Losing in Gainesville (9781940430331) (55 page)

 

 

ON THE PHONE WITH MRS. ALTAMONT

 

“Yeah, I guess it's all right,” Ronnie says. Before dinner (cooked tonight by Charley: steamed kale on hummus-covered bruschetta, with sliced grape tomatoes over that, drizzled with balsamic vinegar) before meditation, Sally-Anne talks to her son on the phone. “I'm left alone at both jobs. So that's nice. Not so much at the department store. You should see these people who come in. Stupid. Fat. Annoying.”

“Ronnie,” Sally-Anne takes on a scolding voice she hasn't used since Ronnie was a smart-aleck tween. “Right speech, right thought . . . ”

“Not even Buddha can help me there,” Ronnie says. “But hey: it's a job, and it's money to get me out of Gainesville.”

“To where, Ronnie?” Sally-Anne asks, stress, the fight-or-flight tension in the nervous system building with each passing second.

“Chicago,” Ronnie says, as if he's simply running an errand and will be back within the hour. “I thought I told you that.”

“No. You didn't.”

“Sure I did. At Christmas.”

“I would have remembered that, Ronnie.”

“Well, that's what I'm doing.”

“To do what?”

“To do what?”

“Yes, Ron. To do what.”

“I don't know.”

“You don't know?”

“Write. Play music.”

“That's what you said about moving to Gainesville.”

“I'm saving up money.”

“You haven't been able to afford Gainesville. How are you going to afford Chicago?”

“I'm on the right track,” Ronnie says, and for once, Sally-Anne not only wants to believe him, but there's something in his certitude this time.

“Ok, Ronnie,” Sally-Anne says, after a pause long enough to take in this news.

“Ok?”

“Yes, Ronnie. Ok.”

“Supper!” Charley bellows, comedically, in the tone of a grubcook in a trite Western. He adds, “Hey, Ronnie.”

“Hey, Dad.”

“Well talk soon, Ronnie. This is a lot to take in.”

“Ok.”

“Soon.”

“Yes, soon.”

Sally-Anne turns off the phone, walks to the dining room, where the bruschetta is plated, and she softly mutters the word “Chicago . . . ” every ten to fifteen seconds. She stares out to the ocean and repeats it. “Chicago . . . . . . Chicago . . . . . . Chicago.”

“What?” Charley says when he emerges from the kitchen. “Chicago?”

“Pour me some wine,” Sally-Anne says.

 

 

THE FUTURE

 

In faded black t-shirts advertising bands with names like Defiled Ballsac and Infested Turdgobbler, the Gatorroni Losers spend their days and nights seated at the front patio of Gatorroni's by the Slice, emaciated ghost-like half-human half-junkie apparitions. Living on Xanax, Vicodin, Rohypnol, and free refills of iced-tea, the Gatorroni's Losers sit like lonely impoverished old men in late-morning fast food restaurants as they stare at what passes for the action of University Avenue—the bleary-eyed students pulling all-nighters for upcoming finals, the crackheads and winos panhandling change with cardboard signs reading “WHY LIE? I JUST WANT A DRINK,” the busses and bikes and cops and hicks, the rich and poor, young and old, southern and northern—in a hazy unfocused state of near-bliss.

At the shows and the parties, the over-25 crowd linger on the edges in an undefined bitterness—in their words, their observations. Increasingly paunchy, thinning hair, clinging to another time, older and wiser in spite of all best efforts to always remain between 18-24, frustrated that the real 18-24 year olds can't be anything more or better than 18-24 year olds. Long out of college, but still in the college town. More jaded than anyone between 25-40 had a right to be. Acting like the music scene existed solely for their own scorn and ridicule. In a town were Youth rules, Not-Youth clings to what they had when they were in charge, compares it to today, finds it lacking.

 

 

CHICAGO. CHICAGO? CHICAGO.

