Losing in Gainesville (9781940430331) (3 page)

“I guess you probably notice that other smell too, pfff!” Alvin never said. Alvin ended most of his sentences with “pfff!” as if to say, “Please disregard everything I just said.”

Ronnie would have nodded, if given the chance, sniffing in furtive inhalations, as if to assuage the assault on his middle-class sensibilities from all the mold, mildew, and feces. “What is that?”

“Um, the thing is,” Alvin never drawled, “I got two buttholes? And one of them? Well, it's not an anus, but more of a crevice on my backside? Where filth collects? The doctors say I'm supposed to wash it? But I never get around to washing it, pfffff.

“And, just so you know,” Alvin did not continue, leading Ronnie out of the kitchen with a gracious “after you” windmill of his stubby left arm, down the dark hallway to the Alabama truckstop bathroom facsimile on the right, where Alvin's stained underwear encircled the rim of the sink, “I never get any women, obviously, so I masturbate pretty much all the time. I'm always watching videos in the living room, pfff!”

“Yeah,” Ronnie would not remark.
“
I noticed that
500 Oral Moneyshots
tape sticking out of your VCR.
”

“Take a peek into my bedroom, pfffff.”

The bed was in the middle. Around it, an island of spread-beaver pictorials from thirty different porno mags.

“Wow,” Ronnie would have gasped, a little impressed.

“And here's your room, pfff.” Ronnie Altamont's eventual bedroom was at the end of the hall. It was a square, whitewalled room with a closet and a backdoor. It was the only empty and almost clean room in the entire trailer. Rectangular windows lined the top of the far wall. The floor was a white linoleum like the kitchen, only unyellowed.

“I'll take it,” Ronnie would have said, adjusting his glasses, running his fingers through the badly dyed hair. “However,” he would have loved to have continued, “since we're putting our cards on the table, I should let you know that I have no money, will pay you no rent, and will seldom leave my room, where I will sit and brood while listening to music, drinking malt liquor while trying to write. I won't say much to you when we're here at the same time, and I intend to move out of this dump as soon as a better offer comes up. Sound good? Roomie?”

Here, Ronnie would have extended his hand. Another three-pump handshake. Deal. No surprises.

In the in-and-out of half-sleep, Ronnie compares how it should have gone down with what really happened. The visual part of the tour was essentially the same, without acknowledgements of the garbage, the porno island encircling Alvin's bed, and the rumored second butthole—and that was mere speculation on Mouse's part, a legendary rumor from when Alvin and Mouse attended high school together. Mouse told Ronnie and Kelly about it after the real tour of the trailer. Mouse had followed them from room to room, snickering with every registered look of discomfort from Ronnie and Kelly. In the middle of the living room, a rotund pasty man in his late teens wielded a broom, swinging and jabbing the air with it, yellowed stalks swishing above his head as he yelled the inevitable “HI-YAH!” He was shirtless, wearing only a pair of short, unflattering navy blue soccer shorts.

“Don't mind Stevie—pfff!” Alvin said as they walked past him in the living room. “He's teaching himself karate.” Ronnie tried not to laugh at this bit of information, coupled with Stevie's flabby flailings; Mouse laughed, and Kelly squealed as the broom brushed inches from his bandaged head.

When the tour was completed, Ronnie, Kelly, and Mouse stepped outside the trailer, “To talk things over,” as Ronnie told Alvin.

“So. What do you think, bro?” Mouse asked, followed by, “Heh heh heh . . . ” In the horror-movie night-time silence of the trailer park, Mouse looked criminally insane. Shoulder-length unwashed escaped convict brown hair, satanic facial hair, sagging earlobes from deflated holes that until recently held two cut tubes of garden hose, a sinister face with a false-tooth smile (from when Alvin accidentally knocked out Mouse's front teeth with a golf club back in high school) dark eyes, black eyebrows at 45-degree angles, a white dress shirt with narrow blue pinstripes dotted with multi-hued splotches and blotches, black slacks cut off above the knees, teal flip-flops.

“We're leaving,” Kelly said. “This place is disgusting.” Kelly, Ronnie was sure, saw nothing but the dark shadows of the live oaks, heard nothing but silence from the surrounding trailers.

