A REGRETTABLE INCIDENT INVOLVING A GRANOLA BAR
. . . And that’s when Kelly leaps from the dumpster, screaming as the red ants bite his tongue.
He tosses the half-eaten granola bar he’d found buried in the rancid smorgasbord of discarded food onto the sizzling black of the minimart parking lot. The granola bar plops between Ronnie’s brown hand-to-hand-to-hand-me-down wingtips.
“How could you miss seeing them?” Ronnie asks, bending over to inspect the granola bar, squinting at dozens of red ants swarming over the oats, the raisins, the green wrapper, as frenetic as those vast totalitarian mounds they’re always constructing, the bane of the Floridian teenage lawnmower’s existence.
Kelly lands, hops, fingers scraping at his tongue. Teary-eyed from the pain, sweat flees his thick brown flat-top, stains the yellowed gauze wrapped around his forehead, gushes down his gaunt face, settles into damp miniature Lake Okeechobees spotting the green medical scrub top he had purchased for a dime in some thrift store back home in Orlando.
“Ow! Ow!” he moans like a novocained dental patient. “Because I’m hungry.”
“Buy some food then,” Ronnie says, entranced by the ants’ movement, still shocked that Kelly somehow missed seeing them. “Please. You’re hungry. I’m hungry.”
“No!” Kelly winces, face turning that popular Crayola color Food Allergy Red. “It burns, bro. Get me some ice!”
“It costs a quarter.” Ronnie finally looks away from the cruel, cruel granola bar, to Kelly’s wiry, twitchy form. He wants to laugh at the idea that this could be the proverbial straw to break the proverbial economical bastard’s cheap-ass back.
“A quarter?!” Kelly steps backwards, leans against the rusty brown dumpster until the heat of the metal compels a shrugged shove forward. “I ain’t paying a quarter!”
“This minimart charges you for a cup of ice,” Ronnie continues, standing there with nothing but an ant-infested granola bar between them in the already muggy April air. “There’s a sign by the door and everything.”
Kelly weighs the pain of the bites versus the pain of spending any money on soothing cool water. The tiny hot welts feel like he’s been biting his tongue repeatedly while cunnillinguisting a habañero.
“Fine!” he huffs, pulls a quarter from the front pocket of his multi-stained white painter’s pants, flips it to Ronnie before hunching over in agony. “Hurry!”
Ronnie trudges to the front of the Floridian Harvest minimart, feels with each pinched step in those wingtips the swamp-assed taint-chafe particular to being in the afternoon sun dumpster diving in jeans, in Florida. Anemic, sweaty, disoriented from not eating in the two days since escaping to Gainesville, he’s delirious enough to mutter semi-coherent ramblings on the order of, “Stupid. Mother. Cock. Shit. Ass. Hot. Food. Dammit. Sucker. Fucker. Cheap. Ass. Hung. Grrrr.”
Ronnie pulls open the door, steps inside, hears the welcoming synthetic Ding!, the A/C a respite from Out There’s heat, humidity, and ant-bitten friends, all of whom tagged along on what Ronnie is starting to think might have been a hasty, ill-conceived move.
Only three nights ago, Ronnie was in his home—a tiny old white shack in the shadows of downtown Orlando’s skyscrapers (tall and vulgar and new, breeding and multiplying like the Samsa-sized bugs always lurking in the kitchen, the bathroom, the living room walls)—in A/C like this—not a sprawling Kennedy compound of wealth, space, and luxury, but better than the double-wide trailer he has just moved into off 34th Street—typing away at his soon to be completed 536-page tour-de-force entitled The Big Blast for Youth, when the phone rang.
It was Ronnie’s friend Mouse, who lived 100 miles north, in the college town of Gainesville—a Charles Manson doppelgänger with penchants for naked performance art, avant white-noise music, and compulsive masturbation. “Ya partyin’?”
“They fired me or I quit at the restaurant tonight. So, no. I’m not.”
“You lost your dishwashing job, brah?” (Mouse enjoys aping the Spicoli-tones of the typical Floridian surfer burnout party dude.)
“Don’t brah me, brah.” Ronnie yelled. “This is serious. I walked out. I can’t live here anymore.”
Ronnie rose from his desk, turned away from the gray computer screen, stretched with his free right hand, scraped the knuckle against the jagged bumps in the popcorn ceiling. “And the girl I was dating? Maggie? Decided she would rather date other girls. Or guys who aren’t broke. Or her cat. Anyone, or, anything, but me.”
“Sounds like you should move.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” Mouse started chuckling, not unlike some sadistic social scientist conducting an experiment on the verge of turning horribly catastrophic. “My old friend Alvin? He needs a roommate. You want to leave Orlando. Sooooo.” The sadistic chuckle returned. “He’s weird and you’re weird and it’ll be rad.”
By “weird,” Ronnie imagined someone who listens to noncommercial music, dabbles in marijuana, and knows a thing or two about foreign films. An unconventional haircut. Some tattoos. You know. Weird.
“Sure. Why not?” Tomorrow would be April Fool’s Day, 1996. No job. Most friends had moved away. Five years of college had ended last summer with an English degree Ronnie had no interest in pursuing. He would call his parents and inform them of his decision once he was settled in. He would do the same with the other two guys in his band, The Laraflynnboyles. Mouse laughed his laugh, and Ronnie concluded the call with a “See you tomorrow night,” hanging up the phone and returning to The Big Blast for Youth, and now, stepping into the maternal A/C that makes Florida habitable in the eight month summer—air-conditioning like this why the state skyrocketed into the Top 5 most populous states, hordes of Rust Belted-exiles taking it from the Crackers and Cubans and Seminoles and Mafioso as the latter half of the 20th century ticked away—Ronnie thinks, Yeah, I shouldn’t have moved here without any money. Because deprivation and delirium have heightened senses that were, until then, always satiated, so it isn’t just the glorious sweat-drying A/C inside the Floridian Harvest Minimart, and not just the theme song for every dude with a Bondoed Firebird—Loverboy’s “Workin’ for the Weekend”—piped in over the store’s speakers, it’s the smells of the juice-glazed foot-long franks rotating under heat lamps, it’s the jalapeño y carne chiliquitos con quesos rotating like overstuffed egg rolls under the neighboring heat lamps, the sausage and egg breakfast biscuits, croissants, and muffins lined in slots, the burnt coffee puddled in caf and decaf pots, even the gnat-clouded bananas, and to see the two aisles of canned goods stacked four rows high—of soups and sauces and vegetables—the boxed and wrapped pastas and ramen and Cheetos and peanuts and ding-dongs—to say nothing of the frozen foods and beer (oh! beer! in cases, in packs, in rings of six, in 12 or 32 ounces. what Ronnie Altamont wouldn’t give for just one of you! Cold to the touch, cold down his throat, Spuds Mac Kenzie and the Swedish Bikini Team and Billy Dee Williams and his malt liquor bull all magically appearing before his eyes to help Ronnie forget that he has no food, no money, and no employment in this new town recently awarded “Best Place to Live in America” by the good people at Money magazine). The quick gag of the Coke dispensers before gushing Mountain Dew into thirty-two ounce orange and blue (the University’s team colors) plastic cups held by skater kids, boards fulcrumed under checkerboard Vans. Ronnie waits for these three 8th grade-looking kids in their requisite black Misfits/NOFX/Pennywise t-shirts and clam digger shorts with the chain wallets dangling below their knees on their left sides. Around the store, sun-fried construction workers punched out for the day enter surrounded by drywall dustclouds, grabbing twelve-packs of Old Hamtramck or Dusch Light, square-shouldered, big boned middle-aged women enter in their blue Wal-Mart uniforms and buy Newports, frizzy hair wet from excessive product and rushed late-for-work showers, college girls in UF leisure wear who will never be more beautiful pump high-octane fuel in their white Honda Civics then pay at the counter and everyone’s Finehowreyew, and Ronnie knows this because when the balding brown-haired mustached nicotine-skinned skinny Confederate-flag-shirted gentleman behind the counter asks “Hahhowreyew?” in that uniquely Floridian way, expressing most of the politeness and civility of regions more southern than this one coupled with a bland unenthusiasm betraying utter disinterest in the person’s well-being, “Finehowreyew?” is the inevitable answer. The door incessantly Ding! Ding! Ding!s with each entrance and exit. Ronnie fills the small cup with ice, turns around, and as always, there’s that disconcerting vibe of everyone looking, pointing, laughing, even if they’re doing none of those things. It’s not just from being what they used to call “punk” way back in 1996, Ronnie Altamont’s wingtips the only real difference from the inevitable black Chuck Taylor high-tops, but he wears black jeans, a well-worn white t-shirt with the words NAIOMI’S HAIR across the front in black silkscreened in early-90s squiggles and fingerpaint fonts (“It’s a band!” Ronnie yells, when strangers ask, as they often do, “Who’s she?”), stained with the gunk of today’s foraging, an average less-thin-with-each-passing-year body (the never-popular “Depression and Poverty Diet” doesn’t halt this) and a scowling face with black-framed glasses in front of self-consciously bugged out Lydon/Rotten blue eyes making him look even more pissed off, apprehensive, pensive, surly, and less-than-thrilled to be here than he actually is, topped off with some unnatural hair dye (now, a truly stupid faded purple Manic Panic job) on a shaggy short bristle of unkempt crazy. No, it’s not the usual discomfort Ronnie feels from living in this strange, strange state, and it’s not the oh-so-nonconformist fashion sense of aligning yourself with the most recent counterculture, it’s like these people know Ronnie’s story right now. They see the stains, the sweat, the general unemployed dishevelment and the cup of ice, and they know he’s up to nothing wholesome. (What Ronnie fails to realize is that any stares, smirks, and hostile undercurrents sent his way have little to do with him and everything to do with how everyone in the minimart has seen Kelly, writhing by the dumpster, both hands gripping his tongue, and the sense they have that Ronnie must be involved.)
You want a piece of my heart? You better start from the start. You wanna be in the show? C’mon baby let’s go! the store’s speakers command, and Ronnie walks to the counter, ice cup in one hand, a quarter in the other.
“You can tell your friend with the mummy tape on his forehead he’s got five minutes to leave the premises before I call the police,” says the minimart clerk. No Hahhowreyews for Ronnie.
Ronnie says nothing, too lethargic from hunger and heat to sneer the appropriate caustically witty retort people are supposed to say in moments like these. He drops the quarter, steps out of the A/C, sweat instantly beading his skin. He pops two ice cubes in his mouth to feel some semblance of hydration, before approaching Kelly, who swipes the cup from Ronnie’s hand and crams his mouth with ice. Kelly sits by the dumpster, elbows on thighs, eyes closed, moaning with relief. Ronnie wants to tell him how the clerk called his gauze “mummy tape,” but thinks better of it. Last week, Kelly was held up by robbers at the dumpy east Orlando hotel he worked at as sole Front Desk clerk of the 11:00 p.m.-7:00 a.m. shift, duct-taped to a chair in the hotel owner’s office, pistolwhipped to the back of the head, knocked over, his left ear pressed into thick red carpeting made redder and thicker with his soppy blood. Hence the gauze around the forehead. When discovered by the morning staff, the owner, a racist South African cocksucker, expressed more concern for the stolen money than for Kelly’s life. Ronnie had also worked at this hotel, but was fired shortly after calling the owner a “racist South African cocksucker” in the popular opinion column1 he had written as enfant terrible of the University of Central Florida’s student newspaper. Upon checking out of the hospital, Kelly, as they say, tendered his resignation, but there was nothing tender about what he wrote, a rant of such acidic fury, it made Ronnie’s student column a Victorian declaration of love by comparison.2 He mailed it off on the way out of town, most of Ronnie’s possessions packed in the cab of his truck.
“We need to leave,” Ronnie says. “You’re causing a scene. I should just leave you here to get arrested for being such a cheap-ass jerkoff.” Ronnie turns and starts walking. “I’m going to campus. I think Mouse said something about there being free Hare Krishna food.”
Kelly nods, water dribbling out his mouth and off his chin, stands, catches up to Ronnie. From the minimart to the campus
is a fifteen minute slog down 13th Street, your basic four-lane main thoroughfare—Gainesville’s stretch of US 441—past a surf shop, a dry cleaners, and all the restaurants with dumpsters in the back that bore no fruit, only inedible refuse, flies, and the expected smell, your Zesty Glazes and Viva Tacos and Szechwan Gator and McDonald’s and Denny’s, all through their hour-long tour of Gainesville’s finest fast food dumpsters, Kelly rolling around black and white Hefty bags, tearing into the contents, as Ronnie kept lookout from clerks, customers, kitchen crews, police. Kelly wasn’t as hungry as Ronnie; at McDonald’s, he sipped from a large chocolate shake, at Viva Taco he dipped at a half-eaten basket of nacho cheese covered tortilla chips. But the crème de la trash, at the top of a filled garbage can between the pumps at the gas station on the corner of 13th and University: a Ziploc bag stuffed with barbequed chicken.
“Oh, no,” Ronnie had said when Kelly plucked it out of the dumpster. “Please—no, man—don’t eat that.” Ronnie was hungry, but he wasn’t dumpster-chicken hungry, not yet.
Kelly tore open the bag, pulled out a chicken leg, put it to his mouth and bit down. “It’s good,” he said, after swallowing the first bite, then licking the sauce off his filthy fingers. “You should try some.”
Ronnie backed off, laughing from the heat, the hunger, everything. “You’re gonna be so sick.”
“Actually,” Kelly said after picking the bone clean, tossing it back into the trash, sealing up the Ziploc bag (still with two legs and a breast), “the food I eat out of dumpsters from people I don’t know tastes better than the food in dumpsters of people I do know.” He stuffed the Ziploc bag into his pink fannypack—yeah, Kelly walks around with a pink fannypack he found on a curb on Alafaya Trail back in Orlando. He washed it. Good as new. It makes his generally fetching ensembles of stained pants and hospital scrub tops that much more fetching. He’s 25, has owned a house since he was 21 due entirely to always (until now) working and living as frugally as possible—saving, never eating out, only going to the once-a-month good shows that came to Orlando and opting to shotgun a six-pack in the parking lot before the show instead of buying drinks at the bar, and it goes without saying that the ladies weren’t exactly lining up to give the man a blowjob; in spite of how genuine Kelly was, of how genuinely kind and generous he, well, usually was (years of friendship having exhausted Kelly’s generosity towards Ronnie, especially in a move as poorly planned as this one), it was impossible for most women to get past the “schizophrenic homeless guy/gay orderly” image he had cultivated.
They walk past Gator Plaza, with its salons and drug stores and University t-shirt shops and generic Floridian “cabanas” of watered-down tropical drinks and bikini-clad waitresses carrying plates of oysters. Ronnie recalls the morning, sitting on the front steps of the trailer, strumming his guitar and crooning the words to The Kinks’ “This is Where I Belong” in his best Ray Davies intoxicated timbre, “Well I ain’t gonna wander / like the boy I used to know / He’s a real unlucky fella / and he’s got no place to go,” and he can’t help but wonder right about now—broke and starving with a friend nursing antbite wounds on his tongue—if Gainesville’s where he belongs, but a part of him, past all of the right-now troubles, sees the potential—Ronnie already loves how people actually use the sidewalks here, contrasted with Orlando, where everything is so spread out and muggy, the sidewalks are like adornments—future friends everywhere—boys and girls wearing t-shirts of bands he likes, of writers he likes—just that they share these interests at all—if only he could look less, you know, bummish right now. But Ronnie’s here for a reason. He has plans, big plans. He recalls strumming the guitar while Kelly told him, “I’m still not going to pay for your food,” leaning against his truck, looking at the thick canopy of pines and palms and live oaks that made Ronnie feel he had just moved to the poor part of Sherwood Forest. “I know you want me to pay for your food right now, but it’s not going to happen. You need to learn about cause and effect. You need to learn not to self-indulge to oblivion.”
Ronnie laughed, strummed, sang, ignored.
“I’m serious, Ronnie,” Kelly continued. “We’re gonna dumpster dive, and you’re going to have to figure out how to live, if this is what you’re choosing to do.”
Ronnie laughed then, and he still could laugh about it now, Kelly’s forays into stern parental life-lessons. They cross University and limp onto the University of Florida, and the poverty and self-inflicted misfortune of the day is replaced by the welcome banalities of a college campus Thursday afternoon. Ah yes, college: the parent-sanctioned, government-approved method to get your child’s ya-yas out in just four years before inheriting a bounteous suburban existence. Youth on bicycles, rollerblades, skateboards, rolling up and down the walkways winding between the brick academic buildings, everyone and everything with a purpose, a direction, and in the commons, students sit in clusters doing all the boring-ass activities collegiates do between classes—highlighting textbooks, tossing Frisbees, various permutations of nothing, and Ronnie already feels a mixture of boredom and self-loathing as they step around all these clusters and approach the Krishna food tables. In purple and saffron flowing gowns, blissed-out Krishnas (are there any other kind?) slop fluorescent curried potatoes and peanut sauce from giant pots onto soggy paper plates. Ronnie and Kelly find a patch of grass in the middle of the commons to sit and try not to look too ravenous, trying to pass for two college students living the life.
“I need to wait until this cools,” Kelly says. “My tongue can’t take it.” He mashes the food, wipes the potato remnants off the clear plastic spork with his hospital scrub, and forces the tines underneath the gauze to scratch his itchy forehead. “What are you going to do about Chris Embowelment?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Ronnie says, trying to ignore Kelly’s violent arm motions as the spork scratches deeper and deeper into the dead skin. The food is at once spicy and bland, a mushy warm gruel that burns the digestive tract. Ronnie doesn’t mind it. He’s grateful to have something to fight the hunger.
“He might come up here and find you,” Kelly says before easing backwards until flat in the crunchy grass, looking/not looking at the cloudless sky above.
Ronnie would laugh if he was less exhausted, less frustrated with Kelly’s frugality. (If Kelly would break down and order a large pizza, there would be no problems.) He actually did laugh when, back at his house in Orlando, Ronnie made a final dummy check before leaving for the last time, and Kelly yelled from his jittery maroon Japanese pickup truck, “Nothing you own is worth taking with you. Chris Embowelment is on his way and he’s gonna kill you! He’s gonna disembowel you with his bass, then he’s gonna kill you. You don’t want to be here when he discovers you’re skipping out on the rent, you dumb dick!”
Ronnie had to laugh, then, thinking, Yes, Kelly is definitely right, on this account, anyway. Chris Embowelment was built like one of those defensive tackles you see on Sunday afternoon television, if said defensive tackle wore green Medusaesque dreadlocks and homemade tattoos covering all skin except the face and played in a touring death metal band called Infestation of Leeches. He had been a practicing Satanist, but lapsed because he found the Church of Satan’s canons—such as they were—to be “too tame.” From there, he naturally gravitated to a full-throated endorsement of Nietzschean existentialist glory-seeking coupled with a black Randian interpretation of self-interest best summarized in his favorite phrase, “Get the fuck out of my way or I’ll rip off your eyelids.” In spite of these quirks and the inevitable funereal pallor he brought to his side of the tiny house, Chris was a clean roommate who paid the bills on time. (Which just goes to show that not all guys surnamed “Embowelment” are bad.) Ronnie owed Chris a note of explanation, at the very least.
“Dear Chris,” Ronnie began, scribbling in purple marker across the back of an electric bill. “Hey man, I’m sorry, but I walked out on the dishwashing gig, and I can’t afford to and I don’t want to live here anymore. I think I’m going stark raving batshit, and I need something these surroundings are not giving me. Anyway, sorry I didn’t repaint the walls of my bedroom . . . ”
(The walls of Ronnie’s closet-sized bedroom were covered in permanent marker graffiti. Somewhere between his seventh and eighth domestic beer, he enjoyed scribbling the logos of favorite bands, the Black Flag bars, the blue Germs circle, The Boobs, The Uncool, The Jerks, The Uncooked Weiners, Butt Butt Butt, Dildos Over Somalia, The [insert anti-social adjective here] [insert anti-social noun here] . . . and so on and so forth, and in the middle of the largest wall was this quote from Richard Hell:
“Rock and roll as a way of turning sadness and loneliness and anger into something transcendentally beautiful, or at least energy-transmitting.”
Since graduating college, Ronnie had taken solace in this quote the way friendless Amway distributors find solace in testimonials from Double Diamonds.)
“Anyway,” Ronnie continued scribbling, “I’m truly sorry to be sticking you with the rent, for whatever that’s worth. I guess what I’m trying to say is, if our paths ever cross again, I would appreciate it if you didn’t disembowel me—”
Outside, the b-flat trumpet of Kelly’s truck horn. “He’s coming up the road!” Kelly yelled. “I’m leaving!”
Ronnie dropped the marker—cold fear flooding his skin, tingling his balls. He ran out the door, left it open, hopped into his dinged-up blandy apple green four-door sedan. Squealing into reverse, Ronnie could almost hear the Flatt and Scruggs car chase bluegrass music as he pulled out of the driveway, shifted the car to Drive, floored the accelerator down the residential street, as Chris Embowelment, fresh off an East Coast tour, passes in his tour van in the opposite direction, about to find the house half-empty, stuck with all the bills. In the rearview mirror, Ronnie saw Chris Embowelment step out of his van, stare at the open door, figure it out, and—holy shit!—punch the front of the house, putting a fist-sized hole in the grimy old aluminum siding. He looked to Ronnie's car, but Ronnie had already turned left towards Highway 441 North, out of town.
Now he’s here, in the middle of a university he did not attend, surrounded by dormitories and riot-proof architecture. Hippies of all ages, excessively tanned South Floridian rich kids, the NYC hipsters-in-training with their tattoos-in-progress snaking down their arms, the winter-hating loudmouthed students from the Eastern Seaboard’s megalopolises, the unceasing buzz of youthful optimism and energy, and Ronnie, well, eventually, he will go home to a double-wide trailer with a roommate rumored to have two buttholes.
As Ronnie falls asleep/passes out in the commons, leaving Kelly to sit there and scratch his bandaged forehead with a clear plastic spork, he will reflect on how it did not go like this:
At the end of the foolish move, it’s Alvin at the front door of the trailer—after a two-hour drive where US 441 North finally escapes Greater Orlando somewhere outside Apopka (You know: Apopka? “The Indoor Foliage Capital of the World?”), and Ronnie actually always loved and will always love this part of the drive—the rundown melancholic old Florida of roadside tourist traps, citrus, moccasins, sweet corn, burned out motels, the violent purple orange sky of the sunsets over undulating pony farms, the live oaks and scrub pines mixing with the palm trees. Driving north in those parts really meant driving South, culturally, and Ronnie, in the car, listening to T-Rex on a worn cassette (The Slider on one side, Futuristic Dragon on the other), he enjoyed the schizophrenic polyglot of his homeland—of handpainted “REPENT! THE END IS NEAR!” signs nailed to posts holding up billboards advertising “TOPLESS BOTTOMLESS GIRLS 24 HOURS!” Alvin waits in the trailer as the sun sets, as Ronnie and Kelly ride through a vast prairie with tall grasses in all directions into the darkness as the stars and satellites appear overhead. Beyond the prairie, a slow immersion into Gainesville—holistic yoga house here, junk yard there, student apartments, Chinese buffets, the teenage wasteland backdrop of fast food and liquor stores mixing it up with seedy motels and crackwhores . . . and then it’s the University, and a westbound turn down Archer Road through vast commercial districts, to the trailer park—a right on 34th Street, then a turn down a lonely little half-lane that crumbles into a dirt path.
No, it did not go down like this—Alvin, welcoming Ronnie into his trailer with one of those three-pump handshakes like the kind employed by Governor Willie Stark in All the King’s Men. Ronnie climbing the four creaky wooden steps to the white steel door opening into the ʼ70s-muff shag brown living room. Wood paneling covering the walls. Dim yellow light bathing the mess below. Against the far right wall a faded gray cushioned chair with a gaping indentation, giving the sitter the sensation of sitting in a moldy barrel. On the opposite wall—a TV, VCR, and stereo, with a shredded green lawnchair and a punctured red beanbag plopped three feet away. Garbage—used tissues, yellowed Q-tips, discarded fast food wrappers, and crinkled porno—covering most of the dusty carpeting.
“Well. Uhhhhhhh,” Alvin did not begin because this never happened, arms outstretched like a realtor in the midst of a hard sell. “As you can see, I never pick up after myself.” Alvin stood five feet five inches. He was squat and barrel-chested, with stubby arms like uncooked hotdogs hanging at his sides. He was buck-toothed. Double-chinned. His curly blond hair was short, greasy, and matted, like the pubic hair of a Swedish wino. He wore primary-colored t-shirts decorated with drawings of big fish and captions reading “I’M OUT FOR TROUT.” Faded gray sweatpants and velcroed white tennis shoes finished the outfit. Somewhere at UC Berkeley, there was a supermodel astrophysicist, and she was the yin to Alvin’s yang, righting the precarious balance of the universe.
Alvin never led Ronnie Altamont forward through the living room and into the kitchen, where the fluorescent lighting heightened the variety of smells, now increased to include rotting food and the earthy stench of an unwashed gerbil cage. The white linoleum was yellowed and sticky. The counters were covered in old newspapers, more discarded microwave dinners, unwashed dishes, glasses, silverware. The sink was filled with the kind of sludgy water you see in the dying industrial towns of the Midwest or Eastern Europe.
“I guess you probably notice that other smell too, pfff!” Alvin never said. Alvin ended most of his sentences with “pfff!” as if to say, “Please disregard everything I just said.”
Ronnie would have nodded, if given the chance, sniffing in furtive inhalations, as if to assuage the assault on his middle-class sensibilities from all the mold, mildew, and feces. “What is that?”
“Um, the thing is,” Alvin never drawled, “I got two buttholes? And one of them? Well, it’s not an anus, but more of a crevice on my backside? Where filth collects? The doctors say I’m supposed to wash it? But I never get around to washing it, pfffff.
“And, just so you know,” Alvin did not continue, leading Ronnie out of the kitchen with a gracious “after you” windmill of his stubby left arm, down the dark hallway to the Alabama truckstop bathroom facsimile on the right, where Alvin’s stained underwear encircled the rim of the sink, “I never get any women, obviously, so I masturbate pretty much all the time. I’m always watching videos in the living room, pfff!”
“Yeah,” Ronnie would not remark. “I noticed that 500 Oral Moneyshots tape sticking out of your VCR.”
“Take a peek into my bedroom, pfffff.”
The bed was in the middle. Around it, an island of spread-beaver pictorials from thirty different porno mags.
“Wow,” Ronnie would have gasped, a little impressed.
“And here’s your room, pfff.” Ronnie Altamont’s eventual bedroom was at the end of the hall. It was a square, whitewalled room with a closet and a backdoor. It was the only empty and almost clean room in the entire trailer. Rectangular windows lined the top of the far wall. The floor was a white linoleum like the kitchen, only unyellowed.
“I’ll take it,” Ronnie would have said, adjusting his glasses, running his fingers through the badly dyed hair. “However,” he would have loved to have continued, “since we’re putting our cards on the table, I should let you know that I have no money, will pay you no rent, and will seldom leave my room, where I will sit and brood while listening to music, drinking malt liquor while trying to write. I won’t say much to you when we’re here at the same time, and I intend to move out of this dump as soon as a better offer comes up. Sound good? Roomie?”
Here, Ronnie would have extended his hand. Another three-pump handshake. Deal. No surprises.
In the in-and-out of half-sleep, Ronnie compares how it should have gone down with what really happened. The visual part of the tour was essentially the same, without acknowledgements of the garbage, the porno island encircling Alvin’s bed, and the rumored second butthole—and that was mere speculation on Mouse’s part, a legendary rumor from when Alvin and Mouse attended high school together. Mouse told Ronnie and Kelly about it after the real tour of the trailer. Mouse had followed them from room to room, snickering with every registered look of discomfort from Ronnie and Kelly. In the middle of the living room, a rotund pasty man in his late teens wielded a broom, swinging and jabbing the air with it, yellowed stalks swishing above his head as he yelled the inevitable “HI-YAH!” He was shirtless, wearing only a pair of short, unflattering navy blue soccer shorts.
“Don’t mind Stevie—pfff!” Alvin said as they walked past him in the living room. “He’s teaching himself karate.” Ronnie tried not to laugh at this bit of information, coupled with Stevie’s flabby flailings; Mouse laughed, and Kelly squealed as the broom brushed inches from his bandaged head.
When the tour was completed, Ronnie, Kelly, and Mouse stepped outside the trailer, “To talk things over,” as Ronnie told Alvin.
