Losing in Gainesville (9781940430331) (32 page)

Ronnie reaches into his right front pocket of his jeans, pulls out the keys, finds the trailer key, puts it into the lock, when he hears the unmistakable pump of a rifle, followed by a loud, authoritative “FREEZE!”

In the chest-caving, ball-tingling panic of the moment, Ronnie recognizes the voice as belonging to the Gulf War veteran butch lesbian neighbor, she with the rusted brown truck parked outside adorned with the “TED KENNEDY KILLED MORE PEOPLE WITH HIS CAR THAN I HAVE WITH MY GUN” bumpersticker. Hands shaking, Ronnie drops the keys.

“Step away from the door, sir!”

Ronnie steps back, slowly steps backwards down the stairs, hands up, because that's how they do it on the TV when characters get guns pulled on them. A surprisingly rational and calm mindset takes hold inside Ronnie. He has a rifle pointed at his back. Pointed at him to prevent his retrieval of a Buzzcocks EP.

Ronnie turns around. The woman stands to the immediate left of her trailer, like she just emerged from around the corner, rifle raised to shoulder blade, angry eyebrows furrowed over the rifle stock, finger on the trigger.

She lowers the rifle. “He don't want you comin'
'
round here no more.” Her hair is buzzed spiky, blonde-gray. She wears a black sleeveless t-shirt that reads “DYKER BIKER” in white iron-on lettering, and camo cutoffs.

Ronnie's voice, never as brave as his mind and body, even on good days, struggles to leave his throat. He chokes out, “I'm here to pick up what I left behind.”

She shakes her head from side to side. “Oh no. No way. He told me to keep an eye on you in case you snuck in.”

“And that's why you have a rifle.” The panic subsides a little bit, replaced by a rising anger that someone would resort to this over something so silly.

“It's in the Constitution.”

Ronnie isn't in the mood, nor is he in the condition, to debate the pisspoor sentence construction of the Second Amendment. “I'm leaving,” he says. “Let me get my keys, and I'm gone.”

“And don't come back,” the woman yells after him as he climbs the steps to the front door, bends over, grabs his keys.

Ronnie walks to his car, looks at Alvin's neighbor. “Jesus,” he mutters, climbs into the car, starts it, backs out, and peels away in quadruple time, finally feeling his hummingbird pulse, itchy with burst sweat glands. And to think, Ronnie was hoping to finally get the chance to say “Thanks for everything!” to Alvin, and yes, “everything” entailed living rent and bill-free. The blandy apple green sedan has never gone faster than when Ronnie accelerates out of the wooded trailer park and the rundown sidestreet, back on 34th Street, too crazed to note once again the mix of sad southern poverty and hot pastel collegiate lifestyle apartment living.

Ronnie will never see Alvin again, and eventually, when the shock wears off, will be of the mind that, in the big picture, he probably deserved to have a rifle pulled on him for his actions and inactions of the summer.

Mouse will hear third-hand rumors from time to time, and pass them along to Ronnie. Alvin was arrested in a not-elaborate meat-stealing scheme with a grocery store butcher. Alvin finds a girlfriend at Waffle House one night who immediately moves in and makes Alvin her pimp, even bringing up her friends from South Florida to turn the trailer into a double-wide of ill repute. Alvin finds work as a camp counselor for disabled teens. Alvin moves to Alaska to work in a cannery. Alvin finds work roadying for the classic rock band Nazareth on a reunion tour. At the end of the day, any and all of these rumors were as absurd as the rumor that Alvin had two buttholes. Ronnie preferred imagining Alvin moving up to a duplex, or an apartment complex with a swimming pool and shuffleboard, maybe even a small home somewhere, as he and a wife who understands him quietly sit in the living room and watch television, expressing their skepticism regarding the veracity of the commercials breaking up the sitcoms with a nice long “Pfffffffffffffffffffffffffffff.”

 

 

TEST TUBE BABY FROM A WALLA WALLA STREET

 

“It's not funny! Fuck!” Ronnie yells, standing in Mouse's bedroom, telling him and Icy Filet what happened. Strangely enough, Ronnie feels more panic-stricken than he did when the rifle was actually aimed at the back of his head. Heart still racing, the unrelenting sensation of being on the verge of hyperventilating, exacerbated by their laughter, their absorption with each other rather than what happened to him twenty minutes prior. “I could have died!”