 

“Why would you leave?” Mitch wants to know. He's up on the roof with Ronnie, the usual routine of two-dollar four-packs of Old Hamtramcks, as the Kinks play from the speakers below. “It's easy here. Girls everywhere, bands, parties.” He smacks Ronnie's side with the back of his hand. “What more do you want?”

“I gotta leave now before I hate it,” Ronnie says, stretching out across the tiles, breathing in this clean air he finds so invigorating. “And I will hate it if I stay.”

“Cah-mahhn, Rahn! You can write anywhere! It gets cold in Chicago!”

Ah, yes. The eternal Floridian belief that snowfall and sub-freezing temperatures are far, far worse than plagues, pestilence, genocide. The mere thought of cold weather sends the average Floridian reaching for their smelling salts.

Winter and spring are rapidly passing into summer. Jeans and long-sleeved shirts are put away until next December. Ronnie drains the second tallboy, revels in the cheap beer bliss, the warmth of the evening sun, regrets that The Sunny Afternoons never covered “This Time Tomorrow.” Ronnie reclines, head on the tiles, croons along, “This tiiiime tomorrrowwww / where will we go / on a spaceship somewhere / watching an in-flight movie show . . . ”

“It's not gonna be as much fun when you leave,” Mitch says, looking out to the sun setting, yet again, over the student ghetto. Only now, these days, over the trees are the construction cranes, there to help construct sore-thumb apartment buildings. One by one, the old houses are razed, replaced by high-density several storied buildings designed in the ugly tasteless pastel architecture aesthetic Ronnie thought he had left behind in Orlando and points south. For two years, Mitch has watched friends arrive and leave, and he never understands—can't fathom—why anyone would want to get out of here. Gainesville has everything you could want in a town. And even if Rahnnie—way too often—gets hung up on some crazy broad, or disappears into himself to write in his room for hours and days on end; even if the dude is weird, off-centered, a thoughtless floundering goof-off, the times here are good.

“I need something new,” Ronnie says. If he thinks of Chicago in any kind of tangible way besides Not Gainesville and Not Florida, he imagines it as he is here-now on the Myrrh House roof: A dark rock and roll bar, playing guitar on an acoustically perfect stage at some lucrative gig that will pay at least one bill, if not all bills, and as he plays, instead of these invigorating breezes, cold bracing wind blasts through the opened front doors as more and more people pack in to listen, to really listen, because, finally, Ronnie will be around hundreds (rather than handfuls) who share his frame of reference, the same cultural heroes, the same underground language. With that kind of perfect fit, why would Ronnie stay in the Great State of Florida?

“You can always come back,” Mitch says, bummedoutedness increasing in a direct relation to his drunkenness.

“Nah,” Ronnie says. “But, you know, I'm hoping people will visit.”

“Oh, we'll visit,” Mitch says. “We'll go see the Cubs lose, then console some baseball sluts in their Ryne Sandberg jerseys when the game ends in typical heartbreaking fashion.”

Ronnie laughs. “Yeah, that sounds about right.”

 

 

RONNIE AND WILLIAM

 

Rolling off this greasy urine-stenched couch, finding your wallet and your keys in a puddle of bongwater on the coffeetable, opening the front door to meet the painful Florida glare, stepping onto the mulchy mucky front yard for home. It's early—too early (with only a sunrise peeking over the trees, to give you any kind of guess at what time it is), but you don't want to know what happened the night before, don't want to piece it together via the predictable post-mortems with friends. The booze hangovers, those are bad enough, but the cocaine hangover on top of it is suicide-inducing. You can almost remember when this kind of thing was fresh and exciting, as everything promised in the 1980s party college movies HBO played incessantly came to life, and it was like those hilarious bits where the characters would wake up with panties wrapped on their heads, naked blondes passed out on either side, limp pizzas spinning on turntables. Now, it's waking up to snoring tattooed gutter girls you've known for way too long, muggy sweat on your aching forehead, and the fourth of five CDs in the CD changer, some factory-grade heavy metal pummeling, the double bass like pistons pounding your weary skull.

