Gainesville-Interior

GAINESVILLE GIRLS: 1996-1997

With your pocket flasks of vodka, and your shaved heads, your pink/black/green/red dyed locks, your granny glasses and your indie-rock cassettes, your dad’s burnt sienna Le Sabre, your old maroon softball t-shirts from Goodwill, your bikes you ride, your feminist theory, holding hands with each other at shows to keep the boys away, working the counters of Gatorroni’s, Floridian Bistro, Sister Chorizo, El Jalapeño del Gordo, your pills and your shitty drugs, your Doc Martens, your memorized jade tree lyrics written in long lines inside cassettes instead of broken up into verse/chorus/bridge/repeat, the stories behind the tattoos on your arms, legs, shoulders, lower back, left ass cheek, right ass cheek, chest, stomach, mons pubis, your boyfriend’s bands, your ex-boyfriend’s bands, your ex-girlfriend’s bands, your old band, the band you’re trying to start now, the languages you’re learning, your major, your minor, the films you’ve seen, the books you’ve read, your soy pot roast bubbling in the crockpot, cheat on me, cheat on you, your nude bodies in early morning showers after one-night stands, your lost Zippos, your laughter, your idealism, your pettiness, your practiced posture and your ever-watchful eye from the barstool of an outdoor patio, your Hal Hartley video collection, your phone numbers ripped from the pages of spiral notebooks, your bass guitars propped in the corners of your bedrooms, your tolerance of empty wallets and afternoon laziness, your summer roadtrips to the big cities of the north and west, that southern accent you put on the “o” in “Chicago,” your bathroom party secrets, the packets of cocaine you rummage your purse in search of, the patches safetypinned to your backpack, your back windows covered in bumperstickers, your kisses, your tongues, your hands, your rejections, your friendship, your fights, your conversations, your hopes and future plans over malt liquor on the roof, looking at the constellations while listening to the quiet sounds of the neighborhood below.

RONNIE AND MAUX

“Don’t do that,” Maux says, shoving Ronnie away. “I hate holding hands.”

Deeper into the student ghetto, weaving in forward and lateral lurches through the narrow streets and dilapidated southern houses with their warped front porches and peeling paint, the silence taking over from the party sounds—Ronnie’s housewarming party—behind them (sounds of drained kegs and gossip, uptempo drums ricocheting off the houses, Paul standing in the middle of NW 4th Lane yelling “You’re leaving?! Your own party?! Now?! But we’re going to Denny’s, ya sellout! How can you leave your own party when we’re going to Denny’s?! You’re a sellout, Altamont! A sellout!”)

Back and forth, they pass Maux’s hip flask of straight Van Veen Vodka back and forth, a cold stainless steel silver reflecting the streetlights like flashbulbs, flask’s contents a cheap burning inside their bloodstreams. In the darkness, the brittle thwack of palm fronds and the shush-shush of the sand pines through the languid Florida breezes. Ronnie loves the Florida nights most of all, and these are the nights he will miss when he finally gets it together to leave.

“So. Your boyfriend. He’s cool with this?’ Ronnie asks as she leads him onward through the parking lot of her studio apartment building.

“That’s a stupid question,” Maux says, and Ronnie laughs, because he knows it’s a stupid question, and furthermore, duh, he doesn’t care about the answer. Boyfriend or not, after a womanless summer coupled with a long night of downing cup after cup of Old Hamtramck keg beer followed by pocket flask vodka swills, Ronnie is in no condition to argue or even think this could be anything less than a brilliant turn of events.

“We broke up tonight,” Maux continues, leading him up the clangy stairs. “I just haven’t told him yet.”

“And this is why I live here,” Ronnie thinks. “And this is why I love Gainesville.” One moment, you’re in the kitchen of your new house, trying to make this girl laugh, this nnnugget with her indigo skirt and indigo blouse and indigo hair and emerald tie, because you know her scowling is all one big ridiculous act the way everybody needs to have one big ridiculous act to stand out, as she stands there around the keg talking about how she hates this and that, thinks the band playing in the living room (Ronnie’s new living room) sucks, and this sucks and that sucks, and Ronnie laughs at her, because he knows it’s an act, and she knows he knows, but he is a new face in town, and even if this Ronnie is too much of a goof to be suckered by her persona, Maux still knows he is hers, anytime she wants, like any boy in this pathetic town is hers, and as Ronnie laughs at her snarled list of hatreds and responds by breakdancing—by backspinning and pop locking and moonwalking around the kitchen on the grimy hardwood floor as the impassioned and overwrought emo band plays in the living room, Maux knows, all she has to do, is look down at Ronnie when the backspin stops, look into his eyes through those ugly glasses and say, “This party sucks. Let’s go.” And that’s what it’s about here in Gainesville. One moment you’re doing all that, and the next, you’re led by the arm by this nnnugget with indigo everything through her dark living room, kicking bottles and stepping on paperback books before stopping and finding lips in the pitch black, kissing in some dump that smells like old cigarette ash and spilled gut-rot booze.

Maux leads Ronnie to the bed. They continue kissing, and here comes the groping, the tentative but not-that-tentative post-awkward post-collegiate movements of hands towards the good stuff, the sweet stuff, the pa pa pa oo mau mau papa ooo mau m-mau stuff as the vertical prepare to shift to horizontal . . .

“Did you hear that?” Maux whispered, turning towards the door.

“No,” Ronnie lied.

“That knocking? There it is again.”

Ok, ok, Ronnie did hear the heavy throbbing pound at the front door. “Don’t answer it.” Ronnie says, knowing it’s either the friends who saw him leave with Maux who want to laugh at him for going home with her, or else it’s Maux’s ex-boyfriend who doesn’t know he’s an ex-boyfriend. “Seriously. Stay here and don’t answer it,” Ronnie says, hands on shoulders.

“Oh, I’m answering, Ronnie Altamont,” Maux says, wiggling free from Ronnie’s clutches, rolling off the bed, tromping off across the cluttered floor, kicking books and bottles along the way. “Yeah. I’m answering.”

Ronnie opens his eyes. Stares upward at the darkness. “Don’t let him in!” he yells.

“Who is it?” Maux barks, voice like a bratty almost-pubescent boy’s.

“You know who it is! Let me in!” a cracking, slurring, young male voice whines from the other side of that door.

“Don’t open it,” Ronnie whispers, pulling the covers over his face. “Don’t open it.”

“Stop pounding!”

“I’m sorry!” A tear-choked voice implores from the other side of the door.

“I don’t care!”

“Are you with someone?” A whine, a moan, a sniffle.

“Yes! I don’t want to see you anymore. Go home!”

“But I’m sorry!” Full-fledged crying.

“You didn’t do anything! Just . . . go home. Write an emo song about it . . . something. Just go.”

Maux trudges back to the bedroom. There’s one last loud pound on the door, followed by a soft slap, a hand skidding downward, one graceless kick, and that’s it. Ronnie stares into the darkness, all the keg beer and bargain bin vodka churning and swooshing in his bloodstream. The room spins clockwise for a revolution, then spins counterclockwise for another revolution. This is what it’s all supposed to be about, Ronnie thinks. I moved here to be in beds like these, with girls like these. What does all of this mean? Ronnie laughs.

“What’s so funny?” Maux says as she enters the bedroom, climbs into bed.

“It’s all very funny,” Ronnie says. “And you’re a nnnnnugget.”

“And you’re drunk,” Maux answers. She pulls him in. “Sleep with me tonight, ok? Sleep?”

Ronnie nods, realizes it’s too dark for Maux to see his nod, laughs again, says “Ok.”

“Why are you laughing?”

“Nothing, man.” Ronnie yawns. “Good night, lady.”

Ronnie turns away from Maux, broods on his life, not as a sweat jam, but as a series of ridiculous, obligatory, meaningless exploits. Growing up, you don’t think you’ll be this lost, this adrift. You think everything will follow neat patterns from school to marriage to career. It isn’t until later that it makes sense to be in strange beds in strange towns.

The booze takes that gnarly late-night stop at a crossroads where you can either pass out brooding this way, or act out through ranting, violence, and unleashed unashamed emotions that way. Like that kid—whoever that was—banging on the door. For Ronnie and Maux, the moment, the potential, is shot for tonight, and there is no getting it back.

Besides, Ronnie wants to pass out and deal with it in the morning. And so he does.

THE NEXT MORNING. A TOUR OF THE MYRRH HOUSE. THIS IS ROGER. HE IS RONNIE’S NEW ROOMMATE.

HE WILL TELL“THE TALE OF THE PORTRAIT OF OTIS”

BEFORE RONNIE AND MAUX LEAVE FOR THE BEACH.

“Let’s go to the beach,” Maux says to Ronnie first thing after coughing and hacking out of dreamless sleep, the noon sunshine bashing through the shut blinds and closed black curtains. “I need to get out of here.”

She flings the thin white holey blanket—this sad childhood relic resplendent in faded rainbows, unicorns, and pleasant elderly wizards—away from Ronnie’s aching head and sluggish body.

Ronnie grunts, moans, opens his eyes, studies Maux’s face, sideways, from the left. The morning sun’s glare off her indigo hair is beautiful, he thinks. Through the fatigue of the hangover, she is as beautiful as she was the night before, with that short-cropped hair and pale skin and dark eyes. Ronnie is profoundly relieved.

“C’mon, jerk. Wake up!” she says through vodka breath, slapping him lightly on the right side of his face. Her voice is like the voice of those weaselly kids you always find riding in the back rows of middle school busses, the kids who poke holes in the seats with their pencils and yell “Faggot!” at pedestrians waiting to walk across the intersections.

“Naw, babe,” Ronnie moans in a manner he thinks of as “Dylanesque.” “I wanna stay heeeere. With yewwwww.”

Maux rolls onto her back. “Don’t call me ‘babe.’ I hate that word.”

Ronnie heaves forward, sits up, arms wrapped around legs. “That doesn’t surprise me.” He looks around, thinking how you can’t beat waking up in a girl’s bedroom when you’re marginally hungover on a weekend afternoon, even when her floor is covered in inside-out t-shirts, crumpled jeans, sparkled skirts, discarded paperbacks, colored pencils, overturned tampon boxes, spare change, the walls tacked with dozens of pencil drawings on pages ripped from sketchbooks—angry, belligerent scribbles, caricatures of the old and the young of Gainesville.

“I’ve seen your stuff,” Ronnie says, looking around. “In the school paper.”

“My stuff?”

“Yeah, you know, your drawings.”

“Oh,” she says, sitting up. “Those.” She swivels left, plants her feet on the floor, stands, pulls her slept-in indigo skirt downward. “I’m not happy with any of that.”

“I liked what I saw,” Ronnie says. “I mean, it’s funny and—”

“And I don’t wanna talk about it,” Maux interrupts. “I just wanna go to the beach. Is that too much to ask?”

Ronnie laughs, yawns, drawls, “Naw. It isn’t.”

“Then get up and get out of here so I can change, then we’ll go to your house, get your shit, and go already.”

“Yup,” Ronnie says, terribly amused by all of this.

Maux now wears a white t-shirt over a pink one-piece swimsuit, cutoff shorts, sockless low-cut green Chucks. It’s a quick walk to Ronnie’s from Maux’s dreary motelish apartment building—across two parking lots, a trodden grass trail between apartment complexes, NW 12th Street, and then NW 4th Lane, a small block of four old houses. Ronnie’s is the biggest on the block, in the middle, on the right. A patch of dirt separates the gravelly road from the front door.

The front windows are bordered with chipped blue paint on the rotting sills. The exterior of the house is white vinyl with fake vertical grain. Two locks open with a rusty twisting. The door creaks in that way particular to old warped wooden doors painted in sloppy gloopy dark red stain.