“So. What do you think, bro?” Mouse asked, followed by, “Heh heh heh . . . ” In the horror-movie night-time silence of the trailer park, Mouse looked criminally insane. Shoulder-length unwashed escaped convict brown hair, satanic facial hair, sagging earlobes from deflated holes that until recently held two cut tubes of garden hose, a sinister face with a false-tooth smile (from when Alvin accidentally knocked out Mouse’s front teeth with a golf club back in high school) dark eyes, black eyebrows at 45-degree angles, a white dress shirt with narrow blue pinstripes dotted with multi-hued splotches and blotches, black slacks cut off above the knees, teal flip-flops.
“We’re leaving,” Kelly said. “This place is disgusting.” Kelly, Ronnie was sure, saw nothing but the dark shadows of the live oaks, heard nothing but silence from the surrounding trailers.
“C’mon man. It ain’t that bad,” Mouse said, picking at the point of his goatee, smiling that smile.
“Fuck that,” Kelly said. “Itʼs worse!”
Ronnie turned around, looked up to the dim yellow light inside the forlorn trailer. This didn’t feel like Gainesville. Rural Florida, yes, but not the college town Ronnie was hoping for.
“The rent’s freee-eeeee.” Mouse sang “freee-eeee” like Luther, the leader of the psychopathic gang in that movie “The Warriors” singing “Warriors! Come out to . . . playyy-yayyyy!” “You get started here, join some bands, get a job, finish that book, meet some girls.” Mouse laughed and sang, “Girrr-rurrrrrlllls.”
“Free?” Kelly said.
“The trailer’s 100% paid off.” Mouse said. He held out his arms, shrugged. “You don’t have to stay in the trailer forever. Get a foothold, brah—a foothold!—and you’ll find someplace better.”
“Or, you can go back to Orlando and stay with me and do this move right,” Kelly said. “Get another job and save up money. Skip this dump altogether and move to Chicago like you’ve been talking about.” Kelly was one of those twitchy-skinny guys who never looked anyone in the eye when he spoke. He was looking Ronnie in the eye.
Back and forth they argued. None of Ronnie’s belongings had been moved in yet. Ronnie did consider driving back, finding yet another crap job in Orlando, waiting it out for another year until the money was in place, take the band to Chicago, take the writing to Chicago, where there would be no doubt as to the vast opportunities awaiting. But then again, he would have to be in Orlando for another year, right when he thought he had finally escaped Orlando. Could Ronnie Altamont possibly stand another year in Orlando?
“I’m staying,” Ronnie said.
“Now that’s the Ronnie Altamont I know and love,” Mouse said, arms outstretched to hug Ronnie.
“Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” Kelly muttered before they went back inside to not sign the nonexistent lease. “This is a chainsaw massacre waiting to happen.”
Ronnie wakes up to a punch on the shoulder. “Let’s go,” Kelly says. “I feel weird and old, sitting around here like this.”
Ronnie looks around at all the collegiates. “Yeah,” he yawns, “I feel it too.”
“I grabbed a copy of the student paper here,” Kelly says. “Not much in the classified job listings, unless you want to go teach English in Prague.”
“I don’t,” Ronnie says, standing up, brushing the grass off his jeans. “Maybe I’ll go back to school.”
“Is that why you’re here?” They start walking in the general direction of Ronnie’s car, parked in a Boca Raton Subs parking lot on University Street.
“I’m going to write and play music,” Ronnie says.
“What music? The Laraflynnboyles?” Kelly smiles, almost forgetting about the sweat underneath the gauze, the welts on the tongue. “You’re not serious, right?”
“I’m booking a tour. The novel’s almost done. I’m mailing it off to get published.”
Kelly shrugs. “I need more ice. Don’t let anybody tell you different: Ant bites on the tongue are incredibly unpleasant.”
“I believe you,” Ronnie says, sensing the chance to make the kill. “So is hunger.”
They were back on the south sidewalk along University, off-campus, approaching the 13th Street intersection, the true center of town. A turtle-waxy blue Ford F-150 drives past with a UNIVERSITY OF CENTRAL FLORIDA ALUMNI sticker across the back window coasts past, horn honking. Ronnie looks over. A rolled down window and an upraised middle finger.
“Must be one of your many adoring fans,” Kelly says.
Ronnie recognizes the truck, the middle finger, the person connected to said middle finger. “He was the Assistant Manager of that Textbook Store I worked at until I got fired for taking a two hour lunch break to, you know, get high, bang Maggie, play 18 holes of golf on Sega Genesis. Not sure why he’s still mad at me, I mean, all I did was call him ‘a stupid motherfucker who would rather masturbate to the sales figures in his office than do real work’ in my opinion column. No need to a hold a grudge, all these months later.”
Kelly sighs. They cross the intersection. “I’m too exasperated to laugh. Let’s get real food, alright? My treat.” To that last sentence, Kelly adds an entirely unnecessary “Duh.” Past the corner gas station on the right, Gatorroni’s-by-the-Slice, where the punk rockers make and sell the pizza, wearing uniforms of black t-shirts, red bandanas, and tattoo sleeves. “You win,” Kelly continues. “You’re getting free food from me, but only because we’ve tried all other alternatives available.” From here, approaching the black iron railings around the perimeter of Gatorroni’s, Kelly shifts into a barely audible Flintstonish muttering—“Stupid Ronnie. Stupid broke-ass Ronnie. No money and unreachable plans.” He turns to Ronnie before they enter the restaurant. “You’re nuts, you know that?”
Ronnie suspects he may be, and opts to say nothing that could in any way jeopardize his first real meal as a Gainesville resident.
A BRIEF EXCERPT OF A DRUNK COMEDIAN
PERFORMING AT GATOR GROWL WHO HAS BEEN
ON THE ROAD A LITTLE BIT TOO LONG
“. . . Yeah. Keep booing . . . and fuck you too . . . I mean, where the fuck am I . . . seriously, where is this? Lafayette? Lawrence? Columbus? Austin? Tallamuthafuckin’hassee?”
[hearty boos from the audience]
“Look, there’s no need to boo me, man . . . all I’m saying is that these college towns are all the same. You think you’re so smart. What is this, Eugene? Charlottesville? Athens, Ohio? Athens, Georgia? Wait, what are you yelling? Gainesville? Gainesville?!
“Guess what: Same diff, assholes. Fuck you, I’m outta here.”
SLACKIN’ OFF IN THE ’90s
Maux (actually, in the caustic comic she draws for the school paper, she spells it M-A-U-X, signed at the bottom right corner in angry slashes like black blood dripping in a homicide) grabs a handful of limp ketchup-doused fries from the stack piled on the Burger King bag and throws them at the television. She laughs like she talks—like a twelve-year old boy on the cusp of a voice change—when three of the larger limper fries stick to the screen and gloop downward, leaving three red trails obscuring the movie Maux has deemed “stupid”—some piece of crap Philip (her boyfriend of the week) rented called Slackin’ Off in the ʼ90s, that one film that’s set in a large city in the Pacific northwest where these unwashed nonconformists in flannel shirts and shiny combat boots stand around listening to plodding rock and roll music while trying to date each other and avoid steady corporate employment.
Philip, dough-bodied and prismatically hair-dyed, sits next to her on his old brown sofa, laughing between chomps of sweet-and-sour soaked chicken nuggets spread out across a JFK-era drink tray he found back home in a resale shop—a tray decorated with the outline of the state of Florida circled by drawings of oranges, orange blossoms, surfers, waves, the sun, a compass, palm trees, dolphins, with sweet and sour sauce smeared across the Space Coast. He laughs because, hey, it’s funny watching Maux get angry. “If you don’t want to watch this,” he says, patting his right hand on her left knee, “you can just tell me, I’ll shut it off.”
She removes the hand with a graceless kick, leans forward. “Look at this shit,” she says, pointing to the television with its pinkish pixels glowing through the ketchup trails. On the screen, two “grungy”-looking men in their early twenties wearing flannel shirts and long-hair wigs sit on a couch in a slovenly living room. Posters for bands like Nirvana, Alice in Chains, and Pearl Jam hang haphazardly throughout the plaster-cracked walls. A 1959 black Les Paul is propped against the couch between Grunge Dude #1 and Grunge Dude #2. Grunge Dude #1 slouches and moans, “Aw maaaaaan. It’s like, I gotta get laid!” Grunge Dude #2 yawns, stretches, returns to his original hunched form on the couch and says, “Yeah, well, you go ahead. I’m too lazy to get laid. I’ll get laid later.” Grunge Dude #1 punches Grunge Dude #2 on the arm and says, “You’re such a slacker,” and punctuates the sentence with a conspiratorial stoner laugh. Grunge Dude #2 says, “Damn right. And proud of it too!” They high-five.
“What? It’s good,” Philip says, egging her on. “It’s what it’s like for our generation. It’s true-to-life, ya know?”
“I don’t know why we’re dating,” Maux says.
“We’re dating?” Philip says, reaching to the remote control to shut off the movie, hoping the silent blue screen of the stopped VCR would keep her riled-up but not so riled up she’d throw more fast food at the television, yelling, ranting, trying to break his things and trying to kick the walls of this dingy duplex he would leave when the lease expired at the end of July, photography degree in hand, bound for anywhere-but-here. No, he didn’t want her so insanely rabid that sex—makeup or otherwise—was out of the question.
“No, we’re ‘seeing each other,’ we’re ‘friends with benefits,’ we’re ‘sleeping together,’ we’re ‘fucking,’ we’re ‘madly in love and ready to exchange marriage vows.’ ” With each sarcastic label of their relationship, Maux makes “finger quotes” like annoying writers performing at readings. She turns away from Philip, huffs, curls up on the couch, gazes at the wall where he hangs all his matted glossy black and white prints from his photography classes—the inevitable photo major chiaroscuro of his ex-girlfriend (that bitch) in a black dress staring all gloomy-gothic in front of rows of dead orange trees, of straight rural dirt roads trailing off into the flat distance, of close-ups of grass blades, of faded Burma Shave signs painted on old barns, of steaming coffee mugs.
Philip says nothing, steals a nice long look at her body—that body—indigo boots up to her knees, indigo skirt and blouse elaborately ripped and safety-pinned, shortcropped dyed indigo hair, and an emerald necktie. It’s sexy to him how she looks like the valedictorian of a Catholic school for wayward mutants. Without that body, Maux’s just a cunt—yes, cunt, that word people like Philip only use when prefaced with “Now I’m not one to use this word very often, but in this case, it fits, because that girl is such a total . . . ”—and Philip stares at her turned away and feels the half-chub against his boxers, and as always with girls like these (are there any other kind?) he reflects on the lengths he goes to ignore the obvious and compromise his common sense and sell-out his self-respect just to get a taste of that pale thin flesh contrasting all that sexy fucking indigo.
Philip finishes the chicken nuggets, sweet and sour sauce now dipped and smeared from Daytona Beach to St. Petersburg. “So what are we doing then?” he asks.
“Let’s go somewhere. Out. Drinks.” She uncoils from the couch, turns to Philip, picks up his beloved Florida drink tray. “Otherwise, I’m gonna fling this.”
He grabs the round metal tray. They tug back and forth. Smiles and laughter. Philip releases his right hand long enough to titty-twister her left A-cup breast. She screams, lets go, laughs, calls him a shit. The half-chub grows. “Let’s stay here,” Philip says, holding the tray at arm’s length. “Don’t you want to see how Slackin’ in the ʼ90s ends?”
“If it’s between that and getting drunk,” Maux says, standing, pulling down her indigo skirt, walking to the front door, “I think you know the answer.” She opens the door, says, “And if you’re not a total douche, you can stay at my apartment for a change.”
Outside, Philip hears her car start. He looks down at his erection. “Oh, the places you’ll go,” he sighs before standing up and thinking unsexy shriveled thoughts of infanticide, cancer wards, and truck-crushed puppies, walks out, locks up.
“You’re lucky to be graduating,” Maux says. They sit in a back booth during an otherwise empty Tuesday night at The Drunken Mick. The twelve televisions scattered around the room reflect strobe lights bouncing across the unoccupied bar as the bartender takes a white towel to the same already-clean pint glass, and the server is hunched over a crossword puzzle in a booth by the opposite wall, absorbed in finding a seven letter word for “Inter-Gender Wrestling Champion of the World.” The jukebox randomly selects “Holiday” by Madonna. “You get to get out of here.” Propped between the edge of the table and her lap is her drawing pad.
“Maybe you can come with me,” Philip says, yawning, hoping this gets the response he’s looking for.
Maux laughs. Philip gets what he wanted. “Why not?” he asks.
“Why?” Maux starts sketching, angry lines stabbed across the paper.
“Because we’re in love,” Philip says. It has been almost four years since he was a Port St. Lucie dormkid, and everything around here was fresh and exciting and first time. Now, he finds amusement in riling up the easily riled, as Madonna pleads If we could have a holiday / it would be so nice!
“We’re only together because there’s nobody else around,” she says, punching dots into the pad. “You’re the best worst option.”
He watches her as she draws, those mean blue eyes—spiteful, hate-filled—a bitter grin. He hates her. He wants her. And at the end of July, he will leave her. If not sooner.
“Here,” she says, sliding the drawing pad across the table. “What do you think?”
He grabs the pad by its spiraled wires across the top, turns it, holds it. It’s a one-panel drawing of Philip, wearing a sundress in an open field, holding a bouquet of limp flowers in his right fist. Arrows point to his “ ‘krazy’ punk haircut!,” “t-shirt advertising some generic southern California pop punk band,” “totally individualistic wallet chain,” and “camera-for taking ‘artistic’ pictures.” He is surrounded by six speech clouds: “You look nice today,” “Let’s go watch a movie,” “I’m really starting to like you,” “This camera is like my soul,” “When can I see you again?” and “I miss you.” He remembers when he said each of these to her—early in their “relationship”—and the scathing laughter and bitter remarks they engendered.
“C’mon!” she says. “It’s funny!”
He smiles, to give a pretense of a reaction. He considers leaving, putting the last two month’s absurdity with her to rest already, finishing this pint of Fancy Lad Irish Stout (or whatever you call it) and walking home through the quiet of a Gainesville Tuesday night. Maybe go down to the Nardic Track or the Bubbling Saucepot and see if any bands are playing. Maybe find a porch where friends are sitting around drinking and talking shit. Anywhere but here, with her. But if he leaves, he leaves the indigo, and the emerald tie, and everything underneath. He doesn’t feel hurt or offended by the drawing, and he’s not sure if it’s better or worse that he simply doesn’t care.
“You’re so ridiculous,” he throws out, to the empty space.
“So you’re not mad?” She sounds disappointed.
“Why would I be mad? It’s a beautiful rendering.” He slides the drawing pad back to her side of the table. “I’m flattered.”
Maux rips the drawing out of the pad, crumples it up, throws it at his head. He dodges, it lands on the table of the booth behind him. “Let’s leave,” she says. “Even my apartment is better than this.”
They finish their pints. She stomps out the door, ignoring the “Have a nice nights” of the bartender and server. Philip slides out the booth when the front door slams. He sees the drawing bunched up into the size of a softball, grabs it, planning on either keeping it or throwing it at Maux’s head in the parking lot.
DANCING GIRLS
Meghan sits in a wobbly wooden chair in Mouse’s living room, with that bobbed hair and the overbite and the lisp. She trills something flutey on the flute while Mouse rummages through piles of unwashed clothes and porno and emptied microwave dinner boxes for “The tape to record the song I want you to help me with, because I know, when you add what you’re going to add, and what you boys are going to add . . . ” (Here, Mouse points at Ronnie and Kelly. “Don’t patronize us, you charlatan,” Ronnie says, sipping from a foamy warm can of Dusch Light on the border of the kitchen and the so-called studio here in this filthy first floor of a rickety gray house on the eastern edge of the student ghetto, while Kelly sits at Meghan’s dirty green low-cut Chuck Taylors, oblivious to everything but the February 1996 issue of The National Review of Titties opened across his lap.) “. . .it’s going to be the best song ever, so . . . ” (And here, Mouse hums like a con artist about to con) “. . .doo dee doo dee doo. Let me try and find it here, and you keep doing what you’re doing . . . ”
“Uh. Mouse? What is this?” Meghan says with that lisp through a retainer (At nineteen and everything! hums Mouse’s fevered, feverish brain, because, with the dark bobbed hair, the overbite, the lisp—well, it’s better than all the dancing girls jiggling at the tittie bar) as she reaches under the trash-covered table (a wretched uneven example of what you find piled at the end of driveways when the students reach the ends of their leases and upgrade to better homes, better furniture) and pulls out a magazine. On the magazine’s cover, a woman with frizzed out 1985 white-blonde So Cal hair, dressed in a pink bikini, only the bikini bottom is lowered to her knees to expose her long, semi-erect penis. The magazine’s title, in yellow lightning bolt lettering, is PSYCH!
Ronnie laughs at this and Kelly pays no attention, enraptured by the pictures of breasts in all shapes and sizes. “Oh, hee hee, that’s nothing, doo dee doo dee doo,” Mouse says. “It’s something I used for a flier, hee hee hee . . . ”
“And what’s this?” Meghan says, laughing, pulling out from under the chair a . . .
“Oh! That!” Mouse says. “Hee hee hee. Well, you see . . . ” (He strokes his long goatee.) “That’s all part of the nothingness too . . . ”
“That’s a big strange nothing,” Ronnie says, stomach empty, behind on meals, feeling and looking underfed, empty enough to already feel the one beer he has finished. “No, really. Tell the nice girl what it is, Mouse.”
Mouse’s smile grows a faint tinge of a sneer towards Ronnie. “Thank you. I will. See, Meghan, it’s just one of those, you know, giant dildos coated in insulation foam to use in some performance art I did at the Nardic Track about a knight in shining bologna?”
“Oh!” Meghan laughs, holds the flute with one hand, swings the dildo onto the dusty living room’s no-longer-white carpeting like Roger Daltrey with a microphone, flinging it to the floor as it lands with a brittle crack.
“I found the tape!” Mouse announces, holding it out for Meghan to see. “Now I’m going to put this in the 4-track, and we’re going to start recording, so before you play the flute, I need you to make up lyrics about dancing girls.”
“Dancing girls?” Meghan says, the nervousness rattling around her insides, finding an outlet in the right side of her face as a random twitch.
“Yeah!” Mouse sees the nervous tic, and it’s that same feeling like at the tittie bar.
“I thought you’d want to sing about poop or jerking off or something,” Meghan says. Ronnie laughs at this. He is buzzed on a can-and-a-half of Dusch Light, unsure of what to say but smiling like a cretin.
“Not today. I feel the need to go into a more commercial direction.” Ronnie, Kelly, and Meghan laugh at this.
“Ok,” Meghan says, free hand’s long fingers moving the sides of her hair behind her ears, stands, arousingly perfect nineteen-year-old breasts jutting out against the cotton of the green, yellow-lettered “LARRY’S PAWN SHOP ALL-STARS” softball thrift store t-shirt she wore. The tic fades. “I’ll do my best.”
“Can we get a pizza first?” Kelly asks, looking up from the engrossing, engorging magazine. “You should order us some pizza for helping you out. C’mon, Phil Spector. Your workers are hungry.”
“Didn’t you guys just eat? You were at Gatorroni’s!” Mouse looks to Ronnie, to Kelly, back to Meghan, regretting the invite extended to the males in the room, but they happened to be there, seated outside at the front patio of Gatorroni’s by the Slice—Meghan, the nnnnnugget from the pointless Gen Ed class he was getting through in order to graduate, and the next table over, the study in contrast that heightened Meghan’s, well, everything—Ronnie and Kelly—who looked lost, more than a little pathetic—Kelly with the bandaged yellowed forehead, holding an iced-napkin to his tongue, Ronnie, as disheveled as Mouse had ever seen him, picking at the final crumbs and sauce dollops of what had been a mammoth sausage calzone. Mouse was on his bike, pedaling home from the library, saw Meghan sitting there, pulled the bike off University onto the sidewalk and bellowed a goofy “Helll-luuuuuuu” to her, and she smiled that overbitten smile, and—shee-yit gotdamn! The things Mouse could do with her!
The right side of Meghan’s face tic’d and tic’d. Mouse noticed the flute case she had there on that greasy gray table, and the plan for the rest of the day formed instantly. (Chance encounters like these happened all the time in Gainesville, part of the thrill of never knowing exactly what kind of youthful adventure you’d get up to.) “A flautist!” Mouse exclaimed. “I need your help recording the greatest song ever made.” Mouse flashed his false-tooth smile, and the scraggly knotty brown hair hung to his shoulders . . . and the moustache is bushy-big and his goatee grows to a Satanic point, but that smile! Meghan finds it sooooo disarming, while Ronnie, who watched from six feet to her right, smiled because he knows all-too-well Mouse’s m.o. with the nnnnuggets, the way he smiles and will soon rhyme when he says things he knows girls might find creepy. “Yes, that’s right!” Mouse continued. “The greatest song ever written, and I’m feeling good, you know—heh heh heh and not just because my friend Ronnie here . . . ” (Mouse pointed to Ronnie, who looked up from the calzone’s remnants long enough to mumble a “Hi,” and that was their introduction.) “. . . just moved to Gainesville, but—and we all need to do this—I was going to go to the tittie bar today for the all-you-can-eat buffet?”
“Oh God,” Ronnie said, licking the grease off his fingers. “You’re still going on about the tittie bars and the buffets.” When Mouse lived in Orlando for two years, a half-hearted student at the University of Central Florida, it was a focal point of many a conversation, and the women around him either laughed or groaned or both, but they never walked away, “creeped out,” as Jan Brady might have said.
“But you know how great it is, Ronnie! You’ve gone!”
“Whatever,” Ronnie said, still hungry, looking for any piece of uneaten calzone on the red tray, no matter how small. “It’s just boobs.”
“Just boobs,” Mouse said. “No no no! It’s too late today—shit!—but if we could have gotten there before 4 p.m . . . ”
“. . . And get only one of their watered-down drinks,” Ronnie interrupted, having heard this spiel countless times.
“. . . Yes, that’s right, Ronald, and around 4:30 they get the buffet going, and . . . ”
“. . . And it’s all-you-can-eat buffet food on plates in front of you and jigglin’ titties and . . . ”
“Yes, yes, Ron—heh heh—and then we go home, and it makes it sooo wonderful when you go home to bang the gong on the ding dong, sing song whack a doodle-doo, hmm?”
“And by that, Meghan, our friend Mouse means masturbate.”
Meghan laughed at Mouse’s refreshingly weird honesty. Oh, college! Oh, Gainesville! They don’t make boys like this back home in Fort Myers! “I wanna sing it!” she lisped through her retainer, smiling. “Let’s make something crazy!”
And now that everyone’s here, Mouse hates that he felt sorry for Ronnie and Kelly, and wishes he had left them at Gatorroni’s as he stands in front of Meghan, handing her the microphone directly plugged into the 4-track. “We’ll eat something soon, after we record this.” To Meghan, he rolls his eyes, and shakes his head, unable to apologize more for the cockblocking beer drinking free loading rejects he brought along to this elaborate ruse of seducing young Meghan into his bedroom. “So I’ll play you the song in the headphones, and you start singing it whenever you feel it.” His hands, her shoulders, a soft too-brief squeeze. “You’re gonna be great! Here we go.”
Mouse turns to the 4-track, presses the record button, the play button. Through the headphones, audible by everyone—synthesized white noise, low-end keyboard burps and farts, guitar sounds high in the treble range, layered and layered, backed by a mid-90s techno beat (or what passed for a techno beat in Mouse’s anti-techno mind—this arhythmical quarter note low-bounce that would clear a dance club faster than live grenades dropping out of the disco ball), all of it working together into an absurd chaos.
“Dancing girrrrrrl,” Meghan begins, singing in a creep soprano, headphones burrowed into her hair, big dark eyes looking into Mouse’s for encouragement, validation. “Won’t you give me a whirrrrrl, won’t you make a man out of meeeeeeee . . . ”
Mouse laughs at this, standing to her left as she sings—so happy and horny he is to be here—waving his hands and mouthing the word, “MORE!”
“Dancing girl,” Meghan continues, the initial nervousness abated, “like a whippo-whirl, won’t you hum to me, sensual-leeeeeeeeee . . . ”
Mouse smiles his smile and hops up and down, like everything in the world has surpassed his optimistic expectations. Unsure where to go from here, unable to come up with any more lyrics about dancing girls, as overwhelmed as she is with laughter that distorts the recording, she la-las sopranically, ooing and ahing until the beat ends and the song collapses into white noise tracks.
“Was that ok?” she asks. Mouse shushes because the mic is still recording, but he knows he will keep the question in the final mix.
Meghan removes the headphones, and the first thing she hears is Mouse shout “Yes! You’re a genius!” He steps up, pulls her in to give her a hug, and he holds her one second longer than the hugs of a friend, and Meghan knows that look, the dude look of “I’m going to kiss you now,” that intent, determined, vulnerable glaze they get. She still hasn’t made up her mind—this strange, strange boy with his strange, strange friends—she pokes him gently in the ribs with her flute, says, “Let’s record this now, hmmmm?”
He’s rebuffed, and she’s relieved, even if Mouse looks less jovial than before. He forces a laugh. “Yes, the flute! I’ll hold the mic, and I want you to play freely.”
“Freely?” Meghan holds the flute to her mouth in the horizontal position. “What do you mean?”
“Just follow your gut, your instinct—play it like you don’t know the rules. Like a dancing girl, spinning on the pole!”
Meghan nods, the 4-track’s tape spins once again, and over the noise and ridiculousness of her lyrics and the singing, Meghan breathes into the flute crazy puffs of swirling bird calls as Mouse holds the microphone, pretending like he’s trying to get the perfect spot for the microphone while he stares at her ti-tays, so close to the hand, like the dancing girls who pinch the folded dollar from his fingers and capture it in (Mouse calls it) their Lee Van Cleave. He will try again.
“Now can we order the pizza?” Ronnie asks, still standing in the kitchen’s threshold, a newly opened beer in his right hand by his side. Kelly tosses the magazine into a pile of dirty clothes, paces around, eyes downward, scanning the filth and the trash for a magazine he hasn’t looked at yet.
“Yesyesyes,” Mouse says, not hiding the annoyance in his voice. “Ronnie, since you know how to work the 4-track, on the last free track there, I want you two to sing “Dancing Girls,” over and over again while Meghan and I take a walk to the ol’ Floridian Harvest Minimart for a 24-pack of Dusch Light and Partini’s Party Pizza.”
“That’s it?” Ronnie says, not hiding the disappointment in his voice. “No screaming? No hooting and hollering? No guitars played through pedals?”
“Just sing it,” Mouse says, already out there, Meghan in front of him, right hand across her lower back. “Then you’ll get your pizza.”
As Ronnie and Kelly (unsurprisingly) nail their contribution to “Dancing Girls” in one take, Mouse and Meghan walk down narrow student ghetto streets, sidewalkless cracked little straight paths the width of the average car. The houses have old white gray porches, subdivided into two to eight apartments, or they’re tin-roofed shacks plopped in the far end of the property lines with mulch driveways leading to the inevitable cul-de-sac of parked cars and trucks. No two buildings are ever the same. The trees canopy the streets and shade the sun, which now leaves nothing but a violet twilight.
“How do you know those guys?” Meghan asks, as they walk back, each with a frozen pizza and a twelve-pack of beer, turning left to face University. “They seem a little, I don’t know, out of it?”
“Yeah,” Mouse laughs. “They’re a little shell-shocked moving here. I lived with Kelly when I lived in Orlando, and we all went to UCF together. Ronnie and I ran for Student Government President and Vice-President.”
“Did you win?”
“No, but that wasn’t the point. It was a dumb college prank, I guess, but one of the ideas of the platform—Ronnie’s idea—was to have a holiday called “Big Lug Day.”
“Big Lug Day?”
“Yeah! It was like—” and Mouse sets the case of Dusch Light in the middle of the sidestreet leading back to his apartment. “Put the pizza and the beer down,” he adds.
“So on Big Lug Day,” Mouse continues. “You get to go up to anyone you want and ask for a hug, and they have to give it to you. You have to do it like this.” Mouse outstretches his arms and says, “C’mere, ya big lug.” Meghan stands there.
“Sooo, what do I do now?”
“You give me a hug because it’s Big Lug Day!”
