Losing in Gainesville (9781940430331) (24 page)

Mouse turns, inserts the cassette, presses play. Foreboding tape hiss, then screeching white noise, followed by a slow synthetic 4/4 hip-hop beat—bass drum, snare, closed high hat cymbals opened on the eighth note after three then closed at four—repeated. A simple four note bass line on an endless loop, and then Icy Filet's voice, an awkward, lurching, talk-speak that doesn't quite lose the rhythm no matter how hard it tries:

I'm in my room watching Sanford and Son

faking heart attacks, Elizabeth it's the big one

drunk like Grady workin' power saws

eatin
'
baked potato with a Jell-O straw

we got astrophysicists down the hall

German swimmers and people throwin
'
Nerf balls

aphrodisiacs circled on my plate

do I have free will or is everything fate?

As the verses stop, the beat continues—the bass line, the white noise guitar—as Icy Filet interjects “Word” and “Aw yeah” here and there. The next verse:

Floridian Wizard of the rhyming scheme

Icy Filet is everything she seems

sortin' it out in a laundry bag

chicken fried rice and a can of Black Flag

roaches on the ceiling fishing for the sounds

of Icy Filet, Mouse, and the Get Downs

candy apple bottom with a tig ol' bittied face

like a Sharpie in your mind that can never be erased

The song soldiers on for five more seconds until the beat stops. The white noise of the guitar fades away into the tape hiss. Mouse stops the tape.

“Well?” Mouse asks, leaning in towards Ronnie, that insistent smile and subtle nod simply begging Ronnie to say it was anything less than completely brilliant.

It is ludicrous, awful, stupid, terrible, cheesy, moronic, sub-par, puerile, painful, insufferable, not-good. Ronnie clears his throat. “Completely brilliant!” he proclaims, smiling. “It sounds a lot like Beck.” (In Gainesville, it is always important to tell everyone what you think everything sounds like. It shows you know what you are talking about.)

“Beck?” Icy Filet leans backwards, lightly pounds Ronnie with her tiny right fist. She pshaws. “That's bogus, yo. I mean, I like him, but that's not what I'm going for. I want to be whiter than Beck, if that's possible.”

Mouse removes the cassette from the stereo, places it back inside its case, tosses the case aside, near a stack of yellowed underwear. “We'll go back to it. It has potential. Ronnie thinks so. Right, Ronnie?”

Ronnie smiles a charming used-car-salesman smile. “I do.” Yes, Ronnie believes the song is horrible, but he also believes that, in a perfect world, songs as amateurishly strange as these would be the staples of commercial radio and played with the same unceasing regularity as Pink Floyd.

“Good,” Mouse says, readjusting his bathrobe, a wavy flick of the wrist preventing encroaching nudity.

“What do you do, Ronnie?” Icy Filet asks, as they rise to stretch, to step out of the slovenly living room.

“He does nothing!” Mouse says, stepping into the kitchen. “It's why he has no money!”

“I'm a writer,” Ronnie says. “I'm also a musician.” They follow Mouse into the kitchen, where Mouse opens three green-bottled beers while howling and laughing, “He doesn't write! His band is a hundred miles away so they never play anymore!”

“That's not true,” Ronnie says, grabbing one of the cold green beer bottles from Mouse, chugging, mulling the idea that Mouse is probably right. Yes, probably.

“Mouuuuse,” Icy Filet whines a scold to her newish boyfriend of two-and-a-half months, who looks as hangdog as a guy who looks like Charles Manson can look. She turns to Ronnie, puts her arm around him. “It's ok. I believe you're a writer. Do you believe I'm a rapper?”

Ronnie smiles. He can't say “No,” no matter what he really thinks. “Yes. I do.”

“Thank you,” Icy Filet says, hugging Ronnie before grabbing the beer from Mouse's outstretched arm. “You look hungry, Ronnie. Let me order us some pizza. How does that sound?”

“Of course!” Mouse laughs. “Ronnie doesn't eat much, and he needs to.”