The upper half of the front door is a large window framed by the red. Covering this dirt-smudged, spider-cracked window is a poster of Myrrh, a quartet from the exurbs of Detroit, Michigan who played a militant left-wing prog rock in the late-1960s (their first record, eponymously titled, spelled out “Myrrh” with bongs; their second, “Myrrh II,” was a close-up painting of a woman’s tongue on which the members of Myrrh posed, standing on a square tab of acid), a clean-living yet still wild and spontaneous group of hard rockers in the 1970s, a commercially viable band of hair balladeers in the 1980s, and militant right-wing militiamen slash children’s hunting-camp counselors in the 1990s—“The Myrrh Militiamen,” to be exact—who relocated to Montana and advocated the imprisonment, for treason, of (to quote one of their manifestoes) “President Clinton, and her husband!,” occasionally resurfacing these days to cut albums of bland anthems about the sanctity of the Second Amendment and other far-right verities. Ronnie had long been fascinated by this band—more for their epic journey from one end of the political spectrum to the other than for their music—and had sent away years ago for a series of brochures they’d published, featuring lots of pictures of kids “Ages 7-17!” pointing and shooting rifles at painted targets ranging from hippies, to Muslims, to butch lesbians. “Fun for the whole wang-dang-sweet-blood-thang family!” the brochures promised, referencing one of Myrrh’s most famous hits that is still a staple of classic rock radio. But his poster—a joke birthday present from Maggie two years ago—was from Myrrh’s 1960s acid rock heyday: In stark black and white, four stone heavy late-era clearly nonpacifist hippies standing in front of an American flag, right fists upraised in the Black Power salute, left fists clutching burning draft cards, shirtless in tight jeans, button flies unbuttoned enough to show there’s no underwear where underwear should be, long unkempt hair, guitars at their feet covered in paintings of Mao and Marx and Lenin, and in the uneven black block lettering of the 1960s hippie press mimeograph, the words, “MYRRH WANTS NIXON’S CORPSE.”

The poster hung, their house became the Myrrh House. That poster represented, to Ronnie’s mind, something like the ultimate symbol of 1990s-youth awareness of the cultural cesspool that was the 20th century. Pop culture was the most accessible target. Ronnie saw the 1990s—and obviously he wasn’t the only one—as a final kiss-off to the stupidity and mediocrity of prior decades. The smug laughter and sneering excitement that used to possess Ronnie and Maggie when they hit the thrift stores and came across anything Myrrh-related was only a small example of this, as the Great Alternative Nation, heralded by Nirvana et. al, temporarily won the neverending battle for cultural supremacy over everything that dominated before it, and for “the kids” who cared about such things, this meant going to sleep at night secure in the knowledge that they would never be stupid and mediocre enough to buy into anything as ephemeral as the crap people valued in the ’80s, ’70s, ’60s, ’50s, even as so many others went around dressing in bell bottoms, or as mods, or as rockers, or as Bettie Page . . .

Through the front door of the Myrrh House, a large wide rectangle of a living room, easily large enough to accommodate 100 people crammed in to watch two to three bands, under high ceilings stained with (Ronnie would come to find out) rat piss. To the right, a wobbly end table where the cordless phone charges next to the answering machine. On the other side of this, a dusty yellow loveseat left behind by the previous tenants, one of those thrift store pieces that always look like they’ve been upholstered with your grandmother’s bathroom wallpaper; this in the corner by the steps up to Ronnie’s bedroom. To the left of the front door, the drumset and amplifiers from last night huddle together, the sole remnant of last night’s mess. Six large windows line the left wall, separated by peeling white plaster. Bombastic dark trim runs along the floor, borders the windows, and with the deep reddish brown of the hardwood flooring—remarkably solid compared to the usual cracks and creaks in student ghetto flooring—the overall look of the living room is that of a shabby Rocky Mountain ski lodge from 1979.

Along the right of the room, past Ronnie’s bedroom doorway, a large long rectangular mirror over a mantle too ornate for such a crumbling house. Assorted French New Wave film posters, Roger’s doing, hang in the gaps between the mirror, the doorway, and the ceiling-high built-in bookcase that Ronnie has ecstatically used for his many books and records, previously boxed up since graduation.

Roger’s large beige couch—more of the no-longer-fashionable hand-me-down variety rather than the stuff of Goodwill—divides the room in half, his smaller beige couch cordoning off a square enclosure for the TV and record player, positioning all of this in the far left corner of the large room. The TV and record player lean against the far wall that rises waist-high below the opening into the kitchen.

Maux follows Ronnie into his bedroom—a smaller, thinner version of the living room, only with powder blue tuxedo colored walls between the six windows along the front and side of the house. Each step is a wobble over pink floorboards adorned in the repeating purple and gold crest of some unknown royalty.

“Well,” Ronnie announces, standing in the middle of his new bedroom, arms outstretched, mouth pressed into a Letterman smirk. “As you will find out soon enough, this is where it all goes down. I look forward to spending many an evening with you, here, in this very room.”

“Shut up,” Maux says, standing in the doorway, trying not to laugh—at Ronnie, at the arrangement of the relatively spacious room.

Ronnie’s mattresses are stacked, parallel to the two front windows. A long (“early colonial,” Ronnie thinks it’s called) wood-framed couch—another “gift” from the previous tenants—decorated with faded tan cushions depicting cowboys riding the dusty plains, is pushed into the four-windowed wall. The wall opposite the windowed outside wall will later become the Haiku Wall, where visitors tape up haiku written at parties Ronnie and Roger throw.7 This is also where Ronnie keeps a found white computer desk and the typewriter he received from Kelly. On the wall opposite the front, the closet, the “master bedroom” bathroom, and a fluorescent green loveseat where Ronnie often

sits reading books, looking up from the pages to survey the room and NW 4th Lane beyond the front windows before thinking, “I’ve arrived.” Into the bathroom, a purple-walled, pink-tiled not-spacious area, just large enough to accommodate both a tub and a shower stall.

Ronnie grabs his American flag swimtrunks from the closet and drops his pants. Ronnie has long since given up on underwear, finding Florida’s humidity not conducive to that extra layer. “You don’t mind if I change in front of you?” he says to Maux, dancing the Macarena as he says this, smiling, swinging the right hand out, palm down, then the left hand out, palm down, then flipping the palms—right, then left.

Maux tries not to stare, tries not to smile. “I’ll be in the living room. Weirdo.” Ronnie steps into the swimtrunks, singing “Dale a tu cuerpo allegria Macarena, por tu cuerpo para darle alegria cosas buenas, dale a tu cuerpo allegria Macarena, ayyy, Macarena!”

He ties up his trunks, leaves the bedroom, follows Maux through the living room to the kitchen. He counts the steps from the bedroom to the kitchen, two steps down from his room, the step-step-step of one dirty bare foot followed by the other, and they keep going, Ronnie has never lived in a house with a living room this large (almost as large as the loft Chuck Taylor lived in by the Orange Line in the South Loop of Chicago), twenty steps from the front of the house into the kitchen. The cabinets are an old metallic green, the counters a soiled old white. The oven has the quaint curves of the 1970s. The kitchen plaster surrounding still more windows is the color of dark mustard. The sink faces the living room. Roger’s bedroom connects to the kitchen, an eternal mystery behind an always shut brown door.

Roger sits in the kitchen at the yellow kitchen table, eating a breakfast of oatmeal, bananas, blueberries, and raisins, sipping from a glass of orange juice while flipping through the latest issue of Cinematic Pedantry. He’s dressed for work—the electronics section of the department store two miles north on 13th Street—black slacks, white Oxford shirt—talking with Maux in the inevitable post-mortems of last night’s party. Roger talks with his hands, flinging oatmeal and fruit remnants from the spoon he holds in his right fingers and thumb with each gesticulation. He has a burnt-tan surfer complexion, bleach-blond stubble scalp, glaring black eyes that stare like a remarkably gifted fish thoroughly engaged in its surroundings, a smiling mouth with glaring white teeth.

“So I cleaned up, Ronnie. You’re welcome,” Roger says, when he sees his new roommate standing in the doorway, in American flag swimtrunks, a faded orange t-shirt with the drawing of a windsurfer navigating a difficult wave as the word “FLORIDA” scrolls below in the art deco style of the mid-1980s, registers the knowing smirk of someone trying to convey the impression that he made sweet love the night before.

Ronnie hadn’t noticed, actually. But yes indeed—everything is as spotless as it was before the party started. The amps are neatly stacked with the drums and guitar cases in the corner by the front door.

“Nice work,” Ronnie says.

“I also kicked everyone out at four, broke up a fight, and kept a nice couple from consummating their love in your bed. You owe me, dude.” Roger says. Ronnie nods, promptly disregarding Roger’s words. Roger. Their mutual friends: Paul, Neal, Mouse, Icy Filet, William, Siouxsana Siouxsanne. Roger finds this place. Needs a roommate. Paul suggests Ronnie.

“He’s weird!” Paul told Roger at some party, one of those summer parties in Gainesville where those who don’t go home between spring and fall semesters spend all their time, inseparable, ending each night llloaded on someone’s porch. “He’s like this writer. Or something. Plays in bands. You’ll like him. Or maybe not. I don’t know. But you should ask him.”

Paul called Ronnie while Ronnie was still scraping floor tiles in Crescent City, a call to the motel room like a message from a distant paradise as Ronnie sat on a caved-in mattress covered in the day’s sweat and dirt and asbestos.

“Roger’s weird! He wants to be a movie critic! Or something. You’ll like him. Or maybe not. I don’t know. But you should ask him.”

“What the hell’s this?” Maux asks, pointing to the large portrait hanging above the fake fireplace in the kitchen.

“Otis!” Roger says, as if that alone clears everything up.

In a large golden frame, a picture of a man who could be nothing else but a good ol’ boy nowhere else but in these southern Yew-nighted States—new jeans, giant oval belt buckle with the name “OTIS” engraved upon it behind a bulbous belly held inside the kind of western shirt the practitioners of the “Dusty Denim” musical genre of the early 1970s wish they could have found at Nudie’s. The neck ain’t the only thing that’s red—red covers every patch of skin. Short brown hair, flat-topped. A fat proud face expressing pure satisfaction with his way of life. In the background, a ranch; in the foreground, a wooden fence, where Otis has placed his thick ringed fingers. Except, on the left hand, a stump where the middle finger should be.

“Otis?” Ronnie asks.

“Yeah! You know, as in Otis from Otis’s Barbelicous Barbeque?’ Roger stands, clearly excited to actually converse about this conversation piece.

Ronnie laughs, recalling Alvin’s endless work tales of buttering bread, stirring the beans, washing the dishes—pffff!—at the Archer Road Otis’s. “Ah,” Ronnie says. “I know it well.”

ROGER TELLS THE TALE

Ronnie pours a cup of coffee, joins Maux at the table, as Roger wolfs down two spoonfuls of oatmeal and fruit, before the pacing, the nervous rubbing of his hands, the rapid gesticulations, the rapid-fire spieling, begins.

“Ok, so this is last year, and we got finished with this completely useless class in Azorean Cinema of the 1970s, right? So we celebrate, get lllloaded, then decide to get dinner over at Otis’s Barbelicious Barbeque. We need to eat enough to sober up because we still had another final exam or two before the semester really ended, and the all-you-can-eat buffet seemed like just a fine idea, Ronnie, a fine, fine idea, and we were so happy that stupid class was done, we had to celebrate somehow. Now if you go to enough Otis’s, you see these portraits inside every restaurant, right there in the entryway on the wall behind the cash register and the spinning pies and cakes under glass . . .

“Anyway, we’re sitting there at the table, and I’m drunker than I thought, even as I’m sipping sweet tea, eating from the buffet, and I can’t stop thinking—can’t stop obsessing—on this portrait. Can’t stop picturing how perfect it would look where I was living at the time. It gets to the point to where I know I’m going to have to steal it. Not like I’m a klepto or anything—I’m not—but it was just one of those things. I mean, look at this guy smiling down at us . . .

“So I whisper to the dude who drove us to Otis’s that I wanna take it, and I ask him if he’ll help me out and pull up his minivan right to the front door of the restaurant, so I can rip Otis off the wall, run out the entrance, and dive through the open side door of the van. He won’t stop laughing about it, and nobody else thinks I’ll do it, and of course, there’s this girl from the class who I want to impress, so there’s no backing out now.

“We finish eating, and I’m starting to sober up, starting to get second thoughts, but as Gibby Haynes says in Locust Abortion Technician, ‘It’s better to regret something you have done, than to regret something you haven’t done,’ right? I’m even in the men’s room while they take care of the bill and walk out the door, looking at myself in the mirror all like, ‘You gotta do this. You wanna be a film critic, you gotta be daring!’ I look down at the sink, back to the mirror, and say, ‘Let’s do this.’ And I’m off.

“I’m standing there in the front of the restaurant, waiting for the hostess to lead the next group to their seat, and the restaurant’s busy, and I’m like casing the area, you know? Like, what jewel thieves do before a heist? Outside, they’re hitting the minivan horn, but inside, I’m trying to play it cool, standing there skimming through one of the complimentary copies of Auto Trader, like I’m doing nothing but looking for a nice used car as I stand by the front door.

