Losing in Gainesville (9781940430331) (44 page)

 

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It holds together. Not tight, not loose. Bradley usually knows his twos from his fours. Mitch's Pete Quaife bass guitar imitations are solid enough. Rae plays better than she thinks. With each practice, they sound closer and closer to being ready to play the Myrrh House.

 

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“I'm out of tune,” Rae says after every song.

“You're fine,” Ronnie insists.

“Yeah. See?” Mitch plucks the E-string of his sister's pink bass. Rae plucks the low E-string on her guitar. “In tune,” Mitch concludes.

“Am I playing it right?” Rae moves to the next concern.

“Yes. You are.” Ronnie answers. He finds a boundless patience for Rae and her endless worries, for the three in this room making music he loves.

 

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“No worries,” Ronnie says. He sips from the Old Hamtramck can, the sudsy water fogging his brain into optimism.

“Nahhh, I ain't worried,” Mitch says, in the flat Midwestern accent that had never left him. “I'm more worried about Rae.”

“I ain't worried about her,” Ronnie says, in the early stages of speaking in a very affected Chicacalgo El-a-noy accent, for the move he plans on making sooner rather than later. “Cahmahn! Ya know it won't be a prah-blum.”

“People are talking, Ron.” (And yeah, Mitch says “Ron” like “Rahhhhn.”) “She's notorious for flaking out.”

“It's not gonna happen.” Ronnie says.

 

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“Look at me,” Ronnie says. “You're going to do fine. Just play it like you did at practice.”

“I think I'm gonna throw up.”

“Good!” Ronnie says. This was something she had said during every practice, and the practices always ended up vomit free. “Wait until you're done, then we'll get you to the hospital.

“Oh,” Ronnie adds. “And have fun.”

 

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All these people, so easily filed under “your so-called friends,” validate Ronnie and the rest of the Sunny Afternoons with their vacant-drunk smiling faces. Should Ronnie feel too high on himself and his ego, friends in the audience are quite willing to yell stuff like “Hey look! It's Maux!” or “Hey look! It's Portland Patty!” or “Hey look! It's Maux and Portland Patty together, making out in your bedroom, Ronnie!”

 

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“What if I forget how to play the songs when we get shows?”

“You won't.”

“What if I play a part from one song in a different song?”

“It won't happen.”

“What if—”

“It'll be fine!”

 

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His favorite heckle is when William yells, “Play that one Stones song again!”

 

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In Gainesville they stare at you with their arms crossed, smiling, basking in the magic. To Rae, to do anything more than offer a silent positive support would reduce her to a quivering neurotic twitch of tears. Ronnie gladly receives any and all heckles.

 

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Ronnie plays and sings. He never gets nervous. Performing never scared him. Not once. Everything else in the world fills him with anxiety and apprehension, but when the guitar goes on, all that disappears. Their friends, they watch Rae, because they want her there, playing a guitar. They want this to work.

 

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The view from Ronnie's roof: The ramshackle student ghetto houses. The unstoppable Florida foliage—the live oaks, pines, palms. NW 13th street—the traffic, the giant green-squared MOTHER EARTH sign above the organic market. The stars and the moon. Ronnie spends more and more time here when the heat dies down and the roof shingles aren't blistering.

 

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There will be no stars in Chicago. Ronnie does not know this yet.

 

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Tonight's post-practice record is “The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society.”

 

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Ronnie hasn't felt this happy in months, if not years. Smiling. Singing. Strumming. An imitation of the cynical, almost-hack tone of Ray Davies:
I need you / I need you more than birds in the sky / I need you / it's true little girl / you can wipe the tear from my eye.
Pure joy.

 

 

AT THE NOISE SHOW

 

“Shit's gay,” Mitch repeats. He stands on the front porch with Ronnie, passing a flask of whiskey back and forth, taking a break from all that Art inside.

“Don't be homophobic now,” Ronnie says, taking the flask, sipping, exaggerating the ol' burn (oh! The burn!) of what you could charitably classify as “the cheap stuff” by tilting his head from side to side, twisting and twitching and convulsing.

“I ain't homophobic,” Mitch says. “If this was gay—like as in, really actually gay—it would be interesting.” He grabs the flask from Ronnie, tips it to his mouth. “But no. Shit's gay.”

“G.A.Y.” Ronnie says.

“If you talk, they shush you!” Mitch says. “It's a fucking party, and they shush you.”

“Shushy shushy shushy,” Ronnie says. He sips, twists, twitches, convulses, then laughs.

“Shush, you heathen! Can't you see we're making very important white noise feedback from our amplifiers?”

Ronnie starts hopping around like a monkey caveman. “Me like rock. Me no get noise.” This, punctuated with armpit scratches and lots of “ooga booga” onomatopoeia.

Mitch laughs, joins in with the hopping and the monosyllabic grunting. It's too easy, laughing at these homespun avant poseur noiseicians, or, as they insist on being called, “soundscapers.”

 

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Here in 1996 AD, noise music is a one-way ticket to underground credibility. Make your guitar produce shrill feedback through various effects pedals and your amplifier, and—voila! You now work with noise the way other capital-A Artists work with clay or marble or wood.

One day back at the Myrrh House, after Ronnie cracked one too many jokes about some swooshy ethereal Morse code bleeps coming out of the living room stereo while Roger sat on the couch leaning forward in an “intent listening” posture, Roger turned to him and said, “You're not smart enough to get it.”