She laughs through the overbite and the retainer, looks down, looks up and to the right, at the bug-swarmed streetlights over the darkened houses and trees, takes one step forward and they hug, and she laughs again, adds, “Happy Big Lug Day, Mouse,” and it’s the sound of Meghan saying that into his unwashed shirt that really gets him, makes him think, in the second before the lean in to kiss that this is really and truly better than the sounds of the dancing girls, those strippers looking Mouse in the eye like they actually like him as those black ladies croon No you’re never gonna get it / no you’re never gonna get it through the mammoth strip club PA speakers as they spin away on the poles and slap their asses while he eats practically flavorless barbeque ribs and sips from a watered down vodka tonic. No, this is much much better than those dancing girls in the tittie flop—through the tongue swirls and puckers and his tongue’s brushings with that hott-hott-hott retainer, Mouse sings in his head Happy Big Lug Day to me / Happy Big Lug Day to me, and while he must eventually thank Ronnie for coming up with the holiday, he must also get them out of the house. Ronnie will sense what’s up even if Kelly’s too obtuse to understand; as a parting/get-the-hell-out-of-here gift: half of this Dusch Light 12-pack and both Partini Party Pizzas, and it’s out the door with those two brokeass brokeasses, so Mouse and Meghan can, you know, do it, while listening to “Dancing Girls” on an endless loop.
ZOMBIE PROSTITUTE
When Nicholas J. Canberry (goes by Nick in class, but uses his full name in the heading to his stories because this is what he wants to go by in the literary world, kinda like Hunter S. Thompson, ya know?) sat down to write the short story “Zombie Narc”3 for Adjunct Professor Anderson “Andy” Cartwright’s Introduction to
the Short Story creative writing class, it surely never occurred to him that the final product would be the catalyst that would send Cartwright swerving eastbound beachbound on FL-20, chugging straight Absolut from a frozen bottle while throwing stacks of student work out the window of his rusty yellow VW Bug.
Nicholas J. Canberry was actually quite proud of his latest in a semester-long series of zombie-themed stories, among them: “Zombie Cop,” “Zombie Prostitute,” “Zombie Frat Boys from Hell,” “Zombie Sluts,” “Zombie Dope Dealer’s Revenge,” “Zombie Dope Dealer’s Revenge Part II: Unkind Bud Strikes Back,” “Zombie Librarian,” and now, “Zombie Narc.” The assigned book for this class—some bullshit short story anthology that was like $70 or something—has not been moved nor opened since he'd tossed it on the window sill by the dorm room bed. (“I don’t see the point in reading if you’re a writer,” is what he tells the ladies at parties. “I mean, movies are the books of today anyway, you know?”) One muse is enough, thank you very much, and Nicholas J. Canberry’s muse is named Janis—a pink bong he found at a Daytona Beach head shop in the middle of last year’s Spring Break (Spring Break!) he christened one night while trying to write a poem about what the Atlantic Ocean means to him4 for some blowoff poetry class he took last fall and as he sat there at his dorm room desk listening to Janis Joplin’s Greatest Hits from the CD boombox on the desk’s upper shelf, he had the really fantastic magical epiphany that Janis Joplin made the greatest music of all time. (Even better than Bob Marley.) Henceforth, Janis never left the right side of Nicholas J. Canberry’s computer (an
off-to-college gift from his realtor parents back home in Newport Richey), and he must have put at least half a sack into Janis’s nug-hungry bowl the night he wrote “Zombie Narc.” When he’d half-finished, Nicholas J. Canberry knew he had something good, something that would blow Cartwright’s farty-ass old punk rocker mind. This was confirmed as he read each page, fresh from the whirring dot matrix printer:
“I taught you were our friend, man!” Smokey cried sadly as the cops put the cuffs on him and took him away. “We did . . . drugs together. Remember?”
“I am your friend, man!” Stoney pleaded insistently. “But there’s one thing, you don’t know.”
Smokey spat at the ground as the cops led him away. “I know everything I need to know, man. You’re nuthin’ but a narc! You’re just a narc!”
“Not so fast, Smokey!” Stoney announced menacingly. “Watch this!” The skin of Stoney’s flesh was ripped by Stoney’s hands. His hands tugged at his face, revealing . . . A ROTTING SKULL UNDERNEATH!!!
“I’m a ZOMBIE NARC!!!” Stoney yelled loudly. “And I’m hungry. FOR BRAINS!”
“What the? No! No!!! Please!” Smokey begged as the top of his skull was being chewed by Stoney’s mouth. Blood shot everywhere, and the cops shot their guns. They had no affect on Stoney. He grabbed the cops and ate them up too.
“Stoney’s brain tastes like chicken!” Stoney reflected calmly to himself. “But these cops’ brains taste like pigs!” Stoney proceeded to eat his way through all their brains, ralishing each volumtous bite. The fact is, Stoney was hungry, hungry for brains . . . ”
. . . These words, one after the other, written by one Nicholas J. Canberry, provide the unintended catalyst pushing Adjunct Professor Anderson “Andy” Cartwright to run out of the house with the keys, the stack of student work, the bottle of Absolut from the freezer, and into the car, sputtering down the road, screaming “What am I doing?! What the hell fuck shit am I doing?!” punching the steering wheel, swerving along as the cassette deck plays what it always plays, songs from local legends Roach Motel, circa 1982—young and angry and fun and stupid and great. So long ago. “What am I doing!” Andy (the Department of Tireless Literary Derring-do at the Gainesville College of Arts and Crafts fancies itself cutting edge and insists on the students calling the teachers by their first names. It’s very egalitarian that way, lest the students get on bummer authority trips) yells again, not fully aware that he is yelling. He used to be a decent writer—a novel published to not-bad reviews five years prior, some short story credits—before he faced down these mammoth stacks of student work (twenty-five students averaging twenty pages a week—the four students who turn in nothing are counterbalanced by the four engaged in Trollopian, Oatesian prolificness—equals 500 pages per week) day after day, to the point that all this bad, bad writing—stories of dorm room dope smoke, of back seat blow jobs, of unicorns and faeries and mawkish breast cancers and battlefield glory and sci-fi robots out of control and kung-fu peasants avenging their honor and wizards and spell books and all the fear and loathing at the kegger fogged up his brain to the point that working on his own writing was out of the question.
He passes into the next county, the road a perfect emptiness, bisecting undeveloped Florida jungle-woods. He drinks the straight vodka, the sticky cold in his hands and mouth, winces then smiles, grabs a handful of pages of the student work stacked on the passenger seat, flings them out the driver’s side window. In the rear view mirror, Andy watches as the pages flip and land onto the pavement.
The stack is smaller now, but Andy lifts what’s left and yells “Not small enough!” over the din of the VW engine and Roach Motel. He grabs a page from the middle of the stack and reads aloud as he keeps the wheel mostly straight along the unbending eastbound beachbound road.
“. . . ‘Just because I’m a prostitute from the ghetto doesn’t mean I can’t have feelings for you!’ Angela said, crying like a baby who wants a pacifier.
“ ‘But you don’t get it!’ Chas said knowingly. ‘I’m a banker, and I’m rich. I preside over the country club! This love just isn’t meant to be!’ ”
“Oh God,” Andy groans, flings the page out the window. He swigs the vodka, rescrews the top, tosses it to the passenger seat, grabs another page at random and reads aloud.
“. . . ‘The beer tasted like warm piss and it was hot as hell, but these minor and meaningless obstacles would not stand in the way of what we wanted to do. There, in the frat house, I wanted to get Lauren in bed so we could screw all night like rabid and fierce animals in heat . . . ’ ”
“Out the window!” Andy howls, laughing at the bad joke his life had become these past two years since learning he would not be getting the first tenure track position offered by the Department in several years, laughing at this self-pity and bitterness brought to the surface from one-too-many stories of zombie narcs eating brains in the passive voice. In front of him, the empty white beach and the Atlantic Ocean washing ashore in the choppy gray-green-blue waves under a beach-bright, beach-hot early afternoon. Andy parks in the free dirt lot, finishes the vodka, sees the final twenty odd pages he hasn’t thrown out of the Bug, and has an idea.
He takes off his black socks, slips off his brown dress shoes, unbuttons his pink Oxford shirt, tosses each article into the backseat, grabs a large swirled red white yellow and green beach towel with the words CLEARLY CANADIAN in white lengthwise letters, hides the bottle in the towel, grabs the pages, and steps out of the car. In the light dizzy rage of an increasingly savage vodka buzz, he steps quickly over the burning rocky sand of the parking lot, descends the precarious wooden steps onto the beach, and as always, when face to face with the ocean, he recalls Ishamel’s lines about people standing by bodies of water, staring to the horizon lines on their lunch breaks with so much wanderlust. The beach and the ocean conspire to give you a proper perspective, to leave you less jaded than you were when you arrived, to remind you that you’re a small but necessary part of something bigger, that there’s more than these tiny little worlds we’ve constructed out of money and stress and desperation. So Andy thinks, always reminded of the past when here, of all the great times with girls, with friends, whether overnight in motels or beach houses—days and nights living the Great Floridian Dream of E-Z beach access. It’s an empty Tuesday afternoon at Crescent Beach. Along the grainy white sand, strands of seaweed wash ashore. Andy stumbles away from the house and the beach shacks, lurching along to the sounds of the waves and the water. Andy spreads out the towel over soft dry sinking sand, steps to the water as it rolls in on his feet, his ankles, up the cuffed khaki slacks (and these outfits, man, these outfits I gotta wear teaching, I mean, how would these kids not know I was—am, am, I mean, am—punk rock if I didn’t tell them!), the waves splash the always jarring crotch region—in a dizzy spin, Andy swings the bottle and sings what he can remember of a long ago Kinks song: “The tax man’s taken all my dough / and left me in my stately home / all I got’s this sunny afternoon . . . ”
Empty bottle in one hand, pages in the other, Andy rolls up the pages, untwists the cap, stuffs the pages inside the bottle. The pages cling in parts to the bottle’s insides, but they’re in, and Andy replaces the cap, turns to his right, faces the ocean, pulls back his right arm and flings, watching the Absolut bottle’s sensual curves flip end over end, the white pages rolled up too tight to move except for those stuck to the insides, vodka/sea water moisture where the black print becomes a blue smudge, it flips end over end in a Saint Louis Arch flight pattern, plopping into a tiny splash a hundred feet away. He stares at that point of impact for a long time, scratches the developing paunch across his abdomen, reflects on the paunchiness of all of this—that gaping chasm that grows with the start of every fall semester, as more eighteen year olds come in as they always do; as Andy once did, way back in 1977. The flabby decision to stick around—the college, the town—part-time professoring, more out of habit than anything else. This life is familiar and comfortable and easy. Two years ago, when the Chair of the Department told him he would not be getting the full-time position, Andy did not want to leave. When people left Gainesville—like his friends had been doing, more and more—so many inevitably returned within the year, tail between legs, wondering what they missed while they were in New York, San Francisco, Chicago, LA. Seeing their returns was a living breathing testimonial to the unstressful simplicity of staying put. The onset of middle-age. Maybe, initially, in the backs of all the minds of creative writing teachers—like touring musicians, bartenders, baseball coaches—you think you’ve found a fountain of youth, and it means you don’t have to give up this life that made you so happy when you were 21, that you don’t have to give it up now and go out and sell the proverbial insurance to pay bills. But, at 37, after years of teaching, that cycle of the academic calendar becomes a kind of Sisyphean nightmare of Twilight Zone proportions. You grow up, you try and mature and evolve, but the students always, always stay the same, and right when Andy connects with these kids and starts making real progress, the semester ends. The students’ comments, concerns, observations, reactions, to the assigned reading, are unvarying. Standing in the ocean, Andy foresees a bleak future of thankless cheerless unappreciated unrespected decades passing by like nothing. On auto-pilot, spouting the same old tired and obsolete platitudes trying to masquerade as wisdom. For a time, the students will believe it, until they see him for what he is: A failed writer. Chills in the bloodstream as his feet feel the sand tugged away from the undertow. A chill, thinking of this future, his future. A shell of a manchild. Around all this youth, stunted. A writing teacher who does not write. Andy teaches writing, and he stopped writing. The vodkabrain poses the obvious question—So why did you want this, then? And the vodkaanswer is just as stripped away from distraction, with added help from the perspective-giving ocean: He didn’t want the job. He only wanted a little office to store his favorite books—Agee to Vonnegut—dusted nightly by the custodial staff—framed posters on the wall of old show fliers and readings he’s done (so the students see he’s not some typical tweed jacket English teaching stuffed-shirt pipe smoking pedantic bore)—and on the opposite wall his nice little desk with a top-of-the-line Apple computer (because the school knows that if you’re going to have quirky artists, you’ve got to give them Apple computers) stuffed with his short story and novel work, and a file cabinet to the left of the desk to stuff all the student work and in the cabinet of the desk drawer a bottle of scotch to sip with colleagues or alone when the work day is done and to the right a window overlooking the bright campus. To say nothing of the summers to travel, sabbaticals to be left alone, benefits to provide security.
Instead, it’s reading 500 pages of student work each week that feels more and more like a massive steaming turd he’s required to eat, every single week, living in the same house he has rented for the past ten years. Rented. Now, renting instead of owning seems like a big deal. There are no surprises to the ocean today. Andy remembers being a student—and he’d be in the Student Ghetto with friends as some house party was winding down, and he wanted more, but you shoot out all this energy, and it simply dissipates in these sad southern days and nights. Like his ambitions and hopes. The energy shoots around in meaningless circles, and you want to explode. His old friends would feel this way, and reach the point where they would have to move, and yet they came back. “So burned out,” Andy mutters to no one, stepping forward, drunk enough to do it, to walk until the waves rise and fall over his head, drunk enough to pass out, drunk enough to not swim ashore. The chill in knowing Anderson “Andy” Cartwright could be exactly the same person in ten years, in the same house, reading the same stories, dispensing the same tired advice students still—most of them—somehow took so much from—but to him, the words are tedious platitudes, and as a writer (a writer who didn’t write, so what did that make him?), he wonders if he believes what he says anymore.
“To pee or not to pee, haw haw haw,” he laughs, drunk enough to drown, but sober enough to turn around to push through the water back to the shore, to fall down and get up with each strong-enough wave smacking him in the back, hands breaking each fall digging into the wet sand. In the trip-and-fall out of the ocean back to shore, just another lush singing, the vodkathought, the seaperspective You could just leave enters his thoughts. It’s the 1990s, and there’s prosperity. Work a job, punch out, go home and forget about it, instead of adjuncting two classes a semester, struggling to pay off bills, never really off the clock, or becoming just another tenured asshole with some tiny office, just another dickhead academic on a sabbatical who accomplishes nothing because he’s accomplished nothing with his life—like one of those professors who dabbles with the same novel for thirty years. He could leave. Andy smiles at the prospect of this as he reaches the spread-out CLEARLY CANADIAN towel in the dry sand, falls onto the thick cotton, passes out.
Two hours of a dreamless konk-out later, Andy wakes up sweaty, sunburned, and dehydrated. The high tide rolls in, up to pink shins, ankles and feet, the burn not in the painful stages yet, but by tonight . . . Andy’s grateful that many of the vodka’s toxins have been flushed out from the heat, and the hangover is little more than a disoriented sluggishness. He carries the sandy wet towel to the VW Bug, trying to piece together the afternoon’s dance along the edges of a blackout. Wind gusts in short bursts, from all directions, stopping and starting. Sandpipers scurry across the sand along the surf. Seagulls swoop in for trash kills, pelicans float overhead. Rides home from the beach are always damp, sandy, and silent. There’s no music when Andy leaves the beach, the little beachy surf shacks and t-shirt shops along the main roads in and out of every beach town, into the jungle again as afternoon turns into evening. It’s the Briggs and Strattonesque lawnmowery rumble of the VW’s engine and the no-thought of an as yet unprocessed unbrooded upon day.
Well into the jungle-forest, halfway to Gainesville, Andy sees the pages he has tossed. Some are stuck to the road, flattened by traffic, others clinging to high weeds sprouting through the cracks along the shoulder.
He pulls over, parks the Bug, steps out, walks to a stack of the pages scattered by the weeds and a guardrail, bends down to grab one, starts reading:
“. . . They called us ‘Sandwich Artists.’ Like Picasso with paint, like Coltrane with the saxophone, so Beth worked with the bread knife, and so I worked with condiment bottles. Artists of the sandwich. On our breaks, one of us would steal a cookie and walk to the far end of the minimall, sitting on the curb in front of the blacked-out windows where the tanning salon used to be. We split the cookie, split a cigarette, held hands, and laughed at ourselves, laughed at our customers, laughed at our ludicrous corner of the world, counting down each day closer to graduation. This was only a year ago, but the path seemed straighter, more clear-cut, than it is now that we’re in college. Graduate, one last summer in town as Sandwich Artists, then we’re off. For good.
“ ‘We’re not going to be like them, right?’ Beth would say on those breaks, pointing out our regular customers, screaming overweight families voiding packed minivans . . . ”
There is no name on this page, only a handwritten “Page 3” in the top right corner. For once, Andy cannot guess who wrote this. And he wants to know who wrote it, he wants to know what happens next. His head is a stabbing post-vodka skullache, the jungle a stultifying mix of insects and sweat, roadkill and exhaustion. Andy gathers as many pages as he can find—almost optimistic, nearly hopeful—walks to his car, straightens the pages into as close an approximation to a stack as he can make these dirty torn crumpled pages, climbs in, drives home.
THE MODERN DAY WARRIOR’S JOB INTERVIEW
Jeremy Moreland, seventeen years old, wunderkind Assistant Director of Partytyme Pizzatyme Anytyme Affairs for Grandfather’s Olde Tyme Goode Tyme Pizza Parlor (the 34th Street location, between Larry’s Reasonably Priced Furniture Rental and Le Chandelier Hut, in Patton Plaza) holds in his freckled hands a grease-smudged application where the only information given is the first name: Stevie. No address, no phone, no social security number, no employment history, no references.
“He must figure we already know him so he don’t gotta put nuthin’ else down,” Brooks Brody, the unwunderkind Table Removal and Replenishment Coordinator says to Jeremy when handing him the application. “He just told me to hand this to you when I walked by his booth.” Brody stood in front of the counter, holding the gray bus tray filled with yellow plates and clear red plastic cups, in a sweat-soaked, sauce-stained yellow apron covering a uniform middle-scale and lower department stores would call “husky.” Brody plays right tackle on the Junior Varsity squad at Buchholz, where Jeremy would soon graduate with a 4.96 GPA. Not that their paths crossed much at school—Brooks Brody being good for little besides plowing open spaces for running backs to sprint through, or parting the overcrowds in the hallways between classes, or lifting heavy objects like free weights or bus tubs. Besides this, he tended to stand there in his short-cropped blond jock mohawk (funny how it was always perfectly acceptable when the o-line or d-line of the football team got mohawks for superstitious reasons or whatever in the middle of the season, but God help anybody else who did it) awaiting his next orders with that blank look of his.
“You did the right thing, Brooks,” Jeremy says. “Go finish the rest of the tables.”
Brooks grunts an affirmation, swivels a 180 to the unbussed tables. “So, Stevie wants a dishwashing job?” Dale Doar, Director of Partytyme Pizzatyme Anytyme Affairs for Grandfather’s Olde Tyme Good Tyme Pizza Parlour, says, removing the yellow, red-lettered regulation work cap (the Employee Manual calls it a “party chapeau”) and running a hand through receding brown hair he used to comb back into a pony tail. He steps away from the counter, laughs his just-had-his-first-post-work-hit-off-the-one-hitter heh heh heh. “I’ll let you handle this one,” he says to Jeremy while walking to the kitchen, to the back door. “Just give him an interview while he’s eating. Make up whatever excuse you need to.”
Jeremy stands behind the counter holding the application, in this all-too-familiar perspective of the gold peppermint candy dish and the red plastic “take a penny/leave a penny” tray next to the register, the Elton John/Kiki Dee duet “Don’t Go Breakin’ My Heart” that the adult contemporary station feels necessary to share with North-Central Florida at least five times a day coming over the paneled ceiling’s speakers, the red and white checkerboard-topped tables in the middle, the red vinyl booths—ducttape covering the tears and containing the inner foam—lined along either side of the room, the walls, like everything here, the colors of pepperoni and extra cheese, Polaroids of kids celebrating their birthdays with candles in pizza slices pinned in rows of twenty above friendly posters of “Grandfather Fredo,” the jolly cartoon mascot for all three hundred and seventeen Grandfather’s Olde Tyme Goode Tyme Pizza Parlour locations, offering litigious-proof advice like “MAMA MIA! BE CAREFUL EVERYBODY! THAT PIZZA! SHE GETSA SO HOT WHEN OUTTA THE OVEN IT COULDA BURN YOUR FACE OR THE ROOFA OF YOUR MOUTHA! OOF MADON!” while spinning flattened circular pizza dough on his index finger like a basketball. The placemats offer the sole nod to the Old Country—between mazes challenging children to “Help Grandfather Fredo ride his gondola through the Venice canals to his Olde Tyme Fun Tyme Pizza Parlour!”—and drawings of mozzarella stix that need coloring—some Italian fun facts underneath the heading “Did You Know?”, e.g., “Italy is a country in Europe,” “Rome is the capital of Italy,” “Dante, an Italian, sent all of his fellow countrymen to Hell in his book The Inferno!” and so on. Through the front windows, through the credit card stickers, the “Now Hiring Dishwashers” sign and two-of-these-for-only-one-of-those sales, beyond the compact parking lot, 34th Street leads to Newberry Road which turns into University Street and that leads to Waldo Road to 301 North to Interstate 95 North which gets you to New York. For two perfect seconds, Jeremy Moreland dreams of that day in August when he’s clocked out of here for good and walking out that front door, never again having lousy tasks like these pawned off on his scrawny teenage back. Doar had seven years seniority and career ambitions far beyond afterschool/summertime employment, and that’s all he had. Doar was a lifer. Jeremy Moreland scored a 1590 on the SAT (only temporarily forgetting that cadaverous: sarcophagus :: billingsgate : Oakland Raiders, a mistake which haunted him for weeks), had effortlessly ascended Grandfather’s ranks in just eighteen months—from Dish Machine Operator to Yummytizer Preparation Specialist to Smiley Service Liaison to Assistant Director of Partytime Pizzatime Anytime Affairs. During this part of the lunch shift, when Dale leaves, Jeremy often feels like a virtuous Caesar—the benevolent rulers Gibbon immortalized—as he overlooks what he thinks of as his store and the aftermath of another busy All-You-Care-to-Load-Up-On-Your-Plate-And-Eat-And-Try-To-Enjoy-Because-It’s-Yummy-Five-Dollar-Lunch-Buffet, as the Table Removal and Replenishment Coordinators—his Table Removal and Replenishment Coordinators—clean off the tables, and the Smiley Service Liaisons—his Smiley Service Liaisons, are sent home at his behest. Only one customer left. Stevie, who’s hunched over stacks of plates, pizza slice in right hand, marinara-tipped breadstick in the other, alternating bites from one to the next. Unshaven and doughy, in a black bulbous Misfits t-shirt covered in crumbs and sauce, working the food like a cud-chewing cow, always in the same booth in the corner, every weekday lunch. And now, evidently, he wants to work here. Jeremy inhales, exhales, indulges in one brief vision of putting all of this in the rear view mirror, grabs fistfuls of the bottom of his red regulation polo shirt with the yellow “GRANDFATHER’S OLDE TYME GOODE TYME PIZZA PARLOR: WHERE EVERY PARTY IS A PIZZA PARTY,” with Grandfather Fredo kissing the tips of his fingers, tucks it into his black regulation work slacks, steps up to Stevie’s usual booth.
“How we doing today?” Jeremy says, trying not to look profoundly disturbed by Stevie’s ravenous eating. “You applied here and I’d like to ask you a few questions?”
Stevie tries speaking, voice blocked by mounds of digested breadstick masticated in violent chomps. He holds out a “Wait a minute” right index finger, moves a stack of plates from what will be Jeremy Moreland’s side of the booth, motions with “Have a seat” outstretched arms, tries wiping the grease off Jeremy’s side of the table with a couple already soiled and crumpled brown napkins and succeeds in spreading the grease into circular smudges, swallows the breadstick and starts in with this torrent in the cadence, timbre and volume of a Florida used car salesman yelling about bargains in late night TV commercials, “Hey man, yeah, sit down and talk to me you probably know who I am ‘cuz I’m in here almost every day so you’re probably like ‘Y’all, who’s that who’s always in here tearin’ up the lunch buffet?’ Well I figured I’m here enough already so might as well apply here since I obviously like the food so much anyway this buffet’s the best in town so I saw that sign outside and figured why not?”
Jeremy slides into the booth, looks over the plates stacked five-six high, littered with pizza crusts and the hard ends of marinara tipped bread sticks, overturned dipping sauces (Awesome Valley Ranch, Totally Dudical Honey Mustard, Mama Leona’s Fatten You Uppa Sour Cream and Chives, Peter Cetera’s Moderate Salsa, Kansas City Dude Squad Mesquite Barbeque Sauce, Paisan Geoff’s Zesty Garlic Butter), stray oregano and red pepper flakes scattered everywhere. “So. Stevie. That’s your name?”
“Yeah buddy!” Stevie says, swallowing the last of the pizza while finishing the breadstick in his other hand. Jeremy Moreland hears the hick accent, sees the gold brah chain around Stevie’s neck and the buzzed black hair and laughs the kind of superior under-the-breath chuckle that comes naturally from the mouths of high school seniors who have been told that they were “gifted” their whole lives. Stevie hears the laugh. “That funny, home slice?”
Jeremy says nothing, pretends to scan the yellow-papered, grease-smudged application for the first time. “And . . . do you have a last name, Stevie?”
“Yeah I gotta last name and a whole lotta other information I could give you, butI ain’t gonna share that with you for reasons you know I know and I know you know, so I’m just going to keep that to myself for the time being.”
“You’re saying you won’t give me your last name?”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying!” Stevie pounds the table, rattling the plates and the napkin dispenser. “’Cause I heard this thing on the radio that the government takes that information and after that who knows what they do with it man! They get that, and they’ll know how to find me, and when—not if, when—society collapses, they’ll round me up with the rest of you suckers—”
“Well,” Jeremy says, starting the scrawny-ass scoot out of the booth, “we can’t hire you without a last name, so if you don’t feel comfortable—”
“It’s Walters,” Stevie interrupts, and Jeremy slides back across his side of the booth. “Steven ‘Stevie’ Raymond Walters.”
“Thank you.” Jeremy writes in the new information in the appropriate lines. Stevie reaches for his massive red plastic cup and straw-slurps a mouthful of sweet tea. “I can assure you no one here will alert the government of your whereabouts should civilization collapse on us.”
“You say that now,” Stevie says, “but man, don’t get me started.”
“I hope not to,” Jeremy says, wishing for these three months to move faster, pissed Dale isn’t dealing with this. “What’s your address, Stevie Walters?”
“Ok, well, that’s a whole other story. I was going to Santa Fe Community College, right? But I wasn’t likin’ it that much so I dropped out. My parents found out about this and they kicked me out—they live out in High Springs now—used to live in Gainesville—but they moved out there when I graduated high school a couple years back. So right now, I’m living with Alvin—he’s friends with my friend Mouse—and he’s got a trailer real close—but that’s not my home home, right? So I didn’t know if you wanted my home-home or like where I’m living now because I ain’t on the lease or any of the bills or anything. I mean, it ain’t like my parents would get mad if I was using their address for a job application—they just kicked me out ’cause I ain’t workin’ right now or goin’ to school so they’d probably be glad to see me applyin’—”
“Your address now. In the trailer.” Jeremy hands Stevie the application, his pen. “Fill it in, please.”
Stevie scrawls in the trailer’s address. “So why do you want to wash dishes for us, Stevie?”
“You ever need money for something?”
“No.” Jeremy says, trying to make the best of this, indulging both his mockery at those who have never taken Advanced Placement classes and the sumptuous thought of taking money from his savings account for the first time, far away from here, happy and not working for nonworking Dale.
“Well, I wanna kick ass and take names. I like to think of myself as a modern-day warrior, and if that’s what I am, then of course I need to learn karate.”
“Karate.”
“Yeah man.”
“Modern-day warrior.” Jeremy leans back in the booth, idea fully hatched. “What does that mean?”
“It means I’m a badass. It means, ok, let’s say you hit somebody smaller than you. Not that that’s gonna happen but let’s just say. You hit somebody who’s smaller than you who’s defenseless and all that shit—oh, sorry man—didn’t mean to swear—but what I’m saying is—if you did that I would hit you and fight you because that’s what modern-day warriors do. They kick ass. If I see anything like that I get like ‘It’s time to take out the trash: HI-YAH!’ ” . . . And here, Stevie smacks the table with the side of his right hand, knocking two plates off the edge where they land on the extra-cheese-colored linoleum with a loud wobble-wobble. “I’ll get that later, don’t worry,” Stevie continues. “I mean it would be good practice if you hired me anyway, right? So I’ve been trying to teach myself karate and other bad ass moves like wrestling—”
“You’re teaching yourself karate?” Jeremy Moreland laughs in cracked pubescent guttural hee hee hees.
“And wrestling too. It’s all part of being a kick-ass badass. It’s what I wanna do, and if I get good enough, maybe I can be an instructor or something. Teach kids how to be modern-day warriors.”
