Losing in Gainesville (9781940430331) (34 page)

Ronnie laughs, speaks in a parodic bark of Maux's voice. “Look at me. I'm Maux. I hate this. I hate that. I hate everything.”

They cut through the Zesty Glaze parking lot, into the relative calm of the student ghetto, where residents sell their driveways to the highest, drunkest bidder going to the game.

“I hate you,” Maux says, punching Ronnie in the arm, a solid thwack. Ronnie laughs harder. He pretends to shadowbox, hopping around Maux as she stomps towards the student ghetto sidestreets. “Let's box, lady. Ooo! Ooo! I'm punching the air! Lightning! Bam!”

Maux refuses to smile at this, even if she finds it somewhat endearing. Ronnie, she thinks, is another aimless goof, the kind who always bounce in and out of her life—smarter than he thinks, smarter than he knows. This won't last. It never does.

By the time they reach her apartment, the streets are desolate. Only the far off cheers from the stadium penetrate the student ghetto silence.

“I hate making out,” Maux says, after they step inside and go straight to her bedroom. The noise and pandemonium that has overtaken the city on gameday doesn't reach this unmade bed in this darkened room.

Ronnie backs away from her mouth. “I know, I know, you hate everything. I get it.”

“Yeah,” Maux says, reaching behind his head, left fingers and thumb ensnared in the disheveled knots of his brown hair, pulls him back. “I can't stand you,” she whispers, breath a mixture of cigarettes, beer, and greasy pizza. “But this? I guess it doesn't . . . I don't know, totally suck?”

That afternoon, they create an island the size of Maux's bedroom. Gone is the sneering, the sarcasm, the professed hatreds. On this island, they are vulnerable, affectionate, real. A fleeting moment when nothing else in Gainesville exists. Her façade is gone. His façade is gone. They no longer have to try; they're together, and that's all that matters.

Afterwards, Ronnie watches her sleep. He likes it when Maux sleeps. It's the only time she seems happy, when the smile on her face isn't a mean grin. Ronnie, wide awake, sweaty and inspired, wants to go home and write. He hasn't felt this way in months. When not binding copypacks at the temp gig in the used college bookstore, when not with Maux or at some party, Ronnie has taken to sitting in his room and listening to the Television album
Marquee Moon
on repeat all night. He stares at the ceiling and basks in the bittersweet ache of the music. It is the soundtrack to this uncertain time. Delving and lost inside the sounds of the album, it never occurs to Ronnie to try and write.

Football is underway now; tens of thousands of screaming tools are off the streets, compressed into the stadium. There is a rare stillness to the student ghetto on gamedays, once the game actually starts. Ronnie needs to be out there on those streets, needs to get home to the pen and paper. He needs to breathe in the emptiness and the silence before floating into the Myrrh House to daydream, to find his journal, to sit on the front steps, and write for hours, as
Marquee Moon
fills the air.

He kisses Maux on two strands of indigo hair across her cheek, steps back, continues watching her sleep. She would hate being kissed like this, would hate being stared at like this. Ronnie steps out of her bedroom, tiptoes through her crummy apartment and carefully walks out the front door.

Outside, out of the island, walking the Student Ghetto streets. It's the no-surprise heat of 85 degrees, tempered by subtle breezes shaking the sand pines, the palms, even the live oaks. The skies are a cloudless Florida blue. No one is walking nor driving these streets. In the distance, marching bands, cheering, whistles, air horns, but here, it's Ronnie Altamont and only Ronnie Altamont. This moment, as fleeting as his time with Maux, he feels the Student Ghetto is his. He is post-coital, triumphant and invulnerable.

The Myrrh House is empty. Roger is at work. Ronnie opens the doors and the windows, turns on
Marquee Moon
, grabs his journal and his pen, sits on the front steps, and writes, an ecstatic counterpoint to the stillness of NW 4th Lane.

