FOUR: NO SEASONS

 

 

 

“No. Calm down. Learn to enjoy losing.”

—Hunter S. Thompson

SUNNY AFTERNOONS

 

Ronnie approaches the mic, check-one-check-twos it, announces, “Hi, we’re The Sunny Afternoons.”

 

•

 

On Rae’s upper left arm, there is a tattoo of the outline of Florida with a hand emerging from the center of the state holding a British flag. The hand and flag are meant to be a replica of the hand and flag on the cover of the 1969 Kinks album Arthur, or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire.

 

•

 

Crammed into the very corner where they practice, here in the Myrrh House—plugged in, setting the levels. At the peak of the party, as the beer-buzzes reach a fine collective plateau before the inevitable spiral into a mindless lack of self-control.

 

•

 

It is October. After the rent is paid, Ronnie is broke. The last of the cash from the temp gig at the bookstore is spent, Ronnie is spent, and his days are spent alone in his room, reading book after book, happy tomes from, say, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, as the Stooges’ first album plays over and over again.

 

•

 

Outside, they stand in groups of four or five up and down NW 4th Lane, leaning against cars, retelling anecdotes. Young voices bouncing around the Floridian no-season of autumnal summer.

 

•

 

Rae lets herself into Ronnie’s room, carrying his guitar with her left hand, and a beige Fender Squire in the right. “Look what I just bought,” she says.

 

•

 

They learn five songs: “Victoria,” “’Til the End of the Day,” “I Need You,” “Dedicated Follower of Fashion,” and “Where Have all the Good Times Gone?”

 

•

 

Two friends, playing unamplified electric guitars.

 

•

 

“I’ve been practicing,” she says. She starts to play that three chord intro to “Where Have All the Good Times Gone?” Strum. Strum. Strum. Two of the strings (B and D) are beyond out of tune, but this only enhances the charm.

 

•

 

Of the many many rock and roll lyricists you’re supposed to admire in your admiring youth, Ronnie Altamont had always idolized Raymond Douglas Davies over all the others.

Why?

Here’s why: Boozy visions of British Walter Mittys struggling and suffering and finding the briefest moments of joy in the most mundane. Less about the in-your-tits sexual innuendo of blues bands, and less about the spiritual yearnings of psychedelia, less about classic rock ego and more about the anti-ego of the reticent trying their best to get through the day-to-day.

And then, the music. It never had to go out-there to tremendous lengths to get the point across—no drum solos, no synthesizer solos, no violin bows to the guitars. Actually, from their earliest to the end, you quite often hear borderline hack attempts at the proverbial “hit song.” —But at their best, nobody does the three minute pop masterpiece better. No one has written a better song than “Waterloo Sunset.” No one.

The demeanor. The idea of the man as an underdog overlooked genius, the Kinks usually rating fourth or fifth behind the Beatles, Stones, Who, and Zeppelin. The Beatles have plenty of champions, and most of them are insufferable bores. The Stones have plenty of champions, and most of them are shit-drunk white males who look and act like Jim Belushi and don’t even care about pre-1969 Stones and get sappy at the mere mention of Charlie Watts. Zeppelin. You can’t throw a dead dick at a radio without it finding some classic rock station gettin’ the goddamn Led out. Seriously. I mean, I like them too, but enough already with the Zeppelin, America. There are other bands. Like The Who, another classic rock staple, and they have plenty of champions, and that’s fine, because in Ronnie’s mind, The Who and The Kinks are in a constant neck-in-neck for Best Band from Those Days. But Ray, he’s the one-true genius of them all, and this genius is compounded in how Ronnie sensed that more than the others from the British Invasion, Ray Davies believed himself to be a vaudevillian . . . and saw the irony in it. The dichotomy of writing a song as beautiful as, say, “This is Where I Belong” (among so many others), then going from town to town and leading American audiences in the call-and-response of “The Banana Boat Song,” or even calling an album Give the People What they Want, or Something Else. Art. Showbiz. The eternal tug of war.

Anyway. Ronnie could go on and on about The Kinks. But before we move on, it’s worth noting: since first hearing them at age ten—the song “Predictable,” on an HBO music video program that predated MTV coming to town—Ronnie wished he could croon like Ray Davies . . . and to live someplace where he has the chance to play Kinks songs, with others who like them almost as much as he does . . . wow, man! Just wow! Gainesville!

 

•

 

The songs hold together. Somehow. The rhythm section chugs along.

 

•

 

He leaves his room each day long enough to walk the one block to the Floridian Harvest minimart and purchase one twenty-five cent Little Lady snack cake for brunch, and a second Little Lady snack cake for dinner.

 

•

 

Bradley wears slacks with leather weave belts and French flaggy Tommy Hilfiger shirts. He aspires to one day write a best-selling book on effectively managing your money. He is the drummer for The Sunny Afternoons.

 

•

 

“And I know the choruses now, too,” she says. With tiny wide fingers, her left hand barres the frets, back and forth between B and A, over and over again. Ronnie cannot help but sing softly, “Won’t you tell me / where have all the good times gone? / Where have all the good times gone?”

 

•

 

“Right now, the working title is Effective Money Management, but that might change,” Bradley says to Ronnie shortly after meeting for the first time, at some dreadful party Rae almost literally dragged Ronnie to, some apartment deep in some complex off of Archer Road filled with the noises of bouncing quarters and shots and gratuitous yelling. “You’re a writer. You know how it is with works-in-progress.”

 

•

 

No shit. Where have all the good times gone?

 

•

 

They run through the song, from beginning to end. They play it a second time, now with Ronnie singing along, louder now, what he remembers, which is most of it. The third time, Ronnie puts more feeling into the vocal delivery. It has been too long since he has picked up the guitar and played something.

 

•

 

On the bass is Mitch, this big lug of an expatriate Midwesterner from Austin, Minnesota, the town where Spam is manufactured. He wears a worn Twins ballcap, white t-shirt, khaki shorts. With a thick red pick he plucks a pink bass guitar he’s borrowed from his younger sister, who isn’t using it anymore since her ill-fated feminist grunge band Bitch Slap broke up last year.

 

•

 

“That’s a very functional title,” Ronnie says before drunkenly burping. Rae punches him on the arm.

 

•

 

Played nonstop, the set is a nice and tidy fifteen minutes. With Rae’s incessant worrying factored in, the set pushes the half-hour mark.

 

•

 

“Here’s your guitar back,” Rae says. Her speech is a rapidfire torrent, tinged with the phlegm of the chainsmoker. “At one of your parties you showed me how to play the beginning of ‘Lola,’ and then you told me I could borrow your guitar and learn the rest because you said you didn’t need the guitar anyway and that it meant nothing if you had or didn’t have it.”

 

•

 

Her name isn’t even Rae. It’s Lauren. She changed it in honor of Ray Davies.

 

•

 

Heckles—smart, dumb, funny, and unfunny—were Gainesville’s “Bravo! Encore!”

 

•

 

Rae’s hair is red ringlets looping to her shoulders. Freckles dot her face and arms. Hazel eyes under horn-rimmed cat’s eye glasses worn only by elderly diner waitresses and hip girls. Short. Thin. Bouncy. A green t-shirt silkscreened with the minimalist childscrawl of some Pacific Northwest indie-pop band. Black skirt. Doc Marten boots. And the tattoo.

 

•

 

They run through their five songs as they have every evening now for nine days straight, in preparation for playing here at the Myrrh House this upcoming Saturday. Ronnie feels like some kind of grizzled veteran you see in old sports movies, the kind of grizzled veteran who knows he’s washed up and turns to boozing, but these ragtag kids with their sugary heads filled with dreams give him a new lease on life, so he puts the bottle down and decides to give the game one more shot.

 

•

 

Ronnie downstrokes a first position A chord, then flamencos the strings like Townshend, then stops and says, “The Sunny Afternoons. That’s what we’re called.”

“I thought we could be called Ronnie, or, The Decline and Fall of the Floridian Empire,” Rae says.

Ronnie laughs, says, “No.”

 

•

 

Rae rescues Ronnie from this miserable, uncreative, self-inflicted youthfully naïve funk. Every night for two weeks, Ronnie sits on the patchwork rug in her living room and she sits across from him and they strum their five Kinks songs. Ronnie enjoys her company. She does all the talking. Ronnie is sick of talking, sick of being the one who does the talking. For too long, he hasn’t listened, opting instead for the mindless barf of alcoholic chatter leaving his mouth before the brain steps in and says, “Whoa! Easy!” On her walls are Pavement promo posters, pictures of the Kinks gallivanting around London, tiny paintings clipped from the pages of art history books. The TV is always softly playing one of those movies that’s always on in these Gainesville houses—your Hartleys, your Jarmusches, your Jadorowskys, your Godards, your Trauffauts. You know. The red curtains are shut and that outside world of Ronnie’s mistake-filled life doesn’t exist in here. In here, Ronnie feels like a teacher; it’s not an unpleasant feeling. He enjoys spending time with Rae and has no interest in anything more than friendship. He has blown it so many times with the people he cares about. He doesn’t want to be like that anymore.

 

•

 

There will be no scathing music on the stereo, no scathing French literature dog-eared on the floor. Instead, Ronnie stretches out on the mattresses, strumming first position chords on the guitar until he falls asleep, and if this action isn’t one of the secret pleasures afforded to guitarists, Ronnie will make a meal of his guitar and use the strings as dental floss.

 

•

 

She stands in front of Ronnie. Facial tics contort her mouth. Their guitars hang off their shoulders, clanging into each other.

“Ronnie,” Rae says, turning away from the dozens beginning to concave around them as the set is about to begin. “I can’t do this. I’m too nervous.”

 

•

 

On some nights, he stares at the typewriter, but no words come. And that guitar, this same guitar Rae holds in her hands as she steps into his room, well, Ronnie had been wondering whatever happened to that thing in the same way you might try and figure out what happened to that book or record that’s missing that you’re not terribly concerned about, seeing how you didn’t really like the book or record that much to begin with.

 

•

 

In the middle, Ronnie stands, running through the songs, singing into a microphone on a stand, cable plugged into a Peavey amplifier as he strums his guitar again, and the simple joy of being here, doing this, is enough.

 

•

 

After practices, Ronnie turns up the stereo loud enough to be heard up on the roof, where he climbs up with a four-pack of Old Hamtramck tallboys. Roger works weeknights now—when he’s not at the library studying—and the neighbors expect the Student Ghetto to be loud. Mitch sticks around after practice, follows Ronnie up an easily-climbed tree next to the roof, steps across.

 

•

 

It holds together. Not tight, not loose. Bradley usually knows his twos from his fours. Mitch’s Pete Quaife bass guitar imitations are solid enough. Rae plays better than she thinks. With each practice, they sound closer and closer to being ready to play the Myrrh House.

 

•

 

“I’m out of tune,” Rae says after every song.

“You’re fine,” Ronnie insists.

“Yeah. See?” Mitch plucks the E-string of his sister’s pink bass. Rae plucks the low E-string on her guitar. “In tune,” Mitch concludes.

“Am I playing it right?” Rae moves to the next concern.

“Yes. You are.” Ronnie answers. He finds a boundless patience for Rae and her endless worries, for the three in this room making music he loves.

 

•

 

“No worries,” Ronnie says. He sips from the Old Hamtramck can, the sudsy water fogging his brain into optimism.

“Nahhh, I ain’t worried,” Mitch says, in the flat Midwestern accent that had never left him. “I’m more worried about Rae.”

“I ain’t worried about her,” Ronnie says, in the early stages of speaking in a very affected Chicacalgo El-a-noy accent, for the move he plans on making sooner rather than later. “Cahmahn! Ya know it won’t be a prah-blum.”

“People are talking, Ron.” (And yeah, Mitch says “Ron” like “Rahhhhn.”) “She’s notorious for flaking out.”

“It’s not gonna happen.” Ronnie says.

 

•

 

“Look at me,” Ronnie says. “You’re going to do fine. Just play it like you did at practice.”

“I think I’m gonna throw up.”

“Good!” Ronnie says. This was something she had said during every practice, and the practices always ended up vomit free. “Wait until you’re done, then we’ll get you to the hospital.

“Oh,” Ronnie adds. “And have fun.”

 

•

 

All these people, so easily filed under “your so-called friends,” validate Ronnie and the rest of the Sunny Afternoons with their vacant-drunk smiling faces. Should Ronnie feel too high on himself and his ego, friends in the audience are quite willing to yell stuff like “Hey look! It’s Maux!” or “Hey look! It’s Portland Patty!” or “Hey look! It’s Maux and Portland Patty together, making out in your bedroom, Ronnie!”

 

•

 

“What if I forget how to play the songs when we get shows?”

“You won’t.”

“What if I play a part from one song in a different song?”

“It won’t happen.”

“What if—”

“It’ll be fine!”

 

•

 

His favorite heckle is when William yells, “Play that one Stones song again!”

 

•

 

In Gainesville they stare at you with their arms crossed, smiling, basking in the magic. To Rae, to do anything more than offer a silent positive support would reduce her to a quivering neurotic twitch of tears. Ronnie gladly receives any and all heckles.

 

•

 

Ronnie plays and sings. He never gets nervous. Performing never scared him. Not once. Everything else in the world fills him with anxiety and apprehension, but when the guitar goes on, all that disappears. Their friends, they watch Rae, because they want her there, playing a guitar. They want this to work.

 

•

 

The view from Ronnie’s roof: The ramshackle student ghetto houses. The unstoppable Florida foliage—the live oaks, pines, palms. NW 13th street—the traffic, the giant green-squared MOTHER EARTH sign above the organic market. The stars and the moon. Ronnie spends more and more time here when the heat dies down and the roof shingles aren’t blistering.

 

•

 

There will be no stars in Chicago. Ronnie does not know this yet.

