this group as Neal and William keep Siouxsanna Siouxsanne from falling to the ground, passed out and dreaming of childhood manatees. In and out of consciousness, she yells expletives, mumbles unintelligible moans between drools. So beautiful, Ronnie thinks. In the parking lot, two more friends join in and hoist her into the back of a Volvo station wagon—one of those relaxed boyfriend and girlfriend couples you know will be married shortly after getting their degrees—and off they go, Ronnie watching the Volvo's boxy red taillights fade away across the mammoth parking lot. In the midst of the parking lot talk—the shrugs and the “That's Sioxusanna Siouxsanne for ya's,” the ride back to William and Neal's where they will have one more beer while listening to CCR (and still talking about Doug Clifford like it will really happen), Ronnie wants to ask about Siouxsanna Siouxsanne, but he knows no one will tell him what he wants to hear, knows no one will say, “You and her, you'd be great together, Ronnie!,” knows no one will claim that she isn't as crazy as she was acting at the Gainesville Bowl-O-Rama for “Rock and Bowl Ain't Noise Pollution Nite.” So he holds it in, “it” being whatever passes for “love” in his heart, mind, and other, less noble, body parts.

 

 

QUASIMODO IN THE DISHTANK

 

Alvin knocks on Ronnie's bedroom door—three soft, unassertive taps.

“Yeah what?” Ronnie grunts, annoyed, because he's thinking about maybe doing some writing as he rifles through his compact discs for something to listen to. He's busy, you understand.

“I got my first paycheck from Otis's Barbelicious BBQ, and I was wondering if you wanted to go out for Chinese food. My treat, pfffff.”

All thoughts of busyness, of thinking about writing while listening to music, vanished from Ronnie's mind, replaced by a massive steaming mountain of pork fried rice. Ronnie hops off the mattresses, leaps to the door, opens it. “Let's go.”

The restaurant—The Ancient Chinese Secret—is a two-minute drive down 34th Street. Alvin drives, narrowly avoids sideswiping two cars, honking blurs in the myopic haze beyond the range of his thick glasses. “Pfff. Guess they didn't see me,” Alvin says. Ronnie laughs at this, trying not to look at the murderous glares from the narrowly avoided cars, thinking how absurd it would be to die in a car crash simply because he wanted to score a free meal.

They sit in a cool dark dining room in a booth by the window overlooking the broiling blinding plaza parking lot. Alvin talks about his job. And talks. And talks.

“So I wash the dishes, the forks, the knives, the spoons, the spatulas, the bowls, the plates, the storage bins, and whatever they want me to wash, really—pffff!—but that ain't all I do there. I stir the beans, butter the bread, take the clean plates to the bus boys, take out the dirty linen at the end of the night. It ain't bad really, pfff.” Yes, Ronnie is aware of the job description here, and not only because he has prior experience in the dishwashing field. Alvin has told him all about the routines of his work several times already. Butter the bread. Stir the beans. Take out the dirty linen. Wash what they take back to me. Pfff. Ronnie is too hungry to listen, to care, to bother with trying to respond to anything Alvin says, because Alvin doesn't respond to what you say, he simply continues talking about whatever the hell he wants to talk about. As Ronnie waits for his food, Pluto orbits around the sun in one complete rotation, empires rise and fall, Ice Ages come and go and come and go again. Still, no food. Alvin keeps yammering. Pfff. But it's a free meal, and if Ronnie can eat something, he can go to Gatorroni's, where he'll score free beer from William and drink all night. If only this food would get here already
.

“. . . So yeah, they call me ‘Quasimodo' at work, pfff.” Alvin mentions in the middle of this nonstop yak.

Ronnie snaps back in the booth, jarred from his impatient reverie. Ronnie huffs. Ronnie is offended. “They call you ‘Quasimodo?' ” Ronnie huffs once more. Ronnie is offended. “I can't believe that, Alvin. That's so mean.”

