Losing in Gainesville (9781940430331) (29 page)

“And then, like two weeks later? We did something else with the portrait. The semester ends, and our financial aid runs dry and I don't have a job yet for the summer. I'm with another broke friend, and we're hungry, so I get this idea.

“I called that same Otis's and ask to speak to someone from the kitchen. They put me on.

“ ‘Hello,' I say, and I'm talking through my hand to try and disguise my voice to make it sound like, you know, someone who might take hostages? ‘We have your portrait of Otis. Here's our list of demands. Write this down.' And the dude who's on the phone is laughing, like he's in the spirit of the thing, because, I don't know, if you work in a kitchen like that, I imagine you need to take the laughs where you can get them, right? So he's like, ‘Ok, shoot.'

“I tell him we want—sealed—four plastic plates each of beef brisket, barbeque pork, barbeque chicken, mashed potatoes, corn, biscuits, and fried okra—inside four to-go bags placed on the blue curb in the handicapped parking spot. Me and my friend figure we can park there long enough to check the food, make sure it hasn't been turded on, or whatever, and there's enough open space and traffic between the parking lot and the front door to prevent us from getting jumped by the kitchen crew or whatever. We tell them we'll be there in forty-five minutes. No funny business. When the demands are met, we will leave Otis in the spot where the food is. We have him read back our order. He does it, laughing the whole time, and I'm thinking, you know, they're cool, they're in the spirit of the thing. He could have hung up on us, could have told us they have a replacement portrait of Otis already hanging up anyway, but they're playing along. So that's cool. They're cool.

“We get there, pull into the handicapped spot, and sure enough, there are four to-go bags, greasy with barbeque right there on the blue curb. I open the door, carrying the portrait, and slowly approach the bags of food, looking around for any funny business.

“I lift up the first two bags, but I'm sensing something isn't quite right, and sure enough, I look up and see, hiding behind the bushes and shrubs and hedges all along the Otis's Barbelicious Barbeque building, the kitchen crew, and they start yelling, ‘Ambush!' and I wanna laugh, but I gotta book it because who knows what they'll pull if they catch me. So I keep one bag, drop the other so I can continue holding the portrait as I hop into the open passenger side door of the car, and yell ‘Go!' at my friend, and he backs out and speeds away a second before the kitchen crew stops us.

“I was bummed we only got one bag for all that trouble, but hey: Still got this portrait, right?”

 

•

 

“Your roommate is weird,” Maux says, later, at the beach.

“Yeah, well, you should have seen my last roommate,” Ronnie says.

“He never shuts up!” Maux continues. “His stories are weird and pointless and he doesn't care if you're listening or not!”

Ronnie yawns, stretches across an old red blanket he brought along. He sips from an Old Hamtramck poured into a blue plastic cup, supplies purchased in a backwoods Circle K, at Maux's behest. After last night, Ronnie has no interest in drinking, but downs two beers anyway and watches the usual action at the beach: Paunchy old men with metal detectors. Bronzed surfer teens in groups of three. Floppy-hatted ladies reading best sellers. Families splashing along the water's edge. Boogie boards. Frisbees. Pro-Am Kadima.

“I hate the beach,” Maux says, scowling at the Atlantic Ocean like it's everything in the world that has ever caused her grief. “It's boring.”

Ronnie shrugs. “It's the beach. Whatever.” Ronnie had quit going years ago. It wasn't, you know,
punk
enough.

Ronnie watches Maux, sitting next to him with her short-cropped indigo hair, pink swimsuit, sun on white freckled skin, her sinewy frame, her hatred for the world. How did he get so lucky? A new house, new girl, new life.

Maux points to the ocean and starts laughing like a weaselly twelve-year-old boy. A morbidly overweight nine-year-old in a red speedo, running into the water, had just been knocked over by a wave. He emerges from the water crying, wailing, “Mommy! The water burns my nose!” The boy's mother, also morbidly obese in a teal monochrome one-piece suit, yells—to Ronnie and Maux's left, ten feet away, sitting under an orange and blue beach umbrella—“Christopher! It's salt water! It's supposed to burn! Get out!”

“Poor kid,” Ronnie says, sipping the beer, suds already warm from the heat. “I feel bad for him.”