 

•

 

Tonight’s post-practice record is “The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society.”

 

•

 

Ronnie hasn’t felt this happy in months, if not years. Smiling. Singing. Strumming. An imitation of the cynical, almost-hack tone of Ray Davies:I need you / I need you more than birds in the sky / I need you / it’s true little girl / you can wipe the tear from my eye. Pure joy.

 

 

AT THE NOISE SHOW

 

“Shit’s gay,” Mitch repeats. He stands on the front porch with Ronnie, passing a flask of whiskey back and forth, taking a break from all that Art inside.

“Don’t be homophobic now,” Ronnie says, taking the flask, sipping, exaggerating the ol’ burn (oh! The burn!) of what you could charitably classify as “the cheap stuff” by tilting his head from side to side, twisting and twitching and convulsing.

“I ain’t homophobic,” Mitch says. “If this was gay—like as in, really actually gay—it would be interesting.” He grabs the flask from Ronnie, tips it to his mouth. “But no. Shit’s gay.”

“G.A.Y.” Ronnie says.

“If you talk, they shush you!” Mitch says. “It’s a fucking party, and they shush you.”

“Shushy shushy shushy,” Ronnie says. He sips, twists, twitches, convulses, then laughs.

“Shush, you heathen! Can’t you see we’re making very important white noise feedback from our amplifiers?”

Ronnie starts hopping around like a monkey caveman. “Me like rock. Me no get noise.” This, punctuated with armpit scratches and lots of “ooga booga” onomatopoeia.

Mitch laughs, joins in with the hopping and the monosyllabic grunting. It’s too easy, laughing at these homespun avant poseur noiseicians, or, as they insist on being called, “soundscapers.”

 

•

 

Here in 1996 AD, noise music is a one-way ticket to underground credibility. Make your guitar produce shrill feedback through various effects pedals and your amplifier, and—voila! You now work with noise the way other capital-A Artists work with clay or marble or wood.

One day back at the Myrrh House, after Ronnie cracked one too many jokes about some swooshy ethereal Morse code bleeps coming out of the living room stereo while Roger sat on the couch leaning forward in an “intent listening” posture, Roger turned to him and said, “You’re not smart enough to get it.”

“Aw, bullshit,” Ronnie muttered. “What’s to get?”

“It’s thought and expression that can’t be expressed any other way.”

“Sure, dude,” Ronnie laughed before going into his room to listen to something slightly less noisy and a lot less pretentious, and a lot more structured.

Yes, it is all quite serious; the dozen-odd geniuses who comprise the Gainesville Noise Community sit around and watch each other make twittering screeches while wearing stern expressions, thinking of highly intellectual comments to make when it is all finished.

This is what is happening inside, as Ronnie and Mitch are on the porch cracking funnies and drinking too much whiskey. It’s a cleared-out, average-sized living room in a typical student ghetto house, filled to capacity, most dressed all in black, and/or wearing masks (papier-mache homemade, or rubber custom shop-bought).

Ronnie and Mitch were standing in the back, trying not to laugh at Roger, “performing” with a strobe light, controlling a theramin with his right hand and a box with knobs he twists and turns with his left hand. All the while, he wears a black robe and nothing else, his face painted all white, looking like some kind of surfer druid, dancing a strange kind of hop-march-jig with his right and left feet kicked up at random intervals.

“It sounds like gerbils mating,” Ronnie thought he was whispering to Mitch, before the audience turned and collectively gave a shush noticeably louder than Ronnie’s whisper.

It was an unrelenting hour of pompously smug guys (all guys) who had no problem talking about how they had “outgrown punk,” and are “far beyond rock and roll,” “fully embracing a post-music landscape,” before making sounds that, to Ronnie’s untrained ears, sounded like highpitched and beepy old telegraphs on sinking oceanliners.

 

•

 

“You’re not profoundly inspired by this?” Mitch asks.

“Let’s go,” Ronnie says. “We’ll walk to the Drunken Mick.” He inhales, exhales, smiles. “It’s a nice night.”

As they turn to step down from the front porch, the front door opens and a familiar voice yells, “Heyyyyyy Ronnnnayyyyy!!!”

Mouse steps up to Ronnie, hugs him. “I never see you anymore, Ronnnayyyyyy!” Mouse wears an off-white suit, too-tight, covered in a multitude of splotchy stains, a very wrinkled black collared shirt, faded red tie. Behind him is Icy Filet, wearing red panties, red sequined pasties, and giant white-framed glasses. “We were hiding in the back getting ready to perform,” she tells Ronnie and Mitch. “But you’re here now, Ronald, and Mouse is right. We never see you.”

“Aw, you know,” Ronnie says, stepping back from the hug, trying to take them in in the numb spin of the whiskey. “I’ve been busy.”

“Heh heh heh, you’ve been busy,” Mouse says. “I can tell.”

Ronnie shrugs. “I’m doing a lot of thinking.”

“And a lot of drinking,” Mitch has to say, since it’s out there, free for the taking. Ronnie turns and punches Mitch on the arm. Mitch hasn’t taken his eyes off of Icy Filet’s breasts.

“That too,” Mouse says. “I hear you just sit in your room all night, drinking alone.”

“I’ve been thinking,” Ronnie repeats, as if that should settle everything. “And we’re just leaving.”

“But we’re about to play,” Icy Filet says.

“Yeah, she’s—they’re—about to play,” Mitch says.

“Heh heh heh,” Mouse says. “Ronnie just wants to drink.”

Ronnie steps off the front porch. He holds out his arms and spins like he’s in a musical, says, “I just wanna dance! And sing. And write.”

“And drink,” Mouse says.

“That too,” Ronnie says.

“You’re a mess, Ronnie,” Mouse says.

Ronnie is stomping down the street now, turns long enough to yell, “Who isn’t?,” continues trudging down the street.

Mitch still stands on the front porch steps. The interaction’s knocked him out of the male-dumb haze of gawking at the red-sequined pasties covering Icy Filet’s nipples. He looks up at Mouse, at Icy Filet, says, “I’m sorry. I’ll look out for him.”

“Heh heh heh,” Mouse laughs his laugh, as if to say, “No, you won’t,” and Mitch stumbles off in pursuit of Ronnie, who’s half a block away trying to imitate Robert Plant’s banshee wail in “Immigrant Song” and concluding each yell by either knocking over a garbage can and/or karate kicking a mailbox. Mitch catches up to him, joins in with the banshee wail, kicking and chopping and laughing before turning left onto University, whiskey-fearless, yelling their conversation:

“What does she see in him?” Mitch says.

“Who?”

“What’s her name. Icy Filet?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah. What does she see in that Mouse guy?”

“No man . . . no . . . it’s like . . . they’re good for each other. Hang on a second.” Ronnie turns to the curb, bends over, throws up, keeps walking, continues talking. “No, they’re good for each other. Totally.”

“How did you do that?” Mitch says.

“What?”

“Umm . . . nothing. Never mind.” A moment later: “I just like her tits.”

“Icy Filet’s?”

“Yeah.”

“Cool.”

“You see those things, Rahhhhn?”

“Yeah,” Ronnie yells. “She has breasts. Women have breasts. And with the pasties? You could almost see them in their . . . fuckin’ . . . entirety.” They approach the darkened doorway of the Drunken Mick. “And now, to celebrate the only pair of tits I’ll almost see tonight, let’s drink.”

Vomit-breathed and dizzy, Ronnie enters the Drunken Mick, sits at the bar. Mitch follows, sits to his right. A shot and a beer, a shot and a beer.

“To the Midwest,” Ronnie proposes, raising his shotglass to toast.

“. . .Ok,” Mitch says, clinks his shotglass to Ronnie’s, drinks.

When the shot is choked down and Ronnie shakes it out and around his head, he says, “Can’t wait to get outta here . . . ”

“Why the Midwest?” Mitch has to ask, because now, really. Cahmahn.

“Why not?”

“Why?”

“Better than here . . . ”

Mitch raises the pint glass to his lips, drinks, sets it back down on the bar. “It doesn’t matter where you live.”

“Sure it does,” Ronnie says, wobbly on the barstool, slurring his speech. “Makes a huge difference.”

“Naw, not really, Rahhhhn. It’s the same bullshit everywhere.” Almost as if on cue, almost as if to bolster his argument, that one Bad Company song about how the vocalist is, well, he’s bad company, and he can’t deny, starts to play on the jukebox.

“You’re saying Chicago is the same as Gainesville?”

“Naw, of course not. You’re missing the point. You can be happy anywhere, or unhappy anywhere. That’s all I’m sayin’.”

Ronnie belches. Laughs. Raises his pint glass. “Ok, yeah: You can make the best of it, like here, for instance. Or Orlando. Or Chicago. Some people need more from the people and places around them. Some don’t.”

“I guess, Rahhn. I’m also saying that Chicago is exactly the same as this, only there’s more of it.”

“Look,” Ronnie says, “look, scientifically,” he burps, continues, “there are big cities, small cities, suburbs, college towns, beach towns, factory towns, and ski towns. Each has their own ratios of boredom to excitement, danger to safety, vibrancy to redundancy, despair to hope. Sure, under the right set of circumstances, you can find your own version of happiness in almost any of these . . . ” Ronnie stops, laughs. Turns to Mitch. “Look at us. Trying to solve the problems of the world.”

“I’m just tryin’ to figure out why you you cheersed the Midwest, Rahhhn. That was your toast, not mine.”

“I don’t know. I got my reasons.” Ronnie laughs. “Let’s get another beer, another shot, hmmm?” Ronnie nudges Mitch in the arm, punctuates the gesture with added “Hmmm?! Hmmm?!”

“Naw, I’m drunk. I’m walking home.”

“Alright. I’m staying.”

“You’re staying?” Mitch stands, starts to walk to the door. “Camahhhn. You’re drunk already. You don’t need to get drunker.”

“I’m stayin’,” Ronnie says. Mitch shrugs, shakes his head, walks out the door, leaves Ronnie to his drunken drooling brooding. Dumbass. Thinks the Midwest—thinks Chicago—is any different. And now Mitch has gotta get home and sleep this off and make it to class tomorrow for an exam, and what does Ronnie have? Nothing. Not a thing.

 

 

TWO ON A FARTY10

 

Naw, dude, he had no idea the age of the nnnugget, Julianna, but she definitely wasn’t some puppy-eyed punkette younger than Ronnie, now floundering somewhere in his mid-twenties. There were some hungover mornings when he could believe his mind’s jive turkey talk—that he was you know hanging out with some older Anne-Bancroft-Mrs.-Robinson-scotch-and-Virginia-Slims-panty-hose-and-blouse-type, but there were nights when the malt liquor was really kicking in, and the bands were hitting their strides three to four songs into their sets, her blue eyes were you know Bambified wonder, and she would shake that curvy-enough body up and down round and round, and Ronnie’s hormones sang Beefheartian lyrics on the order of “Rather than I wanna hold your hand / I wanna swallow you whole / and lick you everywhere that’s pink / and everywhere you think,” she looked younger than Ronnie, younger than the clove-smoking dorm girls in their CRASS t-shirts. As he got to know her, Ronnie no longer thought about Julianna’s thirtiness (thirtiness!), and he even forgot that on the night he met her, he contemptuously regarded her as “an aging yuppie.” Natch, when Ronnie first met Julianna, she was looking notso hotso. It was at The Drunken Mick; she swiveled on the stool next to Ronnie’s and she had lost a twenty dollar bill and was accusing the Irish bartender of shortchanging her on her last drink. She kept swiveling in her chair like a drunken manatee bobbing and weaving in a lagoon scanning the dark dirty bar floor for any sign of the bill, mumbling and swaying as the barstool squeaked each time she spun a 360, leaning forward, back of her blouse bunching upward and revealing the promise of two glorious asscheeks. As she spun, Ronnie was getting the feeling he was on the verge of being accused of reaching across the bar and stealing the twenty when she left it there while stumbling off to use the ladies’. Each time she spun his way he felt nausea in his stomach; he totally thought she was a stupid-ass aging yuppie. Actually she didn’t think Ronnie Altamont had anything to do with it; her only suspect was the bartender, tallying her drinks with her hands—wwwwwun . . . twoooo . . . thhhhreeee . . . ffffffffour . . . fffffive . . . sssssix . . . ssssssseven . . . —repeatedly, obnoxiously asking why they don’t teach subtraction in Irish schools.

Then Ronnie found it as he was about to bail, irritated and depressed with his decision to waste the evening drinking when he could have been trying to write; he spotted the twenty folded in half, pressed against the bar and the floor, far below the range of the swiveling yuppie’s double-sight. With the kind of self-righteous elitist snobbery one gets when knowing that the independent rock and roll music you’re fond of is billions of times better than the dependent rock and roll music the masses are spoonfed, Ronnie plucked the bill from the floor, made a sarcastic production of showing her the discovered twenty, and slammed it on the bar without saying a word. Two events prevented him from leaving The Drunken Mick right then and there. Three Gainesville scene nnnnuggets entered the bar one . . . two . . . three, and they knew Ronnie from his parties, and he knew them because they were nnnnuggets and anytime he saw them—individually and collectively—he bit his fist like Lenny from “Laverne and Shirley,” and as they said their Hahhhhowareyewws in that syrupy southern way of theirs, at the same time, the woman, Julianna, wouldn’t stop thanking him for finding the twenty, wanted to repay him in whatever he wanted to drink. Well? Sure. Ok. He returned to his seat, she bought him the drink, the nnnuggets seated to his right bought him drinks, the yuppie bought the nnnuggets drinks, the nnnuggets bought the yuppie drinks, and Ronnie made charming promises to repay them all when he finally found a job, and in no time it was like the beautiful bright celebration Ronnie wanted to throw when the lead singer of U2 finally up and died.