“C'mon man. It ain't that bad,” Mouse said, picking at the point of his goatee, smiling that smile.

“Fuck that,” Kelly said.
“
It
ʼ
s worse!
”

Ronnie turned around, looked up to the dim yellow light inside the forlorn trailer. This didn't feel like Gainesville. Rural Florida, yes, but not the college town Ronnie was hoping for.

“The rent's freee-eeeee.” Mouse sang “freee-eeee” like Luther, the leader of the psychopathic gang in that movie “The Warriors” singing “Warriors! Come out to . . . playyy-yayyyy!” “You get started here, join some bands, get a job, finish that book, meet some girls.” Mouse laughed and sang, “Girrr-rurrrrrlllls.”

“Free?” Kelly said.

“The trailer's 100% paid off.” Mouse said. He held out his arms, shrugged. “You don't have to stay in the trailer forever. Get a foothold, brah—a foothold!—and you'll find someplace better.”

“Or, you can go back to Orlando and stay with me and do this move right,” Kelly said. “Get another job and save up money. Skip this dump altogether and move to Chicago like you've been talking about.” Kelly was one of those twitchy-skinny guys who never looked anyone in the eye when he spoke. He was looking Ronnie in the eye.

Back and forth they argued. None of Ronnie's belongings had been moved in yet. Ronnie did consider driving back, finding yet another crap job in Orlando, waiting it out for another year until the money was in place, take the band to Chicago, take the writing to Chicago, where there would be no doubt as to the vast opportunities awaiting. But then again, he would have to be in Orlando for another year, right when he thought he had finally escaped Orlando. Could Ronnie Altamont possibly stand another year in Orlando?

“I'm staying,” Ronnie said.

“Now that's the Ronnie Altamont I know and love,” Mouse said, arms outstretched to hug Ronnie.

“Don't say I didn't warn you,” Kelly muttered before they went back inside to not sign the nonexistent lease. “This is a chainsaw massacre waiting to happen.”

Ronnie wakes up to a punch on the shoulder. “Let's go,” Kelly says. “I feel weird and old, sitting around here like this.”

Ronnie looks around at all the collegiates. “Yeah,” he yawns, “I feel it too.”

“I grabbed a copy of the student paper here,” Kelly says. “Not much in the classified job listings, unless you want to go teach English in Prague.”

“I don't,” Ronnie says, standing up, brushing the grass off his jeans. “Maybe I'll go back to school.”

“Is that why you're here?” They start walking in the general direction of Ronnie's car, parked in a Boca Raton Subs parking lot on University Street.

“I'm going to write and play music,” Ronnie says.

“What music? The Laraflynnboyles?” Kelly smiles, almost forgetting about the sweat underneath the gauze, the welts on the tongue. “You're not serious, right?”

“I'm booking a tour. The novel's almost done. I'm mailing it off to get published.”

Kelly shrugs. “I need more ice. Don't let anybody tell you different: Ant bites on the tongue are incredibly unpleasant.”

“I believe you,” Ronnie says, sensing the chance to make the kill. “So is hunger.”

They were back on the south sidewalk along University, off-campus, approaching the 13th Street intersection, the true center of town. A turtle-waxy blue Ford F-150 drives past with a UNIVERSITY OF CENTRAL FLORIDA ALUMNI sticker across the back window coasts past, horn honking. Ronnie looks over. A rolled down window and an upraised middle finger.

“Must be one of your many adoring fans,” Kelly says.

Ronnie recognizes the truck, the middle finger, the person connected to said middle finger. “He was the Assistant Manager of that Textbook Store I worked at until I got fired for taking a two hour lunch break to, you know, get high, bang Maggie, play 18 holes of golf on Sega Genesis. Not sure why he's still mad at me, I mean, all I did was call him ‘a stupid motherfucker who would rather masturbate to the sales figures in his office than do real work' in my opinion column. No need to a hold a grudge, all these months later.”

