Losing in Gainesville (9781940430331) (49 page)

“Wait a minute,” the woman says, punching a final sequence of buttons on the calculator. She looks up at Andy. Smiles. “Any plans tonight?”

“I have plans!” Andy blurts out, stammers. “Big plans. Tonight.”

“Oh, well, that's too bad. We wanted to invite you somewhere.”

“Can't!” Andy blurts out again. He wants to vomit.

“On Wednesday nights,” the woman says, that come-hither look in full effect, “we have our weekly prayer meeting, at our house.”

“Bible study,” Michael McDonald adds.

“Yeah. Busy,” Andy says, smiling, almost laughing that this is all they want from him.

“Hand him them little books we got,” the woman says. Michael McDonald opens the file cabinet, sticks a hand inside. He walks up to Ronnie, hands him six of those Chick Tracts, insanely Christian comics that equate everything on God's green earth with Satanism—rock and roll, homosexuality, Jews, Islam, Catholicism, consumerism, Marxism, mainstream Protestantism, etc, etc.

“Oh, so you're . . . ” and Andy really wants to say “not swingers after all, but run-of-the-mill Florida religious nuts?! Whew! What a relief!”

“That's right,” Michael McDonald says. “We're evangelicals. Pardon us, but we thought it seemed like maybe you need some spiritual guidance, the way all of us do.”

“You're so quiet!” the woman says. “We thought this would help you in your times of trouble. Have you been saved?”

“Oh. No thanks,” Ronnie says.

“Well, when you change your mind, when you're ready to let the Lord into your heart, we're just a phone call away,” McDonald says.

Andy nods. “Yup.”

“Go forth in the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, and stay blessed, Andy!” she says as Andy leaves.

 

•

 

A glass of red wine—Malbec—the bottle within arm's reach. John Coltrane's
Impressions
on the box. A typewriter in front of him, the page left off at that point he couldn't wait to return to all day, as he painted and killed the white roach and brooded on life, death, and whatever spiritual guidance meant and how it applied to him, exactly.

Andy raises the glass. “To the white roach,” he says. He sips the wine, the sleepiness, the annoyances of work disappearing. He sets the glass down, leans into the typewriter, fingers on the home row, thumbs on the space bar, dives in. He's going to leave town. Soon. He needs to save money, needs to write and have some stories to show for all the wasted years, all the time and energy dissipated and squandered when he should have been here, doing what he's doing now.

 

 

GATORRONI'S IN SOHO

 

Once the six-week whirlwind with Julianna has ended, Ronnie wakes up one warm mid-November weekmorning alone, emotionally drained, and as financially wiped out as he has ever been in this past lost year.

Ronnie could almost believe she never happened. He spends two days and two nights in his room, drinking cheap wine with scrounged change she'd left behind, laying on his back, staring at the ceiling. Shortly after the sunset of the second night, Mitch comes by with a twelve-pack.

“I heard what happened,” he says. “Put some music on and we'll go up on the roof.”

Ronnie shrugs.

Before climbing the tree up to the roof, Ronnie turns on and turns up the stereo, throws on
Destiny Street
by Richard Hell and the Voidoids. On the roof, they split the twelve-pack.

“So. Gone like that, huh?” Mitch works up the courage to finally ask, around beer three.

“Yeah,” Ronnie chugs a deep guzzle, tries formulating what he wants to say, but the words leave his mouth before he can check himself. “That was real, right? I mean, I have no proof, except a memory constantly assaulted by this stuff,” he says, pointing to the beer can in his hand. Julianna's friends who used to come around are gone. Neither of them took any pictures of their travels; they didn't take any pictures at all.

“Yeah, Rahhhn. What the hell happened to you?”

“Don't know,” Ronnie says. He stands, and for two seconds—one, two—he considers jumping off the roof. Or, better yet, rolling off and seeing what happens. But it isn't high enough. He wouldn't die. He'd only get hurt. And he has no health insurance. It would only make everything worse. He drains the can of Old Hamtramck, steadies himself, rolls it down the roof in the exaggerated manner of a professional bowler, burps.