“Finally, this group of six old ladies walks in. The hostess smiles, counts out six menus, leads them to the dining room. Here’s my big chance. I saunter up, sneak and weave behind the counter, yank the portrait off the wall with both hands, and bolt for the door.

“Somebody behind me screams ‘Hey!’ but I’m already leaping into the minivan sidedoor and my classmate floors it and we’re speeding away. I look behind, and there’s the hostess, the manager, and behind them three guys from the kitchen crew who sprint after us, but we’re already turning right onto Archer Road. I’m laughing, the class is laughing, and the girl I want looks impressed, like I’m brave or something. And so the unintended consequence of it is that I hooked up with one of the only film studies nnnnuggets in the whole class, if not the department.

“And then, like two weeks later? We did something else with the portrait. The semester ends, and our financial aid runs dry and I don’t have a job yet for the summer. I’m with another broke friend, and we’re hungry, so I get this idea.

“I called that same Otis’s and ask to speak to someone from the kitchen. They put me on.

“ ‘Hello,’ I say, and I’m talking through my hand to try and disguise my voice to make it sound like, you know, someone who might take hostages? ‘We have your portrait of Otis. Here’s our list of demands. Write this down.’ And the dude who’s on the phone is laughing, like he’s in the spirit of the thing, because, I don’t know, if you work in a kitchen like that, I imagine you need to take the laughs where you can get them, right? So he’s like, ‘Ok, shoot.’

“I tell him we want—sealed—four plastic plates each of beef brisket, barbeque pork, barbeque chicken, mashed potatoes, corn, biscuits, and fried okra—inside four to-go bags placed on the blue curb in the handicapped parking spot. Me and my friend figure we can park there long enough to check the food, make sure it hasn’t been turded on, or whatever, and there’s enough open space and traffic between the parking lot and the front door to prevent us from getting jumped by the kitchen crew or whatever. We tell them we’ll be there in forty-five minutes. No funny business. When the demands are met, we will leave Otis in the spot where the food is. We have him read back our order. He does it, laughing the whole time, and I’m thinking, you know, they’re cool, they’re in the spirit of the thing. He could have hung up on us, could have told us they have a replacement portrait of Otis already hanging up anyway, but they’re playing along. So that’s cool. They’re cool.

“We get there, pull into the handicapped spot, and sure enough, there are four to-go bags, greasy with barbeque right there on the blue curb. I open the door, carrying the portrait, and slowly approach the bags of food, looking around for any funny business.

“I lift up the first two bags, but I’m sensing something isn’t quite right, and sure enough, I look up and see, hiding behind the bushes and shrubs and hedges all along the Otis’s Barbelicious Barbeque building, the kitchen crew, and they start yelling, ‘Ambush!’ and I wanna laugh, but I gotta book it because who knows what they’ll pull if they catch me. So I keep one bag, drop the other so I can continue holding the portrait as I hop into the open passenger side door of the car, and yell ‘Go!’ at my friend, and he backs out and speeds away a second before the kitchen crew stops us.

“I was bummed we only got one bag for all that trouble, but hey: Still got this portrait, right?”

•

“Your roommate is weird,” Maux says, later, at the beach.

“Yeah, well, you should have seen my last roommate,” Ronnie says.

“He never shuts up!” Maux continues. “His stories are weird and pointless and he doesn’t care if you’re listening or not!”

Ronnie yawns, stretches across an old red blanket he brought along. He sips from an Old Hamtramck poured into a blue plastic cup, supplies purchased in a backwoods Circle K, at Maux’s behest. After last night, Ronnie has no interest in drinking, but downs two beers anyway and watches the usual action at the beach: Paunchy old men with metal detectors. Bronzed surfer teens in groups of three. Floppy-hatted ladies reading best sellers. Families splashing along the water’s edge. Boogie boards. Frisbees. Pro-Am Kadima.

“I hate the beach,” Maux says, scowling at the Atlantic Ocean like it’s everything in the world that has ever caused her grief. “It’s boring.”

Ronnie shrugs. “It’s the beach. Whatever.” Ronnie had quit going years ago. It wasn’t, you know, punk enough.

Ronnie watches Maux, sitting next to him with her short-cropped indigo hair, pink swimsuit, sun on white freckled skin, her sinewy frame, her hatred for the world. How did he get so lucky? A new house, new girl, new life.

Maux points to the ocean and starts laughing like a weaselly twelve-year-old boy. A morbidly overweight nine-year-old in a red speedo, running into the water, had just been knocked over by a wave. He emerges from the water crying, wailing, “Mommy! The water burns my nose!” The boy’s mother, also morbidly obese in a teal monochrome one-piece suit, yells—to Ronnie and Maux’s left, ten feet away, sitting under an orange and blue beach umbrella—“Christopher! It’s salt water! It’s supposed to burn! Get out!”

“Poor kid,” Ronnie says, sipping the beer, suds already warm from the heat. “I feel bad for him.”

“Well I don’t,” Maux says. She grunts two final heh-hehs. “Fat people are funny. That’s all they’re good for. I hate everything else about them.”

Ronnie has only known Maux for twelve hours, but he has already noticed how “I hate” starts off an incredible number of her sentences. It is quite the achievement. But Ronnie ignores this, distracted by her beauty, her eccentric beauty that trumps everything else, her hair and her glare, a contrast with all this gentle seaside normalcy.

They don’t stay at the beach for long. Ronnie tries holding her hand as they walk off the beach onto the scorched mid-afternoon parking lot. “I hate that,” she says, flinging away his hand. “It’s stupid and disgusting.”

The drive home (home!) is silence except for a cassette recording of “Tiger Trap” by Beat Happening, and Ronnie’s perfectly ok with letting Calvin Johnson’s mono-bass vocals do the talking as he drives and watches the same lush rural jungleside that had blurred past on the triumphant return to Gainesville from Crescent City. Only now, it’s so much better, because it feels like a much less alien land than before, because Maux’s here, and the fall holds a promise of all the possibilities he hadn’t yet experienced in his short stay so far in Gainesville. The students are back, and with them, the bustle of the college town and the promise of parties, after the tease of it in the dire spring and purgatorial summer.

“Let’s go inside,” Ronnie says when he pulls his car into the dirt driveway to the right of the house. He doesn’t even need to ask because he knows Maux will stay with him.

“Not now, Ronnie Altamont.” She leans in for a long kiss. Her lips are salty and sandy and sun-cracked and everything right about this part of the world. She backs away. “I’ll call you later in the week.”

“Oh. Alright.” Ronnie shrugs, tries not to look surprised, watches her open the car door and walk away down NW 4th Lane. She turns the corner, crosses 12th Street—indigo hair, white shirt, blue cutoffs, pink skin, green Chucks—disappears through the walkway leading to a parking lot.

Through the windshield, Ronnie stares at the vines, weeds, and scrub weaving through the fence in the back separating the Myrrh House from the glass company the next block over. Ronnie, alone, is suddenly overwhelmed by vertigo, by the anxious skittish feeling of having nowhere to turn in a foreign-enough land. Even now. Especially now. He hurriedly steps out of the car, enters his new house and falls asleep—in sandy damp American flag swimtrunks—on the mattresses stacked in his bedroom.

THIS DALLIANCE WITH THE MAGGIE’S FARM THAT IS

LIFE IN ADJUNCT ACADEMIA IS NOW OVER

Another year for me and you / Another year with nothing to do . . . Professor Anderson “Andy” Cartwright has always found in Stooges lyrics what his colleagues find in, say, Toni Morrison. He sits inside his sputtering VW bug, engine coughing out death rattles, A/C cranked almost as high as the stereo, looking through the bug-stained windshield at the faculty parking lot. Returning to the familiar, to the first faculty meeting of the fall semester, one week before classes start. Another year for me and you . . .

And so it begins. It’s a potent mixture of dread, resignation, and relief when the students come back to UF, to Santa Fe, to the Gainesville College of Arts and Crafts. The adjuncts return for yet another go-around, somehow surviving yet another broke-ass summer. Out of their aged cars they trod across the lots, shuffling off to take their seats in the auditorium, to await this year’s wisdom passed down from on high, wisdom that will surely sound remarkably similar to the wisdom passed down from on high last year, and the year before that, and the year before that. The administrators also return, to the next and closest lot to the campus, driving freshly-waxed status symbols, each with a bumper sticker on the back giving lip service to their leftist idealistic childhoods. Tanned, bright-eyed and flabby from their vacation homes somewhere far, far away. It’s another year for me and you / another year with nothing to do, Iggy sings in a weary wisdom well beyond his 21 years.

This routine is such a contrast to the wide-eyed first-time lives of the students back on the streets and sidewalks in and around campus. Mom and Dad are here to help with the big move, as their freshmen children, zitty and apprehensive, wear their senior year high school t-shirts as they lug clothes, compact discs, and keepsakes from the minivan to their new home, the smaller-than-expected dormroom. They are nervous and awkward, fearful yet hopeful of the unknown immediate futures. Already, sorority pledges are led around by the neck from leashes held by future sorority sisters, as fraternity pledges run across busy intersections completely naked with the word “PLEDGE” painted on their backs in a nasty shade of poop brown body paint. Others less desperate to fit in immediately take to University Avenue, exploring their new city, freed from the cliques and drama of the hometown high school adolescent past. Book stores. Record stores. Thrift stores. Cafes.

At the start of every academic year, Andy observes all of this, as he plays the role—an anonymous extra in the Big Picture, really—of the struggling adjunct professor waddling off to sit through a meeting he finds pointless, carrying a yellow legal pad and pen to take notes for a meeting he knows will not be noteworthy, but the meeting pays, and he needs the money.

He should shut off the car, should fit the cardboard sunshade across the dash, and walk across the faculty lot, the administrator lot, onto the campus and to the meeting. But he can’t leave The Stooges for this all-too-predicatble routine.

They will file into the white-gray auditorium and take their seats. They will sigh, “Ready for another year?” and sigh their responses. They will joke of how they already need a drink. Andy does not dislike his colleagues—and even personally likes most of them—but in the auditorium for the first meeting, it’s impossible not to feel as if Andy is sharing a miserable experience with them that nobody signed on for—busting ass for a Master’s degree only to work a no-future gig with a limited career trajectory. And yet, it’s somehow more comfortable to soldier on—year in and year out—than to actually find a teaching job with benefits, or to simply find another job that pays better, or to move away for more meaningful opportunities. And when the meeting starts, the administrators will take their turns at the podium, and they will say what they think the adjuncts need to hear, and the overall effect is the opposite of what is intended: Instead of making the adjuncts feel like they’re a part of the Organization, they are made to feel even less a part of the Organization.

Andy can’t think about it too much; it leads down too many dark and depressing trails. And he knows the worst is when he’s teaching in the classroom, and it’s firing on all cylinders, and he’s at his best and that miraculous eye-wonder the students get when they connect the dots is in full effect . . . The worst because lingering beyond that magical moment, he knows it won’t matter to anyone in the department and in the institution beyond the department. To the institution, he is a cipher, in the ledger under “Seasonal Help.” That’s what gets him—loving a place and a job and an institution that doesn’t love you back. Andy imagines that most people, they’re mostly indifferent to their jobs and the jobs are mostly indifferent to them, but as long as those paychecks and benefits keep coming, it’s ok. But this gig is different. It’s an avocation, an opportunity to inspire and be inspired, even if everything circling around and outside it is dreadful, and you’re left feeling like you have no future, and that you’re not growing, as it looks to Andy when he observes his colleagues as they walk along to the first meeting of the semester, as it looks to Andy observing the administrators as they wait out the clock to retirement, as it looks to Andy when he observes himself.

In the car, as The Stooges switch to “I Wanna Be Your Dog,” fear shoots from Andy’s brain to his extremities, settles into the pit of his stomach. It’s the contrast of these new students and these old teachers. It’s the fear Andy will never be the writer he wants to be, at the rate he’s going. That he will never amount to anything, especially if he sticks around. The politics of the place, the complexities in the politics of the place, the complexities in his relationship to the place and the people employed by it, will drive him crazy if he keeps thinking about it. It is this fear: That there is nothing—and will be nothing— new under the sun. This career is going nowhere, but he will not, cannot, leave Gainesville.

In the summer, Andy found work painting apartments. What he loved was the simplicity of it. He’d work all day, then go home and write. The work stayed at work. There was nothing to take home except old paint-stained clothing. His mind was free while the body worked, and when he got home, there was the typewriter. Unclogged and liberated from the hundreds of pages of student assignments each week, the lesson plans, the student conferences, the futile meetings, the phone calls, the letters, the thousand-and-one impositions on his time that the Department and the Institution demanded, Andy could devote all of his energy to what he most wanted to do. And there was so much to show for it—literally hundreds of pages of short stories only a draft or two away from being submittable, and he knew, sitting there in the car as the speakers blared Ron Asheton’s sacrosanct wah-wahs, and the A/C howled through the vents, and the dichotomy of the very old and the very new shared space on-campus, he will have no chance to return to any of these stories, no time to revise, hone, and yeah, craft.