There’s an awkward pause here. Jeremy wants to run to the back and laugh and laugh and laugh, but there’s this awkward pause to fill, and filling it is beyond Jeremy’s paygrade. He can’t wait for Dale to meet this guy.
“Anything else I should know about? Prison time? Drug offenses?”
“No man. Just tryin’ to be . . . ”
“A modern-day warrior. Got it,” Jeremy says. He points to the application sopping up even more grease from Stevie’s side of the table. “I just need you to write down your Social Security Number, a couple references, and anything else on there you left blank, and then you’re hired.” Jeremy slides out of the booth.
“Hell yeah, buddy,” Stevie says, extending a grease-laden hand to shake. Jeremy looks at it, smiles, turns away, says, “Your first job is to clean up your booth here.” He walks to the kitchen, turns, adds, “And clean yourself up before starting tomorrow at five.”
From the open window between the kitchen and the pass, Table Replacement and Replenishment Coordinator Brooks Brody watches Stevie deliver the twenty-odd plates he had used during today’s assault on the buffet, walking back to his booth, swinging his arms in irregular unfluid air-karate motions. Jeremy approaches to the left, pats Brody on the shoulder. “You about ready to punch out and go home?”
“Did you hire that weirdo?” Brody asks, watching the same back-and-forth of remnants to the counter, air-karate to the booth.
“He’s a modern-day warrior, Brooks,” Jeremy says, smiling in malicious adolescent vengeance. “He’ll be Dale’s worst nightmare.”
Brody shrugs.
“Wipe down his table, and you’re out of here,” Jeremy says, basking in power, in anticipation for tomorrow, for getting out of here in August.
PLAY THE PIANO DRUNK LIKE A PERCUSSION INSTRUMENT UNTIL THE FINGERS BEGIN TO
BLEED A BIT: THE BAND (NOT THE BOOK)
So the audience stands there with all their tattoos, howling along to the songs, pulling their arms to the sides of their heads like they’re in a great deal of trauma. And maybe they are. Even the most privileged members of Western Civilization must get the blues from time to time. The shirtless band—Play the Piano Drunk Like a Percussion Instrument until the Fingers Begin to Bleed a Bit, they are called—you know, after the Bukowski book?—have beards and muscletone and short hair and tattoos and they are one of those—they call them emo bands—who, when they sing, put a lot of feeling into stretching out their vowels. This, ergo, expresses the pain and intensity and uncertainty of life. Whatever they are howling about is very important to everyone packed into the Nardic Track on that Thursday night. To Ronnie, it sounds like they are worked up over paper cuts, like they’re singing—“It hurrrrrrrrrrts / paaaaaaaaaper cuuuuut / feeeel the buuuuurrrrrrn / from the fresh copies,” but “It can’t be that,” Ronnie thinks, in the middle of the audience, silently, shyly, observing . . . and the dozens concaved around the band will soon enough be hundreds and soon enough be thousands.
Honestly, Ronnie doesn’t get it. He never will. His band, The Laraflynnboyles, sounds nothing like this. He doesn’t wax emotional about every stupid thing that has gone wrong in his life. He doesn’t want to, and can’t imagine what it would accomplish if he did. He isn’t sure how “feeling” and “sincerity” means stretching out your vowels when you sing—or, how there is a direct correlation between the two. But that’s what Gainesville seems to believe with the fervency of Eastern mystics. Because the way the band sings and the way the audience sings with them and how everyone is on the verge of tears at the minimum and mass catharsis at the maximum has the air of the fervor in a tent revival. At shows, Ronnie used to get bumped by kids dancing. Now, here, he’s getting bumped by, to his left, some pork-skinned joker wearing nothing but camo cutoffs half-covering a pair of plaid boxers and at the feet the inevitable pair of black Chucks—he keeps crouching down then crouching up, hands behind his head, pulling his head into his chest—and to his right, some bleach-blonde short haired squat-bodied girl shrieking the words and punching the air at the start and end of each elongated word that’s sung by the band. This band will be successful; they will hit thousands of kids all over the world in just the right place at just the right time. Ronnie drinks can after can of Brain Mangler malt liquor, leans against load-bearing poles in different parts of the tiny square room, surrounded by strangers, thinking of what he would sing about if he accepted this as valid, as something he could do without wanting to laugh.
He watches this band, the third of three (the first some pop punk band who sang only about girls around town they had crushes on, with titles like “She’s the Publix Cashier Girl,” “She’s the Zesty Glaze Girl,” “She’s the DMV Eye Test Girl”; the second some ska band who sang about whatever it is ska bands sing about), thinks about what kinds of songs he would sing if he could indulge in this level of self-pity onstage. Thoughts of Kelly, who left the trailer three days ago, the bandages around the forehead gone with no traces except for a jaundiced peeled look to the covered skin, standing by his truck in front of the trailer in the eerie Jonestown silence of the late afternoon heat and humidity, his parting words: “Good luck, and try not to starve to death.” Ronnie laughed at this, in the doorway of the trailer. “Hey, thanks! You too! And the next time you dumpster dive, look out for ants.” Kelly winced, still feeling the receding welts across his tongue. “You can always come back,” he offered, like an exasperated father, before sighing, looking up to the trees, muttering a final exasperated “Jesus Christ, dude,” and stepping into the truck. Ronnie watched as he drove away, back to the lonely house, to another dead-end job, to a comfortable nothing, with one less friend. He deserved a song in the style, subject matter, and presentation of Play the Piano Drunk Like a Percussion Instrument Until the Fingers Begin to Bleed a Bit. If anyone did, it was Kelly. Or in the trailer, Alvin deserves a song. Alvin—who Ronnie imagines sitting there in his moldy barrel living room chair, holding a dandruffy gerbil in his pudgy hands. “This here is Squeaky,” he had said the first time Ronnie met Alvin’s furry little pet. Alvin extended Squeaky outward with his stubby arms. “Wanna pet it?” “Uh, no. Thank you,” Ronnie huffed, haughty, uncomfortable. Stevie was in the middle of the room, sweat marks expanding across his black t-shirt, trying to copy the moves in some Jackie Chan film, bending over to pick up the VCR remote and rewind the movie and show the scene again and again—Jackie Chan hi-yahing a bank safe—a sharp pop that instantly craters the safe at the point of impact—Stevie, who, Ronnie thinks, probably deserves an emo song too, was swinging his fists and karate kicking the air in uneven flailings. Meanwhile Squeaky slipped out of Alvin’s hands, landing in the dirty shag carpeting, running—ratlike—straight towards Ronnie. “Eeeeeeeeee!” Ronnie squealed, high and girlish, as the gerbil beelined towards his feet. Stevie’s hand dropped, fat ninja-like, to the rug, plucked Squeaky by the tail with a hearty “Hi-yah!” and lifted him off the ground. The poor gerbil dangled as Stevie held it between index finger and thumb. Ronnie watched, heart racing, as Stevie walked Squeaky to Alvin, placed him back into his hands, announcing to one and all in that redneck-who-doesn’t-know-he’s-a-redneck timbre and cadence Ronnie had grown to fear and despise, “Ya see that shit, hoooweeee! I am a badass muth-ur-fuck-er! Ooooo!” Alvin held Squeaky in his hands, pulled him close to his face, scolded, “Pffff. You shouldn’t do that, Squeaky. You’ll scare Ronnie. Bad gerbil. Bad! Gerbil! Pffff!” The tableau was too bizarre for anything more than a mumbled “I’m going to my room now” from Ronnie. There could be emo songs for Kelly, for Alvin, for Stevie. As the scene in the Nardic Track transforms more and more into something like those cathartic masculine reclamation camps in some desolate part of the Rocky Mountains where men dress in pelts and yell to the heavens until they feel the testosterone again, Ronnie Altamont thinks of himself as a good subject for an emo song, brooding on what happened after the strange incident with Squeaky, when, before going into his room and locking the door, he stopped in the bathroom, giving in to the compulsive need to wash his hands and face several times a day in the brief time he had lived with Alvin and Stevie. He wiped the water off on his navy blue Docker slacks (Ronnie never really tried very hard to incorporate punk fashion into his daily routine, especially in Florida), sized up the Ronnie in the mirror—that faded vermillion dye job (one of the few concessions to looking like the kind of person who listened to the kind of music that obsessed him throughout his late teens and into his mid-twenties . . . and he paid the price for looking so ridiculous, thanks to black hair peeking out where the dye didn’t take, neck and scalp stained vermillion where the dye did take), black-framed glasses rusty and corroded at the hinges with binocular lenses caked with gunk along the edges, the unavoidable Florida tan, the scruffy face of an incompetent shaver, nose average in every way miraculously unbroken in light of all the provocative words he’d ranted back at UCF, flabby chin (despite the depression-fueled weight loss), broad slouched shoulders, a fraying old blue t-shirt ready to give up and dethread with the rest of his shirts, bony arms, small hands pressed against the nasty crusty bathroom counter, slacks stanky from freeballing, unfashionable hiking boots given out of pity and charity by Kelly. He too could be a walking talking emo song . . . Hell, even to get into these shows he’s had to donate plasma, take the money, buy one twenty-five cent Little Lady Snack Cake for lunch and one twenty-five cent bag of Cheese Canoodles for dinner—so yeah, he could write emo album after emo album . . . if only he could take any of this seriously. Always, always, the desire to laugh in the face of futile despair like this—emo bands like Play the Piano Drunk Like a Percussion Instrument Until the Fingers Begin to Bleed a Bit are indicative of the times—these self-loathing 1990s where people have no compunction about walking around in shirts with the word LOSER or ZERO in big letters . . . where all these “alternative” bands tepidly whine about their lives . . . Ronnie, as the “new kid” in the tiny little punk club where the bands play like this and moments are shared that Ronnie can’t understand . . . the only salvation is how they actually laugh with each other between the songs and at the end of the set . . . the way the space between performer and audience is nonexistent . . . the one thing they all agree on is knowing that in the end all of this is nothing more than moments between friends, many of whom could just as easily (and had before, and will again) plug in and play. These were friends—hugging, arms around each other, singing, screaming, sweating, palzee walzee friends, and Ronnie doesn’t know where to begin with anyone, has yet to see any of his old friends who grew up with him in Orlando then went off to college here and started bands. Everyone in the room is a potential friend, but Ronnie doesn’t know how to go about it, and this is also funny to Ronnie. Not only the lyrics, but the music was like nothing The Laraflynnboyles played . . . how all the bands in Gainesville played the octaves of the chords rather than the Ramones chords and/or the Minutemen 9th chord syncopation he loved.
No, Ronnie doesn’t think he will suffer all that much in Gainesville. He figures he will be broke a lot, be hungry a lot, lonely, depressed, but he won’t mope about it and scream it out at some show. He will laugh. These bands work in limited spectrums, and after you’ve heard and processed, say, Captain Beefheart or Albert Ayler, it’s hard to go back.
Ronnie leaves the Nardic Track, and stepping out of the muggy show and into the relative cool of the Gainesville spring is in itself a glorious moment. He walks past groups of sweaty punk kids standing around in gossipy packs or sitting on the steps of the Hippodrome Theatre (a beautiful olden Greco-Roman column-heavy building) across the street, staring at Ronnie, not quite in a “Who the fuck is this guy and what the fuck is he doing here?” but more of a “Who let you in here?” kind of vibe you get anywhere anyplace the crowd is tight-knit and everyone in that circle knows everyone else’s story. He attempts a smile and a “What’s up?” to a couple dudes with skateboards sitting on either side of a girl with shaved green hair and cat-eye glasses. They say nothing.
In the car, Ronnie thinks it’s funny to freestyle emo lyrics like he heard tonight: “I don’t know . . . anybody heeeeeeeere / I shoulda peeeeeeeeeed before I left the shoooooooooow / now I gottaaaaaa gooooooooooo / man, I gottaaaaa goooooo/my blaaaaader screeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeams / to meeeeeee.” Through the small downtown, past the closed restaurants and closing bars and grills, the manic action of novice drunk kids acting like novice drunk kids. At Main and University, a flip-flop stepping brunette-with-blonde-streaks skin-covered skeleton girl in an orange and blue University of Florida t-shirt and matching pajama bottom screams “I’M SO DRUNK AND HAPPY I WANNA PUKE EVERYWHERE” while leading a pack of similarly attired friends across the intersection. Ronnie sings as he drives back to the other side of town, past a university he does not attend, down streets he does not know, as the college gives way to the residential neighborhoods. University Avenue begins its slow metamorphosis into Newberry Road, and the plazas and strip malls and apartment complexes begin.
PAYPHONE CALL TO MR. AND MRS. ALTAMONT
“Look, I walked out. It wasn’t a fun place to be, you know? The owner was this mustachioed Ay-rab cokehead who was always trying to grope the servers at the end of the night while everybody else who worked there had had a few drinks and I’m back there slaving away trying to wash the last of the dishes and plates so I can go home, because God forbid the lowly dishwasher gets to have a drink with the rest of the crew. I mean, sometimes they’d give me a bottle of Budweiser or something, but I mean, Budweiser gives me headaches, so I can’t even drink that. But not only that, it was like, so pretentious, how everyone just had to have their water with lemon, like the lemon makes a difference, and the customers were always calling everything ‘fabulous’ in like these haughty Newport, Rhode Island inflections, like earning five figures from commissions in the Central Florida real estate market gives you the right to act like you’ve made it into the upper echelons of the Really Rich.”
Right View. Right Thought. Right Speech. Right Behavior. Right Livelihood. Right Effort. Right Mindfulness. Right Concentration. As her son goes through this litany of complaints, Mrs. Sally-Anne Altamont makes a list, in spite of herself, of all the ways in which Ronnie is not following the Noble Eightfold Path. Where to begin?
“Ronnie.” Sally-Anne’s voice is firm, serious, a tone she hopes conveys how badly she wants him to stop ranting, just this once. But he’s always ranting anymore; in recent years, an anger, a caustic bitterness, sarcasm at everything and everyone. Where does it come from? They are retired now, Sally-Anne and her husband Charley, self-described “easy-going vegans, old—not ‘ex’—hippies, because we never stopped, and,” (for the past nine months, since Charley stole a book called The Teaching of Buddha out of the nightstand drawer of the luxury hotel he stayed in in Miami for a three-day academic conference devoted entirely to compound adverbs) “dilettante Buddhists.” They retired six years ago, when Ronnie went off to college, and before that lived frugally for decades, invested wisely—ethically, even—used the money to buy a beach house on Hilton Head Island, the ocean to the south, on a quiet section of the beach where they spend their late mornings reading passages from The Teaching of Buddha then meditating on their meanings.
Charley emerges from the hallway, pink-red-tan skin, docksider shoes, navy blue shorts, white t-shirt with two oars crossed into an X across the front, that white cap with the yellow rope coiled around the black anchor, not fat but not thin, a quarter-inch short of six feet tall. He looks at his wife—in a teal one-piece swimsuit, white floppy beach hat over the gray-black ponytailed long hippie hair, sunglasses, pink-red-tan skin, not fat but not thin, a quarter inch over five feet five inches—mouths “What is it?” Sally-Anne shakes her head “No.”
“And like everybody there was so insufferable,” Ronnie continues. “Like, I know this isn’t a big deal or nuthin’, but like people were always asking for capers on their entrees, even when the entrees didn’t need capers. Like they’d just go and ask the servers for capers to show off for their dates, like their taste in capers was gonna get them laid or something . . . ”
“Capers?” Sally-Anne repeats.
“Capers?” Charley Altamont says, laughs, gets shushed by Sally-Anne. He shuffles closer to her, fully immersed in the relaxed pace of beach life, no matter what is happening right now.
“Yeah. Capers. Those little salty pickled bulbous Mediterranean things? People would demand them on like honey-glazed chicken. That’s pretty nasty, right? You gotta admit . . . ”
“Ronnie,” Charley says after gently removing the phone from Sally-Anne’s grip.
“Dad?”
“You moved to Gainesville, and you’re talking about capers?”
“He’s on a payphone because the phone in the trailer was shut off,” Sally-Anne says.
“Hi, Dad.” Ronnie says. “Hi. I was just explaining to Mom what happened and why I ended up in Gainesville.”
“No job?”
“It’s like this,” Ronnie says, over the sounds of screaming babies and arguing couples from the Laundromat next to the minimart where Ronnie found the payphone. “I’m living in this trailer, and there’s no rent because the dude who owns it has it all paid off, so like, there aren’t that many bills, except the phone—but whatever. The payphone’s only like a five minute walk.”
Sigh. Right View. Right Thought. Right Speech. Right Behavior. Right Livelihood. Right Effort. Right Mindfulness. Right Concentration.
“How are you eating?”
“Oh, that’s fine, Dad. I found this place where you can donate plasma twice a week, and that pays like $40, so I get food money that way.”
Sigh. Existence is suffering.
“Plasma.” Charley repeats.
“Yeah, see, it’s fine because now—”
“Give me your address.”
“OK.”
“I’m sending you money. Get your phone turned on. Get a job, Ronnie.”
“I’ve been looking. It’s the end of the semester though, so nobody’s hiring.”
“And you moved to Gainesville, why? I know why you left Orlando, what with the pretentious use of capers and everything . . . ”
“That wasn’t the only reason.”
“Why Gainesville?”
“Hang on . . . I need to put more change in the payphone.”
Charley waits. Sharp shocks of indigestion he hasn’t felt since converting to veganism four years ago. Leave it to his son to give him indigestion, because it sure isn’t the quinoa.
“OK, I’m back. I’m here to be a writer and a musician.”
“You couldn’t do that in Orlando?”
“No, not really.”
“Get a job, Ronnie. Use your degree, and get a job.”
“This degree from UCF doesn’t count for much here in Gainesville.”
“Get a job. This is the only time I’m doing this. Write and play music in your free time.”
“Sure.”
“And no more plasma donating for money. For your mom’s sake. Promise.”
“Of course. I got a plan here . . . ”
“You don’t.” Charley says. “Otherwise, you wouldn’t have moved up there. Give me your address.”
SCENES FROM A STOP AND SHOP AND GAS AND GO
“Thankth hon,” a haggard blonde lisps to Ronnie between missing front and bottom teeth, grabbing the pack of Newports off the cracked plastic wood counter, shakes what remains of her emaciated frame out the door, in that sloppy strut natural to run-down addicts, as her flip-flops flip, flop, flip, flop out the door.
“That’s Crazy Annie,” Travis, Manager of the 7:00 a.m. – 3:00 p.m. shift, explains. Travis is one of those short guys with all his fat compressed and isolated into his belly, with salt and pepper hair in a receding pompadour, bushy black moustache centering a bloated face.
“See, she’s crazy,” Kim, the Assistant Manager of the a.m. shift, one of those thin raspy flame-broiled looking middle-aged women indigenous to the South with sunscarred skin and a frizzy perm circa 1982, the kind who chain smoke Merit cigarettes.
“Hence the name,” Travis supplies.
“I see,” Ronnie says. It’s Ronnie’s first day on the job, clerking here at the Stop and Shop and Gas and Go. He had filled out applications all over town, but it was true what Mouse had told him: There were no jobs to be had this time of year, unless you want to join the military, babysit rich kids at Club Med, or teach English in some ambitious country eager to learn the lingua franca from a card carrying native speaker. He lucked out getting hired here—if by “lucked out,” you think working the morning shift in a convenience store nestled between seedy motels on 13th Street where beat-to-hell black and white men who stumble in with bloodshot eyes and tattered flannel shirts buy all the cheap wine they can afford to guzzle down on a 72 degree Wednesday morning constitutes “lucking out.”
“Cigarettes ain’t all she smokes,” Kim says, punctuating her comment with a wheezy, coughy laugh, her breath like the stale smoke/dirty laundry stench of the clothes Ronnie wears to shows and doesn’t wash for a month.
“No?” Ronnie says, blue eyes widened in an attempt at Andy Kaufmanesque childlike innocence.
“She smokes crack,” Travis says, leaning in close to Ronnie, elbowing him in the ribs and adding, sotto voce. “And dick, if you know what I mean.”
Ronnie stares, from Travis, to Kim, and back, trying to look befuddled. “Crack? Dick? Jeez, Travis, this is a lot to figure out for my first day.”
“She’s a prostitute!” Kim laughs, then coughs. “Smokes dick! Get it?”
“Ohhhhhhh,” Ronnie says, in exaggerated epiphany.
The store’s walls are covered in fake wood paneling. The floors are a pee-stained white tile. The wet turdish mint smell of chewing tobacco. The eye-watering tinge of cheap bleach. The counter area is an overcrowded island in the middle of the store. Inches above Ronnie’s head are hanging trucker’s caps extolling the virtues of fishing over working, of the inherent stupidity of women, of cartoon criminals shooting off sparks from an electric chair with the caption, “JUSTICE COMES DEEP-FRIED OR EXTRA KRISPY.” Ronnie’s first morning behind the counter is a steady hum of American retail commerce; the alcoholics and prostitutes are replaced by the morning rush of the gainfully employed purchasing coffee, cigarettes, gasoline. The rush of the morning passes into the quiet of mid-day.
“Well, here comes Retard Gary,” Travis announces as a short bald man wearing an oversized black t-shirt with a silkscreen on the front of a silhouette of a coyote howling at a full moon as lightning and F-15 fighter planes fill in the background, baggy acid-washed jeans, dirty white sneakers and thick nerd-framed glasses parks his adult tricycle in front of the store and limps in from the bright muggy morning.
“Retard Gary?” Ronnie asks, standing in front of the register, Travis to his left, Kim to his right, both managers standing over to make sure Ronnie pushes the right buttons for the corresponding purchases.
“He’s a retard,” Kim says.
“We was just talkin’ about you, Gary,” Travis says, wicked yellow smile from his fat face. “Your girlfriend Crazy Annie was here asking about you.”
“No way!” Retard Gary says, hobbling to the Coke dispensers. “Nuh-uh. I don’t like Crazy Annie.”
“So you’re a fag then,” Travis hollers. Kim snorts, laughs, coughs. “You probably got AIDS all over you.” Ronnie laughs—not at the joke, but the quietly desperate laugh you laugh when your boss says something so horrible that you don’t know what to do because you need the job because you need the money.
“Shut up, Travis!” Retard Gary says as the ice machine rumbles and delivers a mini-avalanche into his orange and blue extra-extra large (“Thirst Annhilator”) 64-oz cup. “I don’t got AIDS on me! I like girls!”
“I’m from Missouri, Gary,” Travis says, leaning forward to follow Retard Gary’s path from the coke station to the register, belly pressed into the counter. “Show me a girlfriend.”
“And not one of them crackwhores out here on 13th Street neither,” Kim says. Travis laughs like a boorish dog from a 1970s Saturday morning cartoon. Ronnie does not laugh.
•
Ronnie Altamont sits on the closed toilet seat, staring at the racist graffiti, body in the pose of “The Thinker” statue and everything. It’s like: How far out of your element can you feel in 98 percent of your waking hours? Florida. Fucking Florida. Ronnie. Fucking Ronnie. It’s why they call it “work,” right? Life must be sustained by doing stressful seemingly pointless tasks like clerking convenience stores because somebody somewhere needs this job done and is willing to pay somebody else something for it.
Ronnie leaves the men’s room, returns to the register. Two fishermen—a father and son—son a smaller, less round version of the father—both in matching teal Miami Dolphins sleeveless shirts and two white fishermen caps with hooks encircling the brim—set two 12-packs of Old Hamtramck on the counter.
“It’s all you, chief,” Kim says, pointing to the register’s rows and columns of buttons.
Ronnie punches in the prices, adds the sales tax. The fisherfather and fisherson stare at the trucker’s hats dangling inches over Ronnie’s faded vermillion hair.
“Hey man,” the fisherfather says. “Raise that flap!”
The hat directly above Ronnie’s is light blue with white mesh and a velcroed flap reading, in the girlish bubble cursive of hearted I’s, “IF GIRLS ARE MADE OF SUGAR AND SPICE . . . ”
Ronnie turns, raises his arms, unvelcroes the flap. Underneath the raised flap, the question, “WHY DO THEY TASTE LIKE ANCHOVIES?” above a picture of a dead green fish with white stink squiggles.
Everybody haw haw haws, including Ronnie, who actually finds it funny. He might even buy it if he had the money. But he doesn’t, and it would be bad form to steal on the first day of the job.
“Y’all, that’s gross!” Kim says, eliciting further laughs from the fishermen.
“Yeah, I’d buy it,” the fisherfather says, starting to walk away with the two Old Hamtramck 12-packs. “But I have a feeling his mother,” and here, he turns his head to his fisherson, “wouldn’t take too kindly to it.”
Ronnie does not share these concerns. The hat should be his. It is already so close to his head, hanging there. He was never a thief, never had klepto tendencies growing up the way some kids were always stealing gum etc. from stores. It’s only one white trash hat out of dozens that never get sold in these kinds of stores. They’re practically decorations anyway. Travis is on his lunch break. If Ronnie is to make the hat his, he will have to do it now, with Travis gone, and when Kim goes off to take one of countless smoke breaks.
The temptation is too great. While Kim stands on the minimart’s front sidewalk puffing a Merit, Ronnie removes the hat, bundles it up, stuffs it down his “professionally attired” khaki slacks. His blue Oxford shirt is large enough to cover the obvious bulge, and no one can see over the counter anyway.
Ronnie rings up Lunchables and Cokes for the workaday construction or landscaping crews on their breaks. Kim watches his fingers for any slight mis-hit of the register’s buttons from Ronnie as she sings along with the Young Country Music from the store’s speakers—off-key renditions of tunes tackling topics like memories of the fun had near rivers as a randy teenager, of overly confident rural men with tremendous pride in their country and background, of rowdy bars full of questionable characters who, despite all outward appearances and behaviors, are a swell bunch of folks. And so on. And so forth.
“What kind of music do you like?” Kim asks. “I seen your hair.”
Ronnie hates this question. “I don’t know, man . . . ” he says, unable to hide his annoyance. “A lot of things. Punk? Jazz?”
“That ain’t music,” Kim says, matter-of-factly. She points to the ceiling, where the Young Country never stops. “Now this—this—is music.”
Ronnie doesn’t speak to her again.
Travis returns from his lunch break, waddling through the front door, proclaiming, “Hooeee, those were some mighty fine ribs. My-tee fine!” Ronnie immediately steps away from the register, announces “Going on my break now!” He leaves the register island, circling away to the main walkway out the door. “Be back in half an hour,” Travis says, and Ronnie blurts out a “Yup!” and pushes open the doors, steps out, hears the sleigh bells taped to shing-shing when anyone enters or leaves the Stop and Shop and Gas and Go.
“He ain’t comin’ back, is he?” Travis says, rib sauce drying around his mouth and on his fingers, still standing three steps in from the doors.
“Doubt it,” Kim says, taking one step to the register, humming along to the Young Country music. “You seen his hair?”
Ronnie’s blandy apple green domestic sedan squeals into reverse. He shifts to drive, zooms out of the parking lot, cuts off a dirty white lunchwagon whose driver almost honks her horn. At the next light, Ronne reaches down, pulls out the “IF GIRLS ARE MADE OF SUGAR AND SPICE . . . ” hat. He smiles at his reflection in the rear view mirror. He drives towards the University, to the saffron and purple gowned Krishnas doling out free food. He will eat, then drive across town to donate plasma, then buy a real dinner at Publix with the money, try to write something, fall asleep.
WILLIAM RETURNS FROM THE TOUR
Fourteen states, twelve days, three narrowly averted inter-band fistfights, one unaverted inter-band fistfight, one cancelled show, one set cut short because no one showed up and the barstaff wanted to close early, one guitar amp dying a smoky death mid-way through another set, one instance of the drummer waking up naked with a missing suitcase and no idea where in Columbus he might be, and the final three days and nights spent subsisting on nothing but wonder bread and bologna stolen from a corner store near the Fireside Bowl in Chicago later, you’re back in the walk-in cooler behind the restaurant getting high with your equally tattooed and pierced dinner-shift manager, who asks you “So how was the tour, bro?” after exhaling the skunkweedy joint and passing it to you, and you’re either not sure or not willing to answer the question, even if your manager asks this because he plays bass in Salo’s Children—another band in the hardcore scene—and wants the vicarious thrill of actually playing outside Florida, because you figure your bass playing manager must know, deep down, that Salo’s Children suck and will never get the chance to leave F.L.A.