“I gotta get some sleep,” Ronnie says to Mitch. “You can stay up here if you want.”

“Cool,” Mitch says. He watches Ronnie edge downward on the roof to the edge, step across to the tree, climb down. “Jesus,” he mutters, then repeats, “What the hell happened to you?” Ronnie. Mitch is nineteen, Ronnie is 24, and anymore, Ronnie is becoming everything Mitch doesn't want to be, with living, with women, with working . . . shit, with everything. Actually, everyone around him is everything Mitch doesn't want to be. The students. The co-workers at the restaurant where he busses tables. The customers. His friends. It's like nobody knows what the hell they're doing. No mentors. No paths to follow. He finishes his beer, tosses it over his head, listens to it roll down the roof's opposite slope. This could be him in five years, and the very thought of it sends him clattering down off of the Myrrh House roof and straight home.

 

•

 

Late morning, Ronnie wakes up. As the coffee brews, he stands in the living room, noodling around the fretboard of his guitar in Black Flag-style solos. Thinking.

Rent. Bills. In the middle of this binge, Ronnie Altamont had managed to find the time to apply to every restaurant, retail store, and bar he could find. Eviction looms, as usual. He wouldn't put it past Roger to pile up his belongings on the curb on December 1st. Maybe it's all over here. Leave a goodbye note and flee like you did from Chris Embowelment back in Orlando.

Why not? There are no jobs here. The music scene isn't what it was, and is transitioning into something he isn't interested in. He isn't writing. The reasons he moved here don't exist anymore. So leave then. Go back to Orlando and follow Kelly's advice from way back at the beginning of this futile endeavor: Save money. Move to Chicago already. Why the hell not? After eight months of under-, un-, and temporary employment, survival here ain't in the cards.

One Greg Ginn style chromatic solo later, Ronnie unplugs the guitar, turns off the amp. The coffee is ready, and as the pop and hiss fades from his amplifier, he hears the voice of rescue on the answering machine, “. . . from Gatorroni's in SoHo. You turned in an application to us earlier in the month, and we were wondering . . . ”

“Hello?”

Early morning prep cook. 20-30 hours per week, depending on the season and upcoming reservations. Starts at 7:00 a.m. Sharp. You want it?

All plans to leave, poof, like that, gone. What is this, his eighth job in as many months? Who's keeping score?

 

•

 

For what little it was worth, this would be the best job Ronnie would work in Gainesville.

Gatorroni's in SoHo is not in the art district of Manhattan. It's on University Avenue, in a small shopping center by the railroad tracks, between a sporting goods store and a shop with the unusual name of “Stoney O'Bongwater's: Purveyors of the Wackiest of Tobaccos.”

Ronnie has to admit: It feels pretty good to be a productive member of humanity again, to wake up at 6:30 in the morning and have someplace to be. From his house, it is a fifteen minute walk to the restaurant, past dew-drenched windows in the pale early morning sunrise. (Ronnie cannot recall the last time he had seen a sunrise and wasn't too blind drunk to appreciate it.) The smells of food prep fill the air: Zesty Glaze Donuts, Viva Taco, Sesame Happiness Chinese, Szechwan Gator, Party Burgerz, This Can't Be Hummus. The lingering tinge of the recently ended late night—stale beer and garbage. Nobody else on the street but construction workers and bums. The no-season Florida mornings are perfect, especially in Gainesville, the precious daylight hour before most people are out of bed.

His co-workers—among them, “Sweet” Billy DuPree, former late-night DJ for 1970s FM classic rock station BJ 103 “The Tongue,” and current disc jockey for “Rock and Bowl” nights at Gainesville Lanes—are perpetually stoned. Before work, break time, before clocking out, they pass around an endless supply of joints, sneaking off into the dining room in a quiet corner booth while Ronnie follows the caffeine rush and keeps working. Ronnie cannot partake. His boss—Jack, Jack the Fencer, a former world champion fencer for UF before faulty protective gear let through an unfortunate thrust to his right shoulder, robbing him permanently of the speed and accuracy he needed—always asks Ronnie if he wants to get high with him. He never comes right out and says, “Hey, wanna get high?” but couches it in the most ridiculous of insinuations:

“Hey Ronnie, we're about to, uh . . . hop on the Mary Jane Train to Green Town, you in?”

or

“Hey Ronnie—we're fixin' to, uh . . . blaze a nature trail straight into the rec room of our minds. What do you say?”

or

“Hey Ron. We're gonna take a little break so we can, uh, remove the dandruff from our psychic shoulders and face the stresses of the day with a clean scalp. Wanna join us?”