 

 

MOE GREEN'S FUCKING EYESOCKET'S LAST SHOW

 

Tonight at the Righteous Freedom House, Moe Green's Fucking Eyesocket will play their last show. This evening, Ronnie hurries through the copypack binding so he can punch out earlier than usual. He buys a twelver of Old Ham Town at the XYZ, lugs it back to the Myrrh House, unlocks his front door, steps in, opens the first can, sips, calls Maux, asks if—

“I can't,” she cries. No really—she is blubbering into the phone between sobs. “It's my birthday.”

“Oh! Happy birthday! I had no idea.”

“Oh! Happy birthday!” Maux mimics. “Fuck off, Ronnie. I'll call you later, when it's not my birthday.”

Stark silence, then the fast shrill-toned eighth notes of an off-the-hook phone. These are the last years—very brief, in the overarching course of human history—in which human beings will know what it's like to stand with a large cordless telephone in one's hand after the person on the other end violently and abruptly ends the conversation by throwing their large cordless telephone against their living room wall. Ronnie, of course, does not know that Maux does this with her phone, but he stands by the still open front door of the Myrrh House, twelver at his feet, holding that stupid phone to his ear, this dense-enough/weighty-enough antennaed beige plastic wonder of late 20th century technology, looks out the front windows at NW 4th Lane, mutters your basic
frickin' frackin' frickin frack
, can't decide if he should laugh or be angry. He chooses to laugh, chooses to drink away any lingering concerns, drinks the first six in quick succession while slouched on the cowboy couch in his bedroom while listening to
Marquee Moon
, carries the other six on the fifteen minute stumble-and-weave to the Righteous Freedom House.

Three to four times a year, a band will break up, inevitable when one of the members graduates college and/or finds a real job in another city. (Or, in the case of MGFE, when the strains of touring end close friendships, everyone drifts apart, moves on, grows up.) On the front windows of the smaller businesses that can get away with it are handwritten signs reading, “Closing early tonight. Go to Righteous Freedom House for MOE GREEN'S FUCKING EYESOCKET'S last show!” In the Gainesville music scene, the last show of a highly-regarded local band is something akin to an Irish wake, minus the Catholic overtones and, naturally, with a bit more punk rock sentiment. Some will tear up, many will sing/scream along with the band, a few will set off fireworks to siss-boom-bah between songs and band members. And, for those nonstraightedge in attendance, there's lots of drinking.

And there really is something special about it, Ronnie thinks, as he squeezes into the front door, maneuvers around those already packed into this living room to see the end of another band. It has been like this for the six years Ronnie has been making the drive up to see shows in Gainesville. Because, they are your friends up there, even if they are not your friends—not yet—making music they created to express their lives. These are your friends, even if they are your enemies, surrounding you in these muggy house shows; even if they are your enemies, you share this bond over the love of music. Another era ends. Life moves on, and in Gainesville, it moves in an endless five-year cycle, because MOE GREEN'S FUCKING EYESOCKET will be replaced by some younger band. Always younger.

The music howls in amplified barbaric yawps, as Ronnie joins, sweats on, bounces into the throng. He opens one beer, gives away the rest. Through the gaps between bodies—friends standing in a semi-circle around the band, transfixed by the spectacle—Ronnie sees William, ten feet away, screaming into the microphone, face the color of a ripe tomato. The band jabs at rhythm like furious underdog boxers pounding punching bags. Friends grab the microphones, scream along.

Where do we go after this, when the set is over, when the months and years pass? And where do you go after this, William? When your life has been, up to now, entirely focused on the immediate? You scream to all these friends who know the words to these songs like you know the words to their songs, and the only coherent thought in your mind is how fleeting this is. You run out of breath, you roll on the floor, writhing as others grab the microphone and sing your lyrics. In the midst of this entropic cataclysm, you ask yourself if you could ever put your entire being into something or someone the way you did with playing in this band. You'll never sing these songs again. This meant something, even as the law of diminishing returns exacts its slow painful cost. Even as you're now hardly on speaking terms with the others in the band, and you were once the best of friends.

What happens to these memories? Ten, twenty years down the line? This song's about to end. This set. This band. This life. You leap in the air and fall to the filthy hardwood floor, look up at your friends, standing in knowing half-smiles like they're in on the secret, watching this life—this part of your life—end.

