Losing in Gainesville (9781940430331) (57 page)

“It's getting late,” Sicily says, standing on the patio as I lock the front door for the last time. “We have a long drive ahead.”

I pull her in for a long hug, a long kiss. It's a late morning, and I've spent it noticing everything I may miss, and I try not to think about it. This quiet familiar little student ghetto street where every fourth or fifth passerby is an old friend. I gotta remember that my future isn't here. It isn't sitting at Gatorroni's after a shift at the record store, scoring pitcher after pitcher until I'm standing up on the table karaokeeing Angry Samoans songs. I mean, I'm sure I could do that in New Orleans anyway. Easily—ha!

Most moments, you want to forget as quickly as possible, and you try and beer it away and hope the beer replaces it with some better time. Not this moment. I want to hold onto it like I hold onto Sicily. Hold this moment close, a last toehold on the familiar, the feeling of being saved and set free all at once. I love her.

And she is right. It is a long drive ahead. We let go. The future is one step off a rickety wooden front porch away. She holds my hand and I don't look back.

 

 

SUMMER OF WORK

 

Bobby stacks the moving boxes by the front door of the common room of what the University charitably classifies a “dorm suite” as
Youth of America
by the Wipers blasts out the speakers of his boombox, when his dad—the very picture of suntanned venerable grayhaired pink-Oxford-shirted Floridian success, steps into the doorway and says, “What the hell's this you're listening to?”

Bobby shrugs, nearly expels a long, dramatic, “Fuuuuuuuck,” but checks himself.

“The guy ain't even singin',” Dad says, and now Bobby holds back a few other choice phrases.

It's going to be a long summer.

“Let's hurry it up,” Dad says, picking up two of the lighter boxes, walking out of the common room, towards the minivan.

There isn't much left to pack. Throw the remaining clothes into a garbage bag, and that's it. His dorm room is back to how he found it back in August. Thin-mattresssed bed frames. Two desks facing each other, a kind of barrier between Bobby and his now-former roommate. On his roommate's side, gone are his cheesy posters of Lamborghini Countaches and Pamela Anderson. On Bobby's side of the room, gone are the flyers of the local shows he attended. In the common room, gone is the ironical beer can wall.

Bobby remembers when summers were fun. When he was really young, when you could get out of school around Memorial Day, and the idea of ever going back to school seemed unfathomable. Summers when going inside for anything was the worst kind of punishment. Now, the summers are working and saving money, living at home, stuck in a boring town with no more friends.

He walks down the sidewalk between his dorm building and the girls' dorms. Girls lugging laundry baskets downstairs to their own summer fates of hometowns, jobs, the drearily familiar. Everyone takes one final glance at the new and the youthful. Bobby crosses the sticky blaze of the parking lot, tosses his things into the back of the minivan. His dad waits, impatiently.

Back to the sidewalk, he hears the last thing he needs to snag—the boombox. Bobby indulges one last glance at where he spent this past year, shuts the door, jogs out.

The long lithe sinewy women lounge around in the university's grass in cut-off shorts, absorbing the summer sun. It's so easy, really. College. Even when it's difficult, it's learning new things around somewhat intelligent people. It isn't the front counter of Eckerd's Drugs, ringing up purchases from the pissed-off elderly, the depressing break room with its desperate no-talk to fill the tedious hours. Summer is now a waiting game of earning money, saving money, going back to his bedroom at home and listening to The Wipers, counting down the days to go back, X-ing the calendar's passing days.

Bobby climbs into the minivan's passenger seat and Dad pulls away before the door's completely shut. “Have a good semester?” he asks.

“It was fine,” and Bobby could talk about, say, losing his virginity in that room, the girl he met who started talking to him at that party in the student ghetto, where the bands played, where the partygoers shouted along to every word. He could talk about discovering punk rock in Gainesville, of all the people he met from it, but none of that will be discussed.

“I hope your grades are good,” Dad says as they pull out of the campus, south onto NW 13th Street. Bobby turns, looks. Out the minivan's dirty back window, the campus—with its girls, youth, energy, epiphanies, discoveries—fades away. Summers suck now. Summers are working, sleeping, sweating, looking and finding nothing to do. Already, Bobby is planning ways to get through it. Maybe I'll learn guitar while back home. Write some songs. Start a band. Why not?

Until then, Bobby turns back around, away from the campus, through the love-bug smeared minivan windshield as Dad steps on the accelerator, into the Floridian countryside. Bobby's heart sinks.

 

 

RONNIE AND CHARLEY

 

“Now, Ronnie: Are you sure you want to do this?”

His dad (oh, good ol' Charley) waits until it is way past too late to ask this question. Because it is, after all, way past too late.

Ronnie has sold his blandy-apple green sedan for the equivalent of two month's rent in the Chicago apartment. He has made all necessary arrangements with his roommates-to-be, has let them know he will be in Chicago this time next week. He has begun packing his books and records into boxes collected from the XYZ Liquor Store.
14
He has reserved a U-Haul. Put in his two-week's notice at both jobs. Has spread the word about the Going-Away Party. Compared to the move to Gainesville, the move out of town is a calm and deliberative process. And yet, somebody still has to ask, “Are you sure?” Arriving, it was Kelly, and leaving, it is good ol' Charley Altamont, retired teacher, born-again Buddhist and practicing vegan, and Ronnie's father.

Before Ronnie can answer, Charley laughs his little southern-style chuckle-while-talking “I know . . . I know! All I'm saying, son, is that if you're not sure, and if it doesn't work out—because it might not, and that's ok—you can come back.”