“Never again,” you say before smoking, and that’s all you want to say right now. You think of the fifth of Floridian Comfort in your car, and you want it now, but you wait, because you know, once you get started, you’ll elaborate on “Never again,” and the elaborations on the ultimately monotonous hurry-up-slow-down nature of touring, interspersed with the occasional weird and sometimes even wonderful adventures far from home will continue past closing the kitchen tonight and lead you to the usual impromptu front porch party somewhere around here, and there will be no shutting up. The pot keeps you in the moment, heightening the smells of frozen dough and cold sauce, preserved vegetables and damp pasta. Stoned now, you say, “It’s weird being back here,” and that part of it is even harder to explain—to be back in this tiny walk-in cooler in your black Gatorroni’s by the Slice work shirt, dough-stained black work slacks, red bandana soaking up the Florida kitchen sweat—so you don’t.
“I’ll tell you about it later.” You’re now high enough to get through the dishwashing, table-wiping, food-serving shift. You pass the manager what remains of the joint, and step out into the hot parking lot and into the hotter kitchen—a five-second change of eighty degrees.
Your ex-girlfriend, now dating your ex-best friend after finding out you hooked up with his ex-girlfriend, stands by the dishtank holding a red plastic tray with two veggie slices. She works the registers with your ex-ex-girlfriend and your current girlfriend.
“Take these to the outside tables,” she says, hostile yet noncommittal. Deliberately, she’s looking to the front of the restaurant and away from you. She has dyed red streaks in her short black hair now, the circle-plus female symbol newly-tattooed on her inner left arm. You’re trying real hard to not laugh at these latest developments.
You relieve her of the tray, knowing your streak of going nine days without wishing for the horrific death of your ex-girlfriend has snapped. “The dumbass who ordered them is too drunk to come back to the counter,” she says. She flashes a Florida-trademarked mean-grin, passive-aggressive rudeness couched in the faintest of barely polite smiles. “Even makes you seem sober.”
“It’s great seeing you again too.” She rolls her eyes, returns to the counter. Yes, it’s great to be back in Gainesville, back in the kitchen of Gatorroni’s by the Slice. Picking up where you left off.
You walk past the counter, smile at your current girlfriend—who smiles back in that nineteen naïve-teen way of hers—all teeth and wide green eyes and dyed blonde short hair with a barrette in the front of the left part and granny glasses and still untattooed and still unjaded. You brood on how long all of this will last until she gets tired of your moods, your personality. You. It’s a busy, all-too-familiar night. The booths along the front windows are full, students hunched over text books, half-eaten slices temporarily set aside, families bunched around the tables, moms rocking strollers while dads try to keep their four year olds from kneeling or standing on the chairs in potentially dangerous poses as they reach over to sip from their Cokes. Some cheap hippie spent fifty cents to subject everyone to all thirty-plus minutes of the Allman Brothers’ insufferable “Mountain Jam” on the jukebox. The grease-laden underbelly of these red plastic trays, and the burnt cheese/sweaty meat stench of all these pizza pies in and out of the oven to the hungry Gainesville dining public. Outside, dozens of crusty-punks, indie-punks, emo-punks, hardcore kids, so on and so forth, all the little sub-genres too small to hang in their own little cliques, acknowledging each other in the Gatorroni’s outdoor dining area—pitcher after pitcher, often on the house thanks to their friends working inside. The humidity that never seems to go away, heightened by the kitchen’s heat, red bandana around your forehead not enough to soak the sweat.
It’s almost like the tour never happened. You set the pizza down at the drunk guy’s table—some Gatorroni Loser who’s always out here in his finest street punk leisure wear. He doesn’t see the pizza because he’s too busy arguing that The Clash isn’t “punk enough” for his standards.
Your drunk-ass friends, yelling and bouncing around the farthest outdoor dining table, call your name and wave you over. “We-heh-hell, Bill Collector himself, back from the worldwide tour,” Neil says, stepping off the barstool to face you and doff his New York Yankees ballcap—temporarily exposing the stubbled black hair receding higher and higher along the forehead. His brother Paul stands to his right, at the head of the table, pouring their fourth free pitcher into his cup, Neil’s cup, and the cups in front of the aptly-named Drunk John and Boston Mike. You know it’s the fourth pitcher and you know it’s a free pitcher because you’re the one who’s been walking them over to the table.
“Aw, c’mon,” Paul says, finishing the angled pour into Boston Mike’s plastic cup. “You know William goes by William now. Bill Collector was PUNK”—and here, Paul punches the table and rattles the cups and the pitcher—“but William, and just William? That’s hardcore, dude . . . ”
You smile at this. In high school back in Orlando, you were in this band called The Dicks, and your “stage name”—you never played on any stages—was Bill Collector. The band was very short-lived, and not only because there was already a well-known, highly-regarded band from Austin, Texas called The Dicks that you had somehow never heard of.
Drunk John punches you on the right shoulder, a light smack from a scrawny tattooed arm. “We heard all about Bloomington, Indiana, haw haw,” he says, and all you can do is shake your head from side to side and say, “Never again,” to which everyone at the table laughs at what you can only laugh at from a safe distance. You, curled into a corner of the typical punk house, reeking of post-show sweat and smoke, in clothes long unwashed, rolled into a mutli-stained off-white blanket like a filthy unhealthy burrito on the hirsute hardwood floor—pillowless, but whatever. The post-show party was there, full of denim-clad males mostly who wanted to talk about this record and that band as meanwhile the smattering of women present were surrounded by, on average, five men all going after the same thing—and boy, do the women in these towns know it—and what gets you is how disinterested they were in anything but their stupid town—their stupid towns, because everybody wants to talk about where they live like it matters. You don’t think it matters, not anymore. After enough shows like these, all you wanted was a good night’s sleep for a change, not another night of listening to the denim dudes talk about the punk rock all night. So at this particular Bloomington, Indiana post-show after-party, you drank enough to find a relatively quiet corner to pass out, pulled the blanket over your head so the music, some hyper-distorted scream you’re already overly familiar with, seeped into your hearing slightly less obtrusively . . . As you fall into an unconsciousness on the border between drunkenness and the morning’s hangover drain, you sense someone standing over you. You hear sniffles, a conspiratorially whispered, “Yo! Hey!” The only way to get your head out of the blanket is to unroll your body completely from the blankets wraparound, so you roll and roll into this person’s steel-toed black boot. The light is on, the records are off, and there is no sound except for the buzzsaw-to-a-swine’s-throat snores of your bass player who you can see scored the shredded green couch on the other side of the littered living room. “Look at my face!” the singer of the local band, the headlining band, whispers, standing over you. He wears trash-stenched jeans and a sleeveless jean jacket with CRASS written on the back in black permanent marker. He has Jaggerish facial features, if Jagger had that weird kinda-inbred look some people in Indiana have. A red droplet falls from his face, lands on your blanket, and you now understand why his voice is phlegmatic and novocained as he says, “They broke my nose. We’ve been backyard fighting!” He smiles—one lead singer to the next—“And you gotta see this shit!” he adds, and you’re like, “Fuck it, when will I ever be in Bloomington, Indiana again?” So you step out of the blanket—still in your Docs, but whatever—and you step over discarded beer cans, whiskey bottles, pizza boxes, vomit, gum, clothing, show fliers, records, cds, kitty litter, kitty kibbles, blue red and yellow pieces to the “Sorry” boardgame, the bodies of the other members of your band, MOE GREEN’S FUCKING EYE SOCKET5, are too-frozen in that way people get when they’re trying to pretend to be asleep. Are they your friends anymore? You try not to look too closely at the fliers on the wall of show after show after show after band after band after band—shitty drawings of mohawked
skeletons and the graffiti everywhere of DK, Circle As, pot leafs, malt liquor bottles, straight edge Xs, swastikas with NO signs, and echoing through your beat-up skull is that line from “Salad Days” by Minor Threat, the core has gotten soft—and the thing is—when the singer said, “you gotta see this shit!” you didn’t think he was being literal. In the middle of the kitchen—the once-white linoleum kitchen with the once-teal space age cabinetry and space age appliances, everything now smudged with grime, trash and rodent droppings—you recognize the rhythm guitarist of the headlining band, he who proudly told you at the 6:00 p.m. load-in into the club, “I’ve been drinking since ten a.m.!” who by 2:00 a.m. was a not-that-interesting mix of whiskey-blackedout belligerence, nudity, and inarticulate, unreasoned arguments on the college kids in this town, the relative pros and cons of assorted pornographic magazines, and how much better society would be if cops weren’t around to fuck with everybody—this rhythm guitarist is now passed out in the middle of the kitchen as the lead guitarist and bass player stand on either side of him five feet apart holding a stretch of Saran Wrap. The lead singer grabs a video camera, yells “Go!” to the chunky drummer—one of those too-many-Midwestern-meals-from-Dutch-peasant-stock-already-with-a-tendency-towards-bigness type dudes—who squats over the passed out rhythm guitarist, unbuttons his jeans, unzips his fly, drops the jeans and the boxers, and deuces on the Saran Wrap. You’re on the border between the kitchen and the living room, feeling nausea right down to your balls as the turds drop and weigh down the Saran Wrap and the lead singer holds the camera, laughing, asks the rhythm guitarist if he feels something warm on his face. Turd one landed on his septum; turd two on his right cheek. It’s a short stumble, steering way clear of the laughter and the bodies in the middle of the kitchen, to the back screen door. You narrowly avoid puking all over one of their girlfriends—some attempted Bettie Page doppelgänger—and hunch by the fence and cough and spit and gag and ask yourself what the hell you’re doing so far from home. Not-Bettie Page smokes in a lawnchair, is kind enough to inform you upon your emergence from the pukey darkness that “They don’t mean nuthin’. It’s just what we do here when we drink too much.” You nod, and right about here, you decide to leave the back porch, walk around the side of the house, knock on the van doors until someone lets you in, find space to sleep, hope to remember the blanket in the morning and not forget about it the way you forgot about the pillow in a house much like this one, in Cleveland.
“. . . Some people have a weird idea of fun,” is all you can say about it to Neal, Paul, Drunk John and Boston Mike. They laugh at this; you turn to walk away. “Get us another pitcher or we’ll shit on your face!” Boston Mike yells behind you, and you have to laugh.
For now, you won’t tell them, or anyone, that MOE GREEN’S FUCKING EYE SOCKET is finished. From the drive from Louisville to home, no one spoke to anyone excepting the absolute necessity of communicating stops for bodily functions and gas money for the van. You’ve never been happier to see your own bed, but the rhythms of touring—the drive, the load-in, the hang out, the drink, the finally play, the other bands, the load-out, the search for a place to stay, the after-party everyone insists on throwing, the pass out, the wake up from not sleeping is its own routine, and it’s difficult to shake, even if the whole time you missed Gainesville, your house, your girlfriend. But then you’re back and here you are again at Gatorroni’s by the Slice and realize, you don’t miss a thing.
Back in the kitchen, you make more pizza, sneak more pitchers to Neal and all them. The dinner rush tapers off. The students finish their slices and take their textbooks back to the dorms. The families leave their tables unbussed and go home. With an hour to go until closing, your girlfriend with her bleach blonde barretted hair and giant too-young smile who’s working to save money so she can have as many tattoos as everyone else working here, grabs you by the arm in the dishtank while you’re trying to scrub burnt minced garlic from a skillet, says, “Let’s go to the walk-in.”
You grab the mop and follow her out the back door, into the hot parking lot and into the walk-in cooler, thinking, Well, there are worse ways to be welcomed back to town. You wedge the mop into the inside door handle to prevent any unwelcome entry.
“I missed having you here,” she says, leaning in for a long kiss before grabbing you by the hips and gently pushing you backwards until you’re against the cold shelves. She squats down, unzips your pants, grabs, strokes, sucks. Stacked on the opposite shelves are white plastic gallon-sized cylindrical bins where some prep cook lackey wrote “MARINARA 4/16.” Your head rolls backwards and your eyes land on these bins. One hand rolls over her hair, over the barrette, and the other hand grips one of the frosty vertical beams of the shelving. You moan. Someone pulls on the cooler and you yell “Go away!” The mop rattles with the violent pulls on the door but does what it was put there to do.
“Welcome back,” she says when finished. You smile, catch your breath, say nothing. She removes the mop, hands it to you. “Bye,” she says, opening the walk-in cooler as you wipe up with the white towel you keep in your back pocket for wiping down counters and tables. You pull up your boxers, your pants, zip, button. Open the walk-in and step into the heat once again, but instead of going back into the kitchen to start closing up for the night, you run to your car, open the passenger door, unscrew the Floridian Comfort fifth and chug. The booze squeegees and muddles your head. You spin around and look to the clouds and the sliver of a moon and wish you could be ten different places at once and ten different people at once and you want to laugh at this finite life and dance away the unshakable anxiety that keeps you up nights and leaves you a puddle of boozy drool—that this is as good as it will ever be.
You walk back into the kitchen. Your manager asks if you wanna spark another one. You smile, turn around, and it’s back into the walk-in cooler, only, this time, you think you can actually start talking about the tour—all of its good/bad unboring/banal glory/futility.
SCENES FROM THE REVEREND B. STONED’S
OPEN-MIC ECLECTIC JAMBALAYA JAM
The wait. The insufferable wait to perform at Reverend B. Stoned’s Open-Mic Eclectic Jambalaya Jam here at Turn Your Head and Coffee, an off-campus coffeehouse on the University Avenue entertainment strip. Icy Filet (neé Chelsey Anne Cavanaugh) studies her carefully prepared notecards by candlelight in a far corner of the tiny square room, periodically sipping a soy Americano from a large green mug—this wait a nerve-wracking ordeal of hot and cold flashes, sour stomach nausea rumbles, a general itchiness. Maybe she should cross her name off the sign-up sheet. She looks away from her notecards, mouths the words, and always—always—forgets everything past the first four lines. This is no way to be a freestyle rapper, she thinks, breathes in, breathes out. I need to leave.
“Greetings, to all my brothers and sisters of this funktified congregation,” the Reverend B. Stoned bellows in a voice that is one-third televangelical preacher, one-third game-show announcer and one-third stoner-whispering-some-conspiracy-theory-about-the-government (Icy Filet recognizes him from his picture on all the fliers around campus—black beret with the two short black braids sticking out the back, black priest shirt and white clerical collar, pink-tinted John Lennon sunglasses, black fu-manchu rounding his round face, the tie-dyed kilt and the knee-high combat boots), and the dozen-odd patrons seated in the wobbly round candlelit tables in front of the stage clap politely. “Are you ready to hear gospels of nonconformity and antidisestablishmentarianism?” The applause increases, and two of the rowdier audience members Woo-Hoo! to this.
It’s too late now to take her name off the list, or so Icy Filet believes—too anxious, brain increasingly manically feverish with each sip from the soy Americano, to listen to the Reverend B. Stoned’s opening monologue in which he preaches the virtues of marijuana legalization. Unsurprisingly, no one disagrees; Turn Your Head and Coffee is an inevitably lefty/libertarian coffeehouse. Icy Filet could leave. Why does she want to do this in front of strangers applauding platitudes like “Don’t let our dreams for marijuana legalization go up in smoke! Legalize, don’t criminalize!”?
As the enthusiastic applause begins to fade, the Reverend B. Stoned preaches into the microphone, “Brothers and sisters: Lift up your hearts and open your mind, soul, and ears to the righteous tirades of my sister in spirit, Miss Hillary X!”
Miss Hillary X steps onto the six inch high stage, approaches the mic stand—a waifish young woman of seventeen with bright blue short hair, a white t-shirt with the word RESIST! screenpainted across in Courier New font. Spiky wristbands on both wrists. Red plaid pants with suspenders between the legs. Combat boots wrapped in chains so they dramatically clunk with each step. A practice-makes-perfect scowl with a Sid Vicious sneer. She glares at the crowd, removes the mic from the stand.
“EVERY DAY . . . I SUFFER . . . UNDER THE TYRANNY . . . OF THE PATRIARCHY!” she yells, monotonical and strident.
“And it’s nice to see you too,” Icy Filet mumbles to no one, seated in the back, wondering why people can never start things off at open mic nights with nice greetings, simple hellos even, before jumping in with the world-hating.
“I WORK JUST AS HARD AS A MAN,” Miss Hillary X continues, standing at attention, head turning from one table to the next, accusing eyes searching for anyone gathered here tonight at Turn Your Head and Coffee who might be in cahoots with the phallocentrists. “BUT I DON’T GET PAID AS MUCH AS A MAN! I WORK SO HARD . . . BUT TO A MAN, MAN, I’M JUST HERE . . . TO KEEP THEM HARD! MY SUBSERVIENT PUSSY! MY MANHANDLED ASS! MY SLAVEDRIVEN TITTIES!” With each yell of her body parts, Miss Hillary X grabs said body parts and shakes them, dramatically.
Icy Filet remembers Hillary Johnson, aka, Miss Hillary X, from high school back in Lake Mary. Two years younger than Icy, she was the notorious editor-in-chief of the school’s newspaper—annoying and shrill—muckraking the quality of lunchroom pizza, and how there wasn’t enough of a break between classes to get to your next class on time. Somebody somewhere deemed her “gifted,” and everyone believed it, and at the end of the day, the principal and administrators were probably all-too-happy to allow her to use her AP college credits to start college one year early. But still, back then, no matter how insufferable she could be, Hillary was never this angry. Icy Filet analyzes potential causes—moving away too young, one-too-many Women’s Studies classes, or perhaps something much, much worse. Terrible things can happen in college, or even just walking down the street. Everyone needs an outlet—perhaps this is why we’re here tonight, Icy Filet thinks. And if it means indulging dreadful—what? spoken word?—well, it’s better than a lot of other ways people deal with their shit.
Miss Hillary Xs rant culminates in a final scream of “MY REVOLUTIONARY BREASTS SCREAM FOR LIBERATION.” Miss Hillary X lifts her white RESIST t-shirt, exposing budding breasts, nipples pierced with one glittering silver ring each. She raises her arms into the air, makes what may or may not be Black Power fists, tosses her shirt into the air, landing to her left, halfway between stage and tables. The audience gasps, applauds, woo-hoos, screams ecstatic affirmations.
“Oh God oh God oh . . . ” Icy Filet says to herself under the din of the audience. “Please don’t let me go on after her . . . ” Icy tries recalling her lines, her dope-ass rhymes. Her memory has succumbed to panic. She recalls nothing. “I’m screwed,” she thinks. “I should be back in the dorm studying.”
The Reverend B. Stoned returns to the stage. “Wow, man, that was truly inspiringly countercultural, wouldn’t you agree my brothers and sisters? Let’s lighten the mood now with some poetry by my favorite—bud! Heh heh heh!” (Here everyone except Icy laughs.) “Smokey Green!”
Smokey Green, dressed in the obligatory hippie attire, stands onstage in a thick patchouli cloud and reads his poem in the burnout dope dealing raspy voiced stock character in any film from the 1970s:
“See: Bud is my bud
Not the Bud that you drink
But the bud that you smoke
Take a toke
Smell the smoke
This ain’t no joke
Breathe it in
Feel the grin
the love will spread
check your head
you’re as high as the sky
you don’t need to fly
to climb aboard
and be with your bud, bud
Peace.”
Raucous applause. Icy Filet groans. She hopes—more than anything—that she will not be called up next. But of course, “And now, sisters and brothers,” the Reverend B. Stoned says, black fingernail polished right index finger following the sign-up sheet to the next name. “I believe this is the first time we’ve had a freestyle rapper here, but that’s cool, that’s cool. Welcome to our congregation . . . Icy Filet.”
She removes the Casio SK-1 from her UF orange and blue totebag at her feet, gathers her notecards off the table. The walk to the stage feels like the walk to an execution. She sets the SK-1 on the onstage barstool, approaches the mic. “Hi, my name is Icy Filet? I’m a rapper?” The audience laughs at this remark. “Um. I’m not trying to be funny. This is what I do. I rap. I’m from the mean streets of Lake Mary.” Icy Filet dresses in the “sexless librarian chic” style fashionable among indie-rock women in the mid-1990s. Short black hair parted in the manner of a 1950s accountant. Cardigan sweaters. Slouched postures. Thick nerd glasses. Shapeless black pants. Low-cut Doc Martens. She flips through her notecards, finds it. “OK. I’d like to start with this rap. It’s called ‘I Eat Pop Tarts.’ Thank you.”
She turns around, switches on the SK-1. A tinny pseudo hip-hop beat circa 1984 blips and loops out the keyboard’s small speaker. Icy Filet turns to the mic, clears her throat, looks down at her notecards (not daring to look at the audience), and rhymes, in a cadence nervous and uneven:
“I eat Pop Tarts
every day now
it’s how my day starts
every way now
strawberry, blueberry
icing in my mouth
east coast
west coast
Pop Tarts north and south
toaster oven microwave
Pop Tart flava what I crave
eat it cuz it’s healthy
it could even make me wealthy
Yo I know—what I say ain’t true
Yo I know—but what I feel is right
Yo I know—Pop Tarts taste stew [And here, Icy Filet loses the thread, loses her place on the notecards]
Yo I know— Pop Tarts aiiiiight
Word.”
She steps away from the mic, the beat blipping its trebly syncopation behind her as she does a practiced nervous dance of one sideways lift from one leg to the next. She cannot look forward, even if the room is dark beyond the candlelight centering the tables. She shifts sideways as she dances, an awkward lurch to the barstool to turn off the SK-1. The beat is silenced between the two and three of the measure. She stands there, awaiting a reaction, applause, something. There’s an awkward silence, broken only by a loud whisper of “What the fuck was that?” and Icy Filet wants to cry, wants to grab the SK-1, toss the notecards and never look at them again and run back to the dorm and try and find some answer in her Psych 101 textbook that might explain what kink in her psycho-social development makes her aspire to be the whitest rapper in Gainesville, if not the entire world.
One rapid enthusiastic pair of hands clap and someone yells “Yaaaaaaayyyyyy!” as he runs up to her, and Icy Filet is convinced, irrationally but entirely, that it’s Charles Manson and he wants to kill her for what she just did up there, but then she remembers, oh yeah, he’s in jail.
“I’m Mouse!” this sudden fan whispers in her ear as he steps onto the stage. With both hands, he grabs her shoulders, adds, “And I’m sorry to have to go after you, because, heh heh heh, that was the best thing to ever happen here, dude! Seriously!” He loops her right arm like a chivalrous Charles Manson. “Let me lead you back to your seat,” and he—Mouse—has this goofy grin, and Icy Filet no longer thinks he looks like Charles Manson, but like someone more attractive than Charles Manson.
As they walk away, the Very Reverend B. Stoned returns to the stage, to the microphone, says, “That was . . . interesting,” in that sarcastic voice people get when they’re threatened by what they perceive as the not-normal. The audience laughs at this, at Icy Filet. She wants to cry; Mouse sees the hurt in her eyes.
“Fuck ’em!” he says before pulling out her seat at the table, then gently pushing her in. He leans in, whispers, “You did great. Don’t forget that,” and Icy Filet hasn’t completely given up yet on performing, on her ambition of the moment.
“. . . But I guess you never know what you’re gonna get when you come out to Reverend B. Stoned’s Open Mic Eclectic Jambalaya Jam! Am I right?! Am I right!” The Reverend B. Stoned raises his arms in triumph, “Number One” index fingers pointing to the ceiling painted to resemble puffy white clouds on a bright blue day. Enthusiastic woo-hoos, all around. “And hey,” the Reverend continues. “Thanks to Turn Your Head and Coffee for giving us a space to exercise our First Amendment rights, because? If we didn’t have the First Amendment? We’d have a lot of problems, and we couldn’t do what we’re doing tonight . . . like, uh . . . rapping about Pop Tarts.”
Laughter. “Don’t listen to him,” Mouse says, hands on Icy Filet’s shoulders. “I’m nervous to have to go after you.”
Before Icy Filet has a chance to ask, “You’re doing something tonight?” the Reverend calls Mouse to the open mic to, “Do whatever it is Mouse does, because I don’t know if I understand it myself.”
Polite applause, over which Mouse yells, “Thank you! Thank you!” and blows kisses to the audience like a venerable Hollywood starlet waving to fans before climbing into the limousine. He runs to the darkness to the side of the stage, grabs an amplifier and electric guitar, carries them to the stage, plugs in the amp, slips the hot pink strap through his head, connects the cable from the guitar to the amp, connects a distortion pedal to the mic cable, connects another cord from the pedal to a coffeehouse amplifier ill-equipped for much beyond the quiet poetic intensity of the average singer-songwriter. Mouse turns everything on. The guitar shrieks violent open-string vibrations, and the distorted microphone howls painful white noise. Mouse shimmies in place to these sounds for five seconds before screaming into the microphone, voice modulated into monstrous distortion. He drops his pants, tosses the guitar in the air. The guitar lands on its body, clanging layers of noise into the tortured amplifier, neck thwacking into the worn red duct-taped stage floor. Under his smudged blue thrift-store pants are diapers. Pants around his legs, he hops like a leprechaun around an Irish spring. He slips out of his teal flip-flops, dances out of his pants. He reaches into the diaper and pulls out a knife. The guitar still howls and Mouse still screams. He grasps the knife handle, extends his arm, stabs his chest repeatedly. The audience screams. It’s too dim to know for sure that it’s one of those toy knives that sink into the handle with contact. Half the audience, circled around the tables closest to the stage, use this as an opportunity to leave the room post-haste. Mouse screams another psychotic howl—no, um, “lyrics” to any of this, simply extended shrieks and howls—then steps to the amplifier, reaches behind it, removes two bags of flour, a large red bag of Bugles snacks, and three packages of bologna. He tears into the flour bags, shakes them across the front of the stage as the guitar clangs shrill feedback from the vibrations of Mouse’s steps. White dust clouds reflect candle light, overhead stage lights. Through the thick flour flying and landing everywhere, Mouse opens the Bugle bag, grabs a handful, smashes them into his plain white t-shirt, stuffs some down his diaper, chews some, spits them out on stage, hurls handfuls at anyone he can make out through the darkness and the low-visibility flour. He opens the bologna packages, wipes his brow with the slimy gray meaty circles, flings them up and out like tiny Frisbees. Now out of food, Mouse removes the microphone from the stand, falls to the stage and rolls around, screaming a sustained guttural banshee screech, body crunching over Bugles, skidding over bologna, flour sticking to damp skin, guitar sustaining an endless rumbling white howl through the long-suffering amplifier.
The audience has long fled the room. Only the employees, the Reverend B. Stoned, and Icy Filet remain. Icy has never seen anything like this in her nineteen years, insides an adrenalized mix of terror and exhilaration.
The Reverend B. Stoned runs to the stage, screaming, “That’s enough, man!” as three of the bigger members of the kitchen crew run up to the stage, turn everything off, pull him away and drag him outside by his knotty long Manson hair as Mouse yells back, “C’mon, Reverend, it’s all in fun, heh heh—it’s freeeeedom, maaaaaan, heh heh heh!”
“Don’t come back here, ya fuckin’ weirdo!” the Reverend B. Stoned yells after him. In the empty room, the Reverend stands in front of the stage, kicking at the mess on the floor, kicking up flour clouds. He curses, shakes his head, finally walks off.
Icy Filet approaches the stage, grabs the pants, the guitar, the effects pedal, the amplifier, the cables. It’s a cumbersome two-handed carry job, made that much more difficult by general performance-art sliminess caked on everything. She limps like a bag lady out the front door, in time to see the kitchen crew storm past, calling Mouse all kinds of names, and Mouse himself, supine on the curb as the University Avenue foot traffic glares and mumbles as they walk by.
Icy Filet cautiously approaches him. He’s covered in flour, Bugle Bits, bologna strands in his beautiful scraggly hair. He still wears the diaper. His face has the purple chubbiness of the recently punched.
“I couldn’t find your flip-flops,” she says, standing over him now, unsure of what else to say.
Mouse, fetally positioned facing the street, rolls onto his back, moans, looks up, recognizes her—the rapper!—and a slow smile creeps across his face, lips widening, opening to what Icy thinks are two rows of gorgeously mismatched teeth. “Why thank you, Pop Tarts.”
Icy Filet looks away, flushed face, sweaty palmed. “That was really amazing,” she says.
Mouse smiles, pulls himself up. “Glad you liked it.” He stands, plucks a piece of bologna out of his chest hair and tosses it onto the street. “Let me call you sometime.”
“What?” Icy Filet says, and it’s not that she didn’t hear what he just said, but more like all she can think is that if this is his way of meeting girls, it’s insanely elaborate.
“Let me call you.”
Naturally she’s a little hesitant. But then she remembers Mouse, pre-performance, running up to congratulate her after her sucky (her word) attempt at freestyle rapping. “Do you have any paper?”
Mouse gestures at the mess he’s made of himself, his pantlessness, and chuckles. “Don’t seem to, ah, have anything on me, heh heh heh.”
