Losing in Gainesville (9781940430331) (54 page)

AT THE PAWN SHOP

 

“Ronnie? That you?” the Gainesville scenester-looking dude standing to Ronnie's left asks as he's checking out the electric guitars hanging from the greasy walls of the pawn shop.

Ronnie turns away from a black Les Paul worth much more than what he has made in the eleven months he has lived in Gainesville. Each guitar has its own story—old, new, expensive, cheap, dinged, shredded, unplayed, missed, unmissed, covered in stickers, covered in Sharpie-scrawls, hollow-bodied, f-holed, whammy barred—these six-strings, hanging by their necks, unloved and quivering in the air-conditioning.

On the floor of the small and inevitably dingy pawn shop, black bulky amplifiers stacked everywhere you turned—faded knobs, knobless, some speakers look razored, some speakers unused. Ronnie is transfixed, making up the stories behind each instrument, the people who pawned their gear and what they bought with the money. Like Frank here, who pawned this electric blue BC Rich when his band, Hollywood Trix, broke up, and used the money to buy a suit for a job interview with the Barnett Bank on University, where they were hiring bank tellers, and he's trying to figure out if the THC has left his system (it has been six months, maybe? Since he last got high? He thinks?). Or Karl, who pawned the red Hagstrom next to the BC Rich after his wife left him for his best friend and he took the money to buy a shotgun because he never played the guitar anyway and besides—what did he have to live for anymore? Somehow, these bleak imaginary tales made the story of Ronnie, who pawned his black and white Squire Fender, his Crate amp, and his gray Smith-Corona fifteen minutes ago, easier to stomach.

“It's amazing what you find here sometimes,” the scenester-looking dude says to Ronnie, not taking his eyes off the guitars. What was his name again? He wears the old black denim cut-off below the knee that everyone wears here—soiled blue-black Chucks that get that beat-to-hell look only from miles on skateboards, the wallet chain looped from the side of the cut-offs, the lanky-black-haired pale skinned kid you see in the far corner of every suburban parking lot, sitting on his board, sipping from a Big Gulp cup filled with the contents of a Brain Mangler malt liquor quart.

“Yup,” Ronnie says, running his right index and middle fingers across the open strings of the off-white Ibanez Flying-V to the left of the Les Paul. On the opposite side of the room, the pawnbrokers, inevitably orange-skinned, paunchy, and loud, discussing the fish they've caught in their lifetimes, as Rush sings of flying by night away from here on the classic rock radio station playing through the boombox next to the cash register.

It is the afternoon of March 1st.

Ronnie decides to tell him. Out of the three, Ronnie hates mentioning the typewriter most of all, as it was a gift from Kelly before Ronnie left for Crescent City.

The scenester turns away from the guitars, looks at Ronnie. “Damn. Really?” Then, an expression of fearful condescension, of concern mixed with guardedness, his look essentially screaming, Is this guy a junkie?

“Had to make rent, ya know?” Ronnie shrugs, looks down, feeling the hatred and frustration of being here to his bones, the bulge of bills in his wallet going straight to Roger, folded cash for the moment pressing against the left ass cheek of his dirty denim
.

“Oh,” the scenester says, looking almost relieved, shifting his slouch from the right foot to the left. “Aw dude, you can always get another amp and guitar if you want, and what was it, your typewriter?”

“I feel like I just sold off my limbs,” Ronnie oh-so-dramatically puts it.

“Limbs?” The scenester pshaws. “People do this all the time. Our friends do this all the time.” He points to the guitars. “Look around. You're not the first.”

This is something Ronnie loves about Gainesville. Poverty here is temporary, a condition everyone goes through from time to time, rather than a horrible affliction worthy of scorn.

“It's rent. You gotta pay it,” the scenester continues. “It's better than . . . I mean, think of all the guitars here pawned for heroin . . . ”

Ronnie nods, knows this guy is right, but not over the hurt of having to pawn off his most-valued possessions. He thinks of that old chestnut on TV shows, those trips to the pawn shop, when the hardluck protagonist pawns some treasured object—his watch, saxophone, diamond ring—and gets a pittance from the conniving pawn broker, who will not negotiate any better deals, the poor guy having no choice but to take the spare change he's offered, and as he leaves the pawn shop, putting the coins in his pockets, the pawn broker immediately sets the prized possession in the display window with a price tag twenty times the amount he paid the poor bastard for it.