Kelly sighs. They cross the intersection. “I'm too exasperated to laugh. Let's get real food, alright? My treat.” To that last sentence, Kelly adds an entirely unnecessary “Duh.” Past the corner gas station on the right, Gatorroni's-by-the-Slice, where the punk rockers make and sell the pizza, wearing uniforms of black t-shirts, red bandanas, and tattoo sleeves. “You win,” Kelly continues. “You're getting free food from me, but only because we've tried all other alternatives available.” From here, approaching the black iron railings around the perimeter of Gatorroni's, Kelly shifts into a barely audible Flintstonish muttering—“Stupid Ronnie. Stupid broke-ass Ronnie. No money and unreachable plans.” He turns to Ronnie before they enter the restaurant. “You're nuts, you know that?”

Ronnie suspects he may be, and opts to say nothing that could in any way jeopardize his first real meal as a Gainesville resident.

 

 

A BRIEF EXCERPT OF A DRUNK COMEDIAN

PERFORMING AT GATOR GROWL WHO HAS BEEN

ON THE ROAD A LITTLE BIT TOO LONG

 

“. . . Yeah. Keep booing . . . and fuck you too . . . I mean, where the fuck am I . . . seriously, where is this? Lafayette? Lawrence? Columbus? Austin? Tallamuthafuckin'hassee?”

[hearty boos from the audience]

“Look, there's no need to boo me, man . . . all I'm saying is that these college towns are all the same. You think you're so smart. What is this, Eugene? Charlottesville? Athens, Ohio? Athens, Georgia? Wait, what are you yelling? Gainesville? Gainesville?!

“Guess what: Same diff, assholes. Fuck you, I'm outta here.”

 

 

SLACKIN' OFF IN THE
'
90s

 

Maux (actually, in the caustic comic she draws for the school paper, she spells it M-A-U-X, signed at the bottom right corner in angry slashes like black blood dripping in a homicide) grabs a handful of limp ketchup-doused fries from the stack piled on the Burger King bag and throws them at the television. She laughs like she talks—like a twelve-year old boy on the cusp of a voice change—when three of the larger limper fries stick to the screen and gloop downward, leaving three red trails obscuring the movie Maux has deemed “stupid”—some piece of crap Philip (her boyfriend of the week) rented called
Slackin' Off in the
ʼ
90s
, that one film that's set in a large city in the Pacific northwest where these unwashed nonconformists in flannel shirts and shiny combat boots stand around listening to plodding rock and roll music while trying to date each other and avoid steady corporate employment.

Philip, dough-bodied and prismatically hair-dyed, sits next to her on his old brown sofa, laughing between chomps of sweet-and-sour soaked chicken nuggets spread out across a JFK-era drink tray he found back home in a resale shop—a tray decorated with the outline of the state of Florida circled by drawings of oranges, orange blossoms, surfers, waves, the sun, a compass, palm trees, dolphins, with sweet and sour sauce smeared across the Space Coast. He laughs because, hey, it's funny watching Maux get angry. “If you don't want to watch this,” he says, patting his right hand on her left knee, “you can just tell me, I'll shut it off.”

She removes the hand with a graceless kick, leans forward. “Look at this shit,” she says, pointing to the television with its pinkish pixels glowing through the ketchup trails. On the screen, two “grungy”-looking men in their early twenties wearing flannel shirts and long-hair wigs sit on a couch in a slovenly living room. Posters for bands like Nirvana, Alice in Chains, and Pearl Jam hang haphazardly throughout the plaster-cracked walls. A 1959 black Les Paul is propped against the couch between Grunge Dude #1 and Grunge Dude #2. Grunge Dude #1 slouches and moans, “Aw maaaaaan. It's like, I gotta get laid!” Grunge Dude #2 yawns, stretches, returns to his original hunched form on the couch and says, “Yeah, well, you go ahead. I'm too lazy to get laid. I'll get laid later.” Grunge Dude #1 punches Grunge Dude #2 on the arm and says, “You're such a slacker,” and punctuates the sentence with a conspiratorial stoner laugh. Grunge Dude #2 says, “Damn right. And proud of it too!” They high-five.

“What? It's good,” Philip says, egging her on. “It's what it's like for our generation. It's true-to-life, ya know?”