“Aw, bullshit,” Ronnie muttered. “What's to get?”

“It's thought and expression that can't be expressed any other way.”

“Sure, dude,” Ronnie laughed before going into his room to listen to something slightly less noisy and a lot less pretentious, and a lot more structured.

Yes, it is all quite serious; the dozen-odd geniuses who comprise the Gainesville Noise Community sit around and watch each other make twittering screeches while wearing stern expressions, thinking of highly intellectual comments to make when it is all finished.

This is what is happening inside, as Ronnie and Mitch are on the porch cracking funnies and drinking too much whiskey. It's a cleared-out, average-sized living room in a typical student ghetto house, filled to capacity, most dressed all in black, and/or wearing masks (papier-mache homemade, or rubber custom shop-bought).

Ronnie and Mitch were standing in the back, trying not to laugh at Roger, “performing” with a strobe light, controlling a theramin with his right hand and a box with knobs he twists and turns with his left hand. All the while, he wears a black robe and nothing else, his face painted all white, looking like some kind of surfer druid, dancing a strange kind of hop-march-jig with his right and left feet kicked up at random intervals.

“It sounds like gerbils mating,” Ronnie thought he was whispering to Mitch, before the audience turned and collectively gave a shush noticeably louder than Ronnie's whisper.

It was an unrelenting hour of pompously smug guys (all guys) who had no problem talking about how they had “outgrown punk,” and are “far beyond rock and roll,” “fully embracing a post-music landscape,” before making sounds that, to Ronnie's untrained ears, sounded like highpitched and beepy old telegraphs on sinking oceanliners.

 

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“You're not profoundly inspired by this?” Mitch asks.

“Let's go,” Ronnie says. “We'll walk to the Drunken Mick.” He inhales, exhales, smiles. “It's a nice night.”

As they turn to step down from the front porch, the front door opens and a familiar voice yells, “Heyyyyyy Ronnnnayyyyy!!!”

Mouse steps up to Ronnie, hugs him. “I never see you anymore, Ronnnayyyyyy!” Mouse wears an off-white suit, too-tight, covered in a multitude of splotchy stains, a very wrinkled black collared shirt, faded red tie. Behind him is Icy Filet, wearing red panties, red sequined pasties, and giant white-framed glasses. “We were hiding in the back getting ready to perform,” she tells Ronnie and Mitch. “But you're here now, Ronald, and Mouse is right. We never see you.”

“Aw, you know,” Ronnie says, stepping back from the hug, trying to take them in in the numb spin of the whiskey. “I've been busy.”

“Heh heh heh, you've been busy,” Mouse says. “I can tell.”

Ronnie shrugs. “I'm doing a lot of thinking.”

“And a lot of drinking,” Mitch has to say, since it's out there, free for the taking. Ronnie turns and punches Mitch on the arm. Mitch hasn't taken his eyes off of Icy Filet's breasts.

“That too,” Mouse says. “I hear you just sit in your room all night, drinking alone.”

“I've been thinking,” Ronnie repeats, as if that should settle everything. “And we're just leaving.”

“But we're about to play,” Icy Filet says.

“Yeah, she's—they're—about to play,” Mitch says.

“Heh heh heh,” Mouse says. “Ronnie just wants to drink.”

Ronnie steps off the front porch. He holds out his arms and spins like he's in a musical, says, “I just wanna dance! And sing. And write.”

“And drink,” Mouse says.

“That too,” Ronnie says.

“You're a mess, Ronnie,” Mouse says.

Ronnie is stomping down the street now, turns long enough to yell, “Who isn't?,” continues trudging down the street.

Mitch still stands on the front porch steps. The interaction's knocked him out of the male-dumb haze of gawking at the red-sequined pasties covering Icy Filet's nipples. He looks up at Mouse, at Icy Filet, says, “I'm sorry. I'll look out for him.”

“Heh heh heh,” Mouse laughs his laugh, as if to say, “No, you won't,” and Mitch stumbles off in pursuit of Ronnie, who's half a block away trying to imitate Robert Plant's banshee wail in “Immigrant Song” and concluding each yell by either knocking over a garbage can and/or karate kicking a mailbox. Mitch catches up to him, joins in with the banshee wail, kicking and chopping and laughing before turning left onto University, whiskey-fearless, yelling their conversation:

“What does she see in him?” Mitch says.

“Who?”

“What's her name. Icy Filet?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah. What does she see in that Mouse guy?”

“No man . . . no . . . it's like . . . they're good for each other. Hang on a second.” Ronnie turns to the curb, bends over, throws up, keeps walking, continues talking. “No, they're good for each other. Totally.”

“How did you do that?” Mitch says.

“What?”

“Umm . . . nothing. Never mind.” A moment later: “I just like her tits.”

“Icy Filet's?”

“Yeah.”

“Cool.”

“You see those things, Rahhhhn?”

“Yeah,” Ronnie yells. “She has breasts. Women have breasts. And with the pasties? You could almost see them in their . . . fuckin' . . . entirety.” They approach the darkened doorway of the Drunken Mick. “And now, to celebrate the only pair of tits I'll almost see tonight, let's drink.”

Vomit-breathed and dizzy, Ronnie enters the Drunken Mick, sits at the bar. Mitch follows, sits to his right. A shot and a beer, a shot and a beer.

“To the Midwest,” Ronnie proposes, raising his shotglass to toast.

“. . .Ok,” Mitch says, clinks his shotglass to Ronnie's, drinks.