They giggle as Ronnie acts out the action, giggle at each turn and twist of the story like it's some kind of hilarious joke. In bed, in underclothes, fetally conjoined like bed-bound John and Yoko not taking their eyes off each other—Icy Filet stroking Mouse's goatee, Mouse's dentures reflecting the late summer sun through the bedroom's soiled windows as he har-harrs. Mouse runs his fingers through Icy's short black-blonde-red-green-blue hair.

“She wasn't going to use it, Ronnie,” Mouse says, still not looking away from Icy Filet. “It's for show. She wanted the chance to justify having the rifle, and you gave it to her.”

Ronnie looks to the low ceiling, the gargoyle masks and sloppy collegiate abstract art on canvases nailed to the walls. “Jesus,” he says. “You guys are high.”

“We sure are,” Icy Filet laughs, still stroking Mouse's goatee. “But that's not the point. You should play him the tape, Mouse.”

“Heh heh—yes!—heh!” Mouse quickly rolls out of his nauseatingly loving position in bed, hops one foot at a time into the living room, presses play on the tapedeck of his stereo, laughing like a gleeful sadist. “This is the best one yet, brah!” Mouse proclaims. “Listen to this while I run off to sit on the toilet, heh heh heh!”

“Oh no,” Ronnie says, looking to Icy Filet, who continues gazing into the direction of where Mouse's supine body once laid.

“You really do need to get high,” Icy Filet says to Ronnie, not moving her head to speak in his direction.

Before Ronnie could tell her why that is a terrible idea, the music starts. The frequencies are lower than Mouse's previous efforts, like an artified attempt to replicate the low-rider truck bass throbbing out of the subwoofers of any given Floridian weekend night. Initially, there is nothing but this rhythm, rattling the windows, and then, Icy Filet's speak-sing:

“Armor All-ed interior on a turtle wax face

steppin' in the club like you came from outer space

a Sun Ra Saturnalian with a Plutonian mind

bitches steppin' up thinkin' that they fine

Peter Paul and Mary, Don and Neneh Cherry

your trunk is full of junk and you look like Cousin Larry

jammin' on the one, run Forrest run

Coffeemate creamer and a bear clawed sticky bun”

Between the rhymes, the beat continues, the windows rattle, and over the din, samples from the television program
Perfect Strangers
: Cousin Balki, proclaiming over and over again, “A stitch in time saves ten.” Icy Filet resumes:

“Test tube baby from a Walla Walla street

Icy is my name and Mouse provides the beats

we got a Coleman sax with a Danko bass

American birth and Floridian grace

Carol and Mike Seaver, Doctor Johnny Fever

chillin' in a hot tub with Eldridge Cleaver

Terminator X, reps on the Bowflex

Chex Mixmaster with a hankerin' for Tex-Mex”

The song is over in three minutes, finishing in a frenzied orgy of low bass beats, the opening bass line of The Band's cover of “Don't Do It” from
The Last Waltz
, and the opening harmolodics from the Ornette Coleman album
Free Jazz
. When it ends, Mouse sprints out of the bathroom, leaps through the bedroom doorway and dives onto the bed. He, stretches, reclines, laughs, turns to Ronnie. “Yeah? And?”

“Your songs . . . these raps . . . they're really starting to get better,” Ronnie says. “You know, it's still very Beck, very Beckish and all, but there's a bit of Doctor Octagon and Dylan thrown in.”

“Oh, Ronnie,” Icy Filet says, pulling in Mouse to cuddle. “Such the little critiquer.”

“Aw, well, you know,” Ronnie says, blushing, looking away from the bed. “It was actually kinda soothing, after getting a rifle pulled on me for the first, and, I hope, last time.”

“Soothing!” Mouse repeats. A frenzy of smoochy-smooch lip thwacks between Mouse and Icy Filet. Between kisses, Mouse says, “If we keep at it, we'll be sensations. Sensations!” Mouse uncuddles from Icy, rolls out of the bed, stands, announces, “I'm getting beer. To celebrate. Hooray for beer, heh heh heh!”