Icy Filet unzips the white vinyly MC Hamtramck pen pouch she found at an Orlando thrift store—her favorite late ’80s/early ’90s rapper himself, in his trademark crushed velvet purple jumpsuit, big glasses, pulse beats shaved into his scalp, with the thought cloud above him (which he points to) that reads, “U Push It Real Good, Wild Thang”—pulls out a notecard and a pen. “Mouse, right?” she asks, handing him the card with her phone number.
“That’s right, Miss Icy Filet, my favorite rapper. I’ll call you soon, and we’ll dance a’ dance, take a chance, look askance, you know what I’m saying to you?’
Icy Filet does not, or isn’t clear on the details maybe, but says she does anyway. “Bye,” she says, waving, walking westbound on University, back to the dorm, SK-1 jutting out of her UF totebag.
“Thanks for getting my stuff,” Mouse yells after her.
“Word, yo,” Icy Filet says, head and heart spinning in the afterglow of first-times.
FIVE YEARS
Another Amateur Sunday here at fucking Electric Slim’s Used and New CDs and LPs . . . me and Boston Mike standing here behind the counter dealing with lazy illiterate cocksmacks who couldn’t find the new Celine Dion CD if you led them by the hand to the “D” section, removed the new Celine Dion CD from the bin, placed the new Celine Dion CD in their germ-ridden unwiped hands, raised said germ-ridden unwiped hands two inches in front of their cattle-blank eyes and said, “Here. Here is the new Celine Dion CD.” Sundays at the record store . . . it’s like an endless parade of cretinous twats marching in and out through our glass front door . . . me and Boston Mike watch them walk outside along the plaza sidewalk and we see them and pray “Please, please don’t come in here” . . . but God ignores us . . . laughs at our petty requests . . . it’s the cattle march of the UF student body getting their nose rings—figuratively, but might as well be literally—yanked by our beloved music industry towards whatever insufferable dogshit they’ve seen fit to mass produce and ship our way . . . it’s the ox-dumb rural-ass mouthbreather country folk waddling into town to do their “big city” shopping—fat fucks in NASCAR t-shirts ogling the poster racks in the corner . . . you know, like thong-clad women bending over rows of Camaros as the flame-fonted caption reads, “Haulin’ Ass!!!” or the one where the caption reads “Your Tub or Mine?” in watery lettering as the feathery peroxide blonde with the shapily body emerges from a wooden tub painted in the Stars and Bars, all naughty bits strategically covered in soap suds . . . it’s old drunks stumbling into the store to stand by the counter and talk loudly at us about how they were fortunate enough to see whatever played-out-not-that-great-to-begin-with classic rock garbage live in concert and everything back in 1979 . . . and speaking of garbage, Sundays are for some reason the big day when the nasty garbage pickers like to come in dragging crates of records with more scratches than grooves, shredded covers reeking of rotten leftovers and roach droppings . . . and then these jerks have the nerve to get all flabbergasted because we won’t pay like top dollar for their precious finds . . . real rarities like Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass’s Whipped Cream and Other Delights, Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, and Reader’s Digest Presents: Sounds for Easy Listening, Volume Three . . . in the middle of all this wheezing farting monument to human ugliness, egg-shaped moms stroll in thinking if they hum off-key renditions of the hit song they want to buy for their kid’s birthday (on the cassingle format, natch), we’ll get all “Name That Tune” with it and help them out . . . our friends who make up our customer base on every other day of the week are nowhere to be found . . . sleeping off last night’s parties . . . bicycling from one barbeque to the next . . . but not me and not Boston Mike because somebody’s gotta work this counter on Amateur Sunday, and the bills—oh, the damn bills!—never go away, so fuck it, fuck these asshole customers, and fuck me.
Boston Mike stands there on these typical Sundays and calls everything “retarded” in that accent of his that I’m not even going to try to do because I guess it’s just—whatever, right?—I mean, Boston’s where he came from so of course he’s not going to sound like those of us around here who were oh-so-fucking-lucky to be born and raised in the South—and when it gets really fucking unbearable here—he’ll elaborate and call the day “wicked retarded.”
“Wicked retarded,” he says, tongue ring clicking every time his tongue touches the roof of his mouth, standing there in that faded black stink-ass Assuck t-shirt, that smudged-up Boston Red Sox ballcap he wears to cover up his receding hair he thinks women actually care about, spacerless earlobes drooping and sagging like elephant balls, same old piercings across his bearded face, same old tattoo sleeves covering his arms, normally beady brown eyes squinting into that look of hatred fear desperation and annoyance you only see on the faces of jerkoffs like us deep in the existentialist pit of retail hell . . . “Wicked retarded,” Boston Mike says . . . and with that, it’s the cue to give up on any hope of getting to kill the rest of the afternoon by sneaking a sixer of Old Hamtramck tallboys poured into coffee mugs . . . at least for another hour and a half of this shit . . . and I look over to where Boston Mike’s looking, to the front door, and of course that’s the source of the “wicked” in his sentence . . . I mean, what else could make this snail-drag of a Sunday afternoon worse?
Boogie Dave.
Boogie Dave is my boss, the owner of the store, a fecal-breathed troll of a man, a pathetic lumpy-dump troll-turd . . . like if a snaggle-toothed crackwhore had sex with one of the larger Fraggle Rock muppets, this is the thing that would be shat out in trollbirth . . . he never asks us how we’re doing . . . shuffles in in fatguy sweat pants, simian back hair poking out of a sleeveless black Johnny Thunders t-shirt that is given the impossible duty of slimming Boogie Dave’s ample man-tittied torso . . . shoulder-length black hair that probably looked alright back when he opened the store during the dusty-denimed/pub glam era of 1973-1974, but now what’s left of his mane hangs there around the back of his tumor-bumpy skull like frayed tassels from the curtains of a dying pimp . . . he glares at us as he steps past, sniffles, says “It smells horrible in here!” and I want to say “Great to see you too, Boogie Dave,” but all you can do is stand there and look around and make sure your ass is covered and make sure there’s nothing under your control that he has to whine about . . . because Boogie Dave is a total whiner . . . if the jerkoff finds one tiny mistake he’ll harp on it and harp on it and mutter and complain until you wish he would drop dead . . . he climbs the steps to the upraised front counter slash register area, says “Look out” to me and Boston Mike, who step sideways into what little space we have back here, pulls out—yes, of course—about a dozen sticks of New Age Writer’s Retreat incense sticks . . . soon the store will reek of wheatgrass deodorant and tenured patchouli . . . the funny thing is, it never succeeds in covering up the dusty attic smell of all those old records alphabetized in bins in the middle of the store as the CDs and VHS tapes loop around the walls and these fat stupid customers somehow squeeze their fat stupid asses in the narrow spaces between while Boston Mike and I wait for the inevitable Boogie Dave whining about whatever’s wrong today with the store before Boogie Dave leaves, now that his twenty minute task of showing up at the store long enough to make his employees feel completely inadequate has been accomplished . . . such a cranky, cadaverous weirdo . . . clinging to this record store even though he hates it, because it’s all he has . . . if it’s not this . . . it’s retail . . . and I sometimes fantasize of going into the electronics department of some large department store and there he is in the regulation blue dress shirt/khaki slacked uniform of the corporate retail gig . . . actually having to earn a living by dealing with customers for a change . . . and not just customers who normally come in here on non-Sunday days, but the vast unwashed morons who make this record store gig a total can of corn by comparison . . . Sundays times a million . . . he fits the incense sticks into their strategically placed holders on different shelves by the walls . . . pushing through customers who are in the way . . . more likely to say nothing than to say “Excuse me” . . .
“So what do you think’s on his whine agenda for today,” I say to Boston Mike as we stand there watching Boogie Dave push his way from incense-holder to incense-holder.
“The music, probably,” Boston Mike says. “That and he probably found something unalphabetized.”
He always finds something, and if he finds nothing, he can always dust off the ol’ “You guys need to be more alpha” speech . . . because . . . well, look at him . . . you don’t get more Alpha Dog than Boogie Dave . . . he read some book on dogs at one point and has used it ever since as his go-to on leadership and management techniques . . .
I nod, because that sounds about right, and Boston Mike has to repeat his “Wicked retarded,” and Boogie Dave approaches the counter, steps up, says, “What did I tell you guys about not playing Beefheart when it’s busy like this?”
Sure enough . . . it’s the Beefheart masterpiece Lick My Decals Off, Baby, and it’s one of the more . . . avant parts of the record, where marimbas and saxophones and bass clarinets scream over drums that sound like they’re being thrown down a craggy mountain . . . Boogie Dave normally keeps himself scarce on Sundays, but now that he’s here, he gets to witness how Boston Mike and me, we like to flip one abrasive record after the other as a passive/aggressive ploy to make the Sunday amateurs leave us alone because we’re tired, hungover, and besides that, we’re genetically incapable of giving them decent service anyways . . . neither of us says anything to Boogie Dave . . . I mean, I think Beefheart is the ultimate pop music, but hey, that’s just me, and a master race of a few thousand who have ears evolved enough to see the epic enchantment in the music . . .
“I never understood how anyone could like this,” Boogie Dave says, removing the record right when it was getting even better. “It wasn’t good when it came out, and it hasn’t improved with age.”
He throws on some contemporary alternative rock, some cookie cutter pop-rock filled with gravelly vocals and negative navel-gazing . . . and I can’t help but cringe . . . physically cringe from my toes to my head to my balls to my soul . . . at how tedious this music is . . .
“We’re not doing as well as we did this time last year,” Boogie Dave says, turning to us. Nobody makes eye contact. I pretend to be staring at customers, making sure they’re not trying to steal anything (like I care), Boston Mike looks to the front door, smiles and says, “How are you?’ to a group of three chattering college broads in short-shorts and half-t-shirts (and you know they ain’t gonna buy shit . . . girls like these never linger the way the creeps of all stripes linger in here browsing for hours . . . ) who ignore him . . . “And last year we weren’t doing as well as we did the year before that.” This is not news to me or Boston Mike . . . there are five other record stores within this one mile radius, to say nothing of the mall three miles away . . . “And I’m the only one who seems to care about it” . . . we say nothing to this . . . I mean, honestly—we don’t care. Because why should we? This is a minimum wage gig that’s usually a cool-enough minimum wage gig except for Amateur Sundays . . .
“What would you like us to do, Boogie Dave?” I venture, knowing there’s no point, but feeling obligated to say something, even if I know it won’t lead to anything good (the girls who have worked here have all been reduced to tears by this piece of shit at various points in their work-lives here) . . . but I’ve found it’s better to say something instead of nothing . . .
“You guys need to look like you care. You could start there. You know not to play Beefheart. I told you that, but you do it anyway. How am I supposed to interpret that?” Boogie Dave looks at the clipboard to the left of the counter where we write down the sales of every new purchase . . . “And look,” he points to today’s sheet. “You didn’t even write down that we have Built to Spill in backstock. What if I saw that and ordered a bunch more?” He says this, knowing everyone who works here knows we have plenty of Built to Spill records here because it’s a big seller, but Boogie Dave is, to the depths of his soul, a dick, and is like compelled to point out every obviously unintentional mistake . . .
“Things have got to change,” Boogie Dave says, sets the clipboard back down next to the counter, descends the counter steps. He shuffles off to the front door like the pathetic sad sack that he is, adds, “You need to figure out how you’re going to make that happen, because it ain’t gonna go on like this forever.”
On top of all this, the customers get to witness Boogie Dave’s browbeating, and if you want my opinion, his unpleasant style does more to alienate customers than the music of Captain Beefheart ever could . . .
Boston Mike watches Boogie Dave step into his green VW van, back it out, leave the tiny parking lot, roll away down the student ghetto side street on the north side of the plaza. “I’ll buy the beer,” he says, and I laugh, feeling the relief of this stressful meaningless day as it reaches the halfway point before we get to go back to my house and really hit the beer . . .
I immediately put the Beefheart back on . . . ring up the customers and their shitty selections, answer whatever braindead questions they might have . . . dreaming of the Old Hamtramck tallboys in the wet brown paper bag Boston Mike is most certainly carrying out of the Pop-a-Top right about now . . . I want to be buzzed, I want to be numb, I want to forget about that fucking asshole Boogie Dave and how the only nice thing I can say about him is that he doesn’t have any kids to pass along all his horrid-horrid traits . . .
When Boston Mike walks in with that brown paper bag, I can’t help but smile. It’ll get a little bit easier here with each passing half-hour . . . as the dickhead customer rush starts to dissipate and the beer starts to kick in.
Boston Mike pours two can’s worth into our respective coffee mugs—his a white South-by-Southwest memento that reads “KEEP AUSTIN WEIRD” and mine a yellow Cracker Barrel find that reads in red-letters: “WHEN I GET OLD I’LL MOVE NORTH AND DRIVE SLOW.” He toasts with a “To this day being almost over, and to watching the customers start to screw” . . . That’s one of his words, Bostonian for “amscray!” . . . and our mugs cheer, and I chug, eagerly awaiting that first rush to the brain. “Oooooooooo-wooooo!” I howl, spinning my head from side-to-side, like how cartoon characters do when they come to their senses. I know I’ve been kinda, you know, down on working here, down on the customers, down on the scene so far . . . I know this . . . but you know, usually, it really isn’t that bad . . . I mean . . . It’s working at a record store! The great American dream of every young rock and roll-inspired twitty-twat! Oh, to be paid to do what you love! Sit around and play music! That reality isn’t 100 percent accurate . . . but it is often enough . . . now that the rush is dying down, and the boss is gone . . . I can bask in this bright sunshiney afternoon . . . I mean, look at it! Look out there! It’s fucking nice here!
“Hey, this is my friend Drunk John,” Boston Mike says to this girl Daisy I’ve been crushing on since I first started going to shows here, this tall thin curly-blonde covered in tattoos who I usually just call “The Canary Babe” who walks in in eight-mile long jeans and that model walk she has, this sashay that gets me every time . . . it kinda scares me, to be honest, how beautiful she is . . .
Daisy the Canary Babe turns to us, smiles and doesn’t break that stride to say, “Yes, I know Drunk John,” and she has this stunning smile that’s part genuine, part manipulative, and that gets me every time . . . fuck, she’s hot-tot-tot . . . “How are you guys doing today?”
“It’s getting better,” I manage, smiling like a total choad. “I’m glad you’re here.” and she laughs that soft laugh of hers and says “Thanks, guys . . . ” and like any remotely attractive person who comes in here, you know she knows exactly what she wants and will leave as soon as she finds it . . . why can’t it be opposite? Where, like, the assholes and amateurs walk in and walk out and the girls like Daisy the Canary Babe stick around?
“How come you never ask her out?” Boston Mike asks. “She seems to like you alright.”
“Ah, you know . . . she’s hooked up with pretty much all my friends.” (Which is true . . . she’s been with William, Paul, Neil, Mouse, the Play the Piano Drunk Like a Percussion Instrument Until the Fingers Begin to Bleed a Bit guys . . . )
“So?” Boston Mike scoffs.
“So that’s gross.”
“But you’re into her.”
“Yeah! I mean, look at her! She’s Daisy the Canary Babe.”
Boston Mike looks down, shakes his head. “You’re pathetic.”
. . . And maybe I am. “Shh, she’s coming up here,” I say . . . and add a “Fine, I’ll ask her out,” and descend the steps to stand outside in the heat of the parking lot and wait for her to walk out so I can get her number and you know maybe somehow get to bang her.
I try and force what I hope she will interpret as a smile on my face as I step down to the store’s blackened white linoleum . . . she’s easily six inches taller than I am, and I wonder what I would do with someone this tall, but I have total faith in my creativity to come up with some amazing answers . . .
Outside, wishing just this once that I was a smoker, so I could you know look like I had a reason to be standing out here like this, feet balanced between the edge of the sidewalk and the concrete curb. Shifting my weight from one foot to the next . . . watching the plaza’s customers go in and out of the Laundromat, the greeting card store, and the copy place . . . two beers down . . . basking in the Sunday . . . thinking what I’ll say to Daisy the Canary Babe . . . thinking of how everything could stop now, and I’d be happy with it . . . not in an “I’ve made it!” kind of way . . . but I’m comfortable and happy from my perch behind the counter of Electric Slim’s, to be here in Gainesville dicking around my early post-graduation years from that fine-fine institution of higher learning right across the street there . . . time can stop moving . . . just let me woo the shit outta Daisy the Canary Babe when she leaves the store, and the fucking world can stop, ok?
She leaves the store walking that model walk, stops when she sees me, “What are you doing, John?” she asks, smiling, and me, so glad she left the “Drunk” out of my name . . . this encourages me to bounce off the sidewalk and the curb, take the five steps her way . . . “Just taking a break,” I say in what I hope isn’t a too-tipsy looking smile . . . “Where you headed?” I add when my stride somewhat matches hers, putting that emphasis on the “you” to sound you know classy, like I’m interested in the woman for the woman . . . “I have studying to do. Started seeing this guy,” she says.
“Oh yeah?” I say, trying to sound like I barely give a fuck, when inside, that’s all I do . . . “Anyone I know?”
“Nobody you know,” she says, and I stop a few steps past the laundromat’s double front doors, as if I’m unallowed to venture any further due to the high responsibilities of my career in recorded music retail. “I mean—he’s not in ‘the scene,” and she laughs at her finger quotes, and the only iron-clad rule I know is that if you openly discuss “the scene” with someone, you have to put it into finger-quotes, because otherwise it sounds tacky coming out of anyone’s mouth over the age of sixteen . . .
“Well. He’s a totally lucky guy,” I say, cringing deep inside at my use of the word “totally.” Sometimes, to be honest, I hate everything about myself.
“Yeah, well, I don’t know if he sees it that way. Didn’t you graduate?”
Graduation. Something I don’t want to talk about. “Two years ago,” I answer.
“Oh,” she says, practically saying “Then what are you still doing here?” in the way she says “Oh.” and I realize, it’s never gonna happen.
“Yeah, you know,” I add, trying to salvage it. “I like it here just fine—not like I want to be at the record store forever, but I like it here.”
“I do too,” she says, and it seems in the way her voice takes a softer tone, the way she looks at me, then at this plaza parking lot, then turns her head to University, like she actually might mean it. “But I do need to leave. Great seeing you again.”
I wave and smile, watch her tall model walking body move down the sidewalk, plastic bag with an LP bouncing against her gorgeously narrow left hip . . . I walk back towards the store, in that adrenal bounce you get after you do something you think is brave, laughing to myself, thinking, As if I ever had a chance . . .
“She has a boyfriend now. Let’s get drunk,” I say immediately upon entering the store . . . and when I’m back at my perch, Boston Mike pats me on the back. “You tried, bro,” he says. “I’m proud of you.”
“Yeah yeah,” I say, open the third Old Hamtramck tallboy, pour it into my mug, confident this will be the can that transports me to the end of this Amateur Sunday shift . . .
The last hour does fly by, and it always feels great to kick out the final customers in a tone that suggests they are the biggest douchiest fucks on the face of the earth for still browsing after we told them they had ten minutes before the store closes . . . that turn of the lock and the flip of the “OPEN” sign to “CLOSED” are the best things about Amateur Sundays . . . now it’s a matter of tallying the receipts and leaving the till in dear sweet Boogie Dave’s slovenly back office. Punch out the timeclock, sip the last few swillish drops from the drained Old Hamtramck, take the cans with us so we can toss them in a nearby dumpster, engage the security system, and we’re free . . .
It’s a five minute walk to my house, with a stop halfway for more Old Hamtramck . . . I carry the six-pack and we walk down the dirt-covered graveled little student ghetto roads to my place . . . the sidewalks don’t exist so we walk down the middle of these streets—our streets, it seems, since I’ve lived in my place for four years now, and that’s an eternity around here . . . me, I’m on this like, “Fuck that guy,” rant, and Boston Mike’s like, “Who?” and I say, “You know who. Boogie Dave. I think I wanna fight him,” and Boston Mike laughs and says, “I’d love to see that,” and I’m like “He’s such a prick,” and Boston Mike says, “You should open your own store then. Put him out of business.”
I say nothing to this. We’re approaching my front porch and I can’t shut up about the day, “And Daisy. What’s she doing dating somebody outside of ‘the scene,’ man?” Boston Mike laughs and says, “It isn’t right. Maybe she got sick of us.”
We step up the three wobbly steps to my gray porch. I hand Boston Mike a beer and keep one for myself before unlocking the front door and tossing these in the fridge and taking outside two pink beer koozies with light pink flamingos raising their left legs at 90 degree angles as the orange-lettered word “FLORIDA” curves around the bottom. Now, we’ll sit in lawn chairs and kick back and forget about the day . . . without the background noise of music . . . because, after eight hours of forced music, you want silence.
I can usually go about an hour before wanting to throw on a record. Usually, by this point, the beer has obliterated the bad points of the day . . . that, coupled with me and Boston Mike making fun of all of our stupid customers . . . and honestly, I get sick of hearing Boston Mike’s accent. And again, I’m not gonna do the accent, but—and this is going to sound stupid, and by stupid, I mean Florida-stupid—I didn’t think people really talked this way. Shows you what I know about the world outside of my little slice of the Sunshine State. English Degree aside, sometimes I think all I really know about is this town, my friends, and the unceasing routine that is SUNDAY! SUNDAY! SUNDAY! at the record store. By now, we’re getting pretty llllllloaded . . . and I’ll throw on some record . . . on this fine evening, Jailbreak by Thin Lizzy . . . why not? . . . you know those dudes knew all about heartbreak, and shitty jobs, and the highs and lows of love and lust among bros like us . . . party bros! . . . post-work brews, sitting in lawnchairs, and all I know is that the night will eventually take us to Gatorroni’s for slices and however many free pitchers William can send our way, and by then, Boogie Dave and Daisy the Canary Babe will be long out of my Old Hamtramck-soaked mind.
I live in one of these crumbling old one-story houses in the student ghetto where everything’s falling apart beautifully . . . built in the pre A/C Floridian style of practicality, of southern charm . . . patio and house upraised five feet . . . and from this vantage point, you see everyone passing by on foot, on bike, in cars . . . everyone you want to see and everyone you don’t want to see. After living here for five years—believe me—it’s easy to have plenty in both camps.
It’s starting to get really good out here, man . . . Phil Lynott is singing, I’d come runnin / I’d come runnin back to you again and you know he means it in ways all these emo shits will never understand . . . and speaking of (even if he is more, you know “hardcore” than “emo,” but whatever) . . . here comes Max, riding up to us . . . Max, who I lived in the dorms with so long ago . . . and since those days, he’s become this vegan straightedge kid, which—and I hate to say it—basically means he’s figured out a way to deal with his dad being a violent abusive drunk . . . these soy-eating nondrinkers come on all pious and sanctimonious, but really, that’s what it’s about . . . I mean, not to generalize too much here, but you know . . . since he’s vegan he now weighs about a buck oh three, and most of that weight’s from his big brown beard . . . and the money he saves from not buying three dollar six-packs of Old Ham-town go right into tats and piercings, and fuck if he doesn’t already have more than he needs of both.
I want to hide as he rolls up, because I know he’ll probably wanna engage in, you know “tat talk,” because it’s probably the only thing left all three of us have in common (Boston Mike lived down the hall back in the dorm days . . . ), our tat sleeves and shin ink. I don’t need the piercings, but Boston Mike sure has them. Except for the dirty-ass Sox cap, and Max actually has half-dollar sized spacers in his lobes where, like I was saying, Boston Mike’s lobes flap in the breeze all disgusting like—and oh yeah, except for how Mike talks and how Max has this Michigan rust belt emigrant timbre—these two could be identical twins. I want to hide because I hate how humorless Max has become. Back when we’d sneak booze into the dorm, when he wasn’t totally averse to eating the occasional cheeseburger, the dude actually had a sense of humor. He had this thing where we would get completely lllllloaded before going to parties, and he’d bring a package of saltine crackers hidden in his bookbag with the booze . . . when he’d see a group of uptight-looking girls standing around at the party, he’d take out a saltine, approach the girls, unzip his fly, pull out his balls, stick the cracker underneath his balls, and say, “Pardon me, ladies, but could I interest you in an hors d’ouerve called Nuts on a Cracker?” The girls screamed and we laughed. He’d do this until he’d throw up in a corner and me and Boston Mike and whoever else was around that we were friends with would have to drag him back to the dorm before fights broke out. Seriously, Max was a lot more fun when he drank.
But it’s too late. “Hey,” Max says, stepping off his bike, voice weighed down with brooding drama, like he’s on the verge of writing some stupid emo song about this meeting, or that he’s gonna go off and make a zine about it . . .
“Yo, bro!” I beckon, in full-on party dude voice . . . only a semi-ironical thing for me . . . I mean it’s funny to talk that way, like you’re one of those dudes who hangs around kegs all night talking shit . . . but at the end of the day, I basically am that guy . . . I raise my can in the air, so very very comfortable in this old lawnchair, on this patio, in this neighborhood. “What’s going on?”
He approaches the steps, shows us his right arm wrapped in clear plastic. Through the plastic, three fresh black Xs, circled by the words “STRAIGHTEDGE FOR LIFE.” “I got more work done on my arm,” he says, as if we’re blind or something.
“Aw, pissa,” Boston Mike says, and inside, that sinking feeling of pointlessness, like those first fifteen minutes of an eight hour Sunday at Electric Slim’s. That everything and everyone is a stale joke, and I’m the anticipated punchline.
“Oh ho ho, the talk of the tat,” I say, laughing, then standing up to run inside the house to throw on some record, something Max’ll dislike because it’s “ironic,” and the worst thing in the world for these jerks is irony. Irony is a fucking war crime, but sanctimony is godliness to these depressing jerkoff puritans. Fucking liars. All they joke about is Satan or being gay. Seriously. These people are so unfunny, so tiresome in their ponderous pompous piousness . . . how everything in life is such a be-all-end-all big deal. In the old days, they’d go off to be monks. Now, they show off their tattoos. I hate my tattoos. I don’t even know why I have them anymore. To think of all that money I wasted that could have gone to beer, records, and pizza. They’re embarrassing because everybody has them now. Everybody.
So I sneak off into my bedroom, throw on Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust album, and the first song, “Five Years.” There was a time when Max and I would sit in our dorm getting high while listening to Bowie when we should have been studying. Ridiculous—I know—but you do a lot of stupid crap when you’re eighteen, trying on everything to figure out what fits you.
I strut out the front door, trying to move like Ziggy Stardust—like some kind of androgynous alien robot—and it’s that sloppy blissful apathetic-over-all-the-right-things kind of actions—where that part of your self-control that you didn’t really want to develop in the first place is gone—and you feel alive again . . . this is why I bother with the beer. I mouth the words and smile, pointing at Max . . . “Pushing through the market square / so many mothers dying / news had just come over / we had five years left to cry in . . . ” I drain what’s left of the beer and remove it from the koozie. Max glares at me at the bottom of the steps, still standing there holding his bike with his non-new-tat-armed hand.
“What, dude.” I say, sick of looking at this sadsack emo kid who used to be my friend. “C’mon man, you used to be fun . . . ”
“Where do you see yourself in five years, Drunk John?” Max asks me, and my nickname sounds strange coming out of his mouth—and not because he says it like a joyless pompous straightedge kid—the question makes me pause. I mean, I guess I drink a lot—but everybody does here, so whatever. It’s just that my name is John, and it’s such a common name they had to separate it from Straightedge John, Psycho John, Goth John, Short John. Whatever. I’m not especially proud of my nickname, but it could be a lot worse. Slut Chrissy. Roofie Steve. You get a nickname here, and you’re stuck with it. For life.
I answer Max’s question with a long, sustained, guttural belch. Boston Mike chuckles at this. I mean—I could lie like everybody else does around here when asked questions about their futures. Say I’m moving to some big city up North. Share some lofty dream of pursuing this or that. We all know how that ends. Those people come back within a year, when the temperature in their new city first drops below freezing. Honestly, right now, I don’t want to think about what I’ll be doing in five years, or even five months. Five years . . . it will be 2001. I’ll be twenty-nine. I don’t want to think about it. I unleash a second belch, equally as long, sustained, and guttural as the first one.
I drop the koozie, throw up my hands and say, “OK, Maxie. I’ll bite.” I spin my hands in a forward motion and affect a dumb guy voice asking “Why do you ask where I’ll be in five years?”
Max straddles his bike. “I don’t know. It’s like, you’re doing the same shit you did five years ago.”
I pick up the pink koozie and toss it at his pierced, bearded, soy-stuffed head. It bounces off his forehead, lands in the dirt. Boston Mike laughs at this, and Max picks it up, looks at the flamingo and the “FLORIDA,” smiles this smile more in line with the old Max, tosses it onto the porch. “Same old John,” he says.
“And you?” I gotta ask. “Your big change since the dorms, as far as I can tell, is that you don’t eat animals and you got your arms covered in tattoos. What’s 2001 look like for you, big guy?”
