SIX: HEY! IT'S SPRING AGAIN

 

 

 

“Whenever spring comes to New York I can’t stand the

suggestions of the land that come blowing over the river

from New Jersey and I’ve got to go. So I went.”

—Jack Kerouac

AT THE PAWN SHOP

 

“Ronnie? That you?” the Gainesville scenester-looking dude standing to Ronnie’s left asks as he’s checking out the electric guitars hanging from the greasy walls of the pawn shop.

Ronnie turns away from a black Les Paul worth much more than what he has made in the eleven months he has lived in Gainesville. Each guitar has its own story—old, new, expensive, cheap, dinged, shredded, unplayed, missed, unmissed, covered in stickers, covered in Sharpie-scrawls, hollow-bodied, f-holed, whammy barred—these six-strings, hanging by their necks, unloved and quivering in the air-conditioning.

On the floor of the small and inevitably dingy pawn shop, black bulky amplifiers stacked everywhere you turned—faded knobs, knobless, some speakers look razored, some speakers unused. Ronnie is transfixed, making up the stories behind each instrument, the people who pawned their gear and what they bought with the money. Like Frank here, who pawned this electric blue BC Rich when his band, Hollywood Trix, broke up, and used the money to buy a suit for a job interview with the Barnett Bank on University, where they were hiring bank tellers, and he’s trying to figure out if the THC has left his system (it has been six months, maybe? Since he last got high? He thinks?). Or Karl, who pawned the red Hagstrom next to the BC Rich after his wife left him for his best friend and he took the money to buy a shotgun because he never played the guitar anyway and besides—what did he have to live for anymore? Somehow, these bleak imaginary tales made the story of Ronnie, who pawned his black and white Squire Fender, his Crate amp, and his gray Smith-Corona fifteen minutes ago, easier to stomach.

“It’s amazing what you find here sometimes,” the scenester-looking dude says to Ronnie, not taking his eyes off the guitars. What was his name again? He wears the old black denim cut-off below the knee that everyone wears here—soiled blue-black Chucks that get that beat-to-hell look only from miles on skateboards, the wallet chain looped from the side of the cut-offs, the lanky-black-haired pale skinned kid you see in the far corner of every suburban parking lot, sitting on his board, sipping from a Big Gulp cup filled with the contents of a Brain Mangler malt liquor quart.

“Yup,” Ronnie says, running his right index and middle fingers across the open strings of the off-white Ibanez Flying-V to the left of the Les Paul. On the opposite side of the room, the pawnbrokers, inevitably orange-skinned, paunchy, and loud, discussing the fish they’ve caught in their lifetimes, as Rush sings of flying by night away from here on the classic rock radio station playing through the boombox next to the cash register.

It is the afternoon of March 1st.

Ronnie decides to tell him. Out of the three, Ronnie hates mentioning the typewriter most of all, as it was a gift from Kelly before Ronnie left for Crescent City.

The scenester turns away from the guitars, looks at Ronnie. “Damn. Really?” Then, an expression of fearful condescension, of concern mixed with guardedness, his look essentially screaming, Is this guy a junkie?

“Had to make rent, ya know?” Ronnie shrugs, looks down, feeling the hatred and frustration of being here to his bones, the bulge of bills in his wallet going straight to Roger, folded cash for the moment pressing against the left ass cheek of his dirty denim.

“Oh,” the scenester says, looking almost relieved, shifting his slouch from the right foot to the left. “Aw dude, you can always get another amp and guitar if you want, and what was it, your typewriter?”

“I feel like I just sold off my limbs,” Ronnie oh-so-dramatically puts it.

“Limbs?” The scenester pshaws. “People do this all the time. Our friends do this all the time.” He points to the guitars. “Look around. You’re not the first.”

This is something Ronnie loves about Gainesville. Poverty here is temporary, a condition everyone goes through from time to time, rather than a horrible affliction worthy of scorn.

“It’s rent. You gotta pay it,” the scenester continues. “It’s better than . . . I mean, think of all the guitars here pawned for heroin . . . ”

Ronnie nods, knows this guy is right, but not over the hurt of having to pawn off his most-valued possessions. He thinks of that old chestnut on TV shows, those trips to the pawn shop, when the hardluck protagonist pawns some treasured object—his watch, saxophone, diamond ring—and gets a pittance from the conniving pawn broker, who will not negotiate any better deals, the poor guy having no choice but to take the spare change he’s offered, and as he leaves the pawn shop, putting the coins in his pockets, the pawn broker immediately sets the prized possession in the display window with a price tag twenty times the amount he paid the poor bastard for it.

The thing about it was that he used the typewriter only to write haiku. Since receiving it from Kelly, he was more inspired to sit and write haiku than to write short stories or anything else publishable. Instead of that proverbial Great American Novel people were always making jokes about when Ronnie told them what he did (“So, ya writin’ that Great American Novel, heh heh heh?”), Ronnie wrote haiku about the cast of What’s Happening!! A disgrace, in light of all the things he imagined he would write when he first lugged the machine to the car. Ronnie brooded, often, on what kind of muse he was stuck with that was never around when he had something he was aching to say, but was always there to come up with silly, unpublishable horseshit.

