Losing in Gainesville (9781940430331) (48 page)

BEEEEEP.

Sigh.

“Ronnie. Call us please. This is the third message we've left with you. And do you think anyone will want to hire you with that Alice Cooper song on your answering machine? Yes, your mom knows who Alice Cooper is. Call us. We're getting worried.”

Push the off button. Sigh. With no job, what could he possibly be doing?

It's too cold to swim—in the pool, in the ocean. Charley is at the driving range. Too early in the day for a drink. Maybe she should buy him a plane ticket for Thanksgiving. Get him out of there. Maybe let him stay here until he's back on his feet. Maybe. Maybe? Maybe.

It's a lot to consider. The ocean is God. The ocean is the Buddha. Ronnie is in the wilderness, and he must make his own mistakes, and learn from them, and Sally Anne, she stares at the waves rolling, listens to the surf, stares out to the horizon line and the gray-blue sky and the gray-blue waves and none of the world's insights trump how much, on a pure emotional level, she misses her son, her son of today, and the son she used to have.

 

 

THE WHITE ROACH

 

The roach is cradling a crease in the white painter's tarp spread across the living room carpet in the room Andy—no longer Professor Andy—has just finished. It is impossible to miss. Brown with black wings, concave, antennae pulsing in sick throbs. Andy was moving his equipment—paint cans, brushes, rollers, trays, ladder, and, finally, the tarp—into the master bedroom, when he spotted it there.

Andy approaches it, towers over it, shrieks like a little girl in a dodge ball game after he taps the nasty thing with the edge of his boot, and its wings sputter towards him in an ominous droning buzz.

The roach jumps two feet backwards, lands on a different bump in the tarp. Its body expands and retracts like it has giant lungs under its shell. Andy shrieks again, runs into the master bedroom, slams the door.

Andy waits for his pulse to return to normal. If he can find a can of roach spray, there's a slight chance the thing will die. The property managers have their offices at the entrance to the apartment complex, in that trailer where all the red white and blue “WELCOME” flags wave around at the top of poles stuck in the dirt-grass every five feet. But he would prefer not dealing with them if he can avoid it. They are in late middle-age. Husband and wife. Overweight. Andy suspects they are swingers. Unattractive swingers. There's nothing overt about their behavior when Andy interacts with them, and he knows he's being a shallow and judgmental bastard when he's forced to consider them, but it's like they're the kinds of people you'd expect to go off and meet similar-bodied enthusiasts in some exurbian hotel located next to a business/industrial park near the airport. The kinds of people you don't want to see but are inevitably the only ones frolicking at the nude beach.

It is there, in the creepy emptiness of the vacated apartment building's master bedroom, when Andy sees the tray covered in hardening white paint with the brush dipped inside, he hatches a plan so completely idiotic, it just might work.

(But first, a brief, vaguely Melvillian discussion about the Floridian cockroach.

The Floridian cockroaches are nothing like those tiny German cockroaches you see on the walls of large northern city kitchens in the summertime. Floridian cockroaches are FUCKING MONSTERS! They are as large as a toddler's shoe. Larger. Fucking Gregor-Samsa sized. Stomp on them. They live! What is crushed of them gets on your shoes, or, worse, in the case of Andy, the roach guts stain the off-white carpeting of the apartment that needs to be completely finished before the end of the work day so the property managers can show the place to prospective renters tomorrow morning. This is why Andy does not and cannot simply squash the roach with his painter workboots and get on with his day.

They've even been known to fly, and when they do fly, they fly straight for your face.

The Floridian cockroaches are one of many ungentle reminders of the jungle lurking beyond the civilizing effects of air conditioning. Developer's delusions to the contrary, it is the Floridian cockroach who rules Florida. It was here before people moved in, and it will remain when we are gone.)

