Losing in Gainesville (9781940430331) (56 page)

ANDY'S ESCAPE

 

The completed manuscript is the last thing Andy carries out of the now—officially—vacated house. The query letters and novel samples mailed away to agents yesterday, are somewhere between here and New York, and so are the movers, and so is Andy.

He shuts the front door, locks it, the sound of that final dry slide and click sends his thoughts reflecting on how when you move, it's the sounds, and, by extension, the sights, smells, tastes, and touch of all that you take for granted that make you realize that everything you had written off as wornout, tedious, and commonplace, was actually unique, special, a miracle of math, dimensions, resources, humanity, evolution, entropy. Which, almost reluctantly (nineteen years in the same town and it's over, just like that) he removes the keys from his key chain and hides them, of course, under the soiled welcome mat. He has been planning this move since the faculty meeting meltdown, looking forward to this day when he could leave, all the time spent in between saving money, writing, dreaming, planning, and now that it's here, even the twist of the deadbolt is cause for sentimentality. Because, in spite of the self-pity, self-destruction, anger, and bitterness, he knows something bright emerged out of this house, and the years living here were not in vain.

Andy walks to his packed-up, packed-full Volkswagen. To his right, past the small strip of dead grass between their homes, Andy's neighbor, this overtanned brown-mopped ACR
13
landscaper named Rick, sits in a teal tanktop and cutoff shorts, under his front door awning, watching the sprinklers jettison water across the lawn. Between burnt red thigh-skin, he wedges a silver beer can stuffed into a blue koozie.

“Moving?” Rick bellows across the twenty feet of humid air between them.

“Yup,” Andy says.

“Stayin' in town?”

“No. Off to New York. Brooklyn.” Since New Year's, he had made

three trips, falling in love with the pace, the places, the possibilities, hours upon hours of walking around, taking in each new block.

“City?”

“Yup.”

“What's up there?”

“Got a new teaching job.” (Indeed, Andy has enough money saved for the summer, before starting the new teaching gig in the fall. If he can resist the temptation, the ease, of spending money every single time he sets foot outside of his studio apartment (literally one-fifth the size of where he has lived here in Gainesville, for, literally, twice the price), he can make this work. Difficult, but not impossible.

“They got key lime pie up there?” Rick asks.

Andy smiles, turns to face Rick after plopping the manuscript in the passenger seat. “I'm pretty sure they do.”

“Is it good?”

Andy laughs. And to the mix of sensory details unique to here, Andy adds sweet tea, seafood, and, why not, key lime pie to the ever-growing list of what he will miss. He steps into his Volkswagen, turns the ignition. “Good luck.”

“Wanna smoke out before you go?”

“No. Thanks.” Andy gives a final wave before shifting into reverse, hearing that final dirt crunch of the driveway.

On the drive out of town, Andy takes in University Avenue's little stores and restaurants, the bustle of the collegiates, the unknown familiar faces of the smalltown streets. He stops at the Chevron for gas. From the sidewalk, two students—a purple-haired punk rock boy and a pink-haired punk rock girl, shout his name, smile, wave, approach.

“Remember me? Doug? I wrote the story about the chessmaster with, um, chronic flatulence?”

“I do,” Andy says. In a class filled with stuffy English majors, Doug was a welcome bit of comic relief, a bouncing gawky goofball.

“And I'm Lisa,” she says. “I wrote that story about that guy who's addicted to betting on jai-alai and loses all his possessions?”

“Ah yes,” Andy says. Andy recalls how—this was the fall semester before last—they sat closer and closer to each other with each new class—purple hair on the left, pink hair on the right, slowly moving until they were next to each other, hand in hand in the center of the auditorium by the final class. They were serious without being serious, productive but not pretentious . . . Andy's favorite kinds of students. “Still together, I see?” Andy asks, and he hates how, well, professorial he sounds here. But, at the same time—dammit—he loves it.

“We started dating in your class,” Doug says.

“Where are you going?” Lisa asks.

Andy tells them. They are impressed. “You belong there,” Lisa says. “You were the best teacher we ever had.”

“What?!” Andy laughs.

“No, really,” Doug says. “You were different. You cared. You acted like you didn't care, but you cared.”

Andy doesn't know what to say. “Thanks,” he manages to mumble.

“Well good luck!” Lisa says.

Gas tank filled, nozzle replaced, Andy steps inside the Volkswagen, starts the car, drives off. In the rearview, Doug and Lisa wave. It's almost enough to make him want to stay, but instead, he takes in University Avenue one last time—the buildings, the people, the flora and fauna, the sun, the light, the breeze—before the turn onto Waldo Road, and the start of the thousand-mile drive to the north.

 

 

WHERE DO YOU GO?

 

Each passing year, the bands and the fliers and the seven inches look more and more quaint, not as timeless as we believed them to be—but what is timeless is what it is between our ears. What it did to us, for us, when we needed it most. (As d. boon once howled:
“
mr. narrator? (this is bob dylan to me).
”
) This final house show Ronnie attends as an actual Gainesville resident is less an A-to-B movement and more a blurry blurred transcendent glimpse into better worlds. It doesn't move in a real-time so much as that time and how it exists today beyond mere nostalgia, beyond the so-called “classic rock” of misbegotten youth that “Sweet” Billy DuPree spins at the bowling alley.

Because, you see, Ronnie and me, we miss those days, we miss cramming into muggy living rooms watching our friends transcend genetics, background, conditioning, socialization, for those precious moments before we grow up for good, and we will grow up, no matter how we fight it into our 20s, and even our 30s.

