Losing in Gainesville (9781940430331) (40 page)

There is a bleak gray Orwellian pallor to the call room. The walls reverberate with the dull chatter of questions like:

“When shopping, how often do you purchase salty snacks?”

“What kinds of salty snacks do you buy?”

“Salty snacks salty snacks salty snacks?”

Ronnie Altamont's entire career in the field of telemarketing lasts seven calls (and seven hang-ups), one hour, three minutes, and forty-two seconds. For the first time, he cannot reconcile that he spent five years to earn a college degree, in part to avoid shit work like this, and here he is in some forlorn callbank center on the outskirts of this town he moved to so he could plug away at his “art” with less hassle, but instead he's asking probing questions to the American public re: their spending and relative infatuation with salty snacks. It's not even that he thinks he's too good for the gig, but he simply can't do it, won't do it, doesn't want to ask anyone about salty snacks. He feels the seconds ticking away in his too-short life.

He walks out of the large dismal room without a word, never more happy to step outside into the parking lot of a rundown shopping center.

This leaves pizza delivery. Ronnie is hired by the General Lee's Pizza Cavalry chain, driving around with a car full of piping hot peetz made in their Newberry Road location. What Robert E. Lee has to do with pizza is anyone's guess, but people generally appreciated the tip of the hat to their southern heritage. Until the late 1980s, there used to be more of a “Dukes of Hazzard” theme to the place, the name as much a nod to the speedy automobile Bo and Luke Duke drove on the TV as it was to the great Civil War General. This was back when General Lee's Pizza Cavalry promised in their commercials, “Hot and Fresh Pizza Delivered to Y'all's Door in Thirty Minutes or Less or It's Free.” Before too many drivers, not wanting to cost their employers any business-slash-lose their jobs, wrecked their cars, hit pedestrians, died.

Ronnie spends a dinner shift getting trained, riding shotgun in this black Celica driven by a high school senior named Kenny. Kenny gives the grand tour of Gainesville's gridded streets, and like many involved in the lower echelons of the pizza delivery industry, Kenny smokes dope like a Rastafarian.

He wears a peppermint-striped mushroom cap, black Stone Temple Pilots t-shirt, too-big jeans hung halfway down his ass, exposing red boxers, the chain wallet dangling to his side. Clearly, General Lee's Pizza Cavalry didn't bother with uniforms.

“Don't smoke, huh?” Kenny says, after Ronnie declines the joint Kenny holds out, the joint he damps down with wet thumb and forefinger before opening the door and running the pizza to some parent, some college kid, some party.

“Nah,” Ronnie says. “It makes me paranoid, neurotic, and miserable, but, ironically enough, it curbs my appetite. I smoke pot, and I can't eat for days.”

“Take it from me, my man,” Kenny says as they turn into some neighborhood on the heretofore unexplored west side of town, “it's an indispensable tool in this profession.”

“You're an indispensable tool in this profession,” Ronnie wants to say, but keeps quiet, taking in what passed for suburbia in Gainesville. Pot. It is impossible for Ronnie to conceive of doing anything like working while high. Even breathing while high was a neurotic endeavor.

They pull up to some house in some neighborhood far west of anyplace Ronnie would ever want to go in Gainesville. As Kenny goes to the front door, Ronnie stares at the Bob Marley air freshener dangling from the rear view mirror, green black and yellow, Bob Marley exhaling a smokestack of dope smoke. On the radio, alternative rock growls and blares from some lousy station out of Jacksonville. Ronnie kinda hates Kenny the way he kinda hates 98 percent of this immediate world. Like so many Floridians and so many teenagers, so many people, Kenny thinks he's much more clever than he actually is. Ronnie sits in the passenger seat of this Celica, brooding on all the wrong moves he's made in life to end up here. He didn't think that this was how it would turn out, thought the book and the band would wow the world to the point that he could get by, doing what he loved.

Well. It didn't.

Back to delivery. After the training sesh with this high school kid Kenny, Ronnie is ready to deliver the peetz. Ronnie worked in this gig back in Orlando for a summer, delivering for a contemptuously unmentionable corporate chain, before quitting then writing about his boss in his school paper opinion column, calling the man “a lazy lump of shit for brains plopped onto a lazy shit for heart and soul.” Delivery was like riding a bike, only now, said bike was a sputtering blandy apple green sedan on its rapid descent into being driven into the ground through a combination of Ronnie's negligence and utter automotive incompetence.