Ronnie could not disagree. The money is gone. He would be four months behind on rent, if Alvin bothered collecting the rent, to say nothing of the other bills. Ronnie tends to blow the plasma money as soon as he gets it—on beer, on eating out, on enough gas to get to some party and back. He is tired, hungry, exhausted, can't think of tomorrow, or the day after that, and definitely not next week, and don't even mention next month. In the Sweat Jam life, you take whatever resources are at your disposal at that immediate moment and use them to your fullest advantage, to suck the most fun you can out of that moment, because, tomorrow? You will be tired, hungry, exhausted.

When the pizza arrives, Ronnie's hunger pangs temporarily retreat. He finishes the beer and eats his fill, walks into the living room, finds the cassette case dangling at the edge of the dirty underwear pile, removes the tape, places it in the stereo, hits play, then stretches out across the long-unvacuumed floor, falling asleep to the music of his friends, deep in the sleep of one who is exhausted doing absolutely nothing with his life, and having a wonderful time doing so.

 

 

WHAT PART OF “DON'T LOOK BACK”

DON'T YOU UNDERSTAND?

 

Kelly stands in the threshold of the opened front door, watching the sprinkler's jets slowly rise, prismatic droplets refracting the sun before splattering across his crunchy parched brown lawn. He lives in the back of a 1950s subdivision in a tiny, pastel blue cinderblocked one-story house in a large corner lot. Across the street, a massive water tower hovers over everything like a UFO on the verge of shooting lasers at unsuspecting earthlings in some long-forgotten drive-in movie. High fences topped with barbed wire thick as bass guitar strings cordon off the opposite side of the street, separating the construction workers, plumbers, and mechanics who live in the neighborhood from the University of Central Florida Research Park on the other side.

Under the driveway's silver awning, a gray Volkswagen Rabbit is parked with its hood opened, perpetually awaiting whatever repair it needs to return to life. Next to the Rabbit is a brown Chevy Celebrity, jack propping up the left front tire side, also perpetually in wait for the repairs that will/might return it to the roads. In front of these on the driveway, Kelly's still-functioning rusted maroon Nissan truck. A blandy apple green four-door sedan rolls up and stops inches from the truck's downward angled rear bumper.

Ronnie shuts off the car, steps out, awaits the inevitable “Told ya so” from Kelly.

Instead, without taking his eyes off the withered brown grass, Kelly sighs, announces, “Take what you want to make sandwiches. There's beer in the fridge too.”

Ronnie nods, fifteen footsteps a brittle crunch across the grass, stepping around Kelly, then entering the house. Over the sprinkler's spray, Kelly hears the opening of a beer can, the frantic rattling of glass containers, the rustling of wrapped deli meat. Shortly after this, the sounds of
The Incredible Shrinking Dickies
album on the stereo. Loud.

Kelly continues watering what remains of his lawn, wondering if anything will ever change, or if life will always go on like this, surrounded by friends living a hand-to-mouth existence filled with one or all of the following: beer, dope, acid, Xanax, roofies, mescaline, ecstasy, heroin. Time measured between shows, the once or (if we're lucky) twice a month wait, filled with work, sleep, then any or all of the preceding. Kelly watches Ronnie step out the door, a beer can in each hand, draining the first, opening the second. He is much thinner. Disheveled hair, not in the fashionable sense, but in the “two weeks in a Greyhound Bus terminal” sense. The pungent, musty smell of unwashed clothing.

“Jesus, Altamont,” Kelly says, stepping back. “What the hell up and died on you in Gainesville?” He takes another step away, scrunching his gaunt face in disgust. “Besides your soul?”