Max looks right at me, and it’s that look he had on mornings after parties where he’d do the “Nuts on a Cracker.” The way he’d look when we’d be at Denny’s the next morning, eating hangover omelets and trying to look adult by smoking in our booth and brooding over coffee. Like he wants to know something, what he did the night before, and if it was funny, sure, but not just that. Something more.
“I don’t know. I’m trying to figure it out.” With that, Max pedals away, back towards University, as if he just rode over here to bring me down, and now that he’s accomplished that, he can go return to whatever vegan straightedge tattoo parlor he was being all angsty in before he stopped by.
It’s a minute of me and Boston Mike in silence broken only by Bowie going on about five years before the world ends.
“Fuckin’ sanctimonious prick,” I finally mutter. I stumble (I’m stumbling now, but I don’t care because I’m drunk so fuck it), into the house, back to the kitchen, grab two more beers, muttering in the self-talk of the drunk, “Five years . . . who cares . . . why can’t it stay like this, man? Why . . . the fuck . . . not?”
“Five years from now’s gonna be 2001,” Boston Mike says, grabbing the beer from me and moving it slowly to his face like the black monolith in that movie while singing the opening notes to “Thus Spake Zarathustra.” He pounds tympani notes on his right thigh, sings “Dun-dun, dun-dun, dun-dun, dun-dun, duuuuuuuuun.”
“I thought we’d be on a Martian colony by now,” I say, trying to forget, trying to laugh it off. “Like we’d be eating protein pills for lunch in zero gravity.”
“Yeah, no shit, right?” Boston Mike says. “We’d be time traveling to the Roman Empire for orgies, or to 1965 to see The Who.”
We pshaw at the future we were promised at Disney World. “Let’s shotgun these and get outta here,” I suggest. “To the Drunken Mick, to Gatorroni’s . . . shit, anywhere, man.”
We both keep our keys looped on the right side of our pants. We unloop the keys, turn our beers sideways, poke a hole, stick it in our faces and try not to choke as the Old Ham-town gushes straight down our throats. Five seconds later, we toss our cans to the side. I run into the house, turn off the lights and the Bowie, lock up. We descend the stairs, walk down this street I know so well, and these old homes I know so well. I know who lives inside these houses now, who lived there before them, and who lived there before them.
“So what do you think?” I ask Boston Mike, feeling the familiar gravel of these barely paved roads.
“About what?”
“In five years. Where’ll you be?”
Boston Mike laughs. “Jesus, dude.” He punches me in the arm. “I don’t know. I don’t gotta know. You don’t gotta know. We’re young. Wicked young.” I say nothing, eyes trying to focus on the traffic one block ahead on University.
We turn left onto University Avenue, away from the campus towards the bars and restaurants. The sun sets behind us, the afternoon heat replaced by an easy warmth. The streetlights turn on up and down the street. The lights inside gas stations, the hotel, the restaurants and shops . . . they’re bright beacons . . . and all I can ask myself is: Why can’t it always be like this? Everything here and now is perfect and comfortable, and why can’t it always be like this? Me and a friend after work walking somewhere to get even more llllloaded with more friends, to relax in this relaxing place that feels more like home than anyplace I’ve ever been . . . because, even if Boogie Dave is a total dick, and Daisy the Canary Babe will never grace my bedroom . . . that’s alright, because we’re still young—and every moment—every flip of a record, every girl I pass, every waking moment, has so much incredible possibility, and that’s life here, and I don’t ever want that to change.
And that’s the fucking problem . . . it never stays the same—not when you’re in the womb, in the house the morning of your first day of school, graduations, college, after college, and on and on until death. This moment is everything, so who gives a fuck about five years? It’s another perfect night in a town I never want to leave.
Up ahead at Gatorroni’s, Neil and Paul are at an outside table, a pitcher of dark beer in front of them, sipping from plastic cups then spitting out the beer in a long comical mist.
“We’re practicing our spit takes,” Paul says when I sit to join them.
“Let me try,” I say, as Boston Mike goes inside to score two free pitchers from our friends behind the counter.
LIKE STEPHEN KING
“It’s all really ok,” Ronnie says to no one, walking back to the trailer from the Kwik-Mart, down a side street with the kinds of forlorn little office buildings that always house short-lived nondescript small businesses with names like “KDM Systems Inc” and “Southeastern Solutions.” On the right, before the trailer park, two one-level houses, collapsing on themselves in a kind of abandonment most often seen in whole sections of Detroit. “The book will be published soon, and that’s that.”
Ronnie runs into the trailer long enough to grab the disc holding all 536 pages of The Big Blast for Youth, carries the disc—this blue 3” square disc that is his eternally bright and lucrative future—to the car, holding it tight in both hands like the valuable object it is. He hides it in the glove box, drives away, and within minutes is reclined in a gray plasma donation chair by the plasma center’s front windows—facing a row of six similar gray chairs occupied by everyone from collegiate ravers, looking blissfully emaciated in shiny track suits, to the black and white poor of this and nearby counties (Alachua, Putnam, Marion, Union, Gilchrist, Bradford, Levy). A four-inch needle drains the, as Lou Reed might’ve called it way-back-when, mainline in the middle of Ronnie’s right arm, and Ronnie squeezes his right hand, sitting there under fluorescent lights as the TVs in the corner play MTV videos of 1990s musicians making money off their perceived problems . . . Ronnie kills the time by imagining how it’s all going to go down, because, after all, Ronnie is familiar with that film Drinking is a Really Big Deal When You’re a Writer, you know, the one about the poet who liked drinking, so Ronnie knows how these discoveries happen.
It’s only a matter of time, Ronnie thinks, sitting there dreaming about how great it will be, once he mails off the manuscript. All that is left to do is to print it out and mail it, once he is done filling this IV bag with amber colored plasma. Soon this whirring machine to his immediate right will stop whirring, will stop separating Ronnie’s blood from Ronnie’s plasma, and he will get the needle removed from one of the perpetually stoned orderlies who work here, will get the crook of his arm wrapped in gauze from same perpetually stoned orderly, will collect his money, and leave for this friend of a friend of an acquaintance named Chloë, this girl he kinda new back in Orlando who in a chance encounter in a Publix parking lot, told Ronnie she would be more than happy to share her computer, printer, and paper for the cause of The Big Blast for Youth getting into printed form and mailed to the lucky editor who would get to read this.
•
“Do you want anything to drink?” Chloë asks, standing in the doorway to her feng-shuied bedroom, smiling. Smiling at Ronnie.
Ronnie sits in a black office chair crammed to the brim with what Ronnie believed to be spaceage polymer plastics form-fitted to practically massage the asses of anyone so fortunate enough to sit down upon it. What a chair; what a chair! Ronnie contrasts this with that rickety wooden chair of Chris Embowelment’s, painted black with red pentagrams (of course) that creaked and shifted like it would break at any moment as Ronnie had proofread the novel on Mr. Embowelment’s computer (“I wonder how he’s doing, or if he’s forgiven me?” Ronnie thinks to himself) in the early morning hours of the day he was to move to Gainesville. Before leaving, Ronnie wanted to be sure no revisions were needed. None were needed. It was a masterpiece.
“What do you have?” Ronnie asks, staring at the gray monitor screen on the dust-free white desk, the paper-stuffed off-white printer to the right of the wide and dense monitor with a menu awaiting orders to print the novel that would change the world, as Ronnie makes one last dummy check for any mistakes.
“Beer. Wine.” The way she stands there, smiling. Ronnie had always considered Chloë to be like this overweight gothy broad (Yeah, Ronnie thought it was hilarious to say “broad”) with the requisite fixations on Morrissey. Here she is now, living in Gainesville, in the Duckpond neighborhood—this relatively upscale neighborhood of professors and graduate students—standing there, smiling.
“Wine.” Ronnie had learned that having a drink or two after donating plasma was the equivalent of three or four drinks.
“What kind?”
“Whatever.”
She returns with two long-stemmed wine glasses half-filled with chardonnay (Ronnie guesses), sets his to the left of the keyboard. “Have you ever had a spritzer?” she asks.
“Spritzer?” Ronnie repeats, not taking his eyes off the screen.
“It’s wine and Sprite.”
With his left hand, Ronnie lifts the glass. With his right hand, he clicks the “print” button with the mouse. The printer screeches, then whirs. The glasses clink.
“Cheers,” Chloë says. She makes a big production out of sniffing the wine before sipping it, sounding to Ronnie like someone trying to breathe with a bad cold.
She wears too much eye make-up, Ronnie thinks. It’s a painful purple, thick, layered on with a trowel. Same with the lips, the blush, the purple streaks in the bangs of her dark hair, framing her fat pale face, wrapping around the beginnings of that double chin. Still fat, but less gothy, Ronnie decides. Goth-casual? Sure. He decides Chloë is one of those girls who act thirty the moment she obtains a driver’s license. That thirtiness only grows worse with each new rite into adulthood. She has one month left in college, and she acts and behaves like Ronnie’s idea of somebody’s mom. The depleted plasma levels and the lack of food help the wine kick in immediately.
The manuscript prints, one slow page at a time. This house. The interior decoration is straight out of an interior decorating magazine. Color-coordinated walls match furniture, match plates, match curtains, match clothes. Not green: Avocado. Not purple: Plum. But you strip that away, you have these worn hardwood floors, thoughtfully planted Spanish moss dangled shade trees (in Central Florida, they never considered the importance of shade trees as they were tracting out their own take on suburbia—keeping a palm tree or two (and those don’t shade shit) for decorative purposes only), and the distinguished venerable overall charm to the place, with its front porch and soft yellow exterior paint, a house that had weathered more during the past fifteen years than those Central Florida homes had. Ronnie can ignore the feng-shui and all the obnoxious color-coordination, and dream of someday living in a Gainesville house like this, should he ever be fortunate enough to escape the trailer. He tries and fails at recalling the other time he was here, loaded on roofies after The Laraflynnboyles played a chaotic houseparty in the student ghetto, three years ago.
•
It was a tiny little house—Paul’s house at the time—so small that the bands played in the kitchen and only about fifteen people could cram into the living room to watch the performance. It’s one of those houses in punk rock lore where everyone figures quite rightly that they’re going to tear it down in a couple years, so there’s really no need to clean anything, to mop away the sticky black grime on the linoleum floors, and if there are cracks or outright holes in the plaster on the walls—why, it’s nothing a flier from some enjoyed Nardic Track show from the recent past won’t fix. Wille-Joe Scotchgard’s drums are pressed as far into the kitchen as possible, with his back to the oven where he has to consciously avoid brushing the knobs that turn on the gas stove’s burners. John “Magic” Jensen plays the bass, wobbling from side to side—head a dumbed-down mix of stooge pills and stooge drink—bleach blond glam metal rockwig atop his head—and Ronnie, without the wine now blocking the vision—if his mind at the time hadn’t been filled with stooge pills and stooge booze—one little prod from someone there who does remember—and Ronnie could see the view from the floor, underneath about ten bodies who dogpiled him gleefully after he made one comical/not comical leap into those who had packed into the room to see them—guitar face-up on the dirty floor, open detuned strings plucked by random hands, as random voices sing into the microphone and mic stand that have also fallen to the floor—the sweat dirt old beer smoke stench—and through the gaps in the legs and arms, Ronnie looks to the rhythm section, who look back—Magic peeking through the feathered-metal bangs of the wig, and Willie-Joe leaning up over the drums to make sure Ronnie’s alright, and he’s actually better than alright, because his girlfriend is somewhere in here, and his friends are everywhere, and he’s in a band, and outside in the front yard, they stand in groups of three, four, or five, as the Gainesville Police cars are parked along the edge of the yard, officers waiting for anyone to take one step off the property with an open container. Ronnie often forgets about this, forgets about catching a ride (with whom?) to the Duckpond to stay at Chloë’s, and they sat in a circle of eight or nine or ten, Ronnie in Maggie’s lap, Maggie wiping the kitchen floor grime off his face with a borrowed dishtowel, softly asking, “Why do boys with big brains do such dumb things?” to which Ronnie can only smile because he said everything he had to say in the performance and is ready to pass out like this.
•
Three years later, and Maggie’s gone, the band is on a downward spiral, Ronnie has graduated, and here he is in Gainesville, printing a manuscript he feels he has no choice but to believe is his ticket out of this rut. “What’s your book about?” Chloë asks, leaning into Ronnie, one fat boob brushing his back.
“Aw, man, I don’t know,” Ronnie says, leaning away from the fat boob, not taking his eyes off the gray screen showing the novel’s title page. He loathes this question. “It’s about a lot of things.”
Chloë leans in closer, boob brushing his back again, face inches from his right cheek. She smells like the perfume counter at the mall. “That’s not a very good answer, Ronnie.”
“Yes, Chloë. I know.” When sober, Ronnie doesn’t entirely dislike Chloë, but now? “It’s about Orlando, basically,” Ronnie manages.
“Oh. Can I read it?” Chloë asks, wide hips already swiveled to the printer, hands already reaching to the twenty printed pages.
Ronnie moves his hands to block Chloë’s. “When it’s published, you can,” he smiles.
The phone rings on the opposite side of the bedroom. “Be right back,” Chloë says, patting then squeezing Ronnie’s shoulder.
“Oh hi!” she says—too loudly, too loudly—into the phone removed from its cradle on the nightstand next to the bed. She plops onto the bed, left hand holding the phone, right hand running fingers through her hair. “Ronnie Altamont is over here. Yeah! He’s printing out a book! Yeah, he wrote a book! Me neither . . . ”
Ronnie sits in front of the computer wishing the book would print already, wishing he could mail it away, ready to flee Florida for the small press that would easily get his work out there. This Orlandoan notoriety, its final residue manifested in the first and last namedrop, was tiresome, because—really now—he was less than nothing. Some bum, knowing little except not to trust any social acquaintance who speaks of him by his first and last name, because the “glory days” of three years ago, or even one year ago, when his name mattered to anyone, are over.
“Ok! Hmmmm, bye bye!” Chloë says before an indecorous roll off the bed and back on her own two goth casual sensible black-shoed feet. She replaces the phone in its cradle, straightens her clothes. “So. That was Diana,” she announces. “She wanted to tell you ‘Hi.’ ” Diana. She went to UCF with Ronnie. She sang in one of those emasculated bands that have one-word names like “Break” or “Collapse” or “Banish.” Ronnie honestly couldn’t remember. They weren’t “punk,” and therefore, Ronnie didn’t care. At Chloë, he smiles and nods, as is his style when memories are gone or ideas can’t be followed.
“Where are you sending the book?” Chloë asks, returning to Ronnie’s right side with her mall perfume counter stench and her fat.
“It’s this small press in the Midwest,” Ronnie says, almost turning to face Chloë, but too enthralled that the book—his book—was actually printing. “One of my,” and here, Ronnie shrugs in false modesty, “fans,” because he had a few, much to Ronnie’s surprise, when he wrote that opinion column of his back at UCF, where he ranted and raved and sometimes was funny and other times was just caustic, and looking back on it now, he suspected the administrators were simply ignoring him, knowing that someday soon, Ronnie would be out of there, either with a degree or dropped out, and they probably predicted he would be in the exact position he was in now, “suggested this press, and it looked interesting, so . . . ”
“Why don’t you put it out with Random House or something?”
Because they’re not ready for what I gotta lay on society! In Ronnie’s head, there lived a burnout hippie, and while most of the time said burnout was just a comic invention, at least once a year, their thoughts coincided. This was that time for 1996.
“It looks interesting,” Ronnie repeats.
“Well, that sounds good then.” Chloë leans away, smiles. “More spritzer?”
“Ok.”
She grabs the glasses, tromps off to the kitchen. She returns, sets Ronnie’s to the right, in front of the printer. Ronnie sips. They are, um, spritzy. The printer continues from one page to the next. Chloë pulls up a chair next to Ronnie, grabs the stack of pages from the printer.
“No!” Ronnie yells, grabbing her fat arm. The hostess giggles. Coquettishly. She thinks Ronnie is flirting. She reads aloud from the manuscript. “It’s like when Darby Crash howled ‘. . . dementia of a higher order . . . it felt like a passport away from this futile reality’ . . . ?’ ”
It’s the question mark at the end that gets Ronnie. As if she’s saying, “What?” He yanks the pages from her hands, yells, “No!” again, much louder than he intends. “Jesus!” he adds before he knows what he’s saying, “Will you step off, bitch?!” As he pulls the pages away, he knocks over the wineglass. It shatters on the hardwood floor between them. Wine and Sprite spills across the room.
There are exactly five seconds of silence. The coquettish giggling stops. The smile disappears. “I’m . . . sorry, Ronnie,” Chloë says, steps back from the computer, from the mess. “I didn’t mean anything.”
Ronnie holds the crumpled stack of pages in his hands, as the printer keeps on whirring. “I know you didn’t,” Ronnie finally says. He holds out the stack of pages, stands, office chair rolling into the shards on the floor. “I’ll clean this up. You want to read this? Here.” Ronnie offers the stack of papers. “Sorry. I was just . . . nervous. I shouldn’t be.”
“I don’t.” Chloë steps away, 180s out the bedroom door. It looks like her shoulders are shaking as she leaves, but Ronnie can’t think about that.
The print job is only halfway finished, and Ronnie can’t leave until it’s done. He wishes the printer would move faster, hopes the ink and the pages hold out. Then he will leave and they can both forget about it. Ronnie can’t think about why he doesn’t want Chloë—or, perhaps, anyone—reading his book. He can’t think about why he’s so hateful to this person who has been so kind and hospitable to him. As the print job finishes, Ronnie grabs handfuls of tissue paper from the box next to the phone’s cradle on the nightstand, throws the wine glass shards and spritzered paper towels into the garbage back in the next-door bathroom. Down the hall, Ronnie can see Chloë—Chloë’s back anyway—seated on her couch watching CNN in the living room, seemingly enthralled, or perhaps moved to tears, by Bob Dole giving a speech somewhere.
Who-knows-how-long later, when The Big Blast for Youth finally reaches page 536, Ronnie gathers it up, practically runs out of that bedroom, down the hall, to the front door. In the doorway, Ronnie turns to Chloë’s sobbing back. “Um.” Ronnie begins. “Thanks for everything. And hey: thanks for the spritzer.”
“You’re welcome,” she says, devoid of feeling, not turning away from Bob Dole on the TV. “You can show yourself out.”
Ronnie feels like the chump he knows he is, shrugs, turns and steps out of Chloë’s house, carrying his precious, precious manuscript to the car. He never sees her again.
•
Sobering, only a little, on the drive to the post office, Ronnie wonders why he apologized. Who takes pages from printers and reads them without permission? No, really. Who does that? Feelings of guilt dissipate into the near-summer humidity of the Gainesville weekday afternoon.
The line at the post office in the student ghetto is a swift moving nonordeal of students picking up care packages sent by Mom and checks sent by Dad. When it’s Ronnie’s turn, the bulky ashen black late middle-aged mailwoman weighs the package, assesses the postage, takes Ronnie’s money.
“It’s the book I wrote,” Ronnie says, wishing she would ask about it.
“A book? You mean like Stephen King?” She holds the package for a moment, like it might mean something more than what it is.
“Uh, yeah, I guess.” Ronnie shrugs, takes his change. He walks away, wishing he could have told her about how it was on its way to getting published, after so much work, so much writing. And how it only needed one draft.
Do I really need to tell you that the publishers never make it down to Gainesville to track down Ronnie? That they don’t even mail a rejection slip? The days turn to weeks turn to months, and the black mailbox bolted next to the front door of the trailer never has its mouth stuffed with advances on future earnings or galleys or proofs or whatever they’re called.
Ronnie will sit in his sparse white room and listen to the Germs growl and bleed through hand-me-down speakers at the foot of the mattresses while he broods on the unmagical epiphany that writing—his writing—could no longer be this easy task of writing some stupid column while drunk on Brain Mangler malt liquor for some right-of-center University too conservative to be hip to the gonzo style of Thompson and the other New Journalists Ronnie was blatantly ripping off, as is the style of so many young men sitting down to write for the first time. This novel—The Big Blast for Youth—all 536 pages of it—wasn’t anything but practice, and it would surely take lots and lots of practice before anything could even begin to happen.
Possessed of such daunting knowledge, the yellow legal pads and spiral notebooks Ronnie used to spend hours filling were left to fend for themselves by the stacked mattresses in his bedroom. For far too long, Ronnie would write next to nothing besides drunken declarations of love and hate for various people, before passing out in the bedroom, and who knows, maybe that is also a kind of practice, even if nothing will emerge from those pages but loose, illegible, self-absorbed notes.
ALVIN AND MOUSE, DALE AND STEVIE,
STEVIE AND MOUSE
Pffffffffff . . .
I mean, I told him not to punch my wall, and I told him not to drop his boot on Ronnie’s table because if Ronnie sees that, he’ll get mad. So that’s what I said to Stevie when he knocked on the door—pffff—I have the note right here. Ronnie helped me write it. It goes:
“Dear Stevee
you are not welcum heer
you dont cleen your mess and dont pay bills
so you cant stay here anymore. Alvin.”
I put what he had into two plastic bags—pfff, he didn’t have much—and left it by the door. Hoping he’d get the hint. No, he still knocked on my door and it’s late at night—so why’s he gotta bother me so late? I didn’t want to answer—pfff—but he kept knocking, yelling like, “Let me in man, I wanna talk to you, it’s important, I need to ask you something,” and going on and on like that the way he always does. Ronnie’s right, and you’re right, Mouse—Stevie never shuts up.
But he did get real quiet when I opened the door and he stood there in that stinky black Misfits t-shirt he’s always wearing, looking like he just got off of work the way there was new sweat on top of the old sweat smell of him. He says like, “Hey Alvin, c’mon man, let me in, this is a joke right?” and I tell him that no, it ain’t a joke, because me and Ronnie, we don’t want him living there.
He’s gotta ask me, “Why?” and I tell him. Pfff—I tell him, “You broke Ronnie’s table, you put a hole in my wall, you don’t pick up after yourself, and you don’t pay rent.” And that’s all true, Mouse. Ronnie had to point it out for me to really see it, I got so used to it. Around everywhere he sits, there’s dented coke cans, used Q-tips, used tissues, potato chip bags, McDonald’s wrappers covered in ketchup, mustard, and pickles. All of it goes around him in a circle where he sits and it stays there.
But Stevie doesn’t say anything about that, instead he talks like—pfff, “Well Ronnie don’t pay nothing.” Then he tried stepping into the trailer but I wouldn’t let him in and he’s going on talking: “Ronnie told you to do this, didn’t he? Too good to talk to us, too good to leave his room, and he talks you into kicking me out. Where’s his money?”
So I have to tell him that me and Ronnie—me and him—we made an agreement that he would live there, that he was Mouse’s friend he brought up from Orlando. Because that’s what you and me and Ronnie agreed, Mouse.
Because you should have seen it when Ronnie came into the living room and saw the table Stevie broke. I mean, the table, Stevie broke the glass top in two—right down the middle—but he thought if he could stack one part of the glass on top of the other part of the glass—Ronnie wouldn’t notice, but it’s the first thing he says, Mouse. Ronnie never leaves his room. He sits in there all day, or if he does leave, he goes out the back door. Stevie was always asking “How come he never sits out here with us when we’re watching TV or playing Sonic the Hedgehog?” and I always told him—pff—cuz it’s always so dirty in here and in the kitchen, and Stevie, he don’t say nuthin’ to that but like, “So?” and now that he is out, maybe I will try and clean and maybe Ronnie’ll wanna be out there now—pfffff. But that’s the first thing he asks, stepping out there and he’s still got a pen in his hand ’cuz I know you were sayin’ that he’s a writer so maybe that’s what he does all day, but he sees the table and walks over to it, lifts up the porno mags Stevie put there to try and cover the table cracks, turns to me like he wants to kill me and he asks me, you know, “What happened to my coffee table?” and I ain’t gonna lie, Mouse, so I tell him. I’m sitting there in my chair watchin’ Jim Carrey being funny, and I tell him, and that’s when he tells me that Stevie needs to leave and I even told Ronnie that I even told Stevie not to show me his modern-day warrior moves because, pffff! You know he don’t know karate.
So Ronnie, he tells me that Stevie’s takin’ advantage of me—pfff—but I say to him—ok, but how do I get rid of him? He stands there like he’s thinking and then says I should write a note, but I tell Ronnie, you write the note—aren’t you supposed to be the writer? But he says it should be in my writing and he’ll tell me what to say, so he tells me, I write it, and tape it to the door and hope Stevie’ll just read it and not knock, and Ronnie leaves me there to deal with him, because when that’s done Ronnie says he’s gotta leave, and I ask him if I can go with him but he says no because he wants to meet girls, so that’s what happened, Mouse.
Pffffffff. Do you need any help, Mouse?
Mouse has been setting up the four track this whole time, plugging in cables and setting up microphones in the dark living room’s late afternoon ripe squash sunlight shooting through the old-ass blinds as dusty laser light show beams. Alvin follows him from the living room to the bathroom, where Mouse has a mic stand with a microphone plugged in in front of the toilet and leading back to the four track set on an old red dairy crate. Mouse hasn’t caught much of what Alvin’s been saying, throwing in “Oh sure!” and “Right!” and “Oh no!” and “Heh heh heh” at times that feel instinctually appropriate. Icy Filet is coming over (!!!), and Mouse is setting up the bathroom for her to bust out her latest rhymes as Mouse takes a slide and plays the upper cosmic frets of a detuned guitar that’s plugged into reverb and delay pedals. Mouse wants to record this, put it out on a seven inch, or barring that, a cassette to sell at the shows.
“Well—heh heh heh—that’s too bad, Alvin,” Mouse says, walking through the kitchen, to the front door. “I was hoping the three of you would all be friends, you know, like—partners in unemployment? But we’ll talk soon,” and Mouse opens the door, and Alvin wants to say something, but all that comes out is “Pffffff.”
Mouse closes the door. Stevie no longer lives there. That much, Mouse knows, and that much, Mouse can almost care about, even as he’s getting everything together for the big date, because Icy Filet will be knocking soon. Among the things that Mouse doesn’t care about, and wouldn’t have even if he’d known, is what had already happened to Stevie, the night he’d had at Grandfather’s Olde Tyme Good Tyme Pizza Parlour before getting thrown out of the trailer.
Mouse had never met Dale Doar, who was in his office that night, that office which also serves as a tiny storage room for dry goods, the time clock, spare aprons, shirts, and hats, and stacks of those orange and yellow Grandfather’s Olde Tyme Goode Tyme Pizza Parlour Employee Handbooks, with their thick three ring binders that can’t quite stack perfectly. Dale Doar, at his desk, punching a calculator with his left hand, then scribbling numbers into end-of-the-business day forms with his right. Scribbling in the yellow triangle of light from the desk lamp (everyone is ugly under overhead fluorescent lighting after hours of intense restaurant work), smells of marijuana and dish detergent filtering in from the kitchen. The Smiley Service Liaisons had been sent home, The Table Removal and Replenishment Coordinators lined up to punch out—the large figure of Brooks Brody temporarily blocking the white bright of the kitchen as he slid his time card into the clock, said, “Later, Dale, don’t work too hard.” Dale nodded, didn’t look up and didn’t lose the rhythm of tapping the numbers on the calculator, scrawling them into the forms. Like every night, he would soon fax these forms to corporate, drop off the money in the bank, then it’s home to Arthur the cat, the bong, to Gina next to him on the couch—green Publix uniform unbuttoned but not removed, a white t-shirt underneath untucked, and oooo-mmmm those big ol’ . . . and then like David Lee Roth says, in the song “Panama,” . . . reach down, in between her legs . . . see that pus-say . . . Soon, but never soon enough, he would get to that, and beyond tonight, this was another day closer to getting out of the store, going corporate for Grandfather’s—Assistant Regional Director of Quality Pizzarifficness—and up up up the ladder. Not bad for a D student.
The plates and glasses clanked as they were replaced, the silverware rattled in their respective slots, the plastic racks shoved through the dish machine’s conveyor now pushed and scooted into what Dale hoped were neat stacks, and then the abrupt unsettling silence of rooms that had only moments before been filled with noise. It was a silence profound and jarring enough for Dale to stop punching the calculator and to stop scribbling figures into forms. The silence lasted only two seconds, long enough for Dale to tap, tap, tap the desk with his index finger, to sigh if only to make a sound, because Dale hated silence for any duration. The radio was loud, the TV at home was loud, the apartment complex was loud, the traffic, the ceaseless chatter of customers and employees, everything. Especially Stevie—Stevie!, he thought, with disgust—was loud, but in his case, Dale preferred silence. Dale could hear Stevie stepping closer to the office, whistling circus music, pounding on the wall or the steel of the kitchen’s counters while saying “Hi-yah!” in a loud whisper. Dale heard him, talking to himself (he never shut up, that was the biggest complaint from everyone . . . he’s a dishwasher, and the motherfucker never stops talking), “Dammit, man, this day is done, done, done, done, done, done, done” (and with each “done,” Stevie would hi-yah a new part of the kitchen as each step was closer to the timeclock) “and I want to have fun, fun, fun, fun, fun, fun, fun, because if it ain’t five o’clock here, it’s five o’ clock somewhere, and that’s what they say, anyway, right boss?”