You won't talk about any of this when it's over. There will be overlong caught-up-in-the moment sweat-stained embraces with those who have been there all along. Still winded, you will briefly nod to the rest of the band as they start to unplug and break down their gear. They will return the nod, and that's as deep as it will be. You will get drunk, and eventually everything will be a goofy joke again. Nobody takes themselves or their “art” all that seriously, at least not on the surface.

But this moment. You know, and Ronnie knows, and just about everybody else that's here knows. There really is something special about it.

 

 

MEH

 

Kelly: So pleased with himself on this next mid-afternoon's post-mortem of last night's shenanigans.

(Yeah: Shenanigans.)

In hungover shame: Ronnie half-listens to Kelly's rehashing of last night's sexcapades.

(Yeah: Sexcapades.)

No: Ronnie really really really really really does not want to hear about the blow job on the Myrrh House roof, about how Kelly, in the peak of whatever drugs he saw fit to bring up with him from Orlando, couldn't stop with the rolling steady stream of pointing out and naming planets, stars, constellations, even as he's you know feeling her mouth, tongue, hands, up/down, 'round and 'round his engorged peninsula. They're on the front patio at Gatorroni's, and Ronnie is trying—trying—to eat a Portobello slice, and trying not to listen to Kelly, and trying not to piece together what happened, because really now, who cares?

Yes: it's one of those torturous hangovers where the head throbs, the forehead is clammy, perceptions are hazy, dizzy, out of focus, and if all of that isn't bad enough, Ronnie also has the song “Take It to the Limit” by The Eagles on repeat droning on and on in his skull, but not even the whole song, just the chorus, and not even just the chorus, but the one chorus at the end with the high harmonies. And slowly, slowly, brief flashes of moments from last night pop up, things Ronnie said/did, shame flooding his nervous system in the form of nauseous dread with each flash.

Take it to the limit: One more time.

Well: What does he remember so far?

There was the loveseat by the answering machine: Ronnie slouched there, laughing, as the girl—whatshername—falls onto his lap, puts her arm around him, points at the answering machine and asks, “Is this anyone?”

The answering machine message: “Ronnie! Where are you?!” Maux. “Call me. Fucker.”

Ronnie: “Naw naw naw . . . haw haw haw . . . just my crazy friend . . . you know.”

They kiss: Tobacco tongue. Booze breath. Long. Lithe. Nineteen.
Hey Nineteen.

She unsmooches her lips: “Wait a second,” she whispers, smiles, trots off across the living room.

The Who: On the stereo.
Pictures of Lily . . . Lily oh Lileee . . . Lily oh Lileee . . . pictures of Lily
and that fucking French horn solo that slays him every single time he hears it.

Kelly and Caroline: That's her name. Caroline. She was the girl who was “older.” Twenty-one. That's how they all met. They bounce up and down on couches, trying to match the rhythm of the songs.

Kelly: A frenzy of sweat and rolling eyeballs. Chemically-induced happiness.

The fifth: Floridian Comfort. The bottle is on the coffeetable. The girl—
hey, nineteen
—she weaves around Kelly and Caroline, reaches for the bottle. Glug, glug, glug.

That's how they met: Kelly took the weekend off. Fled to Gainesville with a wafer of ecstasy and a dot of mescaline. Fueled accordingly, he charms—and later, he quite literally charms the pants off of (hey-oh!)—Caroline, who's in the XYZ Liquor Store buying a fifth of whiskey for her underage friend, who waits outside in the car. Kelly tells her there's a “party” at Ronnie's, and she believes him. (Later, in less-trusting environments, Ronnie will think back on moments like these, when you could simply talk to a couple girls at a stupid liquor store and somehow get them back to your house on the flimsiest of pretenses, and maybe it isn't even the environment, but the age, because the immediate shame of the next day will pass, and years on, it's a fond memory of capital-Y Youth.) Ronnie and Kelly, they walk back with the twelver of Old Hamtramck, Kelly going on and on about “That Nnnnnugget!” Ronnie didn't get a look at whatshername, and what is her name? At Gatorroni's, as Kelly still goes on and on about the different things that happened—this antic, that antic—her name comes back to Ronnie.