The shift: Saturday, Game Day, 10:30 a.m. to 1:00 a.m.. The customers: collegiates and post-collegiates and families all about the gimme gimme pregame show slices, gimme gimme game day pizza, gimme gimme post-game party food.
Gimme gimme this, gimme gimme that
, as the late great Darby Crash once barked. To the suburban homes, moms with their seven year old sons, moms opening the doors, sons always yelling, “It's the pizza dude!” and the moms smiling in that indulgent way moms smile, saying, “Hey, it is the pizza dude!” and Ronnie tries smiling at this heartwarming tableau as the mom next says, “Give the pizza dude the money, dear!” and the kid gives Ronnie the cash and Ronnie gives the kid the pizza and the mom says “What do you say, dear?” and the kid says, “Thanks pizza dude!” and everyone laughs and the mom gives a “Thanks for tolerating us” kind of nod with her head and Ronnie thinks of a) what he will invest in with his one dollar tip, and b) how they really train them young in Gainesville re: conducting the pizza transaction. There's the suburban homes, and then there are the collegiate apartment complexes up and down Archer Road and Tower Road, nestled far away from the crime and crack and horror of real poverty lurking in the residential neighborhoods on the outskirts of the UF campus. Game day parties where the hosts and partygoers become increasingly generous with their food and beer as the day goes on. They answer their doors, “What's up, pizza's here!” and let Ronnie in, leading him through narrow hallways past fresh new all-off-white living rooms packed with orange and blue adorned football fans yelling at the TV screen or laughing at the commercials on the TV screen and Ronnie leaves the pizzas on the inevitable Kitchen Island as they try and talk to Ronnie about the “big game” and Ronnie tries pretending he isn't too, you know, like, punk rock to give a shit about it, takes the money and hustles out the door, and the tips are usually a little bit better than most places, especially as the day goes on. The tips from upperclassmen parties or recent graduates are always better than the underclassmen, who almost always want exact change. Game day: Some SEC bigdeal the people have been looking forward to all week, and as Ronnie walks through apartment complexes and courtyards, up and down these residential streets, he hears the cheering, the curses, the slow hand-claps for the good plays. Interspersed between the game day, calls not football-related: Pre-med students on study breaks—twenty pound anatomy textbooks, bleary eyes, gifted with an unfathomable (to Ronnie) drive and motivation; metal kids in black Megadeth t-shirts taking the pizza at the door, cumulonimbus marijuana clouds behind them, guitars wrapped around them; weekend mechanics emerging from underneath the hoods of their El Caminos, paying in oil-smudged money; bridal showers where the ladies drunkenly flirt and inform Ronnie that only one of them is getting married; senior citizen book clubs, day care centers full of kids who dash from their Twister and Chutes and Ladders and converge upon Ronnie. They all want pizza. Everybody wants pizza on Game Day Saturday.

The cassette in Ronnie's car: an endless loop of Bad Brains, Flipper, Spoke, Television, Sonic Youth, Thin Lizzy, Crime, Gary Numan, Guv'ner, Superchunk, Crowsdell, Thinking Fellers Union Local 282, Polvo, Urge Overkill, Naiomi's Hair, Melvins, Unrest, Beat Happening, Fudge Tunnel, Tsunami, Bratmobile, The Scissor Girls, Spinout. Fourteen straight hours of nothing but, one side to the next, morning to afternoon to night to late night. Ronnie was on the older end of the spectrum of delivery drivers at General Lee's. He had worked with older drivers. They were generally lost souls, struggling to make ends meet and/or lost in a permanent marijuana cloud that makes everything that's just ok eternally tolerable. Alone with nothing but this mixtape for company, four hours in, Ronnie finds this an alien, alienating gig—he's too old to do it, but too young to be good at anything else. Soon enough he's started taking people up on offered beer.

As the early afternoon progresses to mid-afternoon, it is clear from the general spirit of the parties he is delivering pizza to that the Gators are winning, and winning big. The tips from the apartment parties and backyard or courtyard barbeques are increasing. Everyone wants to be Ronnie's—The Pizza Dude's—buddy.