The idea to simply leave, to walk away and not look back, isn’t really an idea so much as it is an instinct. Painting apartments paid the rent and the bills. At the end of the day, the life of the adjunct is minimum-wage work. It is work he loves, yes, but that’s all it is, and even that, obviously, only goes so far. And it drains him of all creativity. The adjunct’s life is a perpetual limbo, and if he doesn’t leave now, he will never be a real writer, will never be what he believes he is put on this earth to do.

The Stooges’ first album transitions into the extended creepy slow chanting of “We Will Fall.” Professor Anderson “Andy” Cartwright shifts the car into reverse, backs out of his spot, shifts to drive, smiles, sputters out of the parking lot.

Ahead is the brilliant uncertainty of a future not carved out in semester-long increments. Ahead is the great not-knowing. The fear dissipates. The anxiety and resignation are no more. Andy has rejoined the kids on the sidewalks, each second a new beginning instead of a downward spiral. To assert control again, to welcome the new, to be reborn into the image of what he wants to be, needs to be. This is all that matters. Andy pulls into the driveway of his house, immediately shuts off the wheezing Bug and the whirling pound of the Stooges’ “Little Doll,” and in a succession of 1975 Carlton Fisk World Series victory hops from the car to the front door, reenters his house, back to the story in the typewriter, back to life.

DRUNK JOHN MEETS A GIRL

The girls coming into the store today are—“Don’t make me say ‘pissa,’ John. I don’t talk like this to amuse you. They look fine, ok? Fine,” Boston Mike says, and I couldn’t agree more.

Measuring our time in 20 minute album sides. Me and Boston Mike, together once again on a beautiful Sunday morning in late August, and it’s beautiful because the kids are back in school, and by kids, I mean girls, and by girls, I mean nnnnuggets.

We’re making the best of it, stuck behind this depressing-ass counter. Mike throws on Avail, I throw on Archers of Loaf. He throws on the Wipers, I throw on Royal Trux. When that’s over, I scour our used bins and pull out a not-mint copy of “Street Hassle” by Lou Reed, and goddamn if this isn’t hitting me just right.

As Lou Reed talk-sing-moan-pleads, “Leave me leave me leave me leave me leave me aloooooone,” Boston Mike and I sneak sips of Old Ham-town tallboys and assess the new wave of nnnnuggety freshness taking their first awkward parentless steps off-campus into Electric Slim’s to find their deplorable ska or emo or major label poppy punk, wallet chains a’ dangling, so fresh-faced and uncorrupted by the drama in this scene to which they shall surely succumb.

“Hey Mike,” I say. “See the bleach blonde in the stupid Candlebox t-shirt and the acid-washed denim shorts? In two months? She’ll have a mohawk, maybe even her first tattoo. She’ll be the biggest Play the Piano Drunk Like a Percussion Instrument Until the Fingers Begin to Bleed A Bit fan in town.”

Boston Mike laughs. “These freshmen, it’s always at the halfway point in the semester when they get their first mohawk, right?”

“Yup. Just in time for Thanksgiving. It’s like ‘Take that, Mom, Dad, and Suburbia! I make my own rules now!’ Oh, and see the dyed black short stuff with the December’s February t-shirt flipping through The Cure CDs? It’s such a minor sideways step in the ol’ youth culture to go from goth to emo, right?”

“Naw. We gotta cure her of that.”

“It can’t be done. Nobody takes us seriously here,” and I’m right. But suddenly man, it’s like, all at once, the summer, and the feeling like the town is yours and yours alone ends. The parties pick up, old friends come back, and everything’s no longer at the mercy of summer’s lethargy, it’s at the mercy of that giant university there across the street. Yeah, I earned my degree there, two years ago, and like all English majors, I now work retail. Sorry about my luck, right?

“What record is this?” this uber-nnnnugget asks, all punk rock and everything. Short black hair. White skin. Black t-shirt of one of those Oi bands where the lettering is all army stencil and spelling out all kinds of working class anarcho-syndicalist platitudes. She peers up at me behind the counter with these big dark eyes.

I really hate that cliché about love, you know, the one some knowing authority who’s inevitably like a fuckin’ sassy urban single lady in her mid-30s spouts off between sips of boxed wine and handfuls of Hershey’s Kisses, all like “Honey, you’ll find love when you least expect it.” Because, you’re at a bar, you’re at a party, you’re out buying groceries or walking around, it’s always on your mind. It’s like when you’re talking about blinking and you can’t stop paying attention to when you blink, you know? Shit, it’s why I go out at night. You think I go out and drink this much so I can talk to my dumbass friends? No. I keep hoping to meet somebody, but I’ve met everybody here and I know everybody here that’s worth knowing, except for this tiny-tiny window when there are new, heretofore uncorrupted girls like this nnnnnugget looking up at me—here at work when, I can tell you, love really is the last thing on my mind—standing here at work—sipping beers and flipping records—head and mind in a hungover daze and mindlessly checking out the new girls in town like it matters.

“It’s ‘Street Hassle,’ ” I try to smile, as the backing vocal ladies on the record harmonize “Hey nonny nonny, hey nonny nonny, hey nonny nonny, hey nonny nonny.” These nonsense words convey it so much better than I ever could, and the beer’s no help. “Lou Reed,” I mumble, reaching over and down to hand her the record cover.

“Cool,” she says, turning it from front to back, smiling a giant, hundred-tooth smile. “Can I buy it?” So pure, so unmired in the maelstrom of Gainesville’s bullshit.

“On CD or vinyl?” You’re no doubt expecting, since I’m a record store clerk and all, that this is some kind of coolness quiz on my part—like, if she says “vinyl,” I’ll know she’s perfect, and if she says “CD,” I’ll forever look down on her for wanting the medium preferred by the stupid masses, but honestly, I don’t give a shit if she wants the thing on a fuckin’ CD, LP, betamax, 8-track, 12th generation cassette dub. But it does my heart good when she does say “Vinyl,” after all.

I remove the needle from Street Hassle, place the record back into its unwieldy cheap plastic sleeve, and it’s me staring at her staring at Lou Reed staring at her through aviators and holding a cigarette.

“He looks serious,” she says, and she laughs this laugh, a soft girlish giggle, and I have to laugh, a soft drunken heh-heh, because she’s laughing, and the beery bravado—why do I even bother drinking?—isn’t needed, and I’m as vulnerable as I’ve been in a long, long time.

“He is serious,” I laugh, taking the record cover back from her and inserting the sleeve. “Serious dude,” I add—sounding as inarticulate as ever. Fuck.

I feel like I need to do something to make her laugh, and all I can think to do is hold the cover of Street Hassle to my head—I’m one of those idiots who gets a kick out of sticking album covers where there’s a life-size headshot of the performer up to my head—and saying in a goofy voice, “Hey, look at me, I’m Lou Reed! I’m crazy! I’m taking a walk on the wild side!”

I can’t hear any laughter; I hate myself. This constitutes a “good idea” in my dumbass head. I lower the record, and Boston Mike is giving me one of those looks he gives when he’s amused at my failed attempts at interacting with the world at large. I can’t even lower the album enough to face the nnnnugget, assuming she hasn’t walked out, freaked out over whatever it is I’m trying to do here.

But then I do set the record on the counter, and she’s still smiling, looking at me, grabs the record and says, “I wanna do that.”

She holds Street Hassle up to her head, and it’s the head of Lou Reed, glaring at the camera, over the body of this young punkette in her oi band outfit, who’s laughing out, “Heyyyy, I’m Lou Reed. I smoke cigarettes and wear sunglasses. Look at me, guys.”

We’re laughing at this, and when she lowers the album, all eyes turn to Boston Mike, who shakes his head at both of us all like, “I’m not doin’ that. No way.”

She extends her hand. “My name’s Sicily,” she says.

“Sicily?”

“I’m Sicilian.”

“Ok.” I feel stupid and awkward and as you can probably tell, I wouldn’t know how to talk to girls if you stood behind them with cue cards and gave me an ear piece through which you could tell me the perfect Casanovan expressions. I think that’s why I earned the “Drunk” in my name. Drunk John. After a few beers, I stop caring about how I don’t know how to talk to anyone.

“And you are?” her expression like she’d expected me to volunteer this information earlier. I tell her.

“Nice meeting you, John.” She sets Street Hassle on the counter. “I think I wanna buy this.”

“Yeah?” I mumble.

“Yeah. You sold me.”

“I am a professional.” Ha ha ha. But she giggles at my stupid joke anyway.

I hit the cash register, give her the ten-percent-off friend discount, rounding down and knocking two dollars off on top of that. “Two dollars,” I say.

Our hands touch as she hands me the two singles. In a record store, like all used retail, you touch a lot of nasty people, with a lot of nasty possessions. Everything’s dusty, grimy, germ-ridden. This little touch—as fleeting as it is—is a welcome respite.

Put the record in the plastic bag. Hand her the plastic bag. “Thank you for choosing Electric Slim’s,” I announce, trying to sound corporate or something.

Sicily still laughs at my lame attempts at humor. “And thanks for the Lou Reed,” she says. “See you soon.”

“Yup.” I shrug. Hem. Haw. Twitch. Tick. Sicily leaves the store. And that, my friends, is how I talk to girls. Smooth, right?

“She likes you,” Boston Mike says.

“Ya think so?”

“No shit I do.” Boston Mike looks away, towards the front window, then mutters “Dumbass . . . ”

I take the price gun, fully intending to return to what I was doing before, pricing stacks of used records, but with a head awash in Old Hamtramck, and a body awash in adrenaline from what just happened . . .

“I should go talk to her, right? Like, right now?” I ask Boston Mike.

Boston Mike, I can tell, is building up to a flurry of furious Masshole cursings, but before he gets started, we’re rudely interrupted by one of our regular wino-ass garbage trawlers entering the store with a large stack of damp torn moldy jazz fusion records to sell. And it ain’t the good jazz fusion either, but like, the shit you hear at Kinko’s. Just awful. And this guy likes to chat us up while we go through his found shit, like he struck gold out in the crik and can’t wait to reap the rewards. “That’s Spy-row-gy-ra,” he informs us. “That’s a popular band from back before you were born probably. And that copy looks like mint condition, you ask me.”

Oh Lord. It’s like: How many stacks of limp-dicked, weak-grooved noodly records with ridiculously dated 1983 silver sequined, piano-scarved, kee-tar playing mew-zish-ee-ans must a record clerk thumb through, before you call him a man? The answer, my friend, is blowing out Kenny G’s tasty sax. But I digress, because, while I’m about to help sort through this latest delivery of slimy, smelly mold-vinyl, Boston Mike grunts, “Yeah. Go. Now. Do it.”

I hop down from the register and run out to the sunny-muggy outside of this tiny plaza parking lot.

She’s almost to University when I yell, “Sicily! Hey!”

She turns and smiles, and it’s all so easy and so not cool, so totally corny having to put yourself out like this.

I jog to her. (Yeah. “Jog.” Awesome.) “So you’re new here, right?”

“Basically. I transferred from a community college in Orlando.”

“Orlando?”

“Yeah. You know.” She shrugs and I nod. We all have complicated, ambivalent relationships with this state and her people and her cities. Love, hate, frustration, joy, bitterness, splendor, despair. There’s no place like it, but every place is like it.

“Well let me show you around. Let me call you.”

Sicily laughs. “So you do this to all the new girls who come into your store? Swoop right in?”

“Nooo!” I say this a little too forcefully, like the dork I am.

“I’m kidding,” she says, opening her black purse (The purse, it’s covered in a bunch of buttons of bands I can’t stand, but I can fix that, right? Of course!), taking a scrap of paper and writing down her number.

Of course, a couple jerkoff friends of mine on bikes have to ride by in the parking lot, cutting through from University to the student ghetto and yelling, “Drunk John! What’s up, man! You drunk? You gonna be drunk at the party later?” and I feel my whole being deflate into some like shriveled forsaken pool toy.

“Why do they call you that?” she asks.

“It’s a joke,” is the first thing that pops into my mind. “It’s a long dumb story. I’ll tell you some time.”