The thing about it was that he used the typewriter only to write haiku. Since receiving it from Kelly, he was more inspired to sit and write haiku than to write short stories or anything else publishable. Instead of that proverbial Great American Novel people were always making jokes about when Ronnie told them what he did (“So, ya writin' that Great American Novel, heh heh heh?”), Ronnie wrote haiku about the cast of
What's Happening!!
A disgrace, in light of all the things he imagined he would write when he first lugged the machine to the car. Ronnie brooded, often, on what kind of muse he was stuck with that was never around when he had something he was aching to say, but was always there to come up with silly, unpublishable horseshit.

And the amp, well, maybe the scenester was right about that one. After all, The Sunny Afternoons had broken up the day after playing another party where they were well-received, but not as well-received as they had been earlier. (There is a law of diminishing returns at work with cover bands.) Besides, Bradley the drummer needs to graduate, wants to spend more time on his finance book. Rae has found a boyfriend, prefers getting high and watching movies with him in her living room over learning new Kinks songs. Ronnie can't blame her. She has done enough for Ronnie, and he is grateful. This leaves Ronnie and Mitch free to sit on Ronnie's roof to drink beers, but even that is infrequent these days as Ronnie opts, more and more, to scribble whatever thoughts are in his head.

The amp was taking up space in the corner of the living room by the front door. It was good to have around when the mood struck him, as was the guitar, but eviction looms, once again. The part-time gig at the restaurant is conducive to a hand-to-mouth existence, but it didn't make rent this time—Gatorroini's in SoHo has been in a down time between major sports seasons, the cold, and the students hunkering down to study.

“Well, I'm gonna go pay the rent now,” Ronnie says to the scenester, extends his hand. They clasp at the fingers, pull away, snap. “Take it easy.”

“Hang in there, alright?” the scenester says. “Hey wait,” he adds. “If you're around this weekend, my band Marcus Aurelius is playing at the Righteous Freedom House.” He pulls out a small flyer from his pocket, hands it to Ronnie. The flyer artwork is all Mondrian lines and lower-case Helvetica fonts.

“Sure, dude,” Ronnie says, knowing he isn't going.

Walking to the front door, Ronnie takes a passing glance at that gray typewriter on the glass counter between the two pawnbrokers who still talk of fish in this lake versus fish in that lake. It's what he already misses the most.

Out the front door, Ronnie feels the warmth of the spring sun, the breeze. The depression lifts. Ronnie has a notebook and a pen. He wants to go home and work. He will drive his dying car through this perfect weather, leave his share of the rent money on the kitchen table for Roger, then retreat to his bedroom, open the windows, listen to Chuck Berry, and write.

 

 

RONNIE FINDS A SECOND JOB IN THE ELECTRONICS DEPARTMENT OF THAT ONE DEPARTMENT STORE THAT IS QUITE OFTEN THE SOURCE OF CRUEL JOKES AMONGST THE PRE-TEEN SET AT THE EXPENSE OF THOSE BELIEVED TO BE OF A LOWER SOCIOECONOMIC STRATA

 