“Ok, Dad,” Ronnie says, but inside, Ronnie thinks of how there have been so many times he felt bad about what he did. How he left Orlando. How he lived in Gainesville. But what if Ronnie hadn't moved into that trailer and followed Kelly's advice? What if he broke down and admitted to his father, “No, I'm not sure I want to do this.” After all, in a few short months, Ronnie could be lonely and miserable. And very, very cold.

There is safety and warmth in the womb, security in what you know and who you've known. But then they want to tell you who you are and what you can and cannot do, and how you'll always be, and when Ronnie senses that happening in his environment, his first reaction—from his skin, to his bones, to way down deep in the coiled double-helixes of his DNA, is to get the hell out.

He isn't sure he wants to do this, but he isn't sure he has a choice, and not only because the process is already underway. He isn't coming back. Not for a long long long long time. Maybe never . . . but . . . he has always imagined he would end up in the same retirement home with his friends . . . somewhere in what's left of Florida after the glaciers melt. Shuffleboard with Neil and Paul, followed by late-night panty and/or girdle raids. Arthritic hands strumming a guitar, teaching Rae side two of
Kinda Kinks
. Ronnie and Mitch will find a way up onto the roof, with a six-pack of Futro-Hamtramcks (or whatever they'll be called in the 2050s) and a Boombox 2000 playing all the 20th century rock and roll of yestercentury. Movie night, curated by Roger, who will hate the snoring. Mouse and Icy Filet, recording in the Rec Room, drafting the other residents, the nurses, the doctors, to play kazoos, recorders, and detuned electric ukuleles. Kelly . . . Magic Jensen . . . Willie Joe Scotchgard . . . Chuck Taylor . . . Macho Man Randy . . . everyone will be there.

Bingo with William, and as they half-pay attention to the caller's announcements of letters and numbers, they will think back on it all, all those frivolous times in Gainesville, 50 years ago, in those last years when you still had the time space and distance to fuck up and fuck up royally without a Mr. Google to hold your hand and tell you no, Internet Buddy, you're not as alone and confused as you think.

Ronnie, in the retirement hot tub, watching the elderly nnnnuggets practice their water calisthenics. Maggie will be there, and so will Maux, and Siouxsanna Siouxsanne, and Portland Patty and Julianna, and the distant past will be funny to everyone, almost forgotten, and with the warm jets on his achy old limbs, Ronnie will fall asleep, and then he will die in the hot tub, smiling, with no one noticing for a good half hour, at least.

 

 

THE GOING AWAY PARTY

 

Earlier that week, Roger had gotten word that the owners of the Myrrh House—a glass company the next street over—were going to tear it down for a parking lot once their lease expired—or Roger left, whichever came first. Bulldozers will crash and topple these flimsy walls, the neighborhood itself will become another high-density, high-profit bland-ass nothing. You can vandalize, you can set the buildings on fire, you can scream your angry songs, but the Floridian developers march on, and on, and on, and on, and all you can do is dance this one night away before leaving the state of Florida behind.

On NW 4th Lane, bottle rockets whiz and explode everywhere. On opposite ends of the street, Neil and Paul hide behind cars, taking careful aim at each other, shooting, firing, missing. Laughter.

A dizzying array of near friends gather to say goodbye. Ronnie is in constant motion, trying to talk to everyone but too drunk, too overwhelmed, to express how grateful he is.

“You know you're fucked, right?” Kelly says to Ronnie during a short break between Ronnie giving his goodbye “Gonna miss you guys . . . c'mere, gimme a hug” spiels to anyone and everyone who stopped by to see him off. Kelly, who spent the entire day debating whether to show up—because, after all, Ronnie will be back here by Thanksgiving. Even if he somehow stuck it out in Gainesville, Chicago is something else entirely. Kelly had work, but after some internal debate, he called in sick, jumped into his car, and made it to the Myrrh House.

“Yeah, I know,” Ronnie says.

“Good,” Kelly answers. “As long as we're clear on this . . . ”

Ronnie runs off, returns to the keg, cup after cup after cup, emerges from his bedroom with an acoustic guitar, ends up somehow on the roof screaming and strumming “Real Cool Time” by The Stooges, yelling the words at the groups of people clustered up and down NW 4th Lane, and the jungle trees towering over the streetlights will soon be no more, and neither will the street, these friends and near-friends, and Ronnie Altamont could end it—right now—he really could—he could run off this roof and dive headfirst and save the trouble, but so much remains unanswered, and all of this is simply a beginning (when he thought the whole time that this was the end) for better things to come.

Mitch joins him on the roof, followed by Rae, followed by Paul, by Neil, by Mouse, by Icy Filet, by Kelly, by Roger, by Siouxsanna Siouxsanne . . . 

“Hey Rahhn,” Mitch says. “Play ‘Lola.' ”

And so Ronnie plays “Lola” on the acoustic guitar, and in the sea-shanty chorus, he and Mitch and Rae and Paul and Neil and Mouse and Icy Filet and Kelly and Siouxsanna Siouxsanne, along with the dozens spilling out of the Myrrh House, sing along—“Lola / Luh-Luh-Luh-L-Lola / Luh-Luh-Luh-Luh-Low-Luhhhhh” on repeat, and that's the way that Ronnie wants to stay and always wants it to be that way. He will remember this, and over time its meaning will grow, playing music on the roof with friends, this, what it meant to live in Gainesville for thirteen months in the mid-to-late 90s . . . Later, he will go skinny dipping in some apartment complex pool with 30-plus equally intoxicated revelers, but the apartment pool skinny dip is nothing, and the abundant late-night and early morning antics are nothing, and the going home with the blue-haired tat-sleeved nameless one-night stand, while definitely not-bad, that too will be nothing . . . compared to that roof, that street, that town . . . Compared to youth.