“Sounds good. Call me,” she says, and I say, “I will,” and she smiles, turns around, crosses University and steps onto the now-hectic campus.

And me, I stand out here wondering if my luck is going to change, or how will my bad luck continue. Could this be a change for the better? Not that things are bad now, you know, but I keep thinking of how it can’t stay like this for much longer. I’m getting old, man. Twenty-four? Shit, time to collect my punk rock social security, retire, move to Florida. Oh wait.

A WELCOME STABILITY, A SHARED LOATHING

Ronnie finds a temp job at one of the off-campus used textbook stores. For 24 consecutive fourteen-hour days, he assembles photocopied articles taken from academic journals, fits them into brown plastic binders, then shrink-wraps them into copypacks assigned to upper-level classes from all disciplines. The hours are long, but after dish washing, plasma donation, and asbestos removal, sitting on his ass in an air-conditioned office with two kindly southern-accented grad students is the proverbial can of corn. Beyond this, skimming literally thousands of published thesis papers all day—with their constant usage of words like “bathetic,” “epistemological,” “tautological,” “psychosociopolitical,” and “post-Joycean”—is enough to inspire Ronnie to consider going to grad school. Why not?

By the time work is finished, it’s generally 9:00 or 10:00 p.m. Ronnie punches out each night, then walks straight to Maux’s apartment, or else she’s already at the Myrrh House waiting for him. They hang out, drink vodka, watch old movies, sleep (and only sleep), then Ronnie leaves for work the next morning, and Maux eventually leaves for class. There is a welcome stability to this. Ronnie is as settled as he has ever been in Gainesville, happy to be with a girl again, even if all it is is “hanging out,” even if she puts on this cold, spiteful, abrasive persona that Ronnie cannot take seriously. She tries so hard to hate everyone and everything, and it only makes him laugh. If this hatred was real, she would have ulcers, Ronnie thinks. She would be on her deathbed. It’s protection. It’s hiding under self-invented identities. Everybody around them does it to one degree or another, including Ronnie, especially Ronnie.

Living closer to the University, it is easy to see the effect tens of thousands of students have on the town. Shops empty in the summer are now packed. The sidewalks are no longer deserted. Gainesville offers those away from home for the first time unfettered adventure, and those away from home for the first time offer Gainesville unfettered adventure.

Each day, Ronnie makes new friends. They attend his parties. He attends theirs. Each night, leaving work, he runs into these new friends on University Avenue’s sidewalks, and they tell each other what they know and what they’ve heard about this or that person, this or that band, this or that girl.

One night while sunk into the old gray quicksandy couch in the living room of her cluttered might-as-well-be-a garret, Maux shows Ronnie the scrapbook in which she keeps all the comics she has drawn for the student newspaper. Her first published comic, from September, 1994, is a one-panel of a group of beret-clad “smug poetry majors” (so says the cartoon cloud above them, with an arrow pointing) standing on stage in a circle, reading “swill” (so says another cloud), holding journals with their left hand while their “dead-fish handshake” right hands stroke their “tiny dicks,” while their “self-satisfied” audience sits behind tables observing the moment with glowing smiles. The caption above this scene reads “THE REVEREND B. STONED’S ECLECTIC CIRCLE JERK.”

“The hate mail for that one was glorious,” Maux laughs.

Page after page, a balancing act between satire and misanthropy. Everything and everyone in town (she never bothers with politics or celebrity) is a potential target for derisive, mean-spirited laughter. And yet, it is still funny. Ronnie enjoys it—laughs from the gut, laughs out of shock, laughs because it’s good—even if he feels he needs to wash the nihilism off of him when they’re finished. It reminds Ronnie of what he used to do and who he used to be at UCF, columns veering between silly and caustic, writing about what he thought he knew, inspired more by zines than anything he read in English Comp fiction anthologies, trying to be gonzo and almost succeeding, except it ultimately didn’t matter because Ronnie didn’t want to pursue journalism in any form after graduation—not like anyone in “the real world” would have him, and besides, there was the band and the novel-in-progress and Henry Miller saying “Always merry and bright!” and his girlfriend to sustain him through the penniless post-graduation months, except when they didn’t, and here he is now, with someone currently experiencing the same notoriety he once knew.

She turns to a page that instantly catches Ronnie’s eye: This typical Gainesville scenester type hanging from a gallows, his wallet chain used as the noose wrapped around his neck, quite dead, holding a pen in one hand and a coffee mug in the other as vultures swoop in on a collision course with the eye sockets and rabid coyotes and laughing hyenas wait drooling at his feet. Below this, the caption reads, “THE COFFEEDRINKER FANZINE SUCKS,” in letters drawn in the same cut-and-paste “ransom note” font as the local punk fanzine itself.

“That’s hilarious!” Ronnie howls, pointing. “That guy hated my old band.” It sounds weird and unpleasant, Ronnie referring to the band in the past tense, to not be in a band at all. Indeed, Ronnie remembers the lower-case stream-of-consciousness review of their show at the Righteous Freedom House in the pages of Coffeedrinker: “The Laraflynnboyles are typical of the insincere irony of Orlando and their cornball act doesn’t inspire me to fight the problems plaguing our ugly world.”

“I hated your old band,” Maux laughs. “But yeah, I used to date him. Briefly.”

“What? That guy?”

“He said he liked my drawings. Really, he just wanted to get in my pants. Can you imagine? A male with ulterior motives? Whatever, he was terrible and awkward in bed.” Maux lightly punches Ronnie in the arm. “You should be glad he hated your band. Wear it as a badge of honor. In a town of emo whiners, he’s the whiniest.”

Ronnie laughs, sips from a glass filled with far more vodka than tonic. “Yeah, why is everybody so emo here?”

“I don’t know. I hate emo.”

“Finally. A hatred we both share.”

Maux laughs at this, closes the scrapbook, tosses it to the floor, shifts closer to Ronnie.

“Could they be any more passive-aggressive?” Ronnie continues.

“Such a narrow definition of what constitutes sincerity,” Maux says.

“All that whining and moaning and groaning.” Their thighs touch, fingertips moving ever-so-closer.

“Could they take themselves and their oh-so-precious feelings any more seriously?”

“Wahhhhh. I don’t live in a ghetto.”

“Wahhhhh. I don’t live in a developing country.”

“Wahhhhh. I don’t get to live in a concentration camp and instead I get every material need fulfilled.”

“Wahhhhh. I don’t have a terminal disease.”

“And so full of false modesty, always like, ‘Oh we suck, thanks for enduring our set . . . ’ ”

“Phony self-deprecation.”

“Jeez, Maux,” Ronnie says, leaning in, hands on Maux’s thighs, faces inches apart. “I’m so . . . turned on right now.”

Maux whispers, “Me too,” before passionate kisses, a sprint to her bedroom . . .

In bed, after they’ve finished, Ronnie turns to Maux and says, “Just promise me one thing.”

“What?”

“Promise you won’t draw me as a dead man if we stop hanging out.”

Maux laughs that pre-teen weasel laugh of hers, punches Ronnie in the arm. “It’s my ace in the hole buddyboy. That’s why you better treat me right.”

Ronnie laughs, wondering if he will treat Maux right. He has his doubts.

THREE MILE MORNING RUN ON THE BEACH

“Do you think he means it?” Sally Anne asks her husband, five steps into walking off the three mile run on the beach. She’s thoroughly unwinded as Charley, still catching his breath, has actually been thinking the same question, the answering machine message replaying in his head.

Was their son sincere when he left the message on their answering machine last night saying he was happy? They didn’t hear it until this morning—out for dinner the night before as Ronnie called, heard the recording of Sally Anne’s “Hahhh! We cain’t come to the phone right now, but if you leave a message, we’ll call you back thanks!”, cleared his throat and after an extended “Uhhhhm” that almost went on for too long, said, “Yeah hey! Mom and Dad . . . just calling to say hey. Things are going pretty good here. Working, making friends, started hanging out with this girl, so that’s cool. Settling in. You know. But yeah—feeling happy to be here. Happy. Yeah. Everything’s good. Enjoying Gainesville. [sigh] Definitely. Alright, well, talk to you soon.”

The run—from their house, past the other beach houses, turning back once they get into the part of the beach where the hotels and the hordes of tourists start dotting then crowding out the sand—was, for Charley, a reflection on this message. You need a decoder ring trying to figure out what Ronnie actually means, what’s true and what isn’t, the inflection behind the voice—if it’s a forced brave front or if he really and truly is what he says he is. More to the point, if existence is suffering as the Buddha says, has Ronnie learned to accept this? He could never put that into words to his son, how conditions would never be ideal, and would often be nowhere near ideal, and for Ronnie’s generation, the answer was to wallow in it, to writhe in it, to get angry but to do nothing constructive about it. Maybe he was wrong about the generation—he loathed such blanket generalizations on age groups born in a certain time—but Charley had read some of Ronnie’s old columns for the school paper. Where did that come from? The cynicism, the sarcasm, the despair, the bitterness? Like the saying goes . . . send ’em to school and buy ’em books . . . the unfinished part of that expression, of course, hangs out there to be filled in by every member of the older set witnessing the lack of commonsense and experience in children. There are people in the world who will always need something to complain about, who aren’t content unless they’re, well, bitching about any old thing. They could own their own island in the South Pacific, with their dream home, and one thousand harem women of all beautiful shapes, hair color, skin color, and charming personality, fulfilling every material, psychological, and—yes—sexual need, and they’d complain that the sky wasn’t the right shade of cornflower blue. Something. Anything. Charley has spent the last few years wondering if their son was becoming that kind of person. And so, the rare upbeat answering machine message, after so much sulking and brooding and sneering, is unexpected.

When he has finally caught his breath enough to answer Sally Anne’s question, Charley shrugs, smiles, slaps Sally Anne on the ass. “Let’s go inside,” he says.

TIME’S UP

Ronnie has knocked several times on the front door to the trailer. No answer. Alvin’s van isn’t parked on the dead-grass makeshift driveway.

It’s a Sunday late-morning day off, the first day off in weeks. Roger is at work. Maux is studying. At the kitchen table, drinking coffee and thinking about nothing much at all, Ronnie remembers he still has the keys to the trailer.

He had forgotten to return them during the hasty move out of the double-wide. In the sweat of August, in under half an hour, Ronnie tossed his possessions into the cab of the pick-up he borrowed from William, taking out everything except some plates and, more importantly, his vinyl copy of the Buzzcocks’ Spiral Scratch EP. He figures he can return the keys, remove (and presumably, scrub the months of filth off of) the plates and find that copy of Spiral Scratch—whose songs had been burning holes in his mind as lyrics like “they keep me pissin’ adrenaline” and “I’ve been dying in the living room” have ricocheted around his mind for weeks now.

Into the dying blandy apple green sedan. The old drive back from “the action” to the trailer. University to SW 2nd Avenue, winding through football practice fields and law schools and the great Floridian verdure. From there, side streets bisecting softball and baseball fields, and the Harn Museum of Art, where, last summer, broke and underfed, when he should have been looking for a job, Ronnie studied the Lachaise sculptures on display with William. Up ahead, good old 34th Street. It will be great seeing Alvin again. He was so understanding about Ronnie’s situation. Anyway, it will be a chance to say a more relaxed and lengthy goodbye to the trailer and its many smells.

Ronnie reaches into his right front pocket of his jeans, pulls out the keys, finds the trailer key, puts it into the lock, when he hears the unmistakable pump of a rifle, followed by a loud, authoritative “FREEZE!”

In the chest-caving, ball-tingling panic of the moment, Ronnie recognizes the voice as belonging to the Gulf War veteran butch lesbian neighbor, she with the rusted brown truck parked outside adorned with the “TED KENNEDY KILLED MORE PEOPLE WITH HIS CAR THAN I HAVE WITH MY GUN” bumpersticker. Hands shaking, Ronnie drops the keys.

“Step away from the door, sir!”

Ronnie steps back, slowly steps backwards down the stairs, hands up, because that’s how they do it on the TV when characters get guns pulled on them. A surprisingly rational and calm mindset takes hold inside Ronnie. He has a rifle pointed at his back. Pointed at him to prevent his retrieval of a Buzzcocks EP.

Ronnie turns around. The woman stands to the immediate left of her trailer, like she just emerged from around the corner, rifle raised to shoulder blade, angry eyebrows furrowed over the rifle stock, finger on the trigger.

She lowers the rifle. “He don’t want you comin’ ’round here no more.” Her hair is buzzed spiky, blonde-gray. She wears a black sleeveless t-shirt that reads “DYKER BIKER” in white iron-on lettering, and camo cutoffs.