“Well I don't,” Maux says. She grunts two final heh-hehs. “Fat people are funny. That's all they're good for. I hate everything else about them.”

Ronnie has only known Maux for twelve hours, but he has already noticed how “I hate” starts off an incredible number of her sentences. It is quite the achievement. But Ronnie ignores this, distracted by her beauty, her eccentric beauty that trumps everything else, her hair and her glare, a contrast with all this gentle seaside normalcy.

They don't stay at the beach for long. Ronnie tries holding her hand as they walk off the beach onto the scorched mid-afternoon parking lot. “I hate that,” she says, flinging away his hand. “It's stupid and disgusting.”

The drive home (home!) is silence except for a cassette recording of “Tiger Trap” by Beat Happening, and Ronnie's perfectly ok with letting Calvin Johnson's mono-bass vocals do the talking as he drives and watches the same lush rural jungleside that had blurred past on the triumphant return to Gainesville from Crescent City. Only now, it's so much better, because it feels like a much less alien land than before, because Maux's here, and the fall holds a promise of all the possibilities he hadn't yet experienced in his short stay so far in Gainesville. The students are back, and with them, the bustle of the college town and the promise of parties, after the tease of it in the dire spring and purgatorial summer.

“Let's go inside,” Ronnie says when he pulls his car into the dirt driveway to the right of the house. He doesn't even need to ask because he knows Maux will stay with him.

“Not now, Ronnie Altamont.” She leans in for a long kiss. Her lips are salty and sandy and sun-cracked and everything right about this part of the world. She backs away. “I'll call you later in the week.”

“Oh. Alright.” Ronnie shrugs, tries not to look surprised, watches her open the car door and walk away down NW 4th Lane. She turns the corner, crosses 12th Street—indigo hair, white shirt, blue cutoffs, pink skin, green Chucks—disappears through the walkway leading to a parking lot.

Through the windshield, Ronnie stares at the vines, weeds, and scrub weaving through the fence in the back separating the Myrrh House from the glass company the next block over. Ronnie, alone, is suddenly overwhelmed by vertigo, by the anxious skittish feeling of having nowhere to turn in a foreign-enough land. Even now. Especially now. He hurriedly steps out of the car, enters his new house and falls asleep—in sandy damp American flag swimtrunks—on the mattresses stacked in his bedroom.

 

 

THIS DALLIANCE WITH THE MAGGIE'S FARM THAT IS

LIFE IN ADJUNCT ACADEMIA IS NOW OVER

 

Another year for me and you / Another year with nothing to do . . . 
Professor Anderson “Andy” Cartwright has always found in Stooges lyrics what his colleagues find in, say, Toni Morrison. He sits inside his sputtering VW bug, engine coughing out death rattles, A/C cranked almost as high as the stereo, looking through the bug-stained windshield at the faculty parking lot. Returning to the familiar, to the first faculty meeting of the fall semester, one week before classes start. Another year for me and you . . . 

And so it begins. It's a potent mixture of dread, resignation, and relief when the students come back to UF, to Santa Fe, to the Gainesville College of Arts and Crafts. The adjuncts return for yet another go-around, somehow surviving yet another broke-ass summer. Out of their aged cars they trod across the lots, shuffling off to take their seats in the auditorium, to await this year's wisdom passed down from on high, wisdom that will surely sound remarkably similar to the wisdom passed down from on high last year, and the year before that, and the year before that. The administrators also return, to the next and closest lot to the campus, driving freshly-waxed status symbols, each with a bumper sticker on the back giving lip service to their leftist idealistic childhoods. Tanned, bright-eyed and flabby from their vacation homes somewhere far, far away.
It's another year for me and you / another year with nothing to do
, Iggy sings in a weary wisdom well beyond his 21 years
.

