Losing in Gainesville (9781940430331) (53 page)

Maybe this is the best I can hope for
, Ronnie thinks, walking while staring up into the dark, into the least visual, least textured scenery he can find, the patch of black sky overhead. It is an exciting-enough trap, surrounded by people who know you and will always know you. Gainesville is the kind of place where, when you return, you feel the painful pull of the routine, the comfort, the security. If he did manage to leave, it would take every fiber of his being to keep driving when he got on the exit ramp, to not turn around and stay. He could imagine returning, many years later, looking down any of these empty streets on Sunday afternoons, there, see the nineteen year old lesbian on her bike—DYKE POWER in big black letters on the book bag strapped across her back, peddling in an unrushed zig-zag below the canopy of trees, and he will know how much the passage of time hurts, because Gainesville has moved on to the next batch of eager Florida kids trying to figure themselves and their world out. What was once the only world Ronnie knows will be no longer that world, and the 1996 into 1997 nice winter will no longer exist. The blizzards and hurricanes and the spinning planet in spinning galaxies have their own way of making you realize how insignificant you are. Here and now, Ronnie can't fathom this being any different, except for the very real possibility that this acid will leave him insane, and he will be like any other casualty you see on weekday afternoons sitting on bus benches, muttering and laughing about some gibberish concerning Saturn's Rings.

   

   

PEAKING, BRAH

 

“The fuck you doin', dude?”

Normally, this is an easy enough question to answer—for Ronnie, or anyone else. But as the acid peaks, the question fills with peril, with nuance. What does he mean, and what do I say?

Roger kicks open the cracked door to Ronnie's bedroom, starts laughing; there's Ronnie, sprawled, studying the fractals in the purple and pink floor and how the purple and pink crests decorating the floor expand and contract and break apart from each other—how the floor wobbles like the ocean—then suddenly, terrifyingly interrupted.

“Uhhh . . . uh . . . tripping?” Ronnie manages to say, sits up. “Where's Mitch?”

“Tripping?” Roger yells, in a tone filled with mockery, anger, belligerence. Roger's hair moves in blond Medusa hisses, the frays at the ends of his jeans writhing like white worms, and everything in between is too horrible to comprehend. “Not here, but the front door was wide open when I got here, so thanks for locking up, guys.” Roger steps closer, leans in and over Ronnie, asks, “Have any extra for your roomie?” Roger turns down Ronnie's stereo, snickers at the drawn lines and circles on the ripped pages scattered around Ronnie.

“No!” Ronnie gasps, like someone accused of a crime, because that's what questions—any questions—sound like to Ronnie right now. “I got it from some girl, at some party.”

“That stupid sex party?” Roger yells, standing in the middle of the room below the ceiling fan and the light, fan fluttering like dreadful insect wings, the light heightening the opening and closing pores on Roger's face. “I was there, didn't see you.” Unnecessarily, he adds, “I'm drunk.”

Ronnie cowers against the couch, knees pulled up to his chin, hugging the legs of his jeans, tries not to look at the throbbing cracks in the walls, the spider webs on the ceiling, the wavy flowers on the floor tiles.

“Well,” Roger says. “You're obviously no fun right now. Good night, Ronnie. Happy new year.” He steps out of the room, Medusa hair and wavy frayed jeans trailing behind him.

