Losing in Gainesville (9781940430331) (25 page)

God, she looks so good. The song “Little Doll” by The Stooges pops into his head, like it used to whenever he was with her. She has grown out her black hair to her shoulders, bleached the bangs, gentle waves he never had the chance to see before (she had always kept her hair short in the two years they dated, Ronnie's last two years in college), and that smile matches the suspicion, nervousness, happiness, in the voice, but it's a self-assured smile—Ronnie can contrast the smile to the anti-depressant smile of late-morning weekends—the teeth she would always try and hide because of their lack of symmetry—hated her whole body, actually—she thought her breasts were too small, her ass too bony, legs too skinny—to get pictures back from the Eckerd Drugs Photo Lab was always an ordeal of self-loathing and Ronnie's constant assuagement that she was, in fact, beautiful, because she was, goddammit. And she is. Only, now, she knows it. Purple combat boots, short plaid skirt, a tight pink t-shirt exposing a bare midriff (and a navel piercing, another new development) where between the small yet proportionate breasts there was a drawing of a retro looking female cat with long eyelashes, womanly cheeks, a jeweled necklace, a coquettish smile. Karl and Lauren stand to either side of Maggie, glaring at Ronnie—Karl in all black, and the kind of all-black that can't even be considered post-goth anymore, but the kind of all-black waiters wear at restaurants that aspire to urban chic; and Lauren, well, she has armpit hair—two black cotton candy tufts emerging from a white tank top, and that's all Ronnie notices about her—but they are no doubt remembering the last time they saw him, drunk and on roofies at some party, stumbling around in a KISS t-shirt and purple hair, Ronnie loudly, obnoxiously hitting on Lauren as they sat on the couch—awkward gropings, lunging kisses, lewd suggestions as Maggie seethed to his right and Karl seethed to Lauren's left—culminating in Ronnie yelling for a ménage à trois, or, as Ronnie called it that night, a “double-team.” As in: “C'mon Lauren, double-team us! It'll be awesome! We're hip! Let's do it!” An ugly scene ensued—Karl lunging at Ronnie over the couch, Lauren running off to cry, Maggie somehow separating the two before relatively sober heads prevailed. Ronnie passing out shortly afterward was the only thing that saved him from a deserved ass-whipping. Sincere apologies and pathetic pleading accomplished little; their friendship was never the same. Ronnie and Maggie broke up less than a month later, as Ronnie fell into a foul attitude upon meeting the real world after graduation—a real world that cared nothing about his opinions or the opinion column he wrote back in school—and at the same time, Maggie, just turning 21, was beautiful enough to try anything with almost anyone, because almost anyone was nicer and newer than Ronnie was anymore.

“What am I doing here.” Ronnie sighs. Throws up his hands. “I don't know.” There is so much he wants to say, wishes he could say. With all the sincerity of his being, he adds, “It's great seeing all of you again.”

Karl looks at his watch. Lauren yawns. “We gotta go,” Maggie says, starting to walk away. “Bye, Ronnie.”

“Wait!” Ronnie smiles. “Let's go to the Holy Goof Lounge. Like we used to. We'll get caught up.”

Karl and Lauren are already walking away, Karl holding an upraised left middle finger behind him.

Maggie steps back. “Take care of yourself, Ronnie.”

“Heyyyyyy,” Ronnie says in his best Fonztones, holding out his arms. Maggie tries not to smile, hurriedly bounces the few steps needed for the hug. It isn't as long as Ronnie wants and needs, but it is long enough. The smell and the touch are so familiar, so warm and welcoming, so why can't it be like it was?

“Be good in Gainesville,” Maggie says, stepping backwards, smiling at Ronnie—an unexpected smile, a tolerant, indulgent smile to their past—before turning around to catch Karl and Lauren.

“I'm trying,” Ronnie yells after her. Maybe she hears him, and maybe she even believes him.

Ronnie Altamont hangs around the Holy Goof Lounge with its cavernous walls and predictably beatnik décor as the jukebox plays the soundtracks to various spy films. He stays at the empty bar long enough to guzzle three beers in ten minutes. He steps back onto Orange Avenue, into the sea of
Cat and the Hat
hatted, pacifier sucking, raver youth. He finds his car, drives back to Kelly's, eastbound through all the empty miles of Colonial Drive, to that subdivision on the opposite side of the UCF Research Park, where he will climb into a rickety guest bed, think, and not sleep.