Within minutes, she was no longer an aging yuppie but someone decently attractive, who spoke knowledgeably of Belgian indie-pop and Nova Scotian hardcore, who actually knew the older members and the older bands of the scene inside and out, who had moved to Charlotte, North Carolina on a whim, and moved back to Gainesville, Florida on a whim, someone even more to Ronnie’s taste than the nnnnuggets with their fake IDs could ever be. Seeing them, Ronnie and Julianna, in the long bar mirror behind all those multi-colored liquor bottles, he saw all the makings of a fellow flounderer, the perfect companion to kill these empty Gainesville afternoons, evenings and late nights. She could pass for an almost-haggard Swedish stewardess, short blonde hair, pale skin, almost statuesque save for the slight arm flab, a barely perceptible unfirm around the middle, tiny purple veins beginning to emerge in the thighs. Have you ever heard the song “Lady Midnight” by Leonard Cohen? Well, if you have, she—and it—were a lot like that. Ronnie had uneven short black hair from one-too-many friends who were amateurs with hair clippers. He had a darker inevitable Floridian tan—even though he rarely ventured outside. He wore black-rimmed glasses—handles covered in grime eating into the hinges. He kept his stained baby blue Oxford shirts untucked to camouflage the emerging beer belly. Unfortunately for Ronnie, the belly would kind of, you know, hang over the shorts he was forced to wear nine months out of the year, and by the month, it was getting harder and harder to hide, no matter how much he sucked it in. Of course, behind the bar, the nnnuggets didn’t notice it, but when he stood . . . I mean, did The Ramones have beer bellies? That’s how he explained it to Julianna. She said, Dude, find something else to drink besides all that stupid beer, get some exercise! Why do you care so much about it? I’m older than you; I should be the one complaining! Beyond the floundering and the drunken belligerence, Julianna was usually well-intentioned in her honesty, even if Ronnie would never argue with someone as much as he did with her. She would argue over anything—literally anything—especially when drunk—and she lived in France for two years and knew everything about pre-fusion jazz—knew more about music than even Ronnie’s extensive knowledge, spoke fluent Russian, graduated Magna Cum Laude at the University of Florida. Easily, she was the smartest woman Ronnie had ever met, but there was nowhere for that energy to go, so she drank, and that would have been depressing to be around, if Ronnie hadn’t matched her drink for drink, time and time again. Totally, when he stopped thinking of her as some yuppie, he thought of her as a serious drinker—not a drunk or a lush or an alcoholic—not yet, and maybe not ever—but as someone equally as bored as Ronnie by what his surroundings had to offer anymore. Her intelligence simply didn’t exist with the women in the Gainesville punk scene. Some came close—Maux, for instance—but they were too young, masking their inexperience with a self-invented world-weariness.

Fortunately for Ronnie, he had broad shoulders. If he could hold his shoulders back and try not to slouch, the beer belly practically disappeared, but unfortunately, years of playing and seeing loud music had dulled his hearing. To listen to what the nnnuggets were saying, he needed to slouch inward, towards them. He had no money—living a hand-to-mouth existence from plasma donations—so joining a gym or even buying running shoes was completely out of the question. To be in shape meant not playing music, not writing, not going out each night, because it meant finding a full-time job, and Ronnie Altamont, in case you didn’t know it, was destined to be a great writer and all that shit. Yes, all that shit!

Being a little fat and a little deaf, and more so by the month, it seemed, Ronnie would lean into conversations, shoulders slouched, belly poked out, if he wanted to hear what the nnnuggets were yapping about. It isn’t nice and it isn’t cool to not listen to the nnnuggets, because the way they talk and what they talk about is almost as important as how they look in determining whether or not they’re really and truly a nnnugget, or some run-of-the-mill cute girl with the grave misfortune of being a fan of Alice in Chains, and Ronnie hated making that mistake. So he leaned inward a little bit, and the gut popped out enough to make Ronnie inwardly cringe, ashamed at what the floundering was doing to his body, making him age ungracefully, someone who could no longer hang with nnnuggets, with anyone younger than he. But, as he often said to Julianna, it’s important to know if they’re, you know, punk, or not.

Julianna disagreed, and they had many arguments about it. But Ronnie was obsessed with this, and would go on and on about it, like some Maximumrockandroll columnist delineating what is and isn’t punk and why and why not and Julianna would surrender the argument out of outright boredom, simply not caring one way or the other, as Julianna had slowly moved away from younger punk rock obsessions in ways Ronnie had not.

About her own looks, Julianna was equally depressed.

You know, Julianna would say, I used to be a nnnugget myself. Before I thought I had grown up. I can hide years, and sometimes, when they’re drunk enough, I think the boys actually think I’ll be off to take my core classes the next morning. Assuming they even care about it, and many of them don’t. How can they not see this fatty ass and this fatty face and this sagging everything else, Ronnie?

Bull. Shit. Ronnie would counter. You’re beautiful and I know it, and they know it, and if you don’t know it, I’m gonna keep telling you! Kee-rist, lady! Get over here!

And Ronnie would stand, extend his arms into a hug the way he would when he thought he was being charming, and he’d put his arms around her and embrace, hands touching her back where the Carolina pale was darkening into Floridian permatan, and it was always around closing time, when the bars or shows or parties were ending and this youthful life they had lived for far too long felt exhausted and they didn’t know where to go or what to do next, that tasty guitar lead to the Dan’s “Reelin’ in the Years” came on like it always does, somewhere, on a jukebox. Another night where you go out with so much hope and come back feeling older than you actually are. The world is against you, and so are the nnnuggets, who are as coy as you are drunk and the teasing is the worst, the unconscious coy teasing that inspired so many of those emo songs from the emo bands of that emo town. These temporary early twentied sorceresses of the nanosecond, the boys and girls at the height of their beauty, and after this, it would be over for them the way it would be over for Ronnie and Julianna, and only Ronnie and Julianna knew this secret, and it killed their hurt along with the booze—the bottle and the wisdom a futile solace wherever they ended up. This brought out the “Reelin’ in the Years” talk, the regrets of wasted lives with wasted lovers, forgetting they were still young and not unattractive.

Really, they batted about .300. Usually once a week one of them succeeded in what Ronnie called “prospecting for nnnuggets.” On the awesome nights, they were both successful. The awesome nights weren’t as rare as snow, but they weren’t as frequent as frat boys, but it was obvious they were a good pair, setting off the latent charms inside each other that nnnuggets picked up on immediately and responded accordingly. The nights were bright brilliant parties of bands and booze and pizza and singing and the ol’ awoooooga! Julianna’s arrival into Gainesville led Ronnie to reserves of vast energy, to places Ronnie never knew existed. It was the best of times, papa papa papa ooo mow mow papa ooo mow m-mow, even when it was notso hotso. Even if the worst happened, if there were no nnnnuggets around and it was only Ronnie and Julianna sitting on Ronnie’s roof—bored, drunk, and arguing—hey, it beat sitting at home watching television, waiting for work the next day. Good or bad, it was living.

That first week, they were inseparable, seven days and nights of binge-drunk self-destructive hilarity! Kicks! Ronnie thought, in the Kerouac-mindheart of these moments. The break-ups and the frustrations of not fitting in in this alien land melted and out of all that Ronnie reemerged as a goof with a fellow goof, a goofette, and her arrival in town brought all the dudes around and all the nnnnuggets appeared around Ronnie, because it seemed they were together but they weren’t together, it was like that first dusty grizzled prospector sticking his tray into the crick, sifting out the dirt and the water and he sees it and screams “GOLD! IT’S GOLD IN THEM THURR HILLS! HOORAY FOR 1849!” and you and her are the only ones in the crick and it’s simply a matter of how many nnnuggets you can carry off because they’re there ready for you to take them home.

What a great week that was, when they were first inseparable. Starting at The Drunken Mick, when Julianna had lost her twenty dollar bill that Ronnie found. Clinton was reelected. The Gators were bound to win the National Championship in football. There was a safety to the mid-90s, between decades full of apocalyptic gloom and doom, and there was relatively less to worry about. With few responsibilities and a time to get out there and enjoy life, why the fuck not? Everyone was apathetically blissful, ripe for adventure. Yes, ripe!

By the end of the week, when the 70 percent unsuccessful rate would happen, Julianna was crashing on Ronnie’s couch rather than staying in her depressing studio apartment in some “high-rise” (six stories, a veritable skyscraper for Gainesville) close to campus. The second week was nowhere near as good as the first week. Julianna was beyond drinking for fun and relaxation. In the morning, she shook. She would vomit. She wasn’t eating. Her face puffed and sagged, and bags the size of tumors hung below her eyes. She was, as she said, the living embodiment of the Iggy and the Stooges song “Your Pretty Face is Going to Hell,” and Ronnie had to agree. She never looked older, and she lived in a constant cycle of pass out, vomit, pass out, vomit, and somehow nevertheless back to the studio to feed and walk her poor dog.

Then on Friday night, Ronnie’s roommate Roger had had enough. Ronnie figured it would only be a matter of time, but Julianna was oblivious, moving from one drink to the next. Eventually, Ronnie knew, that stressed-out aspiring film critic roomie of his was going to flip out over Ronnie and all these new weirdass older and younger friends coming and going at all hours, on morning drunks, afternoon drunks, night drunks. And Ronnie couldn’t afford to pay the bills, the rent. When he’d enter the Myrrh House with Julianna and whoever tagged along behind her who wanted more of whatever “their thing” was—whatever it was these new friends Julianna introduced to Ronnie were doing, Roger would turn away from his precious artfilms and send a deathglare that grew more severe with each passing day. Then one night, they brought back to the Myrrh House some nnnugget who wanted Ronnie to teach her guitar, and some ponytailed freshman who caught Julianna’s eye, some collegiate claiming he would be the next Scorsese, Roger snapped, raving like a Führer in a traffic jam.

What the fucking fuck fuck! he screamed. I live here! I work and go to school and when I get home I need to study and watch films! This isn’t The Drunken Mick! You’re the most selfish, thoughtless people, and you, Ronnie, are the worst roommate—

A nasty scene. Roger wanted everyone out, immediately. Julianna yelled, Sorry about your luck, fag! Ronnie lives here too! Roger swung a right hook, connecting with Ronnie’s jaw. Ronnie fell backwards, Julianna stuck her right index finger in Roger’s face, screaming, Why are you such an asshole, asshole?! and her new friend—the Next Scorsese, stepped in and started swinging.

Oh my God oh my God! screamed the nnnugget, standing over Ronnie, who bled and stared blankly at the ceiling. Scorsese stood over Roger, who had also fallen backwards to the floor.

As drunk and everything else as she was, Julianna always had a deep reservoir of composure when it was absolutely necessary. She could control her thoughts, her brain, into passable, rational sobriety.

You two should probably leave now, Julianna said to the nnnugget and Scorsese.

All the nnnugget needed was an I’ll be ok from Ronnie for her to step out the door, but Scorsese wanted more punches, even if Roger was already prostrate on the ground, holding back tears. Just leave, Julianna insisted, whispering, I’ll call you later. (The only time they ever saw those two again was at some party by the train depot two to three weeks later, where the nnnugget and Scorsese touched and groped and kissed like boyfriend and girlfriend while Ronnie and Julianna rolled their eyes. Kissing in public. How disgusting.) She gave Ronnie a dishtowel of ice for his jaw, and wiped away the blood and the tears from Roger’s face, making harmless jokes the entire time, so incredibly charming in that way only southerners have, when their voices are smooth soft and sugary and total and complete bullshit. You silly boys, she kept saying. All heart, no brains, no muscle. As a peace offering, Julianna offered Roger her collection of Jodorowsky videos. He agreed, but only if Ronnie agreed to stop having strangers over well into the early morning hours on weeknights. Fine, Ronnie sighed, through the drunkenness and the swelling jaw, as he was starting to believe that, more and more, he could actually date Julianna, if she would have him. That night, after they left Ronnie’s and actually spent the night in Julianna’s studio, she did.

The next morning, they talked about it in terms of its inevitability. Bound to happen, Julianna said. Wanted it to happen, Ronnie insisted. Now they could move on to other thoughts, other people. Dating was out of the question. She refused to be with anyone, after leaving Charlotte, and Ronnie refused to take anything—especially this—seriously. But they would talk about it, indirectly, with a giggly reticence proving neither had grown up completely.

Fantastic, Julianna would later say, as they drank malt liquor on Ronnie’s roof, as the sun set over the student ghetto.

I always wanted it to happen, Ronnie said. From when I first met you and everything. It was better than I expected.

Aw, c’mon, Julianna said, punching Ronnie in the arm. It was awful. I was awful. Dranking (She called it “dranking.” She liked how it sounded more, you know, winoish?) too much made it awful, but it wouldn’t have happened any other way.

No, I was awful, Ronnie said, leaning in to kiss her on the cheek as she pulled away. We’ll never try it again. I was so bad.

You were great. The best. Julianna said. But we’re friends. Friends can’t do this.

It gets dramatic, Ronnie agreed. There’s too much of that here already.

I can’t be monogamous now, Julianna sighed. It’s too much trouble.

I don’t care that much, Ronnie said, finishing his quart of Brain Mangler malt liquor then watching the bottle roll off the roof and shatter.

They never officially got together again, but unofficially? Ok, sure. In those weeks they were the closest and most unorthodox of friends, there were some blacked out moments, when waking up was a jigsaw puzzle missing most of its pieces, one or the other waking up to the other’s snoring, an arm trapped under or draped over the other’s semi-nude body.