And the amp, well, maybe the scenester was right about that one. After all, The Sunny Afternoons had broken up the day after playing another party where they were well-received, but not as well-received as they had been earlier. (There is a law of diminishing returns at work with cover bands.) Besides, Bradley the drummer needs to graduate, wants to spend more time on his finance book. Rae has found a boyfriend, prefers getting high and watching movies with him in her living room over learning new Kinks songs. Ronnie can’t blame her. She has done enough for Ronnie, and he is grateful. This leaves Ronnie and Mitch free to sit on Ronnie’s roof to drink beers, but even that is infrequent these days as Ronnie opts, more and more, to scribble whatever thoughts are in his head.

The amp was taking up space in the corner of the living room by the front door. It was good to have around when the mood struck him, as was the guitar, but eviction looms, once again. The part-time gig at the restaurant is conducive to a hand-to-mouth existence, but it didn’t make rent this time—Gatorroini’s in SoHo has been in a down time between major sports seasons, the cold, and the students hunkering down to study.

“Well, I’m gonna go pay the rent now,” Ronnie says to the scenester, extends his hand. They clasp at the fingers, pull away, snap. “Take it easy.”

“Hang in there, alright?” the scenester says. “Hey wait,” he adds. “If you’re around this weekend, my band Marcus Aurelius is playing at the Righteous Freedom House.” He pulls out a small flyer from his pocket, hands it to Ronnie. The flyer artwork is all Mondrian lines and lower-case Helvetica fonts.

“Sure, dude,” Ronnie says, knowing he isn’t going.

Walking to the front door, Ronnie takes a passing glance at that gray typewriter on the glass counter between the two pawnbrokers who still talk of fish in this lake versus fish in that lake. It’s what he already misses the most.

Out the front door, Ronnie feels the warmth of the spring sun, the breeze. The depression lifts. Ronnie has a notebook and a pen. He wants to go home and work. He will drive his dying car through this perfect weather, leave his share of the rent money on the kitchen table for Roger, then retreat to his bedroom, open the windows, listen to Chuck Berry, and write.

 

 

RONNIE FINDS A SECOND JOB IN THE ELECTRONICS DEPARTMENT OF THAT ONE DEPARTMENT STORE THAT IS QUITE OFTEN THE SOURCE OF CRUEL JOKES AMONGST THE PRE-TEEN SET AT THE EXPENSE OF THOSE BELIEVED TO BE OF A LOWER SOCIOECONOMIC STRATA

 

Into the whoosh of the automatic front doors, that first kiss of stale A/C air, past the wet-moussed cashiers, through the racks of prismatic t-shirts, shorts, blouses, pants, slacks, dresses, and Florida Gator leisure wear, past the cologne and perfume cases, mixing with the lotions to add that chemically floral tinge to the air, and contrast that smell with the automotive aisle (keep walking, keep walking) with its stench of the various automotive lubricants stocked in rows six feet high, and head straight to the cacophony of sixty televisions—five down, twelve across—showing, on an endless loop, the films Space Jam and Independence Day over and over as the CD sampler machine plays ten-second snippets of the same ten songs—Young Country numbers about girls with hearts as big as Texas and drinking establishments where the domestic beer is served cold mixed with alternative rock and roll songs about relationship troubles and stuff. In the middle of this squared-off section of this department store—part of this nationally-known chain notorious for being the butt of so many jokes among kids, the very idea of kids’ parents shopping there the epitome of cheap poverty—rows of compact discs, cassingles, VHS tapes, even movies in the exciting new DVD format arranged alphabetically, more or less, and shrinkwrapped. At the entrance to the territory marked off as the Electronics Department, two employees in matching red vests, black slacks, white Oxford shirts, and black ties stand behind the glass display cases containing wristwatches and beepers stand and pretend to look busy amidst this cacophony—the one on the right seemingly studying the pages of a clipboard, and the one on the left standing behind the register while holding a broom.

The employee on the left has clipper-shaved stubbly black hair, patchy in some parts and overgrown in others because the person working the clippers was on her seventh glass of boxed wine. His glasses take up a large amount of facial territory—two squared circles above the eyebrows rounding downward to above the cheeks. When he scowls, he looks like he could be insane, definitely weird, as he says to his co-worker, “I can’t believe you’ve never seen the punk rock episode of CHIPS.12 Pain is one of my all-time favorite fictional bands. No, they are my favorite. Let me sing it for you again: “I dig pain . . . the feelin’s in my brain . . . ” and here, the employee sounds more aggressive and, well, barky, with each new lyric. “the scratching, the bashing, the clawin’, the thrashin’, the givin’, the gettin’, the total blood lettin’ drive me insane . . . ” and here, the employee bellows out, “I DIG PAIN!”