 

•

 

John “Magic” Jensen opens the door to his first floor apartment, sees Ronnie and Kelly standing there, the traffic of four-lane Alafaya Trail whizzing twenty feet behind them.

“We-heh-heh-heh-heh-hell,” Magic says. “We-heh-heh-heh-heh-heh-heh-heh-heh-heh-hell. We-heh-heh-heh-heh-heh-heh-heh-heh-heh-heh-heh-heh-heh-heh-heh-heh-hell.”

“Shaddap,” Ronnie says, smiling.

“The prodigal son returns,” Magic says, arms akimbo. “We-heh-heh-heh-heh-heh-heh-heh-heh-hell . . . ”

Ronnie and Kelly step around him, into the living room. Saturday night. Beers at Magic's before leaving for a collegiate party. A left turn from the entryway, and it's the familiar smells of old cigarette smoke and stale junk food matching up perfectly to how Ronnie remembers this hazy long rectangle of a living room. Stained uncleanable brown carpeting, flashing Christmas tree lights running around the top, MC Escher prints on the walls everywhere you turn, broken up only by the collage art poster from the Dead Kennedys album
Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables
. The L-shaped blue couches—sagging, cat-clawed and burn-holed. The stereo plays The Flaming Lips. The television plays
Saved by the Bell
.

A right turn from the entryway, and it's the fluorescent kitchen, with its gray walls covered in thrown pasta strands stuck like flat yellow hairballs, the unintentional science projects lurking in abandoned pots and pans on the stove, the case of Dusch Light in the fridge. Ronnie and Kelly go straight to the otherwise empty white Kenmore.

“To old time's sake,” Kelly toasts, one cold damp easily-dented can into the other.

“To a regression to blissfully banal college weekends,” Ronnie toasts.

Magic stops laughing, steps into the kitchen, opens the fridge. “To dreadful parties filled with South Florida rich kids in striped Tommy shirts playing drinking games around coffeetables until someone inevitably throws up.”

“Ah, college memories,” Kelly says, and everyone laughs.

Andrew “Randy Macho Man” Savage sees Ronnie and Kelly from the opposite side of the rectangled apartment, sets aside the whizzing Spin Art machine and the yellow paint he's been glooping into it, runs towards them.

“Ronnie!” he yells, kissing Ronnie on the lips. “Oh wow! It's so great you're here! This is going to be the best night ever!” He grabs a glass from the cabinet, pours water, drinks, runs back to the Spin Art machine.

“Ecstasy,” Magic says. “But he didn't buy enough to share.” Ronnie laughs, watching Randy Macho Man as he follows the splotchy yellow circles the Spin Art machine makes with each drip and drop, sweating even more than is normal on a Florida summer evening, eyes involuntarily rolling upward, but smiling, always smiling.

“So. Yeah,” Magic says, standing in the kitchen, hunched like he's too tall for the kitchen's short ceiling. “You better get ready, Ronnie. This party is going to be so great, you'll move back here, post-haste.”

The three of them move to the L-shaped couch. “So did you find a job up there yet?” Magic asks.

“No,” Ronnie says, feeling the familiar contours of the couch, cushions that rewarded slouching.

“That's great, man!” Randy Macho Man says, running from the kitchen and back every two minutes, filling and refilling a green glass of water. Ronnie sits between Kelly and Magic, Randy sits on the small part of the L-shaped couch, twitching with joy.

“So basically you're the same brokeass you were before, only now you're doing it a hundred miles away?” Magic asks. Kelly laughs at this. “And this is why the band is over? And this is why you've moved back?”

Ronnie sighs, chugs five greedy gulps from the silver Dusch Light can. “I can't stand it here. Gainesville's better. By far.”

“I love both places!” Randy Macho Man says, sweating and rolling his eyes to the back of his head. “You should buy some X, stop arguing, go to this party, meet some women.”

“Quite the to-do list,” Magic says.

“Goddamn UCF sausage parties,” Kelly says, and nobody disagrees.