Andy scrapes the Wite-Out-consistency paint with the brush off the tray, holds the brush in his upraised right arm like an Olympic torch. In the living room, the roach has not moved from the tarp. If he picks up the tarp and shakes it, maybe the roach will leave, but it is just as likely to fly towards him and attack. Floridian cockroaches know no fear. They don't scurry when the lights are turned on. They don't run when they hear footsteps. They possess Viet Cong patience.

Andy stands over the vile bug, nausea typhooning his chest when his eyes meet the thing. It twitches. Andy steps backwards, flings the paint on the brush at the roach, white blobs landing on it with papery thuds. Another paint fling. Another. Five, ten seconds. The thing's still breathing. It is now a white roach. It still breathes. It flaps its horrific wings, tries to fly, but can't, weighed down by the gloopy paint.

“Oh God oh God oh God!” Andy says, stepping backwards. The white roach crawls two inches forward, deeper into a fold in the tarp, then stops. It inhales and exhales, antennae swaying to and fro.

“They're swingers, but they must have roach spray,” Andy says aloud. Out of the living room window, the unused swimming pool, walls covered in paintings of upright alligators in orange and blue helmets encircled by a happily cursive “GO GATORS!” Through open windows, that carsick feeling of stuffy heat. These roaches. Academia. Painting. Life. Life in Gainesville. Andy wants five o'clock, home, the desk, the writing. The writing trumps all of this. All of this.

 

•

 

These days are rooms and rooms, walls and walls. Each workaday, Andy tapes off the trim, throws tarp over the greasy white carpeting, rolls white paint over stained, chipped, and tack-holed apartment walls. Fresh coats, for fresh faces. These days are the wet gloopy sounds of the rollers, the chemical pungence of the paint, the classic rock from the kitchen counter—fuzztoned guitar riffs from an old gray boombox covered in splotchy white blobs like a seagull-turded pier—existing in purgatorial fifteen song rotations that have sucked away whatever grandeur these songs once possessed, Aerosmith banished to hell and forced to sing “Sweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeet Emowwwwwwwwwwwwshuuuuuuuun” for all eternity.

Most days, Andy actually loves the work—perhaps more than he should—pleased with the undeniable evidence that something—no matter how minor—has been achieved each and every working day. Left alone to do a job. To paint, to simply work and look forward to what he has to work on when he gets back home.

An old friend who runs a successful house and apartment painting business gave him the job the summer before last, while Andy was deep in the dire poverty all adjuncts go through between semesters. Everyone else, out painting interiors and exteriors, are college kids. The potential indignity of being, by far, the oldest man on the job, was offset by the pleasant solitude.

So far, this life outside of academia has proven to be the change Andy so desperately needs. There are no shortages of houses and apartments that need repainting. The summer is always the busiest—everyone moving out at the end of May and moving back in in August, but the work never stops. Kids flunk out, screw up, get evicted. Gainesville is not a rich town, and it is transient. It is always hot, always sweaty in these empty apartments, but Andy does not mind. With teaching you are never fully off the clock, but with housepainting, going home for the day means leaving work at work, where it belongs.

 

•

 

In the property manager's office, the woman sits her fat ass at a desk, punching buttons on a calculator with fat fingers, excessive purple eye shadow sweating in the humidity. Her husband is plopped on one of the two folding chairs in front of the desk, gray-black armpit hair bushy out of a lumpy purple tank top, gray Michael McDonald hair and beard, flipping through a magazine. Was he reading something like
Southeastern Swingers Quarterly
? Probably.

“Roach spray? We just sent in the exterminators!” the man drawls, standing up, tossing the magazine on the desk. Andy sees that the magazine is actually called
Modern Property Manager.
But that doesn't mean they're not swingers, doesn't mean they're not going to ask Andy to join them in some sick shit. Andy's 37 after all, not much younger than they. It's not that they're swingers. It's a free country, etcetera. But the way the woman always looks at him, giving him something like what the English call “the come-hither look,” as in, “Andy, come-hither! Me and my husband want you to join us in the heart-shaped bed!”