There would be so many parties after these, in so many different places, and they were never that much different from town to town, and after a while, it is easy to grow jaded as we get older, but in the precious fantastic moments of youth, these house shows border on sacrosanct, tempered from piousness thanks to the accompanying wanton hedonism. When it's really right—when I'm playing or Ronnie's playing or you're playing—don't you wish you could hold those moments a bit longer? When people like you and me forget the mundane daily existence and become something else? An honest expression, even when it's ironic.

Music was the center of our lives.

Ronnie won't remember the bands who play tonight at Righteous Freedom House, he won't remember the so many acquaintances he will never see again, the sort-of friends with whom he hardly exchanges words, but they share what we share no matter what becomes of us later. Some died way too young, some become too boring for words. But in the forever-now of the 1997 Gainesville house party, we're still there, downing beers and cheersing friends and sweating in our own juices as the bands put it all out there.

Yes, the bands in Chicago and elsewhere are much better, but the house parties were never as glorious, because these were the first. It was the miracle—the goddamn miracle—of your friends expressing themselves.

It's as real as this February Chicago morning—me, looking out the front windows of the rehabbed two-flat, the dirty snow on the ground, the leafless trees, the cadaver sky, as King Uszniewicz and His Uszniewicztones counter it with their cover of “Land of 10,000 Dances” honking out the stereo. It is the shortest of body highs, but a lifetime of mental shifts forming you into what you thought you could be.

In our own small ways, we reached our American dream for a nanosecond or two, and it had nothing to do with money or property or sports or cars, and everything to do with simply getting ourselves right in our place in the world, expressing the heretofore inexpressible through music, and when you do get that right, it's hard to go down from that, back to the world of dishwashing, of the cubicle, of balancing the books.

Maybe there is more to life than starting bands, seeing bands, listening to music, but we didn't think so at the time. What the hell did we know then, besides living for these frozen moments, these chances that the band plugging into the sockets of these old houses, trying to tune while their friends stand there heckling and laughing, would be the greatest thing we would ever see? You never know, right?

And to come down from that . . . Where do you go . . . where do you go?

 

 

IN THE PARKING LOT, LISTENING TO “HOOTENANNY”

 

You're sitting in your car in the afternoon sun crying while listening to, for the fifth time today, the Replacements' album
Hootenanny
. The engine is still running, max A/C blows against your not-cool tears. “Treatment Bound.” The last song on the album. Yeah. No shit. Your organs throb in pain and you feel sick and sweaty and shaky. Parked in the far corner of the hospital parking lot, drunk and high and cored out.

What will they say when you walk in? On the passenger seat floor, an Evian bottle filled with vodka. You reach across and down, unscrew it, put it to your lips. There. Better/Not Better.
We're gettin no place . . . as quick as we know how
, Westerberg sings.
We're getting' nowhere . . . what will we do now?
It almost makes you laugh. Yeah. No shit.

What would be easy to do—the easiest thing—would be to go home and sleep it off. You'll be fine. You're too young to be anything but fine, even as your old friends are starting to look away when you enter the room. Night after night after night of hazy—if outright nonexistent—recollections. You need all of this simply to maintain. You finish the vodka, toss the Evian bottle out the window (it's fun throwing bottles when you're vodkafucked) and the eighteen-year-old self, the one who rejected all of this to create something on his own, that kid—that kid you've been doing your absolute best to ignore since returning from the tour—shouts in your head that no, this is not alright, and no, you will not be fine, so instead, you shut off the car, and
Hootenanny
is silent. Don't look in the mirror. Don't look in the reflections. Move. Out of the car. Stumble across the lot to the hospital's front doors and try to come up with the words to say it.

 

 

DRUNK JOHN AND SICILY

 

That's right, shitdicks, we're leaving town—me and Sicily. We're moving to New Orleans. She's transferring to Tulane, and I got nothing keeping me here. Sooo . . .  as we say here in Gainesville: “Screw it.”

I'm removing the second of the two speakers from the front windows of the apartment, and it's a little sad, to think of all the incredible times I've had when all I did was sit on the front patio of this house, going inside only to flip records and grab more beers. But it can't last and I can't stay. I can't.

“Looks like the last of it,” my girlfriend says from the middle of the front room, holding a broom, sweeping away the years of accumulation under now-removed couches into one scoopable pile.

I smile, cradling the giant speaker. To leave Gainesville, it's like launched rockets requiring so much force to overcome the gravitational pull. Into the unknown. Because New Orleans, to me, might as well be one of those planets Roger Dean was always painting on Yes album covers (yeah, I worked at a record store!) for all I know about it.

We talked about it and talked about it when Sicily got accepted. Aside from me, Gainesville wasn't working out. I'm applying to grad school. I'd like to teach college. I could see myself doing that. Easily. Anyway, it's way more appealing than ringing up compact discs purchased by morons as I'm perched behind the counter of that fucking record store, muttering under my breath to avoid completely losing it.

The bedroom, my old bedroom, is empty now. Even the fliers have been taken down, most thrown away. The records are boxed up and packed. With the last speaker pushed inside, the U-Haul is filled.

I take one last walk through the house, trying not to dwell on the memories in each room (even the bathroom), the ghosts of old friends I may never see again. It's that time of year when everyone leaves for summer, some never to return. I always kept track of who came and went, who had moved on, and who, like me, never left. Until now. This girl. She saved me. I could have been Drunk John forever. At 30, 35, 40, and on and on. She saved me from my own stupidity. From a comfortable life filled with regret and past-tense talk.

I don't mean to sound too dramatic here, you know, I mean, I may end up back here within three months. Maybe I'll miss it, and maybe I'll hate New Orleans, and I'll find I actually belong here. Nothing wrong with that, right? Happens all the time.