Ronnie’s voice, never as brave as his mind and body, even on good days, struggles to leave his throat. He chokes out, “I’m here to pick up what I left behind.”

She shakes her head from side to side. “Oh no. No way. He told me to keep an eye on you in case you snuck in.”

“And that’s why you have a rifle.” The panic subsides a little bit, replaced by a rising anger that someone would resort to this over something so silly.

“It’s in the Constitution.”

Ronnie isn’t in the mood, nor is he in the condition, to debate the pisspoor sentence construction of the Second Amendment. “I’m leaving,” he says. “Let me get my keys, and I’m gone.”

“And don’t come back,” the woman yells after him as he climbs the steps to the front door, bends over, grabs his keys.

Ronnie walks to his car, looks at Alvin’s neighbor. “Jesus,” he mutters, climbs into the car, starts it, backs out, and peels away in quadruple time, finally feeling his hummingbird pulse, itchy with burst sweat glands. And to think, Ronnie was hoping to finally get the chance to say “Thanks for everything!” to Alvin, and yes, “everything” entailed living rent and bill-free. The blandy apple green sedan has never gone faster than when Ronnie accelerates out of the wooded trailer park and the rundown sidestreet, back on 34th Street, too crazed to note once again the mix of sad southern poverty and hot pastel collegiate lifestyle apartment living.

Ronnie will never see Alvin again, and eventually, when the shock wears off, will be of the mind that, in the big picture, he probably deserved to have a rifle pulled on him for his actions and inactions of the summer.

Mouse will hear third-hand rumors from time to time, and pass them along to Ronnie. Alvin was arrested in a not-elaborate meat-stealing scheme with a grocery store butcher. Alvin finds a girlfriend at Waffle House one night who immediately moves in and makes Alvin her pimp, even bringing up her friends from South Florida to turn the trailer into a double-wide of ill repute. Alvin finds work as a camp counselor for disabled teens. Alvin moves to Alaska to work in a cannery. Alvin finds work roadying for the classic rock band Nazareth on a reunion tour. At the end of the day, any and all of these rumors were as absurd as the rumor that Alvin had two buttholes. Ronnie preferred imagining Alvin moving up to a duplex, or an apartment complex with a swimming pool and shuffleboard, maybe even a small home somewhere, as he and a wife who understands him quietly sit in the living room and watch television, expressing their skepticism regarding the veracity of the commercials breaking up the sitcoms with a nice long “Pfffffffffffffffffffffffffffff.”

TEST TUBE BABY FROM A WALLA WALLA STREET

“It’s not funny! Fuck!” Ronnie yells, standing in Mouse’s bedroom, telling him and Icy Filet what happened. Strangely enough, Ronnie feels more panic-stricken than he did when the rifle was actually aimed at the back of his head. Heart still racing, the unrelenting sensation of being on the verge of hyperventilating, exacerbated by their laughter, their absorption with each other rather than what happened to him twenty minutes prior. “I could have died!”

They giggle as Ronnie acts out the action, giggle at each turn and twist of the story like it’s some kind of hilarious joke. In bed, in underclothes, fetally conjoined like bed-bound John and Yoko not taking their eyes off each other—Icy Filet stroking Mouse’s goatee, Mouse’s dentures reflecting the late summer sun through the bedroom’s soiled windows as he har-harrs. Mouse runs his fingers through Icy’s short black-blonde-red-green-blue hair.

“She wasn’t going to use it, Ronnie,” Mouse says, still not looking away from Icy Filet. “It’s for show. She wanted the chance to justify having the rifle, and you gave it to her.”

Ronnie looks to the low ceiling, the gargoyle masks and sloppy collegiate abstract art on canvases nailed to the walls. “Jesus,” he says. “You guys are high.”

“We sure are,” Icy Filet laughs, still stroking Mouse’s goatee. “But that’s not the point. You should play him the tape, Mouse.”

“Heh heh—yes!—heh!” Mouse quickly rolls out of his nauseatingly loving position in bed, hops one foot at a time into the living room, presses play on the tapedeck of his stereo, laughing like a gleeful sadist. “This is the best one yet, brah!” Mouse proclaims. “Listen to this while I run off to sit on the toilet, heh heh heh!”

“Oh no,” Ronnie says, looking to Icy Filet, who continues gazing into the direction of where Mouse’s supine body once laid.

“You really do need to get high,” Icy Filet says to Ronnie, not moving her head to speak in his direction.

Before Ronnie could tell her why that is a terrible idea, the music starts. The frequencies are lower than Mouse’s previous efforts, like an artified attempt to replicate the low-rider truck bass throbbing out of the subwoofers of any given Floridian weekend night. Initially, there is nothing but this rhythm, rattling the windows, and then, Icy Filet’s speak-sing:

“Armor All-ed interior on a turtle wax face

steppin' in the club like you came from outer space

a Sun Ra Saturnalian with a Plutonian mind

bitches steppin' up thinkin' that they fine

Peter Paul and Mary, Don and Neneh Cherry

your trunk is full of junk and you look like Cousin Larry

jammin' on the one, run Forrest run

Coffeemate creamer and a bear clawed sticky bun”

Between the rhymes, the beat continues, the windows rattle, and over the din, samples from the television program Perfect Strangers: Cousin Balki, proclaiming over and over again, “A stitch in time saves ten.” Icy Filet resumes:

“Test tube baby from a Walla Walla street

Icy is my name and Mouse provides the beats

we got a Coleman sax with a Danko bass

American birth and Floridian grace

Carol and Mike Seaver, Doctor Johnny Fever

chillin’ in a hot tub with Eldridge Cleaver

Terminator X, reps on the Bowflex

Chex Mixmaster with a hankerin’ for Tex-Mex”

The song is over in three minutes, finishing in a frenzied orgy of low bass beats, the opening bass line of The Band’s cover of “Don’t Do It” from The Last Waltz, and the opening harmolodics from the Ornette Coleman album Free Jazz. When it ends, Mouse sprints out of the bathroom, leaps through the bedroom doorway and dives onto the bed. He, stretches, reclines, laughs, turns to Ronnie. “Yeah? And?”

“Your songs . . . these raps . . . they’re really starting to get better,” Ronnie says. “You know, it’s still very Beck, very Beckish and all, but there’s a bit of Doctor Octagon and Dylan thrown in.”

“Oh, Ronnie,” Icy Filet says, pulling in Mouse to cuddle. “Such the little critiquer.”

“Aw, well, you know,” Ronnie says, blushing, looking away from the bed. “It was actually kinda soothing, after getting a rifle pulled on me for the first, and, I hope, last time.”

“Soothing!” Mouse repeats. A frenzy of smoochy-smooch lip thwacks between Mouse and Icy Filet. Between kisses, Mouse says, “If we keep at it, we’ll be sensations. Sensations!” Mouse uncuddles from Icy, rolls out of the bed, stands, announces, “I’m getting beer. To celebrate. Hooray for beer, heh heh heh!”

“Sensations,” Icy Filet says to Ronnie. “It’s plausible, right?”

“Why not?” Ronnie says.

Mouse returns with three cans of Dusch Light, hands one to Ronnie. “Nah,” Ronnie says. “I’m going home. I need to forget this stupid day. See what Maux’s up to.”

“She’s crazy, you know,” Mouse says.

“Totally,” Icy Filet adds, reaching across the bed to grab a Dusch Light can from Mouse. She opens it, chugs, turns, rearranges the pillows so she’s upright enough to drink.

“It’s what they tell me,” Ronnie says.

“Good luck with that,” Mouse laughs, like he did when he offered Alvin’s trailer as a terrific place to live.

RIDING ON THE METROGNOME

You set the Metrognome to the left of Ronnie’s front door, bang on the window, as the Myrrh poster with its black power salutes and burning draft cards glares at you like you’re The Man they’ve become. (And nevermind how you got here, how you lugged this three foot tall Metrognome—with his painted red boots, blue pants, green shirt, white beard, wise blue eyes, cherubic cheeks, and red hat with one upturned flap. You can always piece it together in the morning.)

“Ronnie!” you yell. Bang the door again. Now that you’ve stopped running, everything spins. Dizzy, you step away to barf in the dirty side yard. It’s a rational barf, one of those barfs you’ve learned to anticipate, when your body tells you, “You know, William, I do believe I am going to vomit now,” and your brain responds, “Yes, body, I understand. If I could get you to give me a minute to find a decent place to throw up, that would be terrific, ‘kay?” When you find the spot, a patch of grass between red ant hills, it is simply a matter of bending over, “Bleeeeeeeeeahhhh” gags, splatter. You’re not doing this on the street, in a car, in front of the door, on someone’s rug. This is a good place and you are reasonable and logical—considerate, even—in your blacked out state.

“William? You alright?” you hear after the front door half-opens.

“Yesh! Hang on!” you manage between heaves, one index finger upraised. “Uh minnit, dude!”

That’s it: Once more, and you’re done. You always feel better after you throw up the booze. You turn around, try rising to a standing posture.

“Rrrrrrrronnnie!” you announce as you round the corner. “Ya gotta let me in. I got something for you!” You point towards that heavy-ass gnome you’ve been lugging all the way from . . . somewhere.

“Get in here,” Ronnie says, laughing. Laughing at you. Of course he’s awake. As you know, the blessing and curse of living in a party house in the student ghetto is that people come by at all hours. Tonight, or, this morning, that someone is you.

“This is important Rrrrrrrronnie!” You lift and hold this twenty pound . . . fuckin’ . . . whatevertheshit . . . dehhhhhh . . . then you set it down again.

“Oh yeah?” he says as you stumble through the door.

“Ronnie, Ronnie, Ronnie Altamont,” you continue, standing in the entryway. “What I have here is a gnome. But . . . but . . . it’s not just any gnome. It’s a mmmmetrognome.”

Familiar girlish weaselly laughter from the back of the living room, and when you step in, you see Maux. She laughs her mean laugh as she stares at you. “You’re ridiculous, William. You drink like a dumbass, dumbass.”

Ronnie carries the metrognome into the house, sets it in the middle of the living room. Roger rises from the long couch, hops over it, runs to the metrognome. “Let me rub it,” he says when he arrives, bending over to pat its stomach. “For good luck.”

The three of you stand around the metrognome, but Maux, she glares from the couch. Through the booziness, her seething unrelenting dislike shoots across this large living room. She hates you now. Why? You don’t care. It’s just her style. But you, you have a metrognome. And you’re drunk. So. Whatever.

“Alright, William,” Ronnie says in an indulgent tone. “What exactly is a metrognome, and how is it different from regular gnomes?”

“See, that’s the thing,” you start to explain, but as you begin putting it into words, all like “See, you got this gnome, this gnome I stole, from somewhere, then you put a metrognome inside it in the hole there at the bottom, then stick some mics around it and . . . voila!” you realize what a stupid idea it is.

Ronnie laughs, repeats the word “Metrognome,” then asks, “You want a beer?”

“Of course I wanna beer,” you say, but by the time Ronnie walks across the living room and into the kitchen, you’re on the floor, sitting next to the Metrognome, stroking its ceramic beard. Ronnie sets the Old Hamtramck tallboy between you and your Metrognome. You lean back, stretch out, lay on your back.

“Maux, you suck,” you yell, turning, left side of your face on the cool dirty hardwood floor. “Everybody knows it except Ronnie. You’re a mean person!”

“Thanks, rummy!” Maux shouts from the couches.

“And Roger,” you continue, because you’ve made these connections now and you need to share them because they need to know these things about themselves because you won’t say it in the morning and you may never say it or even think it again. “You want to be a film critic? If that isn’t duller than dogshit, I don’t know what is.”

“Hey! Thanks! Thumbs up! Two big thumbs up!” Roger says, back at the couches with Maux and Ronnie.

“And Ronnie? Well, you’re ok, for now, because you took me and the metrognome in when nobody else would answer the door.”

“Yup. I am one of the good ones” Ronnie says, smirking at Roger and Maux. “Better than these dicks, anyway.”

“What? We’re the dicks and Ronnie isn’t?” Maux says.

“Yeah,” you slur. “That’s about what I’m saying . . . right now.” You think how Ronnie better appreciate it, as the floor feels grimy and grainy and footsteps approach and a blanket falls on your curled-up nausea-twitched body. Ronnie, yeah, he is one of the good ones, you think, but that’s only temporary, because, because, beeeecause, he’ll like get corrupted by . . . fuckin’ Gainesville . . . but the metrognome . . . oh metrognome . . . oh, metro, metro, metro, metro, metro, metro, metro, metro, gnoooome.