We didn’t, she’d say, waking up in her new place, some prefab house she rented on a month-to-month basis in the Duckpond, realizing she had more money saved from her Russian translation job in Charlotte than she realized. Money went further in Gainesville than in most places. God bless towns with cheap costs-of-living. (The month-to-month at the studio was far too depressing, surrounded by all those dumbass college kids yelling. Simply deplorable, ugh, she said. And besides, there was so much more room and a backyard for Charlie, her dog.) (She paid for everything. Food. Drinks. Once she happened to drive past as Ronnie was walking along. Where are you going? she asked. To donate plasma for money, he answered. What? What?! No, you’re not doing that. Get in here! Ronnie climbed into her car. If you need money, she says, I have money. You shouldn’t do that. It’s not good for you. And Ronnie never donated plasma again.)

Oh we did, baby! Ronnie would laugh. And you were, like . . . rrrrroar! Animal! Sex kitten! All that shit! Meow!

As much as she drank? Really? I must have been like a corpse!

Well, Ronnie said. What are you? Thirty-one? Thirty-two? You’re not far off, har har har . . . 

Shut up, kid. Get your clothes on. I wanna bloody mary.

Oh, a bloody mary! My gout! My hernia! Ronnie laughed and laughed until Julianna yelled STEAMROLLER!!! and tried rolling over Ronnie, Bob and Doug McKenzie style.

Sometimes, they would break out what Dylan called “your useless and pointless knowledge,” but typically, neither wanted to talk of anything much deeper than where they would go to drink, where were the parties, and bands, bands, bands. Ronnie didn’t want familiarity. Familiarity hurt. For the first two weeks, Ronnie didn’t even know Julianna’s last name. Wasn’t interested. And for that first month, neither realized the other had a brain, you know, for thinking? Then, they would start talking of their recent pasts, their almost-glory days (if they were dumb enough to believe life peaked before you were twenty-two), when she was straight As and living in France, when he was editing the school newspaper and writing highly-regarded yet notorious humor columns. Over time, they learned they had more in common than the floundering, that they were older than the college crowd, smarter, yet dumber, and stuck in this town and they had no idea where they were going next.

It was a partnership of necessity, because nobody else around them was going through what they were going through, and they were connected in part because they shared a weariness with everything and everyone around them—for Ronnie, the culture of the South, and for Julianna, youth culture. They did not dislike anyone; they simply found it all too funny—punks, vegans, rednecks, indie-rockers, emo kids, co-workers, roommates, students. They would sit on Ronnie’s roof and they would laugh at all of them, and for all the right reasons. These kids were all so serious, thought everything mattered, thought life and living was all so very important. Ronnie and Julianna were the only ones in Gainesville who saw through all the pretentiousness of everyone. Ronnie and Julianna were real. They had lived. They weren’t in college anymore. Ronnie, for his part, had taken to speaking in an exaggerated Chicago accent, throwing out words like “yer basic,” and “jagoff” whenever the opportunity was there. On the roof, they were like Statler and Waldorf on The Muppet Show, heckling from their balcony. On the ground, at parties and shows, it was a mutual bitterness and frustration with where their lives were going . . . Excuse me, scenester jerks! Ronnie would yell as he moved through parties. Why do you whine so much? Why do you feel the need to whine your songs? Julianna would ask of bands during and after their sets. They hated these uniforms these Gainesville punks all wore—their stupid short hair and their beards and their tattoo sleeves and their black band t-shirts and their cutoff army fatigues and their wallet chains. They lived to be as obnoxious as possible around these people. And on the classic rock radio stations of the world, Steve Miller sang “Time keeps on slippin, slippin, slippin, into the future. Tick tock tick. Doo doo doo doo . . . ”

Yes, with each passing night, the awareness that this really could not last. They would have to grow up already. Knowing this lessened all inhibitions. Because these opportunities would not happen again. Ronnie wasn’t going to act this way when/if he made it to Julianna’s age, and beyond. And there was only so much money Julianna had saved, only so much she could use to buy Ronnie food and drink. She would need to find a real job eventually.

And Ronnie still considered himself and still wanted to be a writer. He thought of people he would never see again, of an Orlando that no longer existed.

This can’t last, Julianna said. Someday soon, we’re going to move on. We need to.

Why? This is fun.

You write. Your bedroom is full of scribbled journals and stacked pages. When I’m around you all the time, you do nothing but sit on this roof and drink and talk shit. It’s not healthy or right for you not to be writing. I’ve read what you’ve written.

No you haven’t.

One afternoon, while you slept off a late night, I grabbed the manuscript off your desk and read the first fifty pages while drinking coffee with Roger. I told him you were actually a pretty good writer. He agreed, didn’t understand why you weren’t trying anymore.

Cah-mahhhhhhn, Ronnie said in his best grew-up-in-Bridgeport-next-to-the-Daleys-accent.

I see you, observing all of this. You think it’s all one big Bukowski scene, and you’re Chinaski himself, but you ain’t that. No way. You’ve had it too good, overall. But you’re shifty-eyed, Ronnie Altamont, and I see you observing these places, this town, and I know you’re writing a book in your mind. And someday soon, you’re going to give up this farty-fart fartaround and get serious with it.

And if I do, Ronnie said, you’re getting serious with me. Move to Chicago.

What am I going to do in Chicago? Seriously.

No idea. Because they knew, when this floundering existence ran its course, when one or the other or both said Enough! they would drift apart. Ronnie even knew it would go down the way Julianna predicted. In upcoming weeks, months. He would move on, and Julianna would either stay on the binge and find another partner in the floundering fartaround, or she would move to a real city and get a real job. The only conceivable way Julianna could get serious with life right now was if she fell off the roof, or crashed her car, or when the proverbial sauce and the proverbial dressing did to her outsides what it was doing to her insides. The Floridian climate makes the easy, unchallenging life very comfortable, seductive, and it isn’t something you can simply change overnight, wake up and say Ok world, let’s get to work. Only when you run out of money does that happen, and Julianna had no shortage of money.

Let’s tour Florida! she said one fine hungover afternoon on Ronnie’s roof. I’ll drive. I’ll pay for everything!

The motherland? You wanna explore the motherland?

We’re taking a Gainesville timeout. Let’s dress like tourists and see what happens. We’ll go through the panhandle, both coasts, the Keys. Everywhere!

At the thrift store, they found a nice pair of sandals to go with Ronnie’s black socks. Swim trunks at the mall that looked like Bermuda shorts. A tan-gray short sleeved collared shirt with a penguin embroidered on the right breast. A light blue fishing hat with a navy blue brim. Flip shades for his glasses. An old camera necklaced over the front. Sticky Fingers by The Stones on cassette on a perpetual loop. (I’m sick of all this played out punk rock garbage, Julianna said. Me too! Ronnie hollered.) Singing “It’s just that demon life / gotchoo in its sway.” Maybe Julianna went overboard with it, too undeniably a native Floridian to really look like a tourist, so when she dressed in a pink Minnie Mouse long-sleeved t-shirt, tucked into tight khaki shorts, she looked like an alien from the planet Camel Toe. The purple cruiseship visor and the sunglasses permanently wedged behind into the bleach blonde hair was a nice touch. Perfectly new white Keds tennis shoes. It didn’t even occur to them to bring a change of clothes. Initially, Julianna drove her blue Honda coupe like a tourist, or like a retiree, sputtering down the Interstate at five to ten mph below the speed limit in the left lane, cutting across two-to-three lanes of traffic to hit an exit at the last second. But they grew bored with this, and it was too much work. Florida! Up and down the Atlantic coastline, where the past of seafood shacks, boiled peanuts, and neon motels gave more and more ground to the hot pink hotel skyscrapers. The old fort at St. Augustine, and the winding little walkways where the bars were filled with Conch Republicans listening to beach bums strum “Margaritaville” on nylon strings on beat-up acoustic guitars on tiny wooden stages. Across and down the peninsula, south of Orlando, driving through all the theme parks. A replica of the Bates Motel seen from the highway, on top of a hill, in front of a setting sun. Highway signs reading “HOLY LAND WET AND WILD/NEXT EXIT 2 MILES.” Everyplace, every sign, reading, in essence: WELCOME TO FLORIDA. GIVE US YOUR MONEY! Decorative palm trees, Seussian in their postures and presentations. Ferneries and grapefruit groves. And it’s the no-season of 70 degrees. The absolute miracle of the nature when it isn’t ruined by overdevelopment. The dreadful towns. The backwoods. The Born Agains. The pick-up trucks with “NEVER APOLOGIZE FOR BEING WHITE” bumper stickers. The feeling of being on what amounts to a narrow stretch of land, memories of Bugs Bunny taking a chainsaw to the Panhandle, pushing Florida away and proclaiming, “Take ’er away, South America!” Through Tampa, the glows of televisions visible in all the tiny shacks along the highway, no promises of anything worthwhile for a couple of pretend tourists like Ronnie and Julianna, no disappointments nor regret for driving straight through.

Stopping in St. Petersburg to check out the Dali Museum. Watching Un Chien Andalou several times, fascinated by how people get up and leave when the music has its triumphant finish though the film does not. Humbled and inspired to continue living, and that’s how it went with them when they found the few artistic statements humbling and inspiring in their semi-affected jadedness. Seafood and wine by the water as piped in Caribbean music steeldrummed all over the place. Yah mon, Gulf Coast irie, Ronnie said, and Julianna laughed. They checked into a hotel for the night, planning to drive farther down the Gulf Coast before cutting across Alligator Alley, check out Miami then drive all the way down to the Keys before the long return trip to Gainesville. It’s a search for what Florida’s all about, Julianna said. The Floridian Dream! Whatever, Ronnie said. They reclined in separate beds, drinking wine, watching late-night television, Ronnie flipping through the hip alternative weekly paper. Says here there’s gonna be something called The St. Petersburg Margarita and Ribs Blues Fest tomorrow afternoon. Oh really? Julianna said. I could do this, Ronnie said. We’ll check out of the hotel, go see what this is all about. I do love all three of these, but together? That’s madness. Yes, it is crazy, Julianna said. Maybe we’ll learn something of our Floridian motherland.

And—hoo boy!—here comes the gremlin, the weasel, the Joe Lieberman of destiny to mess up all their plans, even though they really honestly had no one to blame but themselves!

Downtown St. Petersburg, among the strange mix of the bank buildings and old man bars. The streets are closed off. The margaritas are cheap, too cheap, and the ribs don’t cut into the tequila enough. At first, this is enjoyable. Fat Floridian Rush Limbaugh-type guys looking like they just stepped off their yachts, faces smeared with barbeque sauce, spilling their ’ritas with every sway to the white man bluesbands singing “I went down to the crossroads” and so on and so forth on the stage draped in corporate sponsorship banners. Wristbands and handstamps. Clowns making animal balloons. Police. Ronnie and Julianna dancing like crazy, front and center, alone like Druncles at weddings, on their fourth, fifth, and sixth ’ritas, not as watered down as they should be.

Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

Was it the ribs or the ’ritas or the bummer jams the whiteman blues bands were laying on their ears? It could be any or all of the above, as everything turned a little, then a lot, disorienting, sloppy, gross. How they didn’t wind up in jail is anyone’s guess. There were all these kiosks selling things like pirate hats and plastic swords and rainbow-lensed John Lennon sunglasses. Ronnie, bored and drunk, thought it was funny to shoplift everything that wasn’t nailed down, and through the audacity and total belief that nothing bad could ever happen to him on that day, he continued getting away with it, to the point where he was walking down the street trying to speak in a Liverpudlian pirate accent. Oh, and then there were blackouts:

(Julianna making out with one of these Rush Limbaugh guys, one fattyass hand on her ass, the other fattyass hand holding a cigar.)

(Ronnie on the curb, singing a cappella Steely Dan songs like Michael McDonald for spare change that was not forthcoming.)

(Ronnie wearing dozens of colorful beaded necklaces, exchanging these for views of tits of varying size and quality.)

( . . . . . . . . . . )

. . . And then they’re in the car, on some back road between St. Petersburg and Gainesville, Julianna driving, screaming (screaming!) You’re a shitless piece of worth, Ronnie! You’re the worst! I’m pulling over at the next town, and you can get the fuck out!

What did I do?

What did you do? What did you do?! I don’t know what you did! You were running around screaming “Tits!” at the top of your lungs, and “Blues!” and “Tits Blues!” and it was all I could do to drag you out of there to break up the fight that was about to happen, the arrest that was about to happen.

He needed to remember to thank her for tapping into her sobriety reservoir when the going turned ugly. He could remember very little of this. You’re drunk too, he said.

Yeah, but we’re leaving. You’re getting out at the next town. I hate you Ronnie Altamont! Then, a ten minute tirade: You are a terrible writer, Ronnie, an awful musician, a lazy ass, no friends, no girlfriends. You destroy everything and everyone around you. You ruin people. You fuck up everything you touch, Ronnie. Everyone you touch. Jerk. Dick. Cock. Pussy. And on, and on, and on, Julianna broke out the big guns, so much so, Ronnie couldn’t accept it as anything more than Julianna too far gone on the ’ritas to be rational. Ronnie took out his wallet, tossed bills on the dash. Here’s gas money. Please drive me back to Gainesville, and that’s it. We don’t have to ever talk again. No! I’m pulling over now! She pulled over in the middle of Florida cracker ranchland—flat green earth and cattle only broken up by clusters of jungle. Aw, dude, Ronnie said. Please. Get out! No, I won’t! There’s my money. Take it. Just give me a ride home. And then, as the standoff in the heat and humidity was really about to start, Julianna calmly rolled down her window and barfed. Ronnie looked away, staring at the ranchland. Violent retchings. Splatter onto the dirt shoulder of the road. That smell. What does this all mean? What were they doing here? In the backseat, a gallon jug of water. Ronnie reached back, grabbed it. Here. Drink this, he said. She turned around, wiped the puke off with her ironical Minnie Mouse t-shirt. Ok. Three large gulps. The fourth a swish around the mouth and a spit out the window. I’m drunk, she said. I shouldn’t be driving. We’ll go to the next town. Get a room. Ok.