This routine is such a contrast to the wide-eyed first-time lives of the students back on the streets and sidewalks in and around campus. Mom and Dad are here to help with the big move, as their freshmen children, zitty and apprehensive, wear their senior year high school t-shirts as they lug clothes, compact discs, and keepsakes from the minivan to their new home, the smaller-than-expected dormroom. They are nervous and awkward, fearful yet hopeful of the unknown immediate futures. Already, sorority pledges are led around by the neck from leashes held by future sorority sisters, as fraternity pledges run across busy intersections completely naked with the word “PLEDGE” painted on their backs in a nasty shade of poop brown body paint. Others less desperate to fit in immediately take to University Avenue, exploring their new city, freed from the cliques and drama of the hometown high school adolescent past. Book stores. Record stores. Thrift stores. Cafes
.

At the start of every academic year, Andy observes all of this, as he plays the role—an anonymous extra in the Big Picture, really—of the struggling adjunct professor waddling off to sit through a meeting he finds pointless, carrying a yellow legal pad and pen to take notes for a meeting he knows will not be noteworthy, but the meeting pays, and he needs the money.

He should shut off the car, should fit the cardboard sunshade across the dash, and walk across the faculty lot, the administrator lot, onto the campus and to the meeting. But he can't leave The Stooges for this all-too-predicatble routine.

They will file into the white-gray auditorium and take their seats. They will sigh, “Ready for another year?” and sigh their responses. They will joke of how they already need a drink. Andy does not dislike his colleagues—and even personally likes most of them—but in the auditorium for the first meeting, it's impossible not to feel as if Andy is sharing a miserable experience with them that nobody signed on for—busting ass for a Master's degree only to work a no-future gig with a limited career trajectory. And yet, it's somehow more comfortable to soldier on—year in and year out—than to actually find a teaching job with benefits, or to simply find another job that pays better, or to move away for more meaningful opportunities. And when the meeting starts, the administrators will take their turns at the podium, and they will say what they think the adjuncts need to hear, and the overall effect is the opposite of what is intended: Instead of making the adjuncts feel like they're a part of the Organization, they are made to feel even less a part of the Organization.

Andy can't think about it too much; it leads down too many dark and depressing trails. And he knows the worst is when he's teaching in the classroom, and it's firing on all cylinders, and he's at his best and that miraculous eye-wonder the students get when they connect the dots is in full effect . . . The worst because lingering beyond that magical moment, he knows it won't matter to anyone in the department and in the institution beyond the department. To the institution, he is a cipher, in the ledger under “Seasonal Help.” That's what gets him—loving a place and a job and an institution that doesn't love you back. Andy imagines that most people, they're mostly indifferent to their jobs and the jobs are mostly indifferent to them, but as long as those paychecks and benefits keep coming, it's ok. But this gig is different. It's an avocation, an opportunity to inspire and be inspired, even if everything circling around and outside it is dreadful, and you're left feeling like you have no future, and that you're not growing, as it looks to Andy when he observes his colleagues as they walk along to the first meeting of the semester, as it looks to Andy observing the administrators as they wait out the clock to retirement, as it looks to Andy when he observes himself.

In the car, as The Stooges switch to “I Wanna Be Your Dog,” fear shoots from Andy's brain to his extremities, settles into the pit of his stomach. It's the contrast of these new students and these old teachers. It's the fear Andy will never be the writer he wants to be, at the rate he's going. That he will never amount to anything, especially if he sticks around. The politics of the place, the complexities in the politics of the place, the complexities in his relationship to the place and the people employed by it, will drive him crazy if he keeps thinking about it. It is this fear: That there is nothing—and will be nothing— new under the sun. This career is going nowhere, but he will not, cannot, leave Gainesville.

In the summer, Andy found work painting apartments. What he loved was the simplicity of it. He'd work all day, then go home and write. The work stayed at work. There was nothing to take home except old paint-stained clothing. His mind was free while the body worked, and when he got home, there was the typewriter. Unclogged and liberated from the hundreds of pages of student assignments each week, the lesson plans, the student conferences, the futile meetings, the phone calls, the letters, the thousand-and-one impositions on his time that the Department and the Institution demanded, Andy could devote all of his energy to what he most wanted to do. And there was so much to show for it—literally hundreds of pages of short stories only a draft or two away from being submittable, and he knew, sitting there in the car as the speakers blared Ron Asheton's sacrosanct wah-wahs, and the A/C howled through the vents, and the dichotomy of the very old and the very new shared space on-campus, he will have no chance to return to any of these stories, no time to revise, hone, and yeah, craft.