Ronnie leans against the cowboy couch, moans “Oh God oh God,” while suffering through throbbing undulating hallucinations at every turn. At his side is his journal, where he's tried to write what he had been thinking on the walk home, how he has to leave Gainesville before the law of diminishing returns exacts its ugly costs, but it was more entertaining to draw curvy lines in the journal's pages, to follow their shapes as the patterns emerged. He forgot to put on Side 2 of the MC5
'
s
High Time
and instead plays the Flipper song “Life” on repeat—over and over, finding a surprising tranquility in the music's plodding cacophony as Will Shatter yell-pleads “LIFE! LIFE! LIFE IS THE ONLY THING WORTH LIVING FOR!” over the glorious din. It is almost cold in the Myrrh House. Ronnie could wear a long-sleeved shirt and not sweat. Ronnie tries imagining Chicago cold, a January in Chicago cold, a frozen gray lake facing thousands of buildings gushing smoke. He does this in spite of where the acid wants to take him—bleak eyelid visions of melty-faced Julianas and Mauxs and Portland Pattys and Maggies. The cracked case of the MC5 CD, opened, and the back cover, yellow with red lettering, the song title “Future/Now” hovers over the rest of the text. Two words, separated with a slash, and the meaning is obvious and requires no thought, no brooding, no reflecting. No more of that. He has to go. Just go. Leave. Where? Anywhere. Future/Now. Future/Now. Future/Now. Future/Now. It is time to make this potential energy kinetic.

If only Saturn's Rings would leave. As the hours pass, Ronnie finds fewer and fewer vantage points in which to view his room, fewer objects he can look at without feeling profoundly disturbed by what he's seeing. The lamp on the desk. The Lara Flynn Boyle poster on the wall. The cracked plaster. The guitar. The typewriter. All the little pieces of paper taped to the Haiku Wall. He crawls to his mattresses, falls back, eyes looking upward at the tiny square of window above the horrifyingly jade green curtains; as the sky changes from black to purple to blue, Ronnie can finally close his eyes without seeing ex-girlfriends and all the corny trails and throbs that go with your standard trip, can go back to imagining the beach at Christmas, walking along the shore, feeling quadrophenic, always and forever.
11

 

•

 

“Steal the cue / achieve succeed / place in line / position it in time / make the effort / hey it's worth the effort / sure it's worth the effort / A conversation / a contradiction / you make no sense / you got no position / what you need is a validation / go ahead you got my permission”

—
Minutemen,
“Validation”

 

“No no no, look: It's like, because of last night, I figured it out. What I need to be doing,” Ronnie says, as Ronnie plus you, Neal, and Paul plow through your fifth pitcher of Old Hamtramck, in the middle of a twelve-hour all-you-can-drink Happy Hour at Unknown Pleasurez, a New Wave-themed danceclub on University east of Main that has, for today, transformed into a sports bar, because the Florida Gators football team are winning . . . something? The SEC? The National Championship? You don't know nor care, and of your friends, only Mitch is interested. And he's

off watching it at a real sports bar with his jock-tendencied Tommy Hilfiger-shirted friends from back home. But for today, because business is business and so on and so forth, the TVs here at Unknown Pleasurez that are normally tuned to static—because that's, as any UCF fraternity lad in the early 1990s would tell you, alternative and like . . . post-modern?—are tuned to the channel broadcasting The Big Game
.

“Ok. What?” you moan, sigh, can barely hide your annoyance with Ronnie. Not so much with Ronnie, but with so much talking-talking-talking right now. After all, it has been a twenty-four hour binge of—what?—beer, whiskey, Jaeger, pot, coke, hash, Xanax, Vicodin, with maybe a quick nap on a couch along the way—to Happy New Year Dude, to more of this, to bloody marys, to here, the twentieth bar or party you've been to since getting off work at 4:00 p.m. yesterday.

“What what?” Ronnie says.

Sigh. “What do you need to be doing?”

“William's a little bit tired,” Paul says. “In case you haven't noticed.”

“I think we're all pretty spent here, Ron,” Neal says. “So tell us why today is different from any other day in your life . . . ”

Ronnie, in the shaky gray twitch of an acid hangover, isn't any less exhausted than the rest of you, but in the mania of no-sleep, coupled with the recent addition of Old Hamtramck on draft, he begins talking and talking and talking, as the dozens at the bar and the surrounding tables cheer and slow handclap the touchdown on the screens.

Like so many, Ronnie exaggerates and romanticizes the insights and epiphanies he claims to have had while on acid, either forgetting or refusing to discuss the nightmarish aspects to it—the dark thoughts, the insufferable paranoia, the joyless hallucinations. You've heard variations of this story for so long now. Some drug “cleaned the slate”—and Ronnie will use that expression no less than five times in this spiel. From what you can gather, last night Ronnie figured out that he really-really wants to be a writer, that, once again, he feels the possibilities of life, of what can still be accomplished as they face down baby New Year 1997. He woke up his roommate Roger to tell him this very important news, but Roger (sensibly) moaned and went back to sleep.