After twenty minutes of nervous silence, they find a motel, and of course, like most east coast motels of this type, it’s called The Sunrise Motel. It’s evening when they check in. One bed apiece. Squiggly color TV. Wood-paneled walls. Julianna orders a pizza before passing out. Ronnie eats a slice before passing out. Hours later, he wakes up. Julianna spooned in next to him. He pulled her closer. On the floor, their now-wrinkled, stained, and stinky thrift-tourist clothing. None of this makes any sense to him. It isn’t supposed to. It’s the end, isn’t it? he thinks. The end of the fartaround. Ronnie was wide awake when the heralded sunrise attacked the motel room window, as the A/C unit wheezed like an asthmatic. He kissed Julianna on the back of her blonde head before falling asleep again. They would wake up and leave minutes before checkout time.

Hungover.

The day of the week did not matter, but from the serious driving of the mail trucks and delivery vans, it was a weekday late morning. A little remorse, but no regret, and a lot of recovery in Julianna’s car. These low-energy post-mortems always put Jimi Hendrix in Ronnie’s mind, singing “I don’t live today.” How did we get to that hotel, exactly? Julianna asked. Ronnie shrugged. You drove. I did something to piss you off. You wanted to leave me on a ranch. What?! Yeah, you were screaming. Said I was awful. Really mean. Oh. Ronnie. I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean anything. I don’t remember much. Yeah. Sigh. We should go back to Gainesville. Yeah. You’re right.

Two hours later, they were back up the peninsula entering Gainesville’s city limits. Ronnie marveled as he always did about how innocuous the place looked when you pulled off the highway. The world Ronnie lived in was hidden when you came into town like this. It was hidden. It always looked sad to Ronnie. Transient. Magical, but fleeting. Like Julianna, who would leave very soon. He would never forget the look when she dropped him off at his house, the unwashed touristy clothes and unwashed hair. But the eyes. So bittersweet. At the time, Ronnie would be too hungover, too exhausted, to give it too much thought, and he figured they would be on the roof this time tomorrow, laughing about their arguments, piecing together what they would recall of the Ritas and Ribs fest, and everything after. Wow. What happened? That was crazy! Yeah. I’m sorry, Ron. I already accepted your apology. We were drunk. Ridiculously drunk. It went too far. But I’ve never met anyone like you ever. I . . . no, I’m not going to say love, but couldn’t we try? Who else is there around here? Kids. And you know I’m not like them. I hope. We could try, right?

She would call Ronnie, on the fourth day upon returning from the ersatz search for the Floridian dream. I’m leaving for Tallahassee, she said. I’m going to take the GRE and get into grad school there, and, clearly, I can’t be here anymore. There’s no reason for me to stay here. What little I have is packed. I’m gone. Ronnie, flabbergasted, blubbering like the Big Bopper, uh whuh . . . whuh . . . will I whuh? He would think of all the right things to say in the upcoming weeks and days, but she left town more abruptly than she arrived, Lady Midnight, and Ronnie sat in his room, listening to the song “Days” by The Kinks, over and over again . . . “Thank you for the days, endless days, sacred days, you gave me . . . you’re with me every single day, believe me, although you’re gone, you’re with me every single day, believe me. ” Someone once described “Days” as the only heartbreaking song in which the person had no bitterness towards the person who split. “Days you can’t see wrong from right. It’s alright. I’m not frightened of this world. Believe me.”

And so alone, in his room listening to The Kinks, on the streets, at the parties, riding around the great space coaster aptly named The USS Great Lost Dickaround, Ronnie would think of Julianna, and half expect her to tumble into some dumb scenester party with a six-pack yelling WHAT’S UP NOW, SELLOUTS? WHO WANTS A WINE COOLER? But that Julianna wasn’t coming back, and Ronnie knew, somewhere in his head, that their connection was a brief bright moment, a mutual respite from the uncertainty of impending adulthood. But alone on the roof, looking northwest to Tallahassee, across the miles of Florida, he forgave and he loved and he thought of old Julianna, he thought of old Julianna.

 

 

FROM THE MYRRH HOUSE ANSWERING MACHINE

 

Looking south out to the ocean, Sally-Anne Altamont watches the blue-gray waves roll in and debates whether or not to call her son, once again, and leave an answering machine message, once again.

It has been two and a half weeks since they’ve talked, and even then he sounded distracted, depressed, short in responses, annoyed with the most basic questions of conversation. Answers almost grunted. Like the teenager he no longer was.

Speed dial. Three and a half rings. And there it is again, ten seconds of the intro to “Eighteen.” The worst thing about this is that she can’t even hear his voice, even speaking something as simple and generic as a “We can’t come to the phone right now, please leave a message.”

BEEEEEP.

Sigh.

“Ronnie. Call us please. This is the third message we’ve left with you. And do you think anyone will want to hire you with that Alice Cooper song on your answering machine? Yes, your mom knows who Alice Cooper is. Call us. We’re getting worried.”

Push the off button. Sigh. With no job, what could he possibly be doing?

It’s too cold to swim—in the pool, in the ocean. Charley is at the driving range. Too early in the day for a drink. Maybe she should buy him a plane ticket for Thanksgiving. Get him out of there. Maybe let him stay here until he’s back on his feet. Maybe. Maybe? Maybe.

It’s a lot to consider. The ocean is God. The ocean is the Buddha. Ronnie is in the wilderness, and he must make his own mistakes, and learn from them, and Sally Anne, she stares at the waves rolling, listens to the surf, stares out to the horizon line and the gray-blue sky and the gray-blue waves and none of the world’s insights trump how much, on a pure emotional level, she misses her son, her son of today, and the son she used to have.

 

 

THE WHITE ROACH

 

The roach is cradling a crease in the white painter’s tarp spread across the living room carpet in the room Andy—no longer Professor Andy—has just finished. It is impossible to miss. Brown with black wings, concave, antennae pulsing in sick throbs. Andy was moving his equipment—paint cans, brushes, rollers, trays, ladder, and, finally, the tarp—into the master bedroom, when he spotted it there.

Andy approaches it, towers over it, shrieks like a little girl in a dodge ball game after he taps the nasty thing with the edge of his boot, and its wings sputter towards him in an ominous droning buzz.

The roach jumps two feet backwards, lands on a different bump in the tarp. Its body expands and retracts like it has giant lungs under its shell. Andy shrieks again, runs into the master bedroom, slams the door.

Andy waits for his pulse to return to normal. If he can find a can of roach spray, there’s a slight chance the thing will die. The property managers have their offices at the entrance to the apartment complex, in that trailer where all the red white and blue “WELCOME” flags wave around at the top of poles stuck in the dirt-grass every five feet. But he would prefer not dealing with them if he can avoid it. They are in late middle-age. Husband and wife. Overweight. Andy suspects they are swingers. Unattractive swingers. There’s nothing overt about their behavior when Andy interacts with them, and he knows he’s being a shallow and judgmental bastard when he’s forced to consider them, but it’s like they’re the kinds of people you’d expect to go off and meet similar-bodied enthusiasts in some exurbian hotel located next to a business/industrial park near the airport. The kinds of people you don’t want to see but are inevitably the only ones frolicking at the nude beach.

It is there, in the creepy emptiness of the vacated apartment building’s master bedroom, when Andy sees the tray covered in hardening white paint with the brush dipped inside, he hatches a plan so completely idiotic, it just might work.

(But first, a brief, vaguely Melvillian discussion about the Floridian cockroach.

The Floridian cockroaches are nothing like those tiny German cockroaches you see on the walls of large northern city kitchens in the summertime. Floridian cockroaches are FUCKING MONSTERS! They are as large as a toddler’s shoe. Larger. Fucking Gregor-Samsa sized. Stomp on them. They live! What is crushed of them gets on your shoes, or, worse, in the case of Andy, the roach guts stain the off-white carpeting of the apartment that needs to be completely finished before the end of the work day so the property managers can show the place to prospective renters tomorrow morning. This is why Andy does not and cannot simply squash the roach with his painter workboots and get on with his day.

They’ve even been known to fly, and when they do fly, they fly straight for your face.

The Floridian cockroaches are one of many ungentle reminders of the jungle lurking beyond the civilizing effects of air conditioning. Developer’s delusions to the contrary, it is the Floridian cockroach who rules Florida. It was here before people moved in, and it will remain when we are gone.)

Andy scrapes the Wite-Out-consistency paint with the brush off the tray, holds the brush in his upraised right arm like an Olympic torch. In the living room, the roach has not moved from the tarp. If he picks up the tarp and shakes it, maybe the roach will leave, but it is just as likely to fly towards him and attack. Floridian cockroaches know no fear. They don’t scurry when the lights are turned on. They don’t run when they hear footsteps. They possess Viet Cong patience.

Andy stands over the vile bug, nausea typhooning his chest when his eyes meet the thing. It twitches. Andy steps backwards, flings the paint on the brush at the roach, white blobs landing on it with papery thuds. Another paint fling. Another. Five, ten seconds. The thing’s still breathing. It is now a white roach. It still breathes. It flaps its horrific wings, tries to fly, but can’t, weighed down by the gloopy paint.

“Oh God oh God oh God!” Andy says, stepping backwards. The white roach crawls two inches forward, deeper into a fold in the tarp, then stops. It inhales and exhales, antennae swaying to and fro.

“They’re swingers, but they must have roach spray,” Andy says aloud. Out of the living room window, the unused swimming pool, walls covered in paintings of upright alligators in orange and blue helmets encircled by a happily cursive “GO GATORS!” Through open windows, that carsick feeling of stuffy heat. These roaches. Academia. Painting. Life. Life in Gainesville. Andy wants five o’clock, home, the desk, the writing. The writing trumps all of this. All of this.

 

•

 

These days are rooms and rooms, walls and walls. Each workaday, Andy tapes off the trim, throws tarp over the greasy white carpeting, rolls white paint over stained, chipped, and tack-holed apartment walls. Fresh coats, for fresh faces. These days are the wet gloopy sounds of the rollers, the chemical pungence of the paint, the classic rock from the kitchen counter—fuzztoned guitar riffs from an old gray boombox covered in splotchy white blobs like a seagull-turded pier—existing in purgatorial fifteen song rotations that have sucked away whatever grandeur these songs once possessed, Aerosmith banished to hell and forced to sing “Sweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeet Emowwwwwwwwwwwwshuuuuuuuun” for all eternity.

Most days, Andy actually loves the work—perhaps more than he should—pleased with the undeniable evidence that something—no matter how minor—has been achieved each and every working day. Left alone to do a job. To paint, to simply work and look forward to what he has to work on when he gets back home.

An old friend who runs a successful house and apartment painting business gave him the job the summer before last, while Andy was deep in the dire poverty all adjuncts go through between semesters. Everyone else, out painting interiors and exteriors, are college kids. The potential indignity of being, by far, the oldest man on the job, was offset by the pleasant solitude.

So far, this life outside of academia has proven to be the change Andy so desperately needs. There are no shortages of houses and apartments that need repainting. The summer is always the busiest—everyone moving out at the end of May and moving back in in August, but the work never stops. Kids flunk out, screw up, get evicted. Gainesville is not a rich town, and it is transient. It is always hot, always sweaty in these empty apartments, but Andy does not mind. With teaching you are never fully off the clock, but with housepainting, going home for the day means leaving work at work, where it belongs.

 

•

 

In the property manager’s office, the woman sits her fat ass at a desk, punching buttons on a calculator with fat fingers, excessive purple eye shadow sweating in the humidity. Her husband is plopped on one of the two folding chairs in front of the desk, gray-black armpit hair bushy out of a lumpy purple tank top, gray Michael McDonald hair and beard, flipping through a magazine. Was he reading something like Southeastern Swingers Quarterly? Probably.

“Roach spray? We just sent in the exterminators!” the man drawls, standing up, tossing the magazine on the desk. Andy sees that the magazine is actually called Modern Property Manager. But that doesn’t mean they’re not swingers, doesn’t mean they’re not going to ask Andy to join them in some sick shit. Andy’s 37 after all, not much younger than they. It’s not that they’re swingers. It’s a free country, etcetera. But the way the woman always looks at him, giving him something like what the English call “the come-hither look,” as in, “Andy, come-hither! Me and my husband want you to join us in the heart-shaped bed!”

“Let me get you some spray,” the man says. He steps into the storage closet. Andy avoids the woman’s gaze the way he tried to avoid looking at that goddamn roach.

“How’s the painting coming along?” the woman asks. She peeks up from the calculator through perm-curly gray hair.

“Fine,” Andy says, eyes cast downward as if he’s studying the fascinating patterns from the off-white paint splotched on his workboots.

“Do you need anything?” She leans backwards in the office chair, chubby hands folded behind her fat head.

“Need?” (Need?) “No, I’m fine. Thanks.”

“You sure? It must get hot up there. You by yourself today?” That come-hither look.

“I’m fine,” Andy says, looking to the storage closet.

She swivels to Andy, exposing curdish white cellulitic thighs. “Guess you can’t escape the bugs down here, hmmmm?”

“Guess not,” Andy says.

“Happy hunting.” The man reemerges, tosses Andy the giant cylindrical roach spray can.

Andy nods, leaves immediately.

 

•

 

The roach has not moved from its spot on the tarp—still inhaling and exhaling, antennae quivering, alert. Andy shakes the full can of roach spray. “Kills Bugs Dead” is what the can promises. Andy has little faith in the can’s self-assurance. This is a Floridian cockroach, after all.

Andy pops the top of the can, stands above the roach, extends his right arm, aims the nozzle, sprays with a right index finger. A chemical mist envelops the white roach. It starts twitching. Five seconds of spray. Andy stops. The white roach curls, flips on its back, legs twitching in every direction, antennae in forward lunges like swimmer’s arms. Andy waits another fifteen seconds. He is fascinated by the white roach’s struggles, its ceaseless movement. The white roach has not died yet. Andy sprays again, for ten seconds. Steps back. Observes. Fewer legs twitch, the antennae hang limp. But the legs keep moving. The hiss of the can, hollowed as the spray empties. Andy shakes the can. It won’t die. He sprays for ten more seconds, soaking the spray up and down what passes for its face, this row of legs, that row of legs.