“Let me get you some spray,” the man says. He steps into the storage closet. Andy avoids the woman's gaze the way he tried to avoid looking at that goddamn roach.

“How's the painting coming along?” the woman asks. She peeks up from the calculator through perm-curly gray hair.

“Fine,” Andy says, eyes cast downward as if he's studying the fascinating patterns from the off-white paint splotched on his workboots.

“Do you need anything?” She leans backwards in the office chair, chubby hands folded behind her fat head.

“Need?” (Need?) “No, I'm fine. Thanks.”

“You sure? It must get hot up there. You by yourself today?” That come-hither look.

“I'm fine,” Andy says, looking to the storage closet.

She swivels to Andy, exposing curdish white cellulitic thighs. “Guess you can't escape the bugs down here, hmmmm?”

“Guess not,” Andy says.

“Happy hunting.” The man reemerges, tosses Andy the giant cylindrical roach spray can.

Andy nods, leaves immediately.

 

•

 

The roach has not moved from its spot on the tarp—still inhaling and exhaling, antennae quivering, alert. Andy shakes the full can of roach spray. “Kills Bugs Dead” is what the can promises. Andy has little faith in the can's self-assurance. This is a Floridian cockroach, after all.

Andy pops the top of the can, stands above the roach, extends his right arm, aims the nozzle, sprays with a right index finger. A chemical mist envelops the white roach. It starts twitching. Five seconds of spray. Andy stops. The white roach curls, flips on its back, legs twitching in every direction, antennae in forward lunges like swimmer's arms. Andy waits another fifteen seconds. He is fascinated by the white roach's struggles, its ceaseless movement. The white roach has not died yet. Andy sprays again, for ten seconds. Steps back. Observes. Fewer legs twitch, the antennae hang limp. But the legs keep moving. The hiss of the can, hollowed as the spray empties. Andy shakes the can. It won't die. He sprays for ten more seconds, soaking the spray up and down what passes for its face, this row of legs, that row of legs.

Andy stands over the roach between his workboots, pleads, “Why won't you die?”

It is down to one leg moving in a slow counterclockwise motion. This goes on for five minutes. Ten minutes. The antennae hang limp; the other legs do not move. That one leg, refusing to drop.

Andy is fascinated with the roach, how it finds this roach life so much more preferable to the unknown, even painted white, with a nervous system choked with pesticide. If I was covered in white paint and paralyzing poison, I would offer no struggle. I would surrender. Die quickly. But the white roach, it wants to live. What do I care if it's in here? I don't live here. It wasn't bothering me until I panicked.

Maybe I could save it. Give it some kind of hospice comfort before he passes on. Andy's mind searches for symbolism, for the metaphor of the great white roach, forgetting how much he hates symbolism for the jive speculation of halfwit high school English teachers that it is. He could unroll what remains of the toilet paper in the bathroom, gently pick it up, take it outside, leave it in the shade of a bush.

The white roach's last twitching leg drops. With the toilet paper, Andy picks it up, flushes the white roach down the toilet, watches it circle and circle, bobbing defiantly from the hole before it's swept away.

From the kitchen, the 7/8 shuffle of Pink Floyd's “Money” plays for the sixth time that day. The master bedroom needs a fresh coat of paint. And I've wasted too much time. I need to leave.

Andy stands there thinking about what he has and has not done so far. When the anxiety subsides, he opens another gallon of paint and pours it into the tray.

 

•

 

“Damn, son,” says the Michael McDonald property manager/swinger when Andy tosses him the can. “Musta put a hurtin' on that thing!”

“It wouldn't die,” Andy says.

“Don't gotta tell us,” the woman says, still tapping buttons on the calculator, scribbling numbers in a ledger sheet.

It's nearly five when Andy finishes painting the apartment. He returns the ladder, leans it against an open wall in the office. “Alright, well, see you tomorrow. I'll start on the next building then.”