Uhhhhhhhhhhh . . . shield your eyes, gain whatever bearings you can. Across the street is a field, the parking lot of a crumbling white wooden church. Stand on the empty street, listen for traffic. Nothing happening in either direction. Another tree-canopied sidestreet with houses like this one, full of people you know are always throwing parties. If you squint through the glare and the humid haze, if you listen past the birds and insects, there are cars, whizzing back and forth. It must be University Avenue. University will take you home.

The soft air blowing through the trees is some help, some protection from the sun's already-nasty blaze, as you hobble along like a bum (a bum!), a dizzy sweaty creep squinting one eye like a hungover Popeye on shore leave. These mornings are piling up. Here's where you should believe that you are tired of always picking up the pieces, of always trying to recall what happened the night before, trying to recollect how you ended up where you woke up in the morning and why you feel the need to leave so quickly, but instead, it's all part of this ha-ha-ha-larious routine.

Down this random street, you sing a Replacements song—“bring your own lampshade / somewhere there's a party / here it's neverendin' can't remember when it started / pass around the lampshade / there'll be plenty enough room in jail.” You sing it with atonal gusto, with volume and heartiness, and no one's around to appreciate it. Your best performance yet!

On University Avenue, you mock yourself and the situation, all like, “Oh! Sure! That's right!
Now
I know where I am!” to no one, because no one's on the sidewalks this early. You read the street sign, in your best parodic North-Central Floridian drawl, you say, “Les' see, ‘cordin' mah calcuhlashuns, Ah'm fahve blocks uh-way.” You sound less like a native of the region and more like Mick Jagger when he “goes country” on the occasional Stones song. That's funny to you, so you decide, fuck it, to belt out a few lines from “Faraway Eyes”—“cuz if yer down on your luck / and life ain't worth a damn / find a girl / with faraway eyes . . . and if yer downright disgusted / uh yeah yeah yeah / y-yeah, girl, faraway . . . fuck it.” Christ, you smell. What is that? Stale whiskey/coke sweat, cigarette smoke, old-ass couch musk? Yes. Yes it is. You want to puke, but instead, you continue singing.

“Ah wuz drivin' home early Sunday morning through Bakersfield listenin' to gospel music on the colored radio station . . . ”

You look up from your hungover daydream. It's Ronnie Altamont, singing along with “Faraway Eyes,” laughing at you, at something, at nothing. He's gotta be as hungover as you. You really don't want to see anyone right now, but at least you can bond about the night before.

You duet a few lines of the chorus, burst into laughter by the time you sing, “So if yer downright disgusted,” and you drop it long enough to say, “What are you doing awake?” (No one should be awake right now. No one.)

“Going to work,” he says, and now that you actually pay attention, he looks too . . . awake, to be hungover. “Preppin' the food,” he says. “You?”

You manage a burnout “heh heh” laugh that transcends your usual ironical imitations of burnouts. “Leaving a party,” you shrug.

Ronnie laughs a sympathetic laugh. “Fun?” he asks. Fun.

Another “heh heh.” You find that laugh disconcerting. You try shifting gears. “You know,” you say, a bit sharper. “Where've you been lately, Ron?”

Ronnie tells you. Working. Writing. Planning a move to Chicago. And the way he says it, it sounds so casual, like he's planning a weekend camping trip or something. Like he has no idea what he's in for. That much you can sense from the way he talks. You give Ronnie three months, tops, before the crime, the weather, and his friends beckon him homeward. You don't say this. Instead, you say, “Well, I have some friends up there. If you want, I could see if you could stay with them until you find a place.”

The look on Ronnie's face? Too bright, brighter than this goddamn day, as he speaks all goshwow and oh really and wowthatwouldbeawesomes.

“I'll call them later,” you say. “I'm sure they'll find something.” Sharp pains stab all the major organs. “But I gotta go. I had a—heh heh—late night.”

“Thanks, dude,” Ronnie says, walking to work with an even brisker stride, and you almost hate him for it.