Dale found the silence, as Stevie walked into the room, blocking the lights from the kitchen, to be even more jarring and discomforting. It heightened how the only people left were Dale and Stevie, and that made what Dale was about to do that much more unpleasant. He wanted to have the boy genius—Jeremy—take care of it, but he already caused enough problems by hiring this chatterbox weirdo.
“I need to talk to you for a minute,” Dale said, filling out one last column before rolling back and swiveling towards Stevie.
Stevie punched out, replaced the time card in his slot, held up his hands and announced, “Look at these things!” He wiggled his fingers. “Pruny!”
“So. Stevie. You’ve been here two weeks,” Dale began, leaning back, folded hands behind head.
“Yeah, buddy,” Stevie interrupted. “And I ain’t gonna lie, it gets tough back there by yourself washing all those plates and pans, those utensils. I’m always sayin’ to the crew ‘Y’all! When ya gonna go easy on me back here? You don’t want me to karate chop the next person who brings back too many plates. Best believe I’ll swing these arms and—” and here, Stevie flailed his arms in opposite circular directions, culminating in two hands pushed out while yelling in a high pitched shriek—“HI-YAHHHHHHHHHHH!”
“That’s the problem,” Dale yelled over the “HI-YAHHHHHHHH!” rolling backwards as Stevie’s hands pushed inches in front of Dale’s head. “You’re scaring everyone.”
“What do you mean?” Stevie asked, lowering his hands, straightening up.
“I mean, you’re scaring the crew. You’re scaring customers. And,” Dale scrunched his nose and rolled back two inches, the wheels grinding over the dirt and cracks in the concrete floor. “I’m not sure of how to put this, but, you smell. Bad. You really need to figure out a way to do laundry.”
“Oh!” Stevie laughed, sniffed, then said, “That!” as if it was a trifling thing. “I’m stayin’ with Alvin, and he don’t have laundry in the trailer so I’m waitin’ to get my first paycheck from y’all so I can launder these clothes, so there really ain’t nuthin’ to worry—”
“Do you bathe?” Dale asked.
“Well, Dale. That’s the thing.”
“So no? You don’t?” Dale rolled closer, leaning in, face scrunched into dismay.
“It’s part of my training,” Stevie said, crossing his flabby-beefy arms.
“This modern-day warrior act?”
“It ain’t an act, man! Once some money comes in, it’s like I told Jeremy, I’m gonna get trained to be a modern-day warrior, a real bad-ass. In the meantime, I’m training myself how to do this, and—”
“You’re training yourself?” Dale asked, followed by a short sharp, “Ha!”
“You gotta start somewhere, man! Ya think those Chinese peasants sat around waiting til they had the yen to pay the sen-say to learn how? Ya think they told their friends, ‘Sorry about my luck, y’all, but I can’t be no martial artist ‘til I can af-FORD it? No, man! I’m trainin’ myself, and I need to have a stink on me. It’s in all the movies. You think animals bathe before they hunt? No! They gotta smell like the environment around them, but I keep my hands and arms clean if you want to smell them, because I know we can’t have germs gettin’ on everything.”
“No,” Dale said. “Look. Stevie. Dude. At the end of the day, between all the hi-yahing in the dishtank, your practice chops by the dumpster behind the store, it’s just . . . not working out.”
Stevie lowered his arms, slouched. “You firin’ me?”
“Afraid so, buddy.” Dale extended his hand, to shake. “We’ll mail you your check. Good luck.”
Stevie stepped forward, as if to shake Dale’s extended hand.
“HI-YAHHHHH!” he screamed, shifting into a quasi-Bruce Lee position, right arm pulled back, left arm held in front of him, open palms in both hands.
And Dale, he sure did flinch, rolling backwards in his chair, the scream such a horrible contrast to the near silence of the buzzing fluorescent lights in the rest of the kitchen, to say nothing of the fact that, dude, a couple of the guys in the crew did smoke Dale out as the dinner rush was starting to die down. His face winced, turned rightward sharply in the anticipated shot between the eyes.
“Just kiddin’,” Stevie said, dropping his arms. “Just wanted to see you flinch.”
When Stevie told him it was all one big ha-ha just kiddin’, Dale stood, adrenaline shaking him out of the thc torpor.
“Out!” Dale yelled. “You’re fired! Out!”
Stevie backed out, turned around, walked towards the back door, leaving Dale there to regain his composure, to straighten up, to look down at that desk calendar with all the Xs through all the days that are done, all the days still in the way of getting out of here. Dale cursed, grabbed a black Sharpie, drew an X through today’s date. If it ain’t drunks in the dishtank, it’s crackheads, and if it ain’t crackheads in the dishtank, it’s— fucking modern-day warriors. Dale will laugh about this eventually, over after-work drinks with the others in corporate.
Stevie’s voice faded away, a steady spiel of, “Alright, man, well, no hard feelings, I guess, I mean—I did like working for all y’all even if you didn’t think I was Grandfather’s Olde Tyme Goode Tyme Pizza Parlour material, I mean, it is hard to balance the balance between that and my trying to be a modern-day warrior, so I’ll let myself out the back here and that’s that and I’m sorry if I scared ya Dale with my modern-day warrior chops, but it was funny watching you panic that way . . . ”
•
. . . So I don’t gotta tell you the rest, Mouse, you know how it went down with me and Alvin. He never gave me no chance to explain nuthin, but that’s ’cause Ronnie made him think bad about me. I keep hearing how you can only use the martial arts I’m trying to learn in like self-defense, but I’m like, “Y’all, I wanna kick some ass!” but if that’s the way it’s done, I guess that means I can never go after Ronnie.
I miss living in Gainesville, even if it’s only been a few days, but I grabbed my shit off Alvin’s front steps, threw it in my truck, and I had just been fired, so I’m sitting there in my truck thinking, ‘The hell I’m supposed to do now?’ and, thanks to Ronnie, my only option is to go back to my parents, who’re gonna wanna make me go back to school if I’m to live under their roof. High Springs ain’t that far away, but I do miss Gainesville.
Maybe it’ll be alright, Mouse. I’ll go back to Santa Fe Community College—I mean, I’m only nineteen, so I’m sure I’m not that far behind. Besides that, maybe they got free karate classes there.
So that’s it, Mouse—I was goin’ to town today and thought I’d stop by and see what you were up to, and it looks like you’re busy with your girlfriend here in bed, so let me just walk out of here and let y’all get back to what you were doin’ before but thanks for lettin’ me in and hearin’ my side of the story because I guess if I learned anything, I need to make sure I have plenty of room to do my karate choppin’, and maybe I shouldn’t go around braggin’ that I’m tryin’ to be a modern-day warrior so I’ll just let myself out here and y’all stay in that bed, oh-kay.
WILLIAM AND MAUX
A third shot of some foul-ass octane burn later—some cheap well shot to go with the cheap beer—and your mouth finally liberates the throbbing numb of your thoughts, a steady drooling alkie-babble to Ronnie on your left and Paul on your right as the bar you’re seated at rotates and the old wave music buzzes out the speakers hanging in the four corners of the room . . . “All I’m sayin’ here—all I’m tryin’ to say here—is that it can’t go on like this. You know? My band’s done, and is that tour as good—as, like, adventurous, I should say—as it’s ever gonna be, from here on out? If so, why am I here? Who, in this town, ’s gonna settle down with me? And do I even want to settle down. I mean, it’s the same as it’s been, and it can’t go on forever like this. Can it?”
“Look at these nnnnnuggets,” Paul says. “Everywhere!” He swivels his bar stool, leans in behind you to say to Ronnie, “You want to be in a room full of nnnuggets, you don’t go to the punk rock shows. You come here to the Rotator, to Old Wave Night. They love this shit! Love it!”
“That’s all you can say, man?” you moan, and you know you’re sounding like a grade A buzzkill, but still—Paul’s still calling girls “nnnnuggets.” Is this life always going to be one big joke to him, and what happens when that black Caesar haircut turns gray and that black Bauhaus t-shirt paunches out?
“Aw dude, I don’t know, man,” Paul says, sips his beer, adds, “Just trying to have some fun tonight, unlike you.”
“Who’s she?” Ronnie asks. You watch him point through the darkness beyond the bar’s slowly rotating circle. You like him—he’s Central Florida and you’re Central Florida—and you want to warn him about what and who to avoid, and you see where he’s pointing, and it’s no good. This can be a small, childish town, and not everybody wants you to be happy.
“Her name’s Maureen, but she spells it M-A-U-X.” That name feels so empty in your mouth. When was that? Two years ago? Took her home after some house show. Lately, memories are constantly ambushing you into realizing how much time has passed, how much has changed, between then and now.
“Did you date her, like, in a relationship?” Ronnie asks.
Relationship. “He had a relationship with her poon hole,” Paul says, and you try not to laugh. You fail.
One fifty cent mug of beer after the next. The Rotator skirts the border between the college town and the rural hinterlands. It’s an XYZ Liquor Lounge officially named JP Mc Jelloshotz. The buzzing sign above the front entrance is a white-light background with a drawing of a bow-tied penguin wearing sunglasses shaped in the odd-angled style of the 1980s. Some impoverished punk rocker discovered they had mugs of beer for fifty cents, and here you are. The stools around the circular bar—and the bar itself—spin a complete orbit in one hour. The more you drink, the faster the room spins. Or so it feels. Aside from the lack of sawdust on the floor, the large square room around the rotating bar looks like a roadhouse in a 1970s film about renegade truckers with CBs riding around the country with precocious chimpanzees. The place oozes with seventies gimmickry; you sense the ghosts of mechanical bulls past upon entering. “The scene” took it over from the old day laborer rent-a-drunks who used to sit in these stools and spin after a hard day of scrapping drywall or whatever the hell they did all day, and your generation will devote their lives to supporting whatever you perceive to be a kind of authenticity rooted in recent history.
“So many nnnnuggets tonight,” Paul says. Then, he switches into the clipped cadence he affects when moving into pure sarcasm. “Oh! The nuggets! The nuggets!” His squinty brown eyes dart from one girl to the next—seated at the bar, dancing on the dance floor.
“What’s a nugget?” Ronnie asks.
“Aw, you know, dude—cute girls!” Paul says.
“It’s a porno mag,” you say, facing ahead, an offhand comment to stir the pot.
“William, you know it’s more than that.” And here, as he has so many times before, Paul holds forth on the nuances of nuggetry, “as opposed to mere hotness” he declaims to Ronnie, that “je ne sais quois” he repeats less like someone with an air of pretension, but more as someone with the air of one-too-many 50-cent beers who has come across a phrase he finds funny. You half-listen—having heard this so many times before—and you think of quitting MOE GREEN’S FUCKING EYESOCKET, of quitting music altogether and moving on. To what? A wife? Kids? Thoughts inconceivable only one year ago. Ronnie, he asked about Maux. She sits on a stool by herself, in the corner under neon signs suggesting you drink beer, as if anyone who would come into this place would need prodding in that regard. A pint of Fancy Lad Irish Stout (you know her drink habits—Fancy Lad beer, Van Veen vodka) is wedged between her cream-dream thighs exposed from that short shiny indigo skirt.
“I’ll be back in a minute,” you say, rising from the stool, stepping off the rotating bar, feeling like a kid trying to hop off a decelerating merry-go-round. Paul continues his lecture on nuggets, and Ronnie hangs on every word, mouth agape, nodding.
Maux doesn’t notice you at first. She is glaring at the floor. She looks up as you approach, suddenly smiles, catches herself smiling, scowls.
“Why are you here?” she sneers, unclenching the pint glass from her thighs. Head to toe, this indigo vision from the planet Krazy. And who do you think you are, thinking you could meet the marrying kind here in Gainesville, where the women are as crazy and flaky as the days are hot and generally pointless?
“I don’t know,” you say, pulling up a bar stool and sitting down. For once, you answer honestly. “Why are you here?”
“I don’t have any friends, remember?” she says. “I hate people, remember?” You remember. She sips the Fancy Lad from the pint glass, recrosses her legs. “Oh, and I broke up with Philip.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” you say.
“No, you’re not,” Maux says, and you laugh. “This Charming Man” by The Smiths bounces out the speakers, and all the women in the room run en masse to the dance floor.
“You’re right,” you say. You’re not in the mood for the typical Gainesville duplicity.
She empties the pint glass, hands it to you. “Let’s get out of here,” she says.
Sometimes, like now, Maux has the right idea. “Where to?” you ask, hopping off your barstool.
“What did you say to me when we hooked up?” She slides off her barstool and faces you, knee-high indigo boots, that indigo sleeveless miniskirt, those long lithe arms and that edible neck, the slope of the chin, the cheeks, the indigo lipstick, the indigo eye shadow, the short angry shock of indigo hair. Your erection is profound, this almost leaky menacing high-maintenance wand of hormonal desperation pushing against the black denim of your cut-off below the knee pants, even when she quotes you and imitates you in your Kermit-the-Frog-as-Ian-Mac-Kaye voice, “ ‘Let’s go back to my apartment and listen to music?’ Let’s do that.”
Nothing is long-term, and not much even makes it to short-term here, so who cares. Who cares if your nineteen year old girlfriend, the biggest nothing of all since coming back from tour, is asleep in your bed at home. Waiting for you after closing Gatorroni’s.
“We’re going to listen to music at your place instead,” you say, setting the empty pint glass on your bar stool, and then you think it’ll be funny to imitate Maux’s raspy teenage boy snotty tone, so you say “There’s some dumb stupid horrible band staying with us right now who I hate,” and she has to laugh, and you have to laugh, and it’s a discreet sneak through the crowd of women dancing to The Smiths. You avoid eye contact with all of them, because if they figured out what was happening, well. The last thing you need is another ex-girlfriend co-worker at Gatorroni’s by the Slice. You don’t look up and over to Paul and Ronnie, because you don’t want them to see you leaving without them, and maybe they see you and maybe they don’t. You don’t want to have to explain anything to anyone.
You make it out of there without any interactions, stumbling across the white graveled parking lot in this pathetic little corner of this “mixed up muddled up shook up world” (so you sing to yourself from a song the title of which you can’t recall) to your hail-damaged white Honda coupe, the racquet-ball-sized hail leaving black dimples on the roof and hood. Maux finds her car—something cold and teutonic—and it’s a ten minute drive back to town. You follow the red square tail lights as the darkness of the rural road slowly brightens into college town streets. You arrive at her student ghetto apartment, and you shrug, get out of the car, think/don’t think about what you’re doing/not doing, and how it’s so easy to get into a rut here, and too easy to drink the days and nights away. Easy . . . easy . . . easy. Two steps inside, and Maux has her indigo lips all over the right side of your face.
DOUG CLIFFORD: THE BAND (NOT THE DRUMMER)
Ronnie leaves the plasma center, crook of his right arm bandaged, wallet’s emptiness temporarily assuaged with a ten and a five, drives over to William and Neal’s coach house, nothing to do on a weekday afternoon, pulls up the dirt driveway, white clouds billowing behind him, parks in front of the white shack they lived in, gets out of the car, steps inside because the door’s open and a familiar old record is playing.
“Ronnie!” Neal says, standing in the middle of the tiny dirty beige living room with the low ceiling, shirtless and hairy, in nothing else but blue shorts. The coach house feels like a mid-August afternoon where the breeze—such as it is—doesn’t stop the heat. “We’re starting a Creedence Clearwater Revival cover band, and we want you to be the drummer.”
“Who else is in it?” Ronnie asks, walking the five steps to their battered gray sofa, stepping around Neal and falling onto the couch as John Fogerty sings “Oh Lord/stuck in Lodi uh-gaaaaain” through snap-crackly-popped vinyl.
“Nobody. Yet. Just me and William.” Neal moves to the open doorway, looks out to the sand and the dirt of the driveway, air-bass guitaring, turning to his right at the wobbly black disc on the turntable on the opposite wall of the couch where Ronnie slouches with his bandaged arm and the bloody-dotted cottonball pressed into the crook of his arm. If Ronnie wanted to change the music, he could do so almost without getting up from his seat—only a matter of stretching himself over a cracked and ancient orange coffee table cluttered with stacks of random artbooks, a label-free jug of red wine, and an opened gatefold brown and black record cover—CCR’s Chronicle—dotted with tiny green marijuana flakes.
“What’s the drummer’s name?” Ronnie asks. Like any self-respecting American, Ronnie loves Creedence Clearwater Revival, and finds it impossible to fathom anyone—anyone!—disliking their music. And Ronnie knows he can pull off these rhythms without any problems.
Neal turns around, steps to the coffee table. “Good question.” He picks up Chronicle, flips it over. “Oh! Of course. Everybody knows it’s Doug Clifford.” Neal laughs, extends the album to Ronnie’s face, points to the liner note that has his name. “Doug Clifford, dude.”
Ronnie laughs, takes the cover out of Neal’s hands, stares transfixed at Doug Clifford’s shagginess, the brown mop top and the relief pitcher moustache. “So I’m Doug Clifford?” he asks.
“The band’s Doug Clifford,” Neal says. They laugh. Neal adds, in the shy burnout voice of the musician with the microphone in every independent rock and roll band ever, “Hey what’s up? We’re Doug Clifford? We’re from Gainesville?”
Neal flips the record, and they sit on the couch passing the label-free red wine jug, taking in the sounds, talking about Doug Clifford, the band that wasn’t a band yet, that would, in fact, never be a band.
William steps out of his bedroom—yawning, stretching—groggy from a hungover nap. Short blond hair in bedheaded clumps, wrinkled white t-shirt of some old hardcore band with a cheap-o black silkscreened image of the buzzcut-headed singer in mid-howl, left hand grabbing the mic, right hand balled into an angry punk rock fist. William sits between Ronnie and Neal, blue work pants cutoff below the knees skidding against the worn fabric of the couch, keys jangling in a right side belt loop. He leans forward, grabs the wine bottle, drinks, studies Chronicle.
“Should we grow mutton chops and moustaches for this?” he asks. Ronnie laughs at the idea.
“Naw, dude,” Neal says. “We’ll just wear flannel. No need to be glitzy.” He leans forward, points at the cover. “Doug Clifford would want it that way.”
The afternoon dissipates into evening. They empty the wine bottle and Chronicle ends, and then Neal throws on Cosmo’s Factory and then Willie and the Poor Boys, and it doesn’t matter if some of the same songs are repeated—they are starting a CCR cover band so it is paramount to gain an even greater familiarity with the material.
Paul walks in the door, “Oh, CCR . . . I too can hear the bullfrog calling me . . . ” He stops to look at these three giggling on the couch. “You guys are llllloaded!” Paul says.
“It’s Doug Clifford’s fault,” Ronnie says, fully feeling the spirit of the wine, of the music.
“Well I’m going to the Drunken Mick if you want a ride.” Paul shakes his head, laughs. “Looks like I got some catching up to do.”
“Maybe Paul should be Doug Clifford, and you can be Stu Sutcliffe, Ron,” Neal says, as they stand and stumble out the door, leaving the record to end on the bummer jam “Effigy.” “You can play other instruments, and Paul only plays the drums.”
“Aw, man,” Ronnie moans. “I was really hoping to be ol’ Doug.”
“Well we can’t all be Doug Clifford,” Neal says as he locks the front door. “Such is life.”
Everyone they would see at the Drunken Mick, everyone they would talk to at the Drunken Mick, they would figure out a way to work Doug Clifford—the band that would never be a band—into the conversation. “Doug Clifford drank Fancy Lad Stout, so that’s what I’m gonna have too.” “Doug Clifford likes girls like you, has anybody ever told you that before?” “Yeah, I don’t know if I can see your band this weekend. Doug Clifford said it wasn’t very good.”
“What’s all this Doug Clifford malarkey?” Paul asks Ronnie, sitting at the Drunken Mick as Neal, on the other side of William, serenades all passersby with random snippets of CCR songs, culminating in illogical drunken laughter and a “Doug Clifford!” plea.
“It’s our new band,” Ronnie informs him.
“Really?” Paul says.
“Sure!”
“Uh-huh.” Paul shakes his head. “It’s all talk. Next week, it’ll be something else.”
Before Ronnie can contradict him, the wine and the Irish stout drowning out any counterarguments to the undeniable fact that yes, Doug Clifford will get off the ground and yes, Doug Clifford will be a real band, Neal stands on the bar, completely naked, a gorilla-hirsute body soft shoeing across the mahogany bar, yelling, “This one’s going out to Doug Clifford!” He raises his arms in triumph, sings, “I wanna know! Have you ever seen the rain!” He shakes his dong up and down, round and round.
Ronnie leaps off the barstool, laughs, preparing for a fight somewhere, or jail time—something—but instead, the roomful of drunks, scenester kids Ronnie hasn’t met yet, collegiate-y types seated at the tables throughout the room, all chant “Doug Clif-ford! Doug Clif-ford! Doug Clif-ford!” until the bartender—long used to these antics, coaxes Neal down, bundled clothes in hand, trying not to smile.
“He does this all the time,” Paul yells in Ronnie’s ear over the din of the continued “Doug Clifford!” chants.
Neal squats down, leaps behind the bar, throws on his clothes, yells, “Thank you! We’re Doug Clifford! Good night!”
The short squat ginger-headed bartender looks to Paul, smiles. “You know what to do,” he says in an Irish brogue exaggerated for greater tips the way female bartenders accentuate their tits.
“Yeah yeah, I know,” Paul says, smiling in the familiarity of the routine. “Let’s go, little brother,” he announces, right hand’s fingers beckoning towards the exit.
And in the dizzy-drunk near last-call at The Drunken Mick, Paul leads Neal by the arm, Neal’s pants pulled up but unbuttoned, t-shirt coiled around his neck, followed by Ronnie and William, as the “Doug Clif-ford! Doug Clif-ford!” chants fade and they step out onto the University Avenue sidewalk, to the car, home to bed.
•
No, there would be no Doug Clifford. Doug Clifford would be replaced by the next band concept. There would never be enough time to get to all the ideas. You could pull off two or three bands at once, but the others fell away into afternoons and nights like these—frivolous discussion where someone like Ronnie Altamont could believe it would be possible to actually get Doug Clifford off the ground. So many ideas fell to the wayside, getting no further than creative play, self-expression for self-expression’s sake, impromptu late-night jams, or the idle talk of the potential members of Doug Clifford. Everywhere, kids talk this way, and they make ambitious plans and announcements and they want to believe that this is the band that will get off the ground, and who knows, maybe this will be the band to get off the ground, but just as likely it won’t, it’s more enjoyable to talk. Sometimes, the idea itself is better than any possible execution.
And there were no shortage of ideas. Freed from the confines and general horseshit of high school, stimulated enough by college and the young adulthood of post-college, anything seems possible. Brains bloom endless variations on the same four chords, the same 4/4 rock beats, music—in execution or theory—dancing between the gap of thought and expression the Velvet Underground once sang about. It’s the limitations Melville lamented at the end of Chapter 32, “Cetology,” in Moby Dick: There’s never enough time, and that’s the colossal bummer of life, isn’t it?
SWEAT JAM
In the corner of the spare square room soundproofed with red rugs nailed to the walls, Paul pounds eighth notes on the floor tom of his five-piece gold sparkled Ludwig drumkit, hitting the snare on the two and the four of the 4/4 beat. Like all drummers, he’s the first in the room to get lost in the music, of this simple VU cavepound, eyes opened but not looking at anything . . . often when playing drums, Paul thinks of streets in towns he used to live, streets in towns he will never return. In Wekiva—the neighborhood he grew up in before going off to college—the twenty minute drive through the mammoth subdivision, the Duckpond to the left, the one-story ranch-styles on side streets that branched cul-de-sacs with bike trails winding through the jungle scrub. Hunt Club Boulevard—that was the name of the main thoroughfare and you don’t get much more suburban that that—a four-lane road with only minor curves, winding home after school and yelling “Faggot!” at old people who were dumb enough to walk the sidewalks or “Skateboarding should be a crime!” at the skater kids. With the body memory of the drum beat, his mind wanders down those streets, tries taking stock in what he remembers and what he forgets. Cannonballs into swimming pools, that sensation of hanging in the air—dry—before falling, before the big splash. The hallways of their high school—the high school that has since been torn down and replaced by a newer, larger, nicer, more functional high school—the dirt and grime on the white tile of the old one, the rows of blue lockers, the clang of the lockers, the manic chatter, the drama and secrets and undercurrent of uncertainty masked by everyone with every step between classes, the three bong-bong-bongs of the tardy bell, the cheap portable walls put up to separate what had once been giant rooms, the library in the center of the school, spokes of hallways and classrooms orbiting. In the Fishbowl—the circular steps surrounded by windows of the painting and theatre classes—where the arty kids hung around before the classes started, the goth kids, the skaters, the punks with their liberty spikes and CRASS t-shirts, cliqued up because you needed a group to get through it. Paul pounds the beat and remembers all of this, remembers leaving school, getting in a car, driving down Sand Lake Road through the subdivisions and the open fields that would become subdivisions soon enough, the perpetually sunshiney afternoon of a Central Florida weekday as school lets out and no matter what you think or thought about it it stays in your memories.
Neal stands to his brother’s right, picking at a red Fender bass plugged into a buzzing Peavey bass amp. His mind doesn’t wander around in memories of past places the way Paul’s does—he needs to hold this together—as the bass man, as the bridge, the link, between the drums and the guitars. It’s more of a channeling of the spirit of Mike Watt—of the Minutemen, of fIREHOSE—of locking into what’s happening and finding the freedom in it and the spaces to not just lock down the rhythm and bridge the gap from drums to guitar—but to figure out ways to get to the top two strings and the upper frets—not to show off, but to find the right sounds, the right counterbalance to the guitars, because everyone knows the guitars want nothing more but to wank and noodle and dick around, so this is an anchor that will give them not just the low notes of the chords they play, but a larger framework to do something that is both tasteful and creative. He puffs out his cheeks and exhales like Mike Watt the way guitarists might windmill like Townshend. He moves in spasmodic forward lurches, backbone sways waving from the base of the spine to the neck as the fingers on his right hand pick-pluck the strings. It has to start with Watt for Neal, because Watt opened up the possibilities of the instrument for Neal, and that led to Mingus, to Jimmy Garrision, to Rockette Morton. Day-to-day life is nervous energy channeled into right and wrong places, but here, with the music, it’s all focused on this, and every distraction, every good and bad memory, all the drama of the Great Gainesvillian Soap Opera, fades to nothing.
William, all he wants to do is plug into the Crate amp in the corner and stand to the left of Paul, pedals cranked up all the way, and stab at a detuned off-white Fender Squire so it makes cloudy feedback of dense black and white noise. He doesn’t really know how to play guitar, only picking up chords here and there from friends while sitting around some late-night front porch party, so he tries following the cavepound rhythm, smiling in sweat and angular side-to-side hip swivels, never more convinced that MOE GREEN’S FUCKING EYE SOCKET is over, because the simple enjoyment of it, at its base, of making music with friends, died somewhere on that ill-fated and pointless tour. If anything, instead of dreaming of where he was, or where he is, he thinks of where he will be, if he can figure out how to get out of here.
Ronnie tosses around the phrase “Sweat Jam,” used by Neal before they went to Paul’s gray-teal, wood-rotting, plaster-peeling student ghetto house, walking over from Gatorroni’s with a case of Old Hamtramck, as he follows Paul’s rhythm and bounces around Neal’s foundation, a beat-to-hell black and white Fender Squire plugged direct into a Peavey amp with a small amount of distortion and a small amount of reverb, throttling the instrument with pick strums and fist punches, trying to find new sounds, the high white sounds of life itself. Sweaty forehead, sweat-stained t-shirt, wet hair. Ronnie lived in the all-encompassing now, the brilliantly beautiful now. The music they made in the sweat jam was Ronnie’s life—one loud long song jumping around in keys and tempos, bright then droning, repetitive then chaotic, but always loud and always sweaty. Each day, each moment—he thinks as he jumps around in the three foot diameter of space he has between Neal and William and in front of Paul in that tiny red-rugged room—is a glorious sweat jam, a cliffdive into the unknown, no matter what happens with his writing and his band, here in Gainesville.
Life as a sweat jam. Yeah. Ronnie can live with this.
1 See Appendix A
2 See Appendix B
3 For the complete story, please see Appendix C
4 See Appendix D
5 You demand all-caps