“Shut up, dude!” the other employee whisper-yells, nudging the bespectacled creep employee in the arm. “I know you like that song. You’ve only told me about it for three months now.” This employee has blond, surfer-style hair with plenty of West Coast rock and roll shag. In spite of the laidback hair and the tan that looks imported from the nearest beach, his general demeanor here at the department store is one of harried annoyance with everything and everyone around him, especially his co-worker here, who happens to also be his roommate.

“Well I have the whole episode recorded,” Ronnie says to Roger. “You need to watch it, and get hip to the music of Pain.”

“You’ve turned down every invitation I’ve ever extended to watch films with me, but you want me to watch a CHIPS rerun.”

“Yeah, but this is different.”

“Gotta study,” Roger says, pointing to the clipboard, which contains thirty-four pages of the screenplay he’s working on for class—scenes from a project about, in Roger’s words, “the one and only man living in the United States who is 100 percent happy with the spectacles and entertainment and choices presented that are filed under ‘lowest common denominator.’ For instance, this Phil Collins song we’re hearing right now over the loudspeakers—nobody really likes it, but this guy, he really likes it, and he likes anything and everything about our culture that is intended to make as many people as possible at least somewhat happy . . . so in this mass-produced post-industrial capitalist society that’s just ok, if not worse than ok for most people, this man is in paradise.”

“I can relate,” Ronnie says, trying to understand.

Roger laughs. “You don’t relate, but you understand, right?”

“I think so,” Ronnie says. “Dude’s happy with . . . ” and Ronnie extends his hands outward to the department store, “this crap?”

“Yes,” Roger says. “That’s right.”

 

 

Ten minutes down 13th Street, in the car he will sell soon, southbound through the too-quiet weeknight, softly singing T. Rex’s “Life’s a Gas.” Past the deserted parking lots of the plazas, the lugubrious high school, the old houses where lawyers and accountants and music schools have set up shop. The scuba store. The trophy makers. In the cold of January, the palm tree fronds turn a pale green. There is the slightest tinge of what many places would call “Autumn.” Ronnie wonders if he really wants to leave, for all his talk about it. There are times when Gainesville feels like home, someplace he could settle down and live.

Closer to the Myrrh House, he stops off at the Floridian Harvest, buys the usual two dollar four-pack of Old Hamtramck tallboys. He exchanges pleasantries with the clerk. They know him here. On nights he turns to home, up and down NW 4th Lane, neighbors wave from windows. It could never be like this in the north, in January. Maybe he should stay. He will mull this over while pretending to watch the movie.

 

 

ON THE PHONE WITH MRS. ALTAMONT

 

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

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

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

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

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

“No. You didn’t.”

“Sure I did. At Christmas.”

“I would have remembered that, Ronnie.”

“Well, that’s what I’m doing.”

“To do what?”

“To do what?”

“Yes, Ron. To do what.”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

“Write. Play music.”

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

“I’m saving up money.”

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

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

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

“Ok?”

“Yes, Ronnie. Ok.”

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

“Hey, Dad.”

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

“Ok.”

“Soon.”

“Yes, soon.”

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

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

“Pour me some wine,” Sally-Anne says.

 

 

THE FUTURE

 

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

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

 

 

CHICAGO. CHICAGO? CHICAGO.

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

RONNIE AND WILLIAM

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

ANDY’S ESCAPE

 

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

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

Andy walks to his packed-up, packed-full Volkswagen. To his right, past the small strip of dead grass between their homes, Andy’s neighbor, this overtanned brown-mopped ACR13 landscaper named Rick, sits in a teal tanktop and cutoff shorts, under his front door awning, watching the sprinklers jettison water across the lawn. Between burnt red thigh-skin, he wedges a silver beer can stuffed into a blue koozie.

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

“Yup,” Andy says.

“Stayin’ in town?”

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

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

“City?”

“Yup.”

“What’s up there?”

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

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

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

“Is it good?”

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

“Wanna smoke out before you go?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Where are you going?” Lisa asks.

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

“What?!” Andy laughs.

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

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

“Well good luck!” Lisa says.

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

 

 

WHERE DO YOU GO?

 

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

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

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

Music was the center of our lives.

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

IN THE PARKING LOT, LISTENING TO “HOOTENANNY”

 

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

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

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

 

 

DRUNK JOHN AND SICILY

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

SUMMER OF WORK

 

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

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

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

It’s going to be a long summer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

RONNIE AND CHARLEY

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

THE GOING AWAY PARTY

 

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

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

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

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

“Yeah, I know,” Ronnie says.

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

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

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

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

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

Singing with friends, Ronnie basks in the treacherous ecstasy of transition.

 

12/26/2005—9/3/2013

Longwood, FL—Chicago, IL

 

 

12 Battle of the Bands,ˮ first broadcast on NBC, January 31, 1982

13 “Alachua County Residentˮ

14 Will future generations know the joys and sorrows of packing and unpacking hundreds—if not thousands—of LPs and books? Of knowing that the place you live isn’t really your “home” until youve unpacked the LPs and books? This was one of the reasons why the double-wide trailer was never quite a home for Ronnie, but the Myrrh House was . . .