•

You open your eyes to a purple early morning. You are on a floor staring at the pointed red boots of a garden gnome. Disoriented. No past nor present. The images of the last few hours begin to sharpen into clarity. You recognize your surroundings—Ronnie’s living room—and why you’re not in your bed. Beer. Tequila. Whiskey. It was Neal’s idea, at the Drunken Mick. The Metrognome.

You scoured the neighborhoods west of the university, Neal driving, your head outside the passenger seat window, scanning, in search of a gnome, any gnome, to steal, to use, for, um, performance art?

“We’ll out-Mouse Mouse!” Neal ranted. “It’ll be the greatest performance ever!”

“Yes! Yes!” you agreed, imagining setting the Metrognome on a barstool at the stageless performance corner in the Nardic Track with a microphone placed close, the hidden metronome inside the Metrognome. Nothing but the click click click sound, through effects pedals cranked over the cranked PA. Brilliant.

When you found the gnome, in the middle of this large front yard in front of a house that even had the audacity to look like a cottage from the British countryside, you knew you would open the door as Neal’s car still coasted along at a fast-enough speed. You tried a military-style rolling out, but fell sideways then rolled into the grass from the road, and that’s why your pants are stained at the knees and your shirt is filthy. You run across crunchy Augustine grass blades until you put your arms around the gnome, lift with the knees, then run. Only, it’s more of a gasping gallop across the crunchy Augustine grass. It’s silent except for your panting, Neal’s idling sedan, and the late-night sprinklers across all those lawns. It was too funny and too ridiculous to ask why this is funny and ridiculous. You toss the metrognome in the back, return to the passenger seat, and off you go, laughing-laughing-laughing.

Hours later, you lift yourself up from Ronnie’s living room hardwood floor, and you’re not sure if the joke is even all that funny, or if it’s anywhere near as funny as you thought it was last night.

You had gone with Neal to his house to drop it off, but then you had what you thought was a better idea. A better idea!

“Later,” you yell, at the intersection on University, where the stadium—the swamp, Oh! The Swamp!— is on your right. You open the car door, step out, reach into the back for the Metrognome, your Metrognome, hoist him, and sprint away. Neal shouts after you, “That’s ours! That’s our metrognome!” but you keep huffing and puffing down University before taking a left into the Student Ghetto. From there, the drunkenness increases, and how you avoided pursuit by Neal and how you ended up at Ronnie’s will remain a mystery.

Now, you leave the Myrrh House. You walk down NW 4th Lane, turn left on 13th Street. The metrognome will stay at Ronnie’s; you’re too tired to lug the stupid thing back to your place. Neal will ask about it, will give you grief that you didn’t bring it back to the coach house. Let him get the stupid metrognome. It was his idea anyway, the dick.

Throbbing head. Burning stomach. A head full of regrets. Unfocused eyes. How many times has this happened, and how many more times does it happen?

Walking, shuffling, stumbling, limping past all these quiet apartments and houses where people had the sense enough to at least make it home and not sleep on someone’s dirty-ass hardwood floor. Home. Sleep it off. There will probably be a party later on tonight. No, there will be a party later on tonight. You can pick up the metrognome later. Or, you won’t. Who cares.

THE AMBITIOUS FILM CRITIC AND THE FLOUNDERING ORLANDO EMIGRANT

Roger clears his throat, lifts the hand-held tape recorder to his mouth, begins speaking in his “serious academic” voice:

“What is immediately apparent in Sympathy for the Devil is Godard’s fervent belief in art as revolution, be it the evolution of a Rolling Stones song in the studio, graffiti on the walls of a bank building, the whole love and consumption diaspora of contemporary life, art as a realm in which to critique the most fundamental elements of modern Western Civ—Ronnie! You need to wake up! I can’t concentrate with you snoring.”

“Sorry, dude . . . sorry.” Ronnie abruptly jolts awake on the smaller of the beige couches pushed together to form an L. He yawns, stretches, reclines. “Why don’t they cut out all that agit-prop bool-shit and show only the Stones footage. That’s the only good part in this.”

“See, Ronnie? You’re too ignorant to understand.” Roger would say this often to Ronnie’s deliberately obnoxious questions. “These films cannot be expressed any other way.” As Ronnie would learn, Roger plays the Film Theorist Superiority Card as gratuitously as a New Yorker playing the countless variations on We Can Get a Bagel at 3:00 a.m. and You Can’t.

“Pshaw,” Ronnie pshaws. “Wake me up when the Stones are back on. I’m liking those pink pants Bill Wyman’s wearing.” Ronnie turns away from the television, head buried in the cushions, falls asleep.

When the semester begins, Roger spends his nights watching two to three films on TV, on VHS tapes checked out of the university library. He scribbles notes in a journal while speaking voluminous thoughts into a hand-held recorder. On off-nights from going out or spending time with Maux, Ronnie tries watching these films, increasingly convinced that they are nonsensical forays of self-indulgence, and their only real appeal for anyone is that they aren’t Hollywood blockbusters. Not a big movie guy, Ronnie. These films lull Ronnie to sleep, stretching out on the small beige couch as these invariably French characters move about scenes in the slowest of pacings. Movies affect Ronnie the way books affect many people—they make him sleepy.

Ronnie’s snoozing and snoring irritates Roger to no end.

“Ronnie, you gotta wake up now!” Roger would say, eyes fixated on the twenty-four-inch TV screen, hunched forward, pen in one hand, hand-held in the other, thick journal opened on the coffeetable, pages filled with frantic, coffee-fueled penmanship. “We’re coming upon a very important scene here!”

Ronnie mumbles, does not wake up.

Roger shrugs, heavily sighs, eyes returning to the screen, pen hand scribbling, mouth talking. Why should Ronnie understand? Roger thinks. In his current state, such artistic work is beyond his comprehension. He pauses the hand-held, grabs the journal off the coffeetable, scoots, settles, sinks into the couch. With his right fingers, he pushes his hair—some girls in town describe it as “Kurt Cobainy,” and while he would never admit to being a Nirvana fan, he considers it a compliment nonetheless—behind his ears.

In the short time they have lived together, Ronnie has been drunk most nights of the week, and when he isn’t drunk, he’s here on the couch, using these films Roger loves to get caught up on sleep. Roger thinks on this, leaning forward to sip from the glass filled with the blueberry smoothie he blended an hour ago, the blueberry smoothie a crucial aspect to the routine of every night’s movie watching. Why is Ronnie even living here in Gainesville? There is no reason for it, as far as Roger can tell. They pass in the mornings—Roger eating his fruit-packed oatmeal, Ronnie zombie-hobbling in glazed-dumb hangover faces and postures as he enters the kitchen for a glass of water. How does Ronnie live like this? To live without any kind of purpose, to be here for no reason, floundering, goofing off over beer after beer after beer?

He thought they would be better friends, better roommates. But Ronnie is in his own mindless world. Soon, he will roll off the couch and stumble into his bedroom and throw on Marquee Moon by Television, leaving the cassette on repeat, faint fluttery guitar solos resonating throughout the otherwise silent 3:30 a.m. house. This is how he lives, Roger thinks.

Roger leans forward once again, resumes scribbling notes into the journal as the film “seamlessly drifts from scene to scene, challenging previously cherished conceptions of narrative and characterization.” He does not want to think about how he could be like Ronnie in a year or two, after graduation. Will they want another film critic, out there?

Finally, inevitably, Ronnie does roll off the couch, stands. “Good night, dude,” he mumbles, and off he goes. In seconds, from Ronnie’s room, Roger hears the opening chord to “See No Evil,” the first song on Marquee Moon. Roger sips from the smoothie, leans closer, scribbles notes, unpauses the hand-held, resumes talking of every impression crossing his mind about this film, locked into the present to avoid brooding on the future.

ON AN ISLAND

“Look at these assholes,” Maux says, glaring and pointing at this fat drunken parade of football fans trudging down University to the big Florida Gator football game. Maux and Ronnie had made plans to meet for lunch at Gatorroni’s by the Slice, forgetting that today is a gameday.

“Yup,” Ronnie says, trying to ignore it as he eats a Portobello pizza slice, sitting next to Maux outside on barstools at high tables facing University Avenue. These orange and blue facepainted barbaric hordes, numbly intoxicated and stumbling, assuming, quite correctly, that binged beer coupled with football gives them the right to act like howling dumb dicks.

“I hate football,” Maux says, scowling, short indigo hair glowing in the sunshine. She wears frayed blue cutoffs, a pink t-shirt with “WHO CARES?” written in black Sharpie permanent marker.

Ronnie grunts a second “Yup” between pizza bites. In the short time they have been together, there is simply no limit to what Maux dislikes. Maux hates Lou Reed. Maux hates old people. Maux hates kids. Maux hates babies. Maux hates teenagers. Maux hates rednecks. Punk rockers. Jocks. Frat boys. Sorority sluts. Middle-aged people. Fatsos. Bums. Religious nuts. Retards. Cops. Handicapped. Teachers. Dogs. Cats. Birds. Rabbits. Celebrities. Scenester girls. 98 percent of all scenester guys.

Each day, some new, unexpected hate. “I hate fishermen.” “I hate crossing guards.” “I hate those kids who dress like submarine sandwiches and stand at intersections waving at cars.”

The football fans run up and down the sidewalks, cram into the cabs of honking pick-up trucks.

“Orange!” one side of the street yells to the other.

“Blue!” the other side yells back, in imitation of what they do in the stadium, where opposite sides yell the team colors back and forth.

“These people suck,” Maux says, lighting a cigarette. “People suck.”

Ronnie yawns, wearied as much by Maux’s redundant worldview as the tableau of grown men and women in orange and blue facepaint vomiting on the curb.

So much of their time together is little more than her waxing sardonic on the human condition. When Ronnie takes her to parties, she finds the most isolated corner, sits, and sketches in her pad while chugging straight vodka from that flask she always carries. Ronnie endures it all, glad a girl likes him. And she is beautiful, for a quasi-nihilist.

“Let’s leave,” Ronnie suggests. Ordinarily, Gatorroni’s by the Slice is an ideal spot to enjoy the afternoon, to run into friends walking by, but on gameday, friends hide in their houses, or split town, or at least try to make some money off the invasion by working the overflowing restaurants.

They finish their pizzas, step out of Gatorroni’s and onto the sidewalks, shoving through the orange and blue throngs. With each step away from the stadium, north on 13th Street, the crowds thin out. Passing Gator Plaza on the left, Ronnie reaches out to hold her hand. Maux pulls away. “Stop that,” she says. “You know I hate holding hands.”

Ronnie laughs, speaks in a parodic bark of Maux’s voice. “Look at me. I’m Maux. I hate this. I hate that. I hate everything.”

They cut through the Zesty Glaze parking lot, into the relative calm of the student ghetto, where residents sell their driveways to the highest, drunkest bidder going to the game.

“I hate you,” Maux says, punching Ronnie in the arm, a solid thwack. Ronnie laughs harder. He pretends to shadowbox, hopping around Maux as she stomps towards the student ghetto sidestreets. “Let’s box, lady. Ooo! Ooo! I’m punching the air! Lightning! Bam!”

Maux refuses to smile at this, even if she finds it somewhat endearing. Ronnie, she thinks, is another aimless goof, the kind who always bounce in and out of her life—smarter than he thinks, smarter than he knows. This won’t last. It never does.

By the time they reach her apartment, the streets are desolate. Only the far off cheers from the stadium penetrate the student ghetto silence.

“I hate making out,” Maux says, after they step inside and go straight to her bedroom. The noise and pandemonium that has overtaken the city on gameday doesn’t reach this unmade bed in this darkened room.

Ronnie backs away from her mouth. “I know, I know, you hate everything. I get it.”

“Yeah,” Maux says, reaching behind his head, left fingers and thumb ensnared in the disheveled knots of his brown hair, pulls him back. “I can’t stand you,” she whispers, breath a mixture of cigarettes, beer, and greasy pizza. “But this? I guess it doesn’t . . . I don’t know, totally suck?”

That afternoon, they create an island the size of Maux’s bedroom. Gone is the sneering, the sarcasm, the professed hatreds. On this island, they are vulnerable, affectionate, real. A fleeting moment when nothing else in Gainesville exists. Her façade is gone. His façade is gone. They no longer have to try; they’re together, and that’s all that matters.