Even if it's a cloudy pale gray day, all the colors in the spectrum are so much brighter in Gainesville today, because Ronnie has finally figured out to move on from his past in Gainesville, and his past in Orlando, and it's a new day, and it's time to do it, time to go for it, this is it, it's time to be a writer, blah blah blah blah blah, because that's why he's on this earth—to write—he needs to write and write and . . . 

“Well go then!” you say.

“Go where, William?” Ronnie says.

“Go write,” William says. “I like you, but all you're doing is talking right now. You're not writing. You're wasting time. With us. You're wasting time. Here.” And as you extend your hands, gesturing, Ronnie gives a confused look around, like he doesn't know if you mean Unknown Pleasurez, or Gainesville. “You don't even have a pen with you, do you?”

Ronnie doesn't even bother with putting his hands to his pockets. Shakes his head.

“Ronnie. Go. Go write.”

   

•

 

Ronnie walks down University, crazy University where, like all over Gainesville, cheers are erupting. Cars line up and down the street, honking their horns, drunks hanging out of windows screaming “WE'RE NUMBER ONE!” as the cars swerve close enough for the passengers to high-five each other. Seems like the only ones who don't care about this game are the crusties outside Gatorroni's by the Slice, who seig-heil the honking cheering cars or give them the finger, one with the words GAY GOATERS written on his ass cheeks in black Sharpie large enough to be viewed across the street, which gets even funnier when the police grab him and hustle him off, presumably to jail. Ronnie turns right down 13th towards the Myrrh House, doubting he explained himself very well as he starts muttering to himself, lost in thought, lost in validation—William told him to go but Ronnie would have should have left anyway.

Back in his room, on the floor, journal in his lap, he stares at the minutes ticking away on the digital alarm clock. Will it always be like this? What is he doing here? He stretches, thinks WHAT DOES THIS MEAN? To live this way, to talk to people about your dreams of being a writer or a musician or whatever it is Ronnie wants to do with his life—and the world keeps spinning and it is 1997 and pretty soon the decade will be done and Ronnie if you're going to give up, give up, but if you're going to live, you better live and live right. You better start scribbling something, anything.

On that unhinged January 1st evening, Ronnie takes a deep breath. He laughs, he smiles, and then, Ronnie writes everything that enters his mind, no longer caring if it is good or bad, publishable or un-.

Maybe you expect the climax of this big mother of a book to be something like Ronnie puking all over a girl, or deciding to stay or leave Gainesville, or getting published, or getting a band to some level of success, but really, here's your climax, folks, completely lacking in titties or whatever else you might prefer. It's Ronnie scribbling words into a $1.99 composition pad.

It's Ronnie in his room every morning and most evenings for the remainder of the so-called winter, and onward into the spring and the beginnings of that long Floridian summer, writing whatever comes into his head, not caring that it's awful, filled with missteps and failed experiments and worth nothing but the inevitable rejection slips, year after year. But it doesn't matter. Forgetting everything else and sitting down to write, that is the important thing. To have the joy of that voice in his head, of these characters, of thinking of what needs to happen in the worlds he creates. To jettison ambition in favor of workman effort.

The pages and the journals stack, some better than others. The ratio will improve over the years. Ronnie thought he was a writer before this winter, but really, “aspiring” hung over him like the specters of favorite writers he wanted to emulate so badly—in lifestyle as well as prose talent. As he really writes for the first time, Ronnie thinks of how ass-backwards he had had it before, thinking he was going to be successful the way he was in college, effortlessly barfing out caustic opinion columns as too many gave him more credit than he deserved. The real world—Thank God—didn't work out that way. It would be a slog through February Chicago blizzards rather than the can of corn that was the Floridian winter.