Andy stands over the roach between his workboots, pleads, “Why won’t you die?”

It is down to one leg moving in a slow counterclockwise motion. This goes on for five minutes. Ten minutes. The antennae hang limp; the other legs do not move. That one leg, refusing to drop.

Andy is fascinated with the roach, how it finds this roach life so much more preferable to the unknown, even painted white, with a nervous system choked with pesticide. If I was covered in white paint and paralyzing poison, I would offer no struggle. I would surrender. Die quickly. But the white roach, it wants to live. What do I care if it’s in here? I don’t live here. It wasn’t bothering me until I panicked.

Maybe I could save it. Give it some kind of hospice comfort before he passes on. Andy’s mind searches for symbolism, for the metaphor of the great white roach, forgetting how much he hates symbolism for the jive speculation of halfwit high school English teachers that it is. He could unroll what remains of the toilet paper in the bathroom, gently pick it up, take it outside, leave it in the shade of a bush.

The white roach’s last twitching leg drops. With the toilet paper, Andy picks it up, flushes the white roach down the toilet, watches it circle and circle, bobbing defiantly from the hole before it’s swept away.

From the kitchen, the 7/8 shuffle of Pink Floyd’s “Money” plays for the sixth time that day. The master bedroom needs a fresh coat of paint. And I’ve wasted too much time. I need to leave.

Andy stands there thinking about what he has and has not done so far. When the anxiety subsides, he opens another gallon of paint and pours it into the tray.

 

•

 

“Damn, son,” says the Michael McDonald property manager/swinger when Andy tosses him the can. “Musta put a hurtin’ on that thing!”

“It wouldn’t die,” Andy says.

“Don’t gotta tell us,” the woman says, still tapping buttons on the calculator, scribbling numbers in a ledger sheet.

It’s nearly five when Andy finishes painting the apartment. He returns the ladder, leans it against an open wall in the office. “Alright, well, see you tomorrow. I’ll start on the next building then.”

“Wait a minute,” the woman says, punching a final sequence of buttons on the calculator. She looks up at Andy. Smiles. “Any plans tonight?”

“I have plans!” Andy blurts out, stammers. “Big plans. Tonight.”

“Oh, well, that’s too bad. We wanted to invite you somewhere.”

“Can’t!” Andy blurts out again. He wants to vomit.

“On Wednesday nights,” the woman says, that come-hither look in full effect, “we have our weekly prayer meeting, at our house.”

“Bible study,” Michael McDonald adds.

“Yeah. Busy,” Andy says, smiling, almost laughing that this is all they want from him.

“Hand him them little books we got,” the woman says. Michael McDonald opens the file cabinet, sticks a hand inside. He walks up to Ronnie, hands him six of those Chick Tracts, insanely Christian comics that equate everything on God’s green earth with Satanism—rock and roll, homosexuality, Jews, Islam, Catholicism, consumerism, Marxism, mainstream Protestantism, etc, etc.

“Oh, so you’re . . . ” and Andy really wants to say “not swingers after all, but run-of-the-mill Florida religious nuts?! Whew! What a relief!”

“That’s right,” Michael McDonald says. “We’re evangelicals. Pardon us, but we thought it seemed like maybe you need some spiritual guidance, the way all of us do.”

“You’re so quiet!” the woman says. “We thought this would help you in your times of trouble. Have you been saved?”

“Oh. No thanks,” Ronnie says.

“Well, when you change your mind, when you’re ready to let the Lord into your heart, we’re just a phone call away,” McDonald says.

Andy nods. “Yup.”

“Go forth in the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, and stay blessed, Andy!” she says as Andy leaves.

 

•

 

A glass of red wine—Malbec—the bottle within arm’s reach. John Coltrane’s Impressions on the box. A typewriter in front of him, the page left off at that point he couldn’t wait to return to all day, as he painted and killed the white roach and brooded on life, death, and whatever spiritual guidance meant and how it applied to him, exactly.

Andy raises the glass. “To the white roach,” he says. He sips the wine, the sleepiness, the annoyances of work disappearing. He sets the glass down, leans into the typewriter, fingers on the home row, thumbs on the space bar, dives in. He’s going to leave town. Soon. He needs to save money, needs to write and have some stories to show for all the wasted years, all the time and energy dissipated and squandered when he should have been here, doing what he’s doing now.

 

 

GATORRONI’S IN SOHO

 

Once the six-week whirlwind with Julianna has ended, Ronnie wakes up one warm mid-November weekmorning alone, emotionally drained, and as financially wiped out as he has ever been in this past lost year.

Ronnie could almost believe she never happened. He spends two days and two nights in his room, drinking cheap wine with scrounged change she’d left behind, laying on his back, staring at the ceiling. Shortly after the sunset of the second night, Mitch comes by with a twelve-pack.

“I heard what happened,” he says. “Put some music on and we’ll go up on the roof.”

Ronnie shrugs.

Before climbing the tree up to the roof, Ronnie turns on and turns up the stereo, throws on Destiny Street by Richard Hell and the Voidoids. On the roof, they split the twelve-pack.

“So. Gone like that, huh?” Mitch works up the courage to finally ask, around beer three.

“Yeah,” Ronnie chugs a deep guzzle, tries formulating what he wants to say, but the words leave his mouth before he can check himself. “That was real, right? I mean, I have no proof, except a memory constantly assaulted by this stuff,” he says, pointing to the beer can in his hand. Julianna’s friends who used to come around are gone. Neither of them took any pictures of their travels; they didn’t take any pictures at all.

“Yeah, Rahhhn. What the hell happened to you?”

“Don’t know,” Ronnie says. He stands, and for two seconds—one, two—he considers jumping off the roof. Or, better yet, rolling off and seeing what happens. But it isn’t high enough. He wouldn’t die. He’d only get hurt. And he has no health insurance. It would only make everything worse. He drains the can of Old Hamtramck, steadies himself, rolls it down the roof in the exaggerated manner of a professional bowler, burps.

“I gotta get some sleep,” Ronnie says to Mitch. “You can stay up here if you want.”

“Cool,” Mitch says. He watches Ronnie edge downward on the roof to the edge, step across to the tree, climb down. “Jesus,” he mutters, then repeats, “What the hell happened to you?” Ronnie. Mitch is nineteen, Ronnie is 24, and anymore, Ronnie is becoming everything Mitch doesn’t want to be, with living, with women, with working . . . shit, with everything. Actually, everyone around him is everything Mitch doesn’t want to be. The students. The co-workers at the restaurant where he busses tables. The customers. His friends. It’s like nobody knows what the hell they’re doing. No mentors. No paths to follow. He finishes his beer, tosses it over his head, listens to it roll down the roof’s opposite slope. This could be him in five years, and the very thought of it sends him clattering down off of the Myrrh House roof and straight home.

 

•

 

Late morning, Ronnie wakes up. As the coffee brews, he stands in the living room, noodling around the fretboard of his guitar in Black Flag-style solos. Thinking.

Rent. Bills. In the middle of this binge, Ronnie Altamont had managed to find the time to apply to every restaurant, retail store, and bar he could find. Eviction looms, as usual. He wouldn’t put it past Roger to pile up his belongings on the curb on December 1st. Maybe it’s all over here. Leave a goodbye note and flee like you did from Chris Embowelment back in Orlando.

Why not? There are no jobs here. The music scene isn’t what it was, and is transitioning into something he isn’t interested in. He isn’t writing. The reasons he moved here don’t exist anymore. So leave then. Go back to Orlando and follow Kelly’s advice from way back at the beginning of this futile endeavor: Save money. Move to Chicago already. Why the hell not? After eight months of under-, un-, and temporary employment, survival here ain’t in the cards.

One Greg Ginn style chromatic solo later, Ronnie unplugs the guitar, turns off the amp. The coffee is ready, and as the pop and hiss fades from his amplifier, he hears the voice of rescue on the answering machine, “. . . from Gatorroni’s in SoHo. You turned in an application to us earlier in the month, and we were wondering . . . ”

“Hello?”

Early morning prep cook. 20-30 hours per week, depending on the season and upcoming reservations. Starts at 7:00 a.m. Sharp. You want it?

All plans to leave, poof, like that, gone. What is this, his eighth job in as many months? Who’s keeping score?

 

•

 

For what little it was worth, this would be the best job Ronnie would work in Gainesville.

Gatorroni’s in SoHo is not in the art district of Manhattan. It’s on University Avenue, in a small shopping center by the railroad tracks, between a sporting goods store and a shop with the unusual name of “Stoney O’Bongwater’s: Purveyors of the Wackiest of Tobaccos.”

Ronnie has to admit: It feels pretty good to be a productive member of humanity again, to wake up at 6:30 in the morning and have someplace to be. From his house, it is a fifteen minute walk to the restaurant, past dew-drenched windows in the pale early morning sunrise. (Ronnie cannot recall the last time he had seen a sunrise and wasn’t too blind drunk to appreciate it.) The smells of food prep fill the air: Zesty Glaze Donuts, Viva Taco, Sesame Happiness Chinese, Szechwan Gator, Party Burgerz, This Can’t Be Hummus. The lingering tinge of the recently ended late night—stale beer and garbage. Nobody else on the street but construction workers and bums. The no-season Florida mornings are perfect, especially in Gainesville, the precious daylight hour before most people are out of bed.

His co-workers—among them, “Sweet” Billy DuPree, former late-night DJ for 1970s FM classic rock station BJ 103 “The Tongue,” and current disc jockey for “Rock and Bowl” nights at Gainesville Lanes—are perpetually stoned. Before work, break time, before clocking out, they pass around an endless supply of joints, sneaking off into the dining room in a quiet corner booth while Ronnie follows the caffeine rush and keeps working. Ronnie cannot partake. His boss—Jack, Jack the Fencer, a former world champion fencer for UF before faulty protective gear let through an unfortunate thrust to his right shoulder, robbing him permanently of the speed and accuracy he needed—always asks Ronnie if he wants to get high with him. He never comes right out and says, “Hey, wanna get high?” but couches it in the most ridiculous of insinuations:

“Hey Ronnie, we’re about to, uh . . . hop on the Mary Jane Train to Green Town, you in?”

or

“Hey Ronnie—we’re fixin’ to, uh . . . blaze a nature trail straight into the rec room of our minds. What do you say?”

or

“Hey Ron. We’re gonna take a little break so we can, uh, remove the dandruff from our psychic shoulders and face the stresses of the day with a clean scalp. Wanna join us?”

 . . . To which Ronnie naturally replies, to any and all of these questions:

“What do you mean?”

At which point Jack the Fencer would lean in and whisper, “We’re going to smoke some marijuana. Would you like to join us?”

“I can’t, man,” Ronnie always says. “I can’t function stoned.”

Here Jack the Fencer would always chuckle, like he was privy to some top-secret information, then repeat the word “Function . . . ”

While his co-workers get high, Ronnie drinks cup after cup of coffee, often exhausted from the previous night’s fun—wired enough to fill buckets with marinara sauce, plastic bins with white bean salad, tubs of white rice (eating bowls of it on breaks with co-workers, drenching the rice in spicy Sriracha sauce). It feels good to be locked into the ethic he was learning while removing asbestos from schools in the Crescent City heat. His co-workers are two-to-twenty years past college age, and for that, Ronnie is grateful. They are interested in DJing or fencing, in fishing or bondage, in biking or boating—their only goals in life being comfort and the flexibility to devote time to what they love. The job is a laid-back trap, deep in the heart of the laid-back trap that is Gainesville.

But it is quiet, steady work, thankfully lacking the unpredictable annoyances of customers. It is enough to keep Ronnie busy, to forget Julianna, Portland Patty, and Maux, to try and move on with life, to pull out of the depression, to pay Ronnie enough money each week to keep him living in the Myrrh House, to keep him living in Gainesville.

 

 

THE LIGHT IN THE DORM ROOM

 

It’s one of those days at the record store when you’re reminded of that line from Monty Python’s Flying Circus: “Never kill a customer.”

Who are these people who walk through our door on Sundays? What planet are they from? Why don’t they bathe on that planet? Why do they have such shitty taste in music on that planet? You would think the customers at a record store would be cool, you know, rock and roll? Not here man, and not on Sundays. On the Corner by Miles Davis gets me through the tedium, the mindlessness, the assholes and jerkoffs and douchebags who come in here and stink up the place and don’t buy anything.

“Sounds like pimp music,” some teenager in all black looking up to my perch behind the counter says, and it’s all I can do to not hit him on his zitty head with a hammer until his cretin brain squishes all over the grimy floor. Instead, I glare. “Never kill a customer,” the Pythons warn, and they’re right. Just sit here and lock into these fantastic beats. Tune out everything else unless these jerks actually need to ring up something they’re actually going to buy (on Sundays, it’s always something cheap . . . a two dollar used VHS tape, a one dollar punk rock button, a one dollar alternative rock patch to sew on their bookbag), and look forward to the evening.

“Ya wanna beah?” Boston Mike asks, the wet six-pack of Old Ham-Towns soaking through the brown paper bag.

“Y’know . . . I shouldn’t,” I say. I’m really trying to cut back. Yeah, ok, it’s about the girl. I don’t wanna be “Drunk John” anymore. I’ve been good. Better. No, really: I’ve been good! But this day man, these fucking . . . fuck it. “But perhaps maybe I should,” I say, reaching into the wet bag and pulling out a can. Boston Mike laughs as I pour it into my usual black mug used more for these beers than for coffee.