“The trailer tub is covered in mildew. Mold. Dirt.” Ronnie says. He walks the ten steps towards the sprinkler. He takes off his t-shirt, drops it, sets his glasses on top of it. He falls on all fours on the wet grass, leaning directly over the sprinkler, the water shooting his face and hair, wetting his hands, washing the dirt away. In the midst of all the idleness—the parties, shows, general drunkenness—the money ran dry. Therefore, reluctantly and temporarily, Ronnie went back to Orlando. He survived three and a half months without steady work, but after the pizza with Mouse and Icy Filet, he didn't eat for three days. On the third day, he made the two hour round trip walk, from the trailer off 34th Street to Mouse's first floor student ghetto apartment in that gray three story dilapidated house, to borrow twenty dollars, enough for gas money and a meal. Not even Mouse could laugh about it, or say much beyond, “Hurry up and get back here. We'll miss you, buddy,” shaking his head as he stood in the living room listening to his latest recordings made with Icy Filet. Ronnie took the money, bought a double cheeseburger and fries at the Checkers behind Mouse's place, on University Avenue, ignoring the glares generated by Ronnie's smell (he stunk like the trailer now, like summer at the season's sweatiest worst) and general demeanor. From the payphone outside the Kelly's Kwik-Stop, Ronnie talked to Kelly long enough to tell him he was coming back for a little while, hung up, packed a few clothes, some books, and a journal, threw them in the car, filled up the gas tank with the money he had left, and kept the speedometer at 80 mph, forsaking the sentimental journey of olde-tyme Florida southbound 441 for the touristy blur of Interstate 75 to the Turnpike.

Ronnie crawls, even with the sprinkler's trajectory so he is always getting wet. His khaki pants turn green at the knees from the grass stains. Between the payphone call two hours ago and now, Kelly secured Ronnie a job. His neighbors own an asbestos removal business. The work is at a school near the beach. Ronnie will sleep in Kelly's spare bedroom for the next month, work the asbestos job, earn and save money. The pay is $7.50 an hour, more than Ronnie has ever been paid for anything.

Kelly goes into the house, returns with a bar of soap and a towel. “Here,” he says, tossing him the soap. Ronnie lathers up.

Oh, to be clean again! Kelly tosses him beer cans as the others are drained and tossed. Drunk and drenched in the blazing summer sun, as the Dickies' cover of “Eve of Destruction” howls from the living room and out the open doors and open windows, Ronnie stands, smiles, raises a beer to the great water tower in the sky, because Florida—Central Florida—is at this moment everything it is allegedly cracked up to be. An escape. A new start. Another chance.

 

•

 

Friday night. Ronnie borrows a twenty from Kelly before Kelly leaves to his new job, night auditor at some hotel, only this time he's working in relatively safer Lake Mary—where the worst things he will deal with are one-night stands and sloppy drunk insurance salesmen unwinding after long hours of teleconferencing. Ronnie takes the twenty—promising to pay it back when that first asbestos-removal paycheck comes in—and drives off to downtown Orlando, hoping to run into anyone he knows.

Downtown Orlando in 1996 is a five block unvibrant stretch of Orange Avenue, rave clubs and meat markets populated with the most vapid people this side of southern California. Oppressive booty bass and the macho growling of scruffy alternative rock fill the desperately festive atmosphere. Bike police ride in slow predatory packs, shrieking whistles and writing tickets to jaywalkers. The homeless are cordoned off into approved “Panhandling Zones.” Douchebags with Mardi Gras beads in July, screaming for no discernible reason.

Ronnie parks on a sidestreet, steps into the anti-carnival of Orange Avenue. The good times from the past attack in the unlikeliest of places: furtive makeout sessions at that ATM machine, holding hands while serenading passersby with Dead Milkmen songs on that sidewalk, fits of laughter over “you had to be there” jokes on that corner. It didn't really start to suck until this past year.

He crosses Washington Street, passing bars that used to be decent enough, past venues for live music that were now gross dance clubs. Too many memories here, and many of them good.

“Ronnie Altamont?” A familiar girl's voice yells as he waits to cross another street.

He turns around, sees his ex-girlfriend Maggie. Everything inside him spins, falls. She is with her best friend Lauren, and Lauren's boyfriend Karl. The four of them used to spend most of their waking non-working hours together, sometimes in these downtown bars, other times in each other's apartments around the University of Central Florida.

“Uh . . . hey!” Ronnie manages, followed by a strange awkward cackle that has never left his mouth before or since. “How are you guys doing?”

“I'm fine,” Maggie says, tone a perfect blend of suspicion, nervousness, happiness. “What are you doing? Here, I mean.” She looks around at Orange Avenue, the almost-skyscraping bank buildings, the near-bustle of the foot and car traffic, the Orwellian sounds of prefabricated leisure. “I thought you moved away finally.”