“Well, it's nothing I ain't used to, pffff.” Today, the “pfff” sounds especially resigned, like a deflated tuba.

“No, man . . . that's not right,” and Ronnie, he actually tries imagining that there is someone inside Alvin that's real, someone suffering an endless series of slights, guilty of nothing but being born with Swedish wino pubic hair scalp, acne, buckteeth, that smell. Everything is off about him, and he knows it and has to live with it. Ronnie could look around town, could look at himself and those around him, and at the end of the day, no one was stranger, no one was a bigger nonconformist than Alvin. He didn't even try. He was born into it. Everyone else magnifies their nonconformity just enough to get laid but not enough to adversely impact the quality of life they are accustomed to. Beyond a heightened sensitivity and artistic inclinations, they didn't suffer daily the way Alvin suffered daily.

Ronnie manages an “I'm sorry, man.”

“Pfff.”

Finally, the food arrives. Sweet and sour chicken for Alvin, pork fried rice for Ronnie. After subsisting on little besides Little Lady snack cakes and microwave burritos, Ronnie relishes it all—the taste and the chew, the swallow and the downward movement, the warmth and the fullness. All thanks to Alvin. Shit, Alvin's the entire reason Ronnie's even here in Gainesville. Who else would let him live this way? Rent-free. Bill-free. And all Ronnie does is make fun of him.

“Well, that was great,” Ronnie says on the drive back to the trailer. “Best meal I've had in a long time.”

“I'm thinkin' about watchin' a movie tonight, pff,” Alvin says on the drive home. “Ya wanna watch it with me?”

Ronnie thinks it over as Alvin turns right off 34th Street onto the side street leading to the trailer park. After free Gatorroni's beer, when William gets off work, they'll show up at peoples' houses, see what they are doing, or maybe they will end up at the Rotator. Nothing definite. With some food in his belly, it would make drinking that much easier.

“Naw, man,” Ronnie says. “I made plans.” Alvin parks the van. Ronnie immediately opens the door, hops out. Oh yeah. He almost forgets to say, “But thanks for dinner.” Alvin watches Ronnie get into his car and drive away.

 

 

“IT'S THE BEGINNING OF THE BEGINNING OF

THE END OF THE BEGINNING,” SEZ ROBBIE

ROBERTSON IN “THE LAST WALTZ” . . . 

 

 . . . is the quote I've been running around in my head lately after watching that movie at some hippie party at UCF (all the little subcultures hang out together on the fringes, so you end up being around hippies, no matter how, like, fuckin', punk rock or whatever you are). At first, I scoffed at it, and I don't remember much of the rest of The Band playing with all their old fart friends—once the roofies kick in alls I remember is a vague steady blunt surly torrent leaving my mouth and the delusion that my brain is finally making some truly wonderful and fearless connections re: my life and shit.

But yeah: What does that mean? I mean, I know it's probably just some cocaine koan bullshit when Robertson says that, but, ok, let's break it down:

We know it's the beginning, but it's the end of that beginning, but it's the beginning of the beginning of that end of the beginning.

I‘m starting to think I know what he means by that, as me and Macho Man Randy pull up to what Ronnie tells me is called the “Righteous Freedom House,” one of these large old houses people here live in where bands play every weekend, one of those Gainesville punk rock houses Ronnie busts a nut over in his corny punk rock fantasies.

“This better be good,” I say before stepping out of Randy's brown-exteriored, gold-interiored 1981 Chrysler Cordoba—you know, the car with the “fine Corinthian leather” ol' what's-his-name from
Fantasy Island
promises, only Randy's car isn't fine Corinthian anything—cloth seats blackened with dirt and tears from lugging amps and drum gear from one end of Orlando to the next, the paint job worn away by the sun—hood, roof and trunk dented by hailstorms—and somebody (Ronnie, probably) started calling it “The Poop Ship Destroyer” after that Ween song. Randy climbs out, looks across at me, over the pock-marked roof as I continue, “I have five roofies in my pocket, and I'm not afraid to take them if this isn't.”