Two hours left before closing. I will drink two beers, be sober by the time we clockout. Until then, I’m going to pray for minor time travel. To be locking up the front doors, saying “Later” to Boston Mike, and walking out of this plaza, crossing the street, stepping onto campus as the sun sets behind the football stadium and those brick buildings housing all those academic departments. In twilight, past dutiful students marching to the library, past groups of students talking of their usual big-deal collegiate concerns.

I’ll round a corner and see her dorm building. It’s getting dark now; the streetlights are turning on. Second light from the right. Third floor. I’ll be up there very soon. Her dorm room, where she has spent the day studying, and (I hope) waiting for me. Up the stairs, past barefoot students lugging laundry. Down the third floor hallway. Knock on her door. I’ll hear her footsteps, running. Locks unlock. The door opens. She will hug me. She will look tired and I will look tired, but it’ll be alright. All the irritations will fade away. We’ll order pizza, play a boardgame, watch movies. The beer stores and bars and even Boston Mike will have to get by without me. I’m sure they will.

The nursed beers help the time pass as fewer and fewer jerks come in to bother me. All I really see is that dorm room, her dorm room. That light. These aren’t the things I’d like to talk about with Boston Mike, or the jokers over at Gatorroni’s by the Slice, but I don’t have to. For the first time in a long time, something good has happened, and we’ve only been together for three months, so I don’t wanna put too much into it, but I can’t help thinking this is the beginning of something better. Finally.

 

 

DEEP INTO THE WHAT-NOW

 

“Yeah.” Sigh. “I don’t think I can see you anymore,” your latest girlfriend tells you, over Sunday brunch at Gatorroni’s in SoHo, seated at a table plopped at the edge of the curb and the parking lot of what they call the front patio on an otherwise perfect late November afternoon. You’re on your second bloody mary, third cup of coffee, second carafe of water, and the tiniest of scrambled eggs and toast from the buffet—all of it free of charge, a fringe benefit from working at the other Gatorroni’s. Your friends serve all of this on this fine, fine day.

“Ok,” you say, somehow expecting it, not asking “why,” because you have a feeling you know why.

“It’s like, you haven’t been sober since before Halloween. Now it’s almost Thanksgiving.” She leans in, speaks in a near-whisper. “I wanted to take you home to meet my parents.” She scoffs. Leans back. “That’s not going to happen. I can’t even imagine it.”

“Ok,” you repeat, staring at the glasses and liquids that are supposed to get you back to functioning like a productive member of the human race. You’re scheduled to work tonight. You’ll probably phone it in. No, you will phone it in. Sundays are dead anyway at Gatorroni’s by the Slice.

This brunch isn’t agreeing with you, or, more to the point, it isn’t agreeing with the beer, the whiskey, the wine, and the vodka you guzzled last night over six nonstop hours.

“Wait,” you say, leaping from the chair and rushing to the men’s room.

When you’re done, your insides are a dizzy dry delirium. Now, this is the part where you’re supposed to leave the stall, wash your face and hands in the mirror, wipe the puke off your chin and your shirt, stare at your proverbial bloodshot eyes and five o’clock shadow, the greasy hair, the dirty clothes, and whimper, “What am I doing? What am I doing with my life? I need help!” With the notable exception of wiping the puke off your chin and shirt, you do none of these things. You shrug, you laugh a desperate “Hee hee hee” about the way it’s going, and think about that Bloody Mary on the table.

No, it’s no surprise that she’s gone when you return. You can’t blame her, can’t explain what’s been going on in your mind. As a boy, going with your father on weekends to the bar, drinking Coke after Coke after Coke while Dad talked to the bartender, surrounded by all those other old guys at the bar who kept yellowed newspaper clippings in their wallets of this play or that play they made in some high school game from their high school years so long ago. Telling their varsity stories. And when they’d start to get really drunk, they’d remember a few years beyond high school—what happened with girls at college or what happened in the service fighting wherever whichever president saw fit to send them. This tacit, unspoken agreement between all of them that the best years in life were over, and it was enough to sit here and make the best of it beneath the ESPN’s 1 through 4 broadcasting the eternal strivings of Youth on the bar televisions. Make the best of it, and wait to die. Over the years, as your dad got drunker, and the men got older, and you grew up so slow, too slow, always that silent envy of the old men, who always referred to you in third person, “How old’s Will getting to be now, Tom?” “Pretty soon, Will’s gonna be chasin’ girls, eh Tom?” Their lives were over, aside from these vicarious twinges from the next generation, and that bar was a pleasant-enough waiting room before death. You saw this, weekend after weekend, until you were old enough to have the option of saying no, you’re gonna go skate, and by that point, your Youth had a caustic air of insolent truth that no one in the old man bars wanted to face or confront. You vowed never to be like that, to think like them. It sounds so corny now, but when you wrote those three Xs on your hand with the black marker, it was your line in the sand, that you would always be young, no matter what, Straight Edge for Life, and time as portrayed by society with its Hallmark-greeting card parameters of “old” and “young,” was meaningless. Even after giving up on being straight edge around the time you realized the beer made it much easier to talk to girls, you always kept that belief that NOW was the best, and to look back was death.

Lately, since returning from the tour, you think you understand those old guys your dad drank with every non-working/sleeping hour. You see nothing—absolutely nothing—to look forward to. These hours are empty, directionless. Those guys delayed it by having children. You don’t want children. So what now? You drink your bloody mary, drink her bloody mary, stare at the remnants of a post-breakup Sunday brunch, all you want—all you really want—is what you had on Halloween.

You were dressed as that stand-up comedian from the 1980s whose shtick was to smash fruits and vegetables with a comically large mallet. Vodka drunk and dressed in black beret, black mustache, black curly-haired wig glued to the beret, black and white striped shirt, black pants, black shoes, and a garbage bag filled with produce, in the front yard of the Righteous Freedom House, you smash tomatoes, grapefruit, cantaloupe, watermelons, and the unveiling of each new piece of produce brings louder applause and laughter to everyone circled around you. With vodka, the body is light—indestructible—and it is nothing to swing the mallet as the rinds and pulp and juice spray all over the front yard, and it’s fun slipping in the mess. Inevitably, the front yard becomes a massive food fight, with produce remnants hurled into anyone who dares get involved, until the produce is too pulpy, too disintegrated, to pick up. Fun. Laughter. In the immortal words of Mick Shrimpton: “Have a good time, all the time.”

There isn’t much that is more ridiculous than the walk of shame on the morning after Halloween. Walking back to your house—dizzy and nauseous, heavy and destructible—you keep all of your costume on, the clothing stained, the mallet broken. On the couch, back at the party, some girl dressed like a Plus-Sized Wonder Woman, not your girlfriend, laying on top of you. Walking past Gatorroni’s, friends wave pitchers of beer to you. Of course you take it. You’re tired and you’re shaking and your body wants more, more, more. Kill the night. What else is there? The band is finished. Just this job in this kitchen . . . water bottles filled with vodka. What do you want? What do you need? What’s missing here? Nothing’s missing! Everything’s alright! It’s there, and I will drink it. To drink like this always leaves the element of surprise, the possibility that life will be less boring. Maybe those old guys remembered the time a beautiful woman once set foot in that bar—years ago—and hoped that such a momentous occasion would happen again, or perhaps they wanted to hear a new joke, a new twist on the sports on TV, something spontaneous, anything but the routine of responsibility. Yes, you understand. You never know how it will turn out when you drink. What impulses you will act upon, for good or ill. Too old to sing in bands anymore, like those guys are too old to play varsity football.

You feel that brainrush of the booze coming on once again, here at the brunch table on this otherwise perfectly warm late November afternoon, you’re reminded of that song you heard in a movie somewhere, that 1920s song where the characters happily drone What’s the use of gettin’ sober / if you’re only gonna get drunk again? You belch. Ha. Ha. Harrrrrrrr.

The server, whatshername, in the fancy white shirt and black tie and black apron, that reddish brown hair long, curled, ponytailed. Nnnnnnugget! She fills your pint glass with the bloody mary mix she carries in a pitcher.

“You’re the best,” you say, smiling your smile. She will do. Yes, she will do.

“Rough night last night?” she asks. You know what you smell like, what you look like right about now.

“Well, you know, ha ha, you weren’t there, so yeah, it was rough, you know.” You almost visibly cringe at this corny dumb line, but you’re charming—you still have your charm—and you can make this work.

“Ha,” she says, an emotionless laugh. “I can’t go out, then work here the next morning. I stayed in and watched movies.”

“Sounds like you need a rough night then. When are you done?”

“A couple hours,” she says. She gets more and more beautiful, with each sip of the bloody.

“Meet me at Gatorroni’s later,” you say, still smiling that smile. “I’m working tonight. I’ll hook you up. Pizza. Drinks. Whatever. It’ll be nice to talk.”

“What about . . . ?” she says, pointing at the empty chair across from you.

“Her?” Scoff. Pshaw, pshaw! “Just a friend. Seriously though, meet me after work.”

“Ok definitely,” she says, and you know that’s Gainesvillese for “I’m probably going to flake out on you.”

You laugh. “See you then.”

She leaves you to your hangover cures and your thoughts. The future. It’ll be like this, only it will get worse, until you become what you always hated. You may as well embrace it. It is, after all, your birthright.

 

 

INCREDIBLE MARINARA, AND WHY

“SWEET” BILLY DUPREE LEFT RADIO

 

“Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention please,” Jack the Fencer announces, right hand on Ronnie’s shoulder, tongs in left hand upheld like an Olympic torch.

The morning crew gathers around Ronnie’s section of the kitchen, between the cooktops with bubbling pots and the cutting boards lined in front of industrial-sized containers of herbs and spices.

“I beseech each and every one of you to feast, first, your eyes, and second, your palette, on this incredible marinara sauce contained inside this rather ordinary looking clear plastic bucket,” Jack the Fencer announces, with a little too much Shakespearean flourish for 7:30 in the morning, heightened by the fencing stabs he applies with the tongs.

Everyone in the kitchen gawks, Ronnie standing to the right of Jack the Fencer, waiting for the other shoe to drop, wondering if it already has.

“Note the bold red, contrasted with the perfect arrangements of whites and yellows from the onions and garlic. The interplay between the smooth and rough between the sauces, juices, and the chunks of diced tomato. A hint, a tantalizing tease, if you will, of the green flakes of herb sprinkled delicately, sublimely, across the top.”

“That’s great, Jack,” the dominatrix of the crew said, a towering Scandinavian beast of a woman covered in tattoos.

“Hold on, hold on, my alpha female mistress of the dark,” Jack continues, still swinging the tongs in his hands, like he was in the UF gymnasium and these were the Southeastern Conference Fencing Championships, and not an ordinary Tuesday at Gatorroni’s in SoHo. “Note the confident swirls of the sauce, the inevitable intangible results of assertive stirring and accurate measurement.

“This bucket of marinara sauce, my friends and colleagues in the culinary arts, is the desperate, hard-earned expression of an artist at the peak of his powers. But let us sample and confirm with our mouths what our eyes have already told us.” The crew grabs spoons, scoop samples, tastes.

“Please,” Jack announces. “One spoonful and one spoonful only. This must be shared with our patrons, who probably don’t deserve and will most certainly not appreciate the glory, the enchanting wonder that is this marinara sauce.”

Ronnie watches as the rest of the kitchen crew sample the sauce, each silently nodding in agreement with Jack’s eloquent, bombastic words as they let the sauce cover their eager taste buds.

“It’s really good, Jack. You’re right,” the dominatrix says. “Nice work, Ronnie. Now can we go get high?”

“Yes, we can go get high now. Ronnie: Well done,” Jack adds, one last pat on the back before everyone leaves him in the kitchen to continue tending to the rice, the sauce, cutting the artichokes, the tomatoes, the cherry tomatoes, and so on.

Only “Sweet” Billy DuPree remains, chopping parsley in the next station over.

“That sauce rocked,” DuPree says, in the low, gravelly, grave yet celebratory voice innate to all classic rock DJ’s, especially those who work for the more serious “rock is art” stations. “It was delicate yet dangerous, like David Gilmour’s guitar work.” DuPree looks up from his stack of half-cut parsley. “You like Floyd, right?” DuPree looks away, coughs out a laugh. “Shit, what am I talking about, you probably haven’t even heard Pink Floyd.”

“I like some of it,” Ronnie says. “The Syd Barrett stuff, mainly. I like Meddle and Soundtrack from the Film More.”

“Meddle?” DuPree laughs, wheezes, laughs, coughs. “Wow man, haven’t even heard that since they first did Meddle.” DuPree laughs again. “I almost can’t remember, man. Know what I mean?”

Ronnie had no idea, but ventures a guess. “You mean, it came out so long ago, you don’t remember it that well, and besides, you were high on drugs at the time?”

“Right,” DuPree says. Ronnie is fascinated by DuPree’s classic rock radio timbre—that voice you never hear or see, in the flesh. “Still man, if I had a dollar for every time we played ‘More Than a Feeling’ when they still had BJ 103: The Tongue here, I wouldn’t be cutting parsley right now, that’s for damn sure, brother.”

“I always wondered that,” Ronnie said. “Like, do classic rock DJs ever get sick of playing the same old songs, over and over again? I mean, I went through a Zeppelin phase, and a Pink Floyd phase, but I could easily go the rest of my life without ever having to hear ‘Black Dog’ or ‘Time’ ever again.”

“Sweet” Billy DuPree stopped everything he was doing to stare at Ronnie. For a moment, Ronnie thinks DuPree is going to fling his knife at Ronnie’s forehead for such blasphemy, but instead, DuPree coughs out a laugh and says, “That’s why I left, man. I mean, the station was going under anyway, but the DJs had less and less power every time somebody new took over the station.