Into the whoosh of the automatic front doors, that first kiss of stale A/C air, past the wet-moussed cashiers, through the racks of prismatic t-shirts, shorts, blouses, pants, slacks, dresses, and Florida Gator leisure wear, past the cologne and perfume cases, mixing with the lotions to add that chemically floral tinge to the air, and contrast that smell with the automotive aisle (keep walking, keep walking) with its stench of the various automotive lubricants stocked in rows six feet high, and head straight to the cacophony of sixty televisions—five down, twelve across—showing, on an endless loop, the films
Space Jam
and
Independence Day
over and over as the CD sampler machine plays ten-second snippets of the same ten songs—Young Country numbers about girls with hearts as big as Texas and drinking establishments where the domestic beer is served cold mixed with alternative rock and roll songs about relationship troubles and stuff. In the middle of this squared-off section of this department store—part of this nationally-known chain notorious for being the butt of so many jokes among kids, the very idea of kids' parents shopping there the epitome of cheap poverty—rows of compact discs, cassingles, VHS tapes, even movies in the exciting new DVD format arranged alphabetically, more or less, and shrinkwrapped. At the entrance to the territory marked off as the Electronics Department, two employees in matching red vests, black slacks, white Oxford shirts, and black ties stand behind the glass display cases containing wristwatches and beepers stand and pretend to look busy amidst this cacophony—the one on the right seemingly studying the pages of a clipboard, and the one on the left standing behind the register while holding a broom.

The employee on the left has clipper-shaved stubbly black hair, patchy in some parts and overgrown in others because the person working the clippers was on her seventh glass of boxed wine. His glasses take up a large amount of facial territory—two squared circles above the eyebrows rounding downward to above the cheeks. When he scowls, he looks like he could be insane, definitely weird, as he says to his co-worker, “I can't believe you've never seen the punk rock episode of
CHIPS
.
12
Pain is one of my all-time favorite fictional bands. No, they are my favorite. Let me sing it for you again: “I dig pain . . . the feelin's in my brain . . . ” and here, the employee sounds more aggressive and, well, barky, with each new lyric. “the scratching, the bashing, the clawin', the thrashin', the givin', the gettin', the total blood lettin' drive me insane . . . ” and here, the employee bellows out, “I DIG PAIN!”

“Shut up, dude!” the other employee whisper-yells, nudging the bespectacled creep employee in the arm. “I know you like that song. You've only told me about it for three months now.” This employee has blond, surfer-style hair with plenty of West Coast rock and roll shag. In spite of the laidback hair and the tan that looks imported from the nearest beach, his general demeanor here at the department store is one of harried annoyance with everything and everyone around him, especially his co-worker here, who happens to also be his roommate.

“Well I have the whole episode recorded,” Ronnie says to Roger. “You need to watch it, and get hip to the music of Pain.”

“You've turned down every invitation I've ever extended to watch films with me, but you want me to watch a
CHIPS
rerun.”

“Yeah, but this is different.”

“Gotta study,” Roger says, pointing to the clipboard, which contains thirty-four pages of the screenplay he's working on for class—scenes from a project about, in Roger's words, “the one and only man living in the United States who is 100 percent happy with the spectacles and entertainment and choices presented that are filed under ‘lowest common denominator.' For instance, this Phil Collins song we're hearing right now over the loudspeakers—nobody really likes it, but this guy, he really likes it, and he likes anything and everything about our culture that is intended to make as many people as possible at least somewhat happy . . . so in this mass-produced post-industrial capitalist society that's just ok, if not worse than ok for most people, this man is in paradise.”

“I can relate,” Ronnie says, trying to understand.

Roger laughs. “You don't relate, but you understand, right?”

“I think so,” Ronnie says. “Dude's happy with . . . ” and Ronnie extends his hands outward to the department store, “this crap?”

“Yes,” Roger says. “That's right.”

 

•

 

Ten minutes down 13th Street, in the car he will sell soon, southbound through the too-quiet weeknight, softly singing T. Rex's “Life's a Gas.” Past the deserted parking lots of the plazas, the lugubrious high school, the old houses where lawyers and accountants and music schools have set up shop. The scuba store. The trophy makers. In the cold of January, the palm tree fronds turn a pale green. There is the slightest tinge of what many places would call “Autumn.” Ronnie wonders if he really wants to leave, for all his talk about it. There are times when Gainesville feels like home, someplace he could settle down and live.

Closer to the Myrrh House, he stops off at the Floridian Harvest, buys the usual two dollar four-pack of Old Hamtramck tallboys. He exchanges pleasantries with the clerk. They know him here. On nights he turns to home, up and down NW 4th Lane, neighbors wave from windows. It could never be like this in the north, in January. Maybe he should stay. He will mull this over while pretending to watch the movie.