Of course, Ronnie couldn't grace us with his presence to load in the gear, and actually—nobody's here right now as we're in that awkward time of after dinner and before the party when you wonder if anyone's going to bother showing up, so Randy and I trudge back and forth from The Poop Ship Destroyer to the corner of the living room that's been allocated as the place to plug in and set up by the scenester (the thing about Gainesville that I never understood was how everybody here kinda looks the same . . . it's like that line in
Quadrophenia
: “it's easy to see / that you are one of us / ain't it funny how we all seem to look the same?” (And now you see why I'm not the singer for The Laraflynnboyles. If you think Ronnie's singing is bad, and it is . . . )) with his black band t-shirt and hair dyed some bright unnatural color and very short on a frail vegan frame and they're all nice enough, I guess—these wannabe prodigies of Ian MacKaye, and you can tell in their behavior, they're always sitting there thinking “What would Fugazi do here?” but we trudge across the small treeless grassless dirt front yard into the large living room covered in (of course) show fliers and (of course) the iconic photographs of like Minor Threat sitting on the front steps of the Dischord House, Jawbreaker sitting on an old couch, some angry singer I don't know doing that “breaking the fourth wall” thing all these angry desperate singers do when they run up to a crowd of equally angry desperate kids in the audience who gather around the mic to scream along to the words they've memorized like solemn Boy Scout oaths of forthrightness to the Den Leader, interspersed with pictures of Kiss and Iron Maiden and Van Halen that somebody here finds funny, and, come to think of it, I find it funny too, meanwhile Scenester dude stands over us as we plug in and set up asking questions like “So how's the Orlando Scene these days?” and I pshaw and grunt a “Sucks” and Randy shrugs and says, “Yeah,” and Scenester dude presses on and asks us about different bands in Orlando and yeah, we've heard of these bands, they all have names like December's Februrary and Car Bomb on a Sunday Afternoon, and I can't stand those bands, but I try to be polite so I says, “Yeah, we're not really into any of that,” and Scenester dude gets the picture.

True to form, Ronnie shows up the moment everything is finally set up. He's with William, Neal, and Paul, and it's like some kind of high school reunion with our hearty ha ha has and backslapping embraces. Ronnie seems happier. He looks like hell—disheveled hair, smelly unwashed clothing, an underfed weight loss—but he does seem happier the way he stands around us smiling, looking from me and Randy to the other guys. He always wanted to be a part of something. I think that's why he wrote that retarded opinion column for the school paper. I really do.

Anyway, Paul, who communicates entirely in inside jokes, volleys about five inside jokes my way in about twenty seconds, and it's like we're all seventeen or eighteen years old again having a late night at the Denny's on State Road 434 back in Orlando, only, instead of ten of us taking up the largest booth in the restaurant, ordering nothing but a basket of fries and ten glasses of water, it's six years later, and we're living whatever short-sighted dreams we had back then of playing in bands. It's really all we ever talked about, aside from girls.

Neal steps up to Randy, rubs his recently emerged beer belly. “Looks like Tara's keeping you well-fed, heh,” and as he rubs, he pokes Randy's belly and punctuates it by saying, “Heh! . . . Heh!” until Macho Man Randy shoves him away, laughing (the dude doesn't have a mean bone in his body) and says, “Fed and fucked, dude. You know how it is . . . ”

“I only know about the second one,” Neal says, and we laugh. It really is great being around these dudes again. It almost makes me want to like Gainesville. Almost.

Anyway, they show up with a case of Old Hamtramck, and they're already drunk, so it looks like me and Randy have some catching up to do before we start playing. People slowly start showing up, peeking into the empty living room, taking one look at us, realizing they don't know us, then stepping out to shoot the shit in the front yard. I shotgun three beers in a row, and my friends—oh, my friends!—they circle me and cheer me on in a way that's sincere in its ironical references to collegiate dude squad bro-ham peer pressure. It's like we're making fun of it even though it's exactly what we're doing.