“After a while, I had the feeling all they wanted me to play was Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin, with a bit of Skynyrd thrown in here and there, over and over again. Like a whole generation that prided itself on having an open mind and an embracing spirit decided they’d had enough change. Not that anybody wanted to hear that DEVO crap . . . ”

(And here, Ronnie wants to laugh, because he loves DEVO.)

“. . . But still, there were plenty of new bands out there worth playing, but management, and even listeners, didn’t want to know. I mean, radio gave the world ‘Surfin’ Bird’ and ‘Louie Louie!’ Do you think something like that could happen today? Hell no!

“And it’s not because the ’60s were so much better than today. They weren’t. Maybe even worse in a lot of ways. It’s because accountants, instead of DJs like me, run the show now.

“So fuck ’em,” DuPree says, returning to the parsley chopping with a couple crunchy thwacks with his knife. “I’d rather work here, pick up money on the side at the bowling alley for anybody who remembers me, instead of all that FM jive.”

Throughout DuPree’s spiel, Ronnie tosses in words like “Right” and “Right on” and “Yeah” and “Totally” and “Uh-huh” and “Oh for sure” and “Yeah man.” The rest of the crew returns to their stations, as high as they were before. There is so much more Ronnie wants to say to “Sweet” Billy DuPree, but he doesn’t know where to begin, and besides, there are white bean salads to make.

Rock and roll. If it doesn’t kill you, it tosses you out of the tour bus at top speed and leaves you on the side of a desolate Death Valley highway to rot. Or, to spend your late middle-age years chopping parsley at sunrise.

Same diff.

 

 

HOW NOT TO ACE THE GRE’S

 

First, don’t prepare. In bookstores, you’ve probably seen those Vollman-sized test prep books filled with practice questions. Don’t buy them. Don’t even look at them. They will only help you succeed. Same with tutors, computer programs, CD-Roms, and DVDs.

Now to the night before. You haven’t been prepping up to this point, and there’s no reason to start now. In fact, why not throw a huge party? Ask one of your friends’ bands to play, the friend who recently quit being straight-edge, because you know he’ll have enough beer and liquor to knock out 10,000 Marines (or Keith Richards). His band will stink—coming up from Orlando and all—but no matter. Drink what he offers you, and try not to laugh at the other band—vegan jokers from Pensacola some scenester woman in town asked you to help out, soy ham and soy egger happy hippy punks who used your kitchen before the party to make sauceless pasta then sat in your bedroom staring at your haiku wall covered in haiku about Boom Boom Washington and Bam Bam Bigelow and asked, “This is cool, but have you ever heard of Charles Bukowski?”

Continue drinking. You don’t want to be alert and refreshed for the GRE, do you? If there are other drugs on hand, take those too, but nothing that requires serious time commitment. Showing up to take the GRE on, say, LSD, doesn’t sound particularly pleasant. But, as they say, whatever Christmas-trees your Scantron is fine.

Watch the bands. One of them should be at least decent. It is your house, after all, and this is a Gainesville houseparty. Tell everyone how you’re taking the GRE the next morning. Look how respectfully everyone looks at you. So punk! Way to go, Sheena!

Feel that beer, dulling your brain. No matter. It’s important to have total and complete faith in your unshakable intelligence, the kind of brains that slept through high school and still made it into a Florida state university. Don’t worry about it! You’re gonna ace this thing!

Now is the time to use this looming standardized test to your advantage. Since it is a party—your party—there should be girls there. There’s that girl you’ve had the hot-tot-tot-tots for a couple months now.

With the GRE, you have a readymade excuse to leave your party (but not too early—like 2:00 or 3:00, instead of 4:00 or 5:00). Ask that girl if you can stay with her tonight—you know, just so you can get a good night’s sleep before this very-important-my-whole-life-hangs-in-the-balance examination. She’ll naturally take pity and say yeah, and you know she has no couches in her house, only that magical miracle of a bed, and soon enough, you have to (awwww . . . ) leave your own party to the care of your roommate, and walk to her place, using what remains of your brain on this fine fine early early morning not towards any final prep for this test, but for thinking of how you will get her out of that black miniskirt.

Don’t sleep now. Whatever you do, don’t sleep. Stay up all night and put the moves on the girl you like so damn much. Maybe you’ll be luckier than Ronnie Altamont in this situation and not be with a girl coming out of a four year relationship and not ready for any kind of rebound sex just yet. No, not just yet, and not with you. But that’s ok, because it’s all in fun. Fun fun fun fun fun fun fun fun fun.

Now get up early and don’t eat breakfast. Why start trying to do well on the GRE now? Don’t bathe. Walk to the nearby campus and line-up for your seat. You won’t be hungry. You’ll be too tired, too hungover, for breakfast.

Only half-listen to the test proctor, who looks like a smarmy prick anyways with his clean clothes, combed hair, and glasses.

Now you have the GRE in front of you. Do your best, but by this point, your best couldn’t get you through the arithmetic quiz Walmart lays on its job applicants, so, you know what? Hurry it along. It’s multiple choice, and the odds of getting each question right aren’t the worst. You have better odds guessing these questions correctly than you did hooking up with that Gainesville scene nymphette earlier this morning.

Your goal is to be the first one done. It makes those around you, those driven fools determined to live out their dreams of facing thesis committees of tenured assholes, quite uncomfortable.

Now you’re finished and now you’re free. Enjoy the rest of the day, and don’t be surprised when, a few weeks later, you get your GRE test scores in the mail and you’re in the bottom third of almost everything. Hey, at least you tried, right? No. No you didn’t. But it’s fine, because you didn’t really want to stay in Gainesville, did you? And this stupid test, while lining the pockets of the college standardized test industry, failed, like school has always failed, to adequately assess your intelligence. On the other hand, it clearly showed your total inability to handle the demands of graduate school, then and there, a nonstudent in the student ghetto of Gainesville.

 

 

THANKSGIVING

 

At dusk, Ronnie walks around the Student Ghetto, thoroughly enjoying the desolation of cleared-out Gainesville on Thanksgiving. Ronnie turned down a flight to Hilton Head to stay with his parents because he is scheduled to work early Friday morning, but really, he turned it down for the same reason he turned down various invites to attend “orphan” Thanksgiving dinners—he would rather be alone.

Not since summer has he really felt that Gainesville was his. The stillness of the streets makes him smile. He passes Maux’s hideous giant cinderblock of an apartment building, wonders how she’s doing. This leads to thoughts of Julianna, Portland Patty, Maggie. There’s no emotion guiding the thoughts, as he walks through the silence, the darkened little houses with the bombed-out dirt yards littered with lawn furniture, the chipped-paint porches, the tree-canopied strange streets he never bothers exploring. He hopes they’re well, wherever they’ve gone.

At University and 13th, the streetlights are almost pointless. Ronnie jaywalks east across 13th, passes the gas station, Gatorroni’s by the Slice. The bookstore. A different General Lee’s Pizza place. What’s Ronnie thankful for?

Of course, his mother asked him that when she called earlier. He couldn’t say at the time, grunted an “I don’t know. Nothing?” but then said he was thankful to have a job again, but it wasn’t a definitive answer, and Ronnie, now, really wants to know.

He turns right where the Boca Raton Subs store is empty, dark, and closed. Back onto an empty residential street, he’s thankful for all of this. For everything. For being alive. He’s thankful for heartbreak and failure and for getting the chance to learn from them. He’s thankful for getting the opportunity to teeter on the edge of bankruptcy. To teetering on the edge of sanity, sobriety, stability. For the adventure possible in each waking moment. If he could ever get things right again, he would be more appreciative, now that he’s seen the opposite of success, wealth, long-term love. He would appreciate those who smiled, no matter how much they suffered from within and without. He would be a better person than that snarky prick who acted like he was some kind of hot shit on-campus genius big shot destined for great things.

These aren’t the kinds of words Ronnie’s parents—or anybody’s parents—really want to hear on Thanksgiving. But Ronnie is thankful for all of these things, and thankful for everything Gainesville has shown him, and now that he has learned what he needed to learn here, Ronnie walks back to the Myrrh House, and begins to plot his escape from this life.

 

 

MAUX, ONCE MORE

 

“Where have you been, asshole?”

Good ol’ Maux. Indigo hair. Indigo clothing. Swigging vodka. She follows Ronnie into the kitchen as he stands at Mitch’s counter, pouring more nog—thick, off-white, boozy, and potent—from a clear green glass pitcher.

“Nice to see you too, Maux,” Ronnie says. She is within striking distance. Or kissing distance. From the living room, the party chatter of the Yankee gift exchange. In Mitch’s kitchen, a wiped down orderly arrangement of someone who actually uses their kitchen to cook, as opposed to Ronnie’s kitchen, which was more of a place to store beer, brew coffee, and throw away fast food wrappers.

“Aw, you know I’m kiddin’.” She taps him on the right bicep with her right fist.

“Wocka wocka,” Ronnie says.

Maux steps back. “Seriously though. Where have you been?”

“Around.” He sips from the nog. “Out. About. Here. There. Thinking about moving. The girls here are bonkers.” Ronnie smiles at Maux, punctuates his remark with a loud and lengthy belch.

Maux smiles at this. “Hey man, you were the one who went off with that Portland Patty fee-male.” The way she says “fee-male” makes him laugh. He can’t help it.

“Yeah, well . . . you know.”

She punches him on the arm again. “You disappeared, Ron.”

Mitch invited him three days ago, as they sat on the roof before another Sunny Afternoons practice, telling Ronnie to “Bring a shitty gift because it’s a Yankee gift swap.” Fair enough. Ronnie brings a round fake porcelain goose that doubles as an egg holder, ends up with a VHS compilation of videos from the glamorous metal band Trixter. He breaks about even.

Throughout the party he avoids Maux, avoids looking at her as the guests sit in a circle in Mitch’s cramped living room. Paul, Neal, William, Siouxsanna Siouxsanne, Mouse, Icy Filet, Rae, and a dozen-odd others Ronnie doesn’t really know that well talking and laughing in the sluggish bright hazy throb of a nog-buzz. Ronnie doesn’t want to try and iron out whatever happened between him and Maux. He knows he’s partially at fault, but only partially. If that.

But the funny thing is that, of course, as the hours whiz along and the party evolves into rolling laughter and loud talk, the bad ideas start to turn into totally awesome ideas. So the next time they happen to be in the kitchen alone, as she opens the freezer to take out more ice for the nog, he stands next to her, leans in, whispers, “Sorry I disappeared, Maux. Let’s get caught up. Let’s get outta here. Let’s listen to mus—”

“Listen to music?” Maux scoffs. “That line is as phony as your Chicago accent.” She turns away from the freezer to face him, smirks, scowls. “But let’s get out of here. Drinks at Drunken Mick. My treat. Since I’m assuming your writing career is still nonexistent?”

“Hey, you’re hurting my feelings.” They walk out of the kitchen and pass through the living room without anyone realizing they had left until whoever is stuck with the fake-porcelain-egg-holding goose will pick it up to take it home, and someone will ask “Where’s Ronnie?”, and no one will know and it will suddenly occur to them that he hasn’t been seen for a while now, and Maux isn’t around either, and then Mitch will say, “Oh no. Them two, again?” and someone else will see the Trixter VHS on the coffee table and point out that he left it there, and by the time they put it all together, Ronnie will be at a stool at the Drunken Mick next to Maux, both slurping from pint glasses filled with more vodka than tonic.

The bar isn’t terribly crowded. It is December and finals and the final end-of-semester celebrations aren’t in effect yet. Groups are scattered around the tables spread throughout the room, plus a couple old drunks near the front door.

“So,” Ronnie says.

“So,” Maux says.

“Let’s talk,” Ronnie says, leaning in, placing his hand on her thigh right above the knee, moving up . . . up . . . up.

“Yeah, talk,” Maux says, grabbing Ronnie by the wrist and pulling away the horny hand. “I just want to talk to you, Ron. I don’t really have any friends around here anymore.”

Ronnie laughs, leans in, tries repeating the move with the hand, and as Maux blocks the thigh-grab with her hands, he says, “You know . . . that’s not my problem.”

“Not your problem?!” Maux swivels away from Ronnie, stands off the barstool.

“Goodbye, Ron.” She starts to walk past Ronnie to the exit.

“Aw, c’mon! Why do you gotta be so bitter all the time?” Ronnie asks.

She turns to Ronnie, each word out of her mouth slow-slurred and carefully annunciated: “Don’t be one of them. I thought you were better than that.”

Ronnie chugs what remains of the vodka tonic Maux bought him, steps off the stool, stands up, faces her. “I don’t understand you.”

“I understand you,” she says. “You’re a loser. Goodbye.”

Ronnie raises his right arm, waves his right hand like he’s bon voyaging on a cruise ship, hopes she doesn’t turn around, even goes so far as to think, “Don’t look back.” And when he thinks “Don’t look back,” it makes Ronnie think of Bob Dylan playing an electric guitar for folkies, and he’s drunk enough to yell to her back, in his best/worst/most parodic Dylanese: “I don’t belieeeeve yew. You’re a LIAR!”

At the exit, she turns, one last time. All that indigo. Nnnnnnugget. Ronnie smiles at her. Maux smirks at him. Stupid Ronnie. Of course this is how it would play out. When she sobers up, she’ll blame the drinking, holiday loneliness, how they can’t give what the other one wants, her inability to hate Ronnie as much as she should. But now, she knows and he knows it can go one of two ways as they look at each other in these challenging smiles and smirks. She walks out the front door.

Ronnie will never see Maux again. In two months, she will move to Atlanta. Around that time, Rae will inform him that Maux scribbled a list in one of the ladies’ room stalls of The Puzzled Pirate Saloon of “People I Will Miss in This Shit-Shitty Town,” with Ronnie’s name in the top two.

There will only be two names, but hey.

 

 

¹⁰ Yes, this is a stylistic/structural parody of the Tennessee Williams short story “Two on a Party.”