“Hey man, sucks you gotta work today,” says some shirtless guy with short blond surfer hair and aviators, conveying the authority of the host who's having this party outside in the back space between the clusters of apartments.

“What can you do?” Ronnie shrugs, hands the dude the pizzas.

“Well the Gators won. Ya want a beer?”

“Sure.” Maybe it will make him feel better.

“Hold on, dude!” the guy says. “Set the pizzas on the picnic table.” To his friends, he announces, “I'm gettin' the pizza dude a beer!”

Everyone cheers at this. This is Ronnie's last delivery before going back to the store for the next round. Why not? He sets the pizzas on the picnic table. This beautiful blonde—so so so Floridian with her tan and fluorescent green bikini, not like beautiful in some California centerfold polyethylene kind of way, but in a natural, not even trying, not even caring kind of way—turns to Ronnie, holds out a thermos. “Hey,” she slurs. “Pizza dude. You want some FloCo?”

Floridian Comfort. Ronnie takes the thermos, unscrews it, takes a healthy swig.

“Sucks you gotta work,” she says.

Ronnie says, “Yeah,” and before he can even start to think he has a chance, the host shows up with the inevitable blue Solo cup of foamy beer, hands it to Ronnie, leans in, kisses the blonde. Blond on Blonde. The pinnacle of Floridian beach culture.

“Yeah, I used to deliver at General Lee's,” the surfer host tells Ronnie. “The Game Days were the worst. And you don't even make any money.”

“What?” Ronnie had already made twenty something deliveries and the day wasn't halfway through. He was eagerly anticipating returning to the Myrrh House with a small fortune.

“No, you get tips, and what, seventy-five cents a run?”

“Right,” Ronnie says.

“Yeah. Fuck that. Between what you pay in gas, and the wear and tear on your car, you'll be coming home tonight with less than minimum wage.”

Ronnie says nothing.

“Which is fine, if the tips are good, and the deliveries aren't a long way to go, and you got a new car. Then maybe you'll make money. But this is Gainesville.”

Ronnie says nothing.

“Looks like you could use more beer,” the surfer host says, and his girlfriend laughs, holds out the thermos of FloCo, adds, “This too.”

Ronnie takes the thermos, extends his emptied blue Solo cup.

“Yeah man, it's tough to make a living here,” the host says, returning with the filled cup.

“No shit,” Ronnie says, and he's never meant it more. “What do y'all do?”

“School,” the host says, and his girlfriend nods and says, “Yup.”

“I'm really a musician,” Ronnie says. “And I write. I have parties. We have a big house in the student ghetto. Y'all should come by.” He holds out his cup. “And give me one more. For the road.”

“You got it,” the host says, taking his cup.

The party is clusters of surfer types talking about the usual party topics. Ronnie wishes he could stay. “Give me some more of that,” Ronnie says, pointing at the blonde's FloCo thermos.

“You sure you'll be alright to drive?” Her concern breaks his heart.

“Totally,” Ronnie says. He smiles. “I'm fine.”

“Well. Ok.” Ronnie grabs the thermos, sips again, feels that rush. “Whoooo!” he says.

“Here ya go, brah,” the host says returning with the newly filled blue Solo cup.

Ronnie takes it. “Yeah, dude, I live in the Myrrh House. It's on NW 4th Lane. Look for fliers, ok?”

“You got it dude,” the host says. “Later. Thanks for the pizza. Good luck with it.”

Ronnie shrugs, walks back to his car. The sharp-dull numb from the beer and FloCo leaves him in a giddy eternal-now focus. The host gave him a ten dollar tip. Ronnie takes note of that in the car, as the mixtape returns to life. Ronnie honks as he pulls away, one last sight of that blonde, there on the picnic table. The party waves back. As Ronnie leaves, he bites his fist like Squiggy from
Laverne and Shirley
, one last tribute to that girl he knows he'll never see again.

Ronnie drives back to General Lee's to pick up another round of pizzas, muttering about “No money? Fourteen and a half hours for less than minimum wage? Fuuuuuuuck that, man. Fuck that.” He sneaks sips of the beer as the car moves, keeps it hidden at stop lights, wedged between his sweaty thighs.