“I wanna kill this case before we leave,” Magic says, crushing the empty Dusch Light with his fist. “I want to be good and drunk before I get there . . . ”

 . . . And really now, there isn't much that's more pathetic than drinking too much before a party to the point that you can't go to the party. Magic broke out the stooge pills, and now it's a black gap of four hours later, and there is no party, and it's only Ronnie driving Kelly back to his house, rambling on about, “If this was Gainesville, we could have walked to that stupid party, but you gotta drive everywhere here.”

“Don't blame me because Magic had stooge pills,” Kelly says, in and out of consciousness in the passenger seat, weaving forward and back, side to side, with every bend and bump in Alafaya Trail.

“Yeah, yeah—too many stooge pills, too many crap drugs . . . did you see it in there?”

“Yeah, I saw it. I see it every weekend.”

“Mumbling slurring idiots, and Randy acting like everything was the greatest thing ever.”

“So nothing's changed since you left.”

“No. It hasn't.” Ronnie drives down Alafaya Trail, past his jungled alma mater, the bright shiny new apartment complexes and the bright shiny new plazas and hotels. They enter Kelly's neighborhood. “Meh, the party would've been boring anyway.”

“Yup.”

A throb and a drain as the beer and stooge pills leave the body. The empty 4:00 a.m. streets, weaving through the verdure.

“It's all over here,” Ronnie says. “I mean, I admit that I did have some great times, you know? The school, my column, you guys, Maggie, everything? That campus over there . . . it used to be mine. So many warm afternoons doing nothing but writing, skipping class, sitting by the reflecting pond, talking to girls. Right when you settle in—comfortable—the world changes and it's another flying leap into the unknown. The time is too short, too short. And transitional times like these, Kelly. Do we grow up? Get older? Mature? Evolve? What? I can't go back. It can't be done. What will happen to us? Do you wanna be the 25-year-old suburban burnout who buys Bacardi for the high school party? Of course not. Do I wanna be a 40-year-old with a mohawk? Fuck no! I mean, it's just, what are we supposed to do here, in this too-short life filled with these tiny epochs you're always having to shed? What do you think?”

Kelly snores, mouth agape, leaning against the passenger window, drooling.

“Well. Alright then,” Ronnie says, as they pull into Kelly's driveway. He leaves him in the car, unlocks the front door with the key hidden beneath the welcome mat, stumbles and lurches through the house to the guest bedroom, climbs in, passes out/falls asleep.

 

 

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“Cain't ya see? Ohhhhcain't ya see? What that woman! She been doin' to me!”

Every bright beautiful morning, the undeniable smell of old spitcups, and the sounds of The Marshall Tucker Band's
Greatest Hits
playing from a worn cassette. Eastbound on I-4, watching the billboards scroll by with oversaturated regularity. Up ahead, the asbestos removal gig, in some elementary school in sleazy old Daytona Beach. Ronnie rides bitch in a dirty white pickup truck between two recent high school graduates with soccer scholarships named Tommy and Bassanovich. Neither can harmonize, but the sentiment is clearly heartfelt as they wail “Cain't ya see? Whoa whooooa cain't ya see? What that bitch! She been doin' to me-heeee!”

The job interview was a formality. Kelly got him the job. The bosses, a husband and wife three houses down from Kelly, were cheerful enough. They were more southerners than Floridians, which meant that when they asked “How're yew?” they actually meant it. The State of Florida required all prospective asbestos removers to take a test showing knowledge of asbestos, its power, its evil, and once Ronnie sat in that yellowed warehouse office and watched the required Nixon-era slideshow about the dangers of asbestos, he was sent off to work with the other “College kids like you,” as A.Q., the husband boss, told him, and Ronnie didn't feel like correcting him.

So Ronnie rides between Tommy and Bassanovich—between two soccer scholarship earners leaving for school in Kansas somewhere within the month. Tommy always drives. He has the lanky grace of a forward, which he is. Bassanovich has the squat strength of a goalkeeper, which he is. It is impossible to determine their hair color or style, as they both are never without blue ball caps pulled down over their foreheads. They try growing five o'clock shadows, but their faces are still stuck in a baby-smooth 2:30 in the afternoon.