 . . . To which Ronnie naturally replies, to any and all of these questions:

“What do you mean?”

At which point Jack the Fencer would lean in and whisper, “We're going to smoke some marijuana. Would you like to join us?”

“I can't, man,” Ronnie always says. “I can't function stoned.”

Here Jack the Fencer would always chuckle, like he was privy to some top-secret information, then repeat the word “Function . . . ”

While his co-workers get high, Ronnie drinks cup after cup of coffee, often exhausted from the previous night's fun—wired enough to fill buckets with marinara sauce, plastic bins with white bean salad, tubs of white rice (eating bowls of it on breaks with co-workers, drenching the rice in spicy Sriracha sauce). It feels good to be locked into the ethic he was learning while removing asbestos from schools in the Crescent City heat. His co-workers are two-to-twenty years past college age, and for that, Ronnie is grateful. They are interested in DJing or fencing, in fishing or bondage, in biking or boating—their only goals in life being comfort and the flexibility to devote time to what they love. The job is a laid-back trap, deep in the heart of the laid-back trap that is Gainesville.

But it is quiet, steady work, thankfully lacking the unpredictable annoyances of customers. It is enough to keep Ronnie busy, to forget Julianna, Portland Patty, and Maux, to try and move on with life, to pull out of the depression, to pay Ronnie enough money each week to keep him living in the Myrrh House, to keep him living in Gainesville.

 

 

THE LIGHT IN THE DORM ROOM

 

It's one of those days at the record store when you're reminded of that line from Monty Python's
Flying Circus
: “Never kill a customer.”

Who are these people who walk through our door on Sundays? What planet are they from? Why don't they bathe on that planet? Why do they have such shitty taste in music on that planet? You would think the customers at a record store would be cool, you know, rock and roll? Not here man, and not on Sundays.
On the Corner
by Miles Davis gets me through the tedium, the mindlessness, the assholes and jerkoffs and douchebags who come in here and stink up the place and don't buy anything.

“Sounds like pimp music,” some teenager in all black looking up to my perch behind the counter says, and it's all I can do to not hit him on his zitty head with a hammer until his cretin brain squishes all over the grimy floor. Instead, I glare. “Never kill a customer,” the Pythons warn, and they're right. Just sit here and lock into these fantastic beats. Tune out everything else unless these jerks actually need to ring up something they're actually going to buy (on Sundays, it's always something cheap . . . a two dollar used VHS tape, a one dollar punk rock button, a one dollar alternative rock patch to sew on their bookbag), and look forward to the evening.

“Ya wanna beah?” Boston Mike asks, the wet six-pack of Old Ham-Towns soaking through the brown paper bag.

“Y'know . . . I shouldn't,” I say. I'm really trying to cut back. Yeah, ok, it's about the girl. I don't wanna be “Drunk John” anymore. I've been good. Better. No, really: I've been good! But this day man, these fucking . . . fuck it. “But perhaps maybe I should,” I say, reaching into the wet bag and pulling out a can. Boston Mike laughs as I pour it into my usual black mug used more for these beers than for coffee.

Two hours left before closing. I will drink two beers, be sober by the time we clockout. Until then, I'm going to pray for minor time travel. To be locking up the front doors, saying “Later” to Boston Mike, and walking out of this plaza, crossing the street, stepping onto campus as the sun sets behind the football stadium and those brick buildings housing all those academic departments. In twilight, past dutiful students marching to the library, past groups of students talking of their usual big-deal collegiate concerns.