“Sensations,” Icy Filet says to Ronnie. “It's plausible, right?”

“Why not?” Ronnie says.

Mouse returns with three cans of Dusch Light, hands one to Ronnie. “Nah,” Ronnie says. “I'm going home. I need to forget this stupid day. See what Maux's up to.”

“She's crazy, you know,” Mouse says.

“Totally,” Icy Filet adds, reaching across the bed to grab a Dusch Light can from Mouse. She opens it, chugs, turns, rearranges the pillows so she's upright enough to drink.

“It's what they tell me,” Ronnie says.

“Good luck with that,” Mouse laughs, like he did when he offered Alvin's trailer as a terrific place to live.

 

 

RIDING ON THE METROGNOME

 

You set the Metrognome to the left of Ronnie's front door, bang on the window, as the Myrrh poster with its black power salutes and burning draft cards glares at you like you're The Man they've become. (And nevermind how you got here, how you lugged this three foot tall Metrognome—with his painted red boots, blue pants, green shirt, white beard, wise blue eyes, cherubic cheeks, and red hat with one upturned flap. You can always piece it together in the morning.)

“Ronnie!” you yell. Bang the door again. Now that you've stopped running, everything spins. Dizzy, you step away to barf in the dirty side yard. It's a rational barf, one of those barfs you've learned to anticipate, when your body tells you, “You know, William, I do believe I am going to vomit now,” and your brain responds, “Yes, body, I understand. If I could get you to give me a minute to find a decent place to throw up, that would be terrific, ‘kay?” When you find the spot, a patch of grass between red ant hills, it is simply a matter of bending over, “Bleeeeeeeeeahhhh” gags, splatter. You're not doing this on the street, in a car, in front of the door, on someone's rug. This is a good place and you are reasonable and logical—considerate, even—in your blacked out state.

“William? You alright?” you hear after the front door half-opens.

“Yesh! Hang on!” you manage between heaves, one index finger upraised. “Uh minnit, dude!”

That's it: Once more, and you're done. You always feel better after you throw up the booze. You turn around, try rising to a standing posture.

“Rrrrrrrronnnie!” you announce as you round the corner. “Ya gotta let me in. I got something for you!” You point towards that heavy-ass gnome you've been lugging all the way from . . . somewhere.

“Get in here,” Ronnie says, laughing. Laughing at you. Of course he's awake. As you know, the blessing and curse of living in a party house in the student ghetto is that people come by at all hours. Tonight, or, this morning, that someone is you.

“This is important Rrrrrrrronnie!” You lift and hold this twenty pound . . . fuckin' . . . whatevertheshit . . . dehhhhhh . . . then you set it down again.

“Oh yeah?” he says as you stumble through the door.

“Ronnie, Ronnie, Ronnie Altamont,” you continue, standing in the entryway. “What I have here is a gnome. But . . . but . . . it's not just any gnome. It's a mmmmetrognome.”

Familiar girlish weaselly laughter from the back of the living room, and when you step in, you see Maux. She laughs her mean laugh as she stares at you. “You're ridiculous, William. You drink like a dumbass, dumbass.”

Ronnie carries the metrognome into the house, sets it in the middle of the living room. Roger rises from the long couch, hops over it, runs to the metrognome. “Let me rub it,” he says when he arrives, bending over to pat its stomach. “For good luck.”

The three of you stand around the metrognome, but Maux, she glares from the couch. Through the booziness, her seething unrelenting dislike shoots across this large living room. She hates you now. Why? You don't care. It's just her style. But you, you have a metrognome. And you're drunk. So. Whatever.

“Alright, William,” Ronnie says in an indulgent tone. “What exactly is a metrognome, and how is it different from regular gnomes?”

“See, that's the thing,” you start to explain, but as you begin putting it into words, all like “See, you got this gnome, this gnome I stole, from somewhere, then you put a metrognome inside it in the hole there at the bottom, then stick some mics around it and . . . voila!” you realize what a stupid idea it is.