Afterwards, Ronnie watches her sleep. He likes it when Maux sleeps. It’s the only time she seems happy, when the smile on her face isn’t a mean grin. Ronnie, wide awake, sweaty and inspired, wants to go home and write. He hasn’t felt this way in months. When not binding copypacks at the temp gig in the used college bookstore, when not with Maux or at some party, Ronnie has taken to sitting in his room and listening to the Television album Marquee Moon on repeat all night. He stares at the ceiling and basks in the bittersweet ache of the music. It is the soundtrack to this uncertain time. Delving and lost inside the sounds of the album, it never occurs to Ronnie to try and write.

Football is underway now; tens of thousands of screaming tools are off the streets, compressed into the stadium. There is a rare stillness to the student ghetto on gamedays, once the game actually starts. Ronnie needs to be out there on those streets, needs to get home to the pen and paper. He needs to breathe in the emptiness and the silence before floating into the Myrrh House to daydream, to find his journal, to sit on the front steps, and write for hours, as Marquee Moon fills the air.

He kisses Maux on two strands of indigo hair across her cheek, steps back, continues watching her sleep. She would hate being kissed like this, would hate being stared at like this. Ronnie steps out of her bedroom, tiptoes through her crummy apartment and carefully walks out the front door.

Outside, out of the island, walking the Student Ghetto streets. It’s the no-surprise heat of 85 degrees, tempered by subtle breezes shaking the sand pines, the palms, even the live oaks. The skies are a cloudless Florida blue. No one is walking nor driving these streets. In the distance, marching bands, cheering, whistles, air horns, but here, it’s Ronnie Altamont and only Ronnie Altamont. This moment, as fleeting as his time with Maux, he feels the Student Ghetto is his. He is post-coital, triumphant and invulnerable.

The Myrrh House is empty. Roger is at work. Ronnie opens the doors and the windows, turns on Marquee Moon, grabs his journal and his pen, sits on the front steps, and writes, an ecstatic counterpoint to the stillness of NW 4th Lane.

MOE GREEN’S FUCKING EYESOCKET’S LAST SHOW

Tonight at the Righteous Freedom House, Moe Green’s Fucking Eyesocket will play their last show. This evening, Ronnie hurries through the copypack binding so he can punch out earlier than usual. He buys a twelver of Old Ham Town at the XYZ, lugs it back to the Myrrh House, unlocks his front door, steps in, opens the first can, sips, calls Maux, asks if—

“I can’t,” she cries. No really—she is blubbering into the phone between sobs. “It’s my birthday.”

“Oh! Happy birthday! I had no idea.”

“Oh! Happy birthday!” Maux mimics. “Fuck off, Ronnie. I’ll call you later, when it’s not my birthday.”

Stark silence, then the fast shrill-toned eighth notes of an off-the-hook phone. These are the last years—very brief, in the overarching course of human history—in which human beings will know what it’s like to stand with a large cordless telephone in one’s hand after the person on the other end violently and abruptly ends the conversation by throwing their large cordless telephone against their living room wall. Ronnie, of course, does not know that Maux does this with her phone, but he stands by the still open front door of the Myrrh House, twelver at his feet, holding that stupid phone to his ear, this dense-enough/weighty-enough antennaed beige plastic wonder of late 20th century technology, looks out the front windows at NW 4th Lane, mutters your basic frickin’ frackin’ frickin frack, can’t decide if he should laugh or be angry. He chooses to laugh, chooses to drink away any lingering concerns, drinks the first six in quick succession while slouched on the cowboy couch in his bedroom while listening to Marquee Moon, carries the other six on the fifteen minute stumble-and-weave to the Righteous Freedom House.

Three to four times a year, a band will break up, inevitable when one of the members graduates college and/or finds a real job in another city. (Or, in the case of MGFE, when the strains of touring end close friendships, everyone drifts apart, moves on, grows up.) On the front windows of the smaller businesses that can get away with it are handwritten signs reading, “Closing early tonight. Go to Righteous Freedom House for MOE GREEN’S FUCKING EYESOCKET’S last show!” In the Gainesville music scene, the last show of a highly-regarded local band is something akin to an Irish wake, minus the Catholic overtones and, naturally, with a bit more punk rock sentiment. Some will tear up, many will sing/scream along with the band, a few will set off fireworks to siss-boom-bah between songs and band members. And, for those nonstraightedge in attendance, there’s lots of drinking.

And there really is something special about it, Ronnie thinks, as he squeezes into the front door, maneuvers around those already packed into this living room to see the end of another band. It has been like this for the six years Ronnie has been making the drive up to see shows in Gainesville. Because, they are your friends up there, even if they are not your friends—not yet—making music they created to express their lives. These are your friends, even if they are your enemies, surrounding you in these muggy house shows; even if they are your enemies, you share this bond over the love of music. Another era ends. Life moves on, and in Gainesville, it moves in an endless five-year cycle, because MOE GREEN’S FUCKING EYESOCKET will be replaced by some younger band. Always younger.

The music howls in amplified barbaric yawps, as Ronnie joins, sweats on, bounces into the throng. He opens one beer, gives away the rest. Through the gaps between bodies—friends standing in a semi-circle around the band, transfixed by the spectacle—Ronnie sees William, ten feet away, screaming into the microphone, face the color of a ripe tomato. The band jabs at rhythm like furious underdog boxers pounding punching bags. Friends grab the microphones, scream along.

Where do we go after this, when the set is over, when the months and years pass? And where do you go after this, William? When your life has been, up to now, entirely focused on the immediate? You scream to all these friends who know the words to these songs like you know the words to their songs, and the only coherent thought in your mind is how fleeting this is. You run out of breath, you roll on the floor, writhing as others grab the microphone and sing your lyrics. In the midst of this entropic cataclysm, you ask yourself if you could ever put your entire being into something or someone the way you did with playing in this band. You’ll never sing these songs again. This meant something, even as the law of diminishing returns exacts its slow painful cost. Even as you’re now hardly on speaking terms with the others in the band, and you were once the best of friends.

What happens to these memories? Ten, twenty years down the line? This song’s about to end. This set. This band. This life. You leap in the air and fall to the filthy hardwood floor, look up at your friends, standing in knowing half-smiles like they’re in on the secret, watching this life—this part of your life—end.

You won’t talk about any of this when it’s over. There will be overlong caught-up-in-the moment sweat-stained embraces with those who have been there all along. Still winded, you will briefly nod to the rest of the band as they start to unplug and break down their gear. They will return the nod, and that’s as deep as it will be. You will get drunk, and eventually everything will be a goofy joke again. Nobody takes themselves or their “art” all that seriously, at least not on the surface.

But this moment. You know, and Ronnie knows, and just about everybody else that’s here knows. There really is something special about it.

MEH

Kelly: So pleased with himself on this next mid-afternoon’s post-mortem of last night’s shenanigans.

(Yeah: Shenanigans.)

In hungover shame: Ronnie half-listens to Kelly’s rehashing of last night’s sexcapades.

(Yeah: Sexcapades.)

No: Ronnie really really really really really does not want to hear about the blow job on the Myrrh House roof, about how Kelly, in the peak of whatever drugs he saw fit to bring up with him from Orlando, couldn’t stop with the rolling steady stream of pointing out and naming planets, stars, constellations, even as he’s you know feeling her mouth, tongue, hands, up/down, ’round and ’round his engorged peninsula. They’re on the front patio at Gatorroni’s, and Ronnie is trying—trying—to eat a Portobello slice, and trying not to listen to Kelly, and trying not to piece together what happened, because really now, who cares?

Yes: it’s one of those torturous hangovers where the head throbs, the forehead is clammy, perceptions are hazy, dizzy, out of focus, and if all of that isn’t bad enough, Ronnie also has the song “Take It to the Limit” by The Eagles on repeat droning on and on in his skull, but not even the whole song, just the chorus, and not even just the chorus, but the one chorus at the end with the high harmonies. And slowly, slowly, brief flashes of moments from last night pop up, things Ronnie said/did, shame flooding his nervous system in the form of nauseous dread with each flash.

Take it to the limit: One more time.

Well: What does he remember so far?

There was the loveseat by the answering machine: Ronnie slouched there, laughing, as the girl—whatshername—falls onto his lap, puts her arm around him, points at the answering machine and asks, “Is this anyone?”

The answering machine message: “Ronnie! Where are you?!” Maux. “Call me. Fucker.”

Ronnie: “Naw naw naw . . . haw haw haw . . . just my crazy friend . . . you know.”

They kiss: Tobacco tongue. Booze breath. Long. Lithe. Nineteen. Hey Nineteen.

She unsmooches her lips: “Wait a second,” she whispers, smiles, trots off across the living room.

The Who: On the stereo. Pictures of Lily . . . Lily oh Lileee . . . Lily oh Lileee . . . pictures of Lily and that fucking French horn solo that slays him every single time he hears it.

Kelly and Caroline: That’s her name. Caroline. She was the girl who was “older.” Twenty-one. That’s how they all met. They bounce up and down on couches, trying to match the rhythm of the songs.

Kelly: A frenzy of sweat and rolling eyeballs. Chemically-induced happiness.

The fifth: Floridian Comfort. The bottle is on the coffeetable. The girl—hey, nineteen—she weaves around Kelly and Caroline, reaches for the bottle. Glug, glug, glug.

That’s how they met: Kelly took the weekend off. Fled to Gainesville with a wafer of ecstasy and a dot of mescaline. Fueled accordingly, he charms—and later, he quite literally charms the pants off of (hey-oh!)—Caroline, who’s in the XYZ Liquor Store buying a fifth of whiskey for her underage friend, who waits outside in the car. Kelly tells her there’s a “party” at Ronnie’s, and she believes him. (Later, in less-trusting environments, Ronnie will think back on moments like these, when you could simply talk to a couple girls at a stupid liquor store and somehow get them back to your house on the flimsiest of pretenses, and maybe it isn’t even the environment, but the age, because the immediate shame of the next day will pass, and years on, it’s a fond memory of capital-Y Youth.) Ronnie and Kelly, they walk back with the twelver of Old Hamtramck, Kelly going on and on about “That Nnnnnugget!” Ronnie didn’t get a look at whatshername, and what is her name? At Gatorroni’s, as Kelly still goes on and on about the different things that happened—this antic, that antic—her name comes back to Ronnie.

Her name: Laney. Of course! Laneylaneylaneylaneylaneylaney! Oh, of course! Yes.

Anyway: Laney skips (yes, skips) back to Ronnie, stops in front of him, raises the bottle to her lips, drinks. She tells Ronnie how much she actually likes the burn of the Floridian Comfort. People are always talking about how they hate the burn. They can’t drink the way Laney drinks. To which Ronnie, drunk and giggly, replies, quote, “Haw haw haw yeah!” She’s back on his lap, and Ronnie, who doesn’t really have an opinion one way or the other about the burn of Floridian Comfort, glug glug glugs, sets the bottle on the end table, stares at the blinking light on the answering machine, and Maux and her message contained therein, burps, mutters the common Floridian axiom, “Fuck it, dude,” kisses Laney’s neck, up to the side of her face, and then she turns, opens her lips, and again, the tobacco tongue, the booze breath.

As The Who mixtape plays on: spiders named Boris, pictures of Lily, teenage wastelands, squeeze boxes, and whoooooo are youuu, who-who who-who, who cares, because this is it—too easy, too perfect, too Gainesville—and it’s Ronnie and Laney there on the loveseat—Mwah! Mwah! Mwah!—her tongue the sour ashy taste of bilish alkeehal and too many cigarettes and Ronnie loveloveloves it, his brain spinning “Wheeee!”, “Yeeeessss!” his heart pumping “Goooooooooooooooo!” and The Who calls it a bargain, the best I ever had, and Moonie’s drums crash and smash and pummel.

Kelly: Tells Ronnie how this was one of the best nights of his life, no shit, dude, as Ronnie sits there in a throb-stab hangover and “Take it to the Limit” still bouncing around in his head, unable to comprehend how last night was that big of a deal. This is how it goes anymore. Kelly tells him how it seems like “amazing” things are starting to happen for Ronnie here in Gainesville, noting that he even bought the food today, and Ronnie has to acknowledge that, yes, it’s better than it was, but still.

Meh: Ronnie, he wants to shake Kelly and scream, “So what!?” Maybe it’s the “come down” The Who are always singing about in Quadrophenia, or these things you slowly learn over time that have to be experienced over and over again before one can actually question the heretofore foregone conclusion that getting lllllllloaded and getting into some sexual (to use the clinical term) hanky-panky is innately fascinating and worthy of so much of your time. Because Ronnie, he feels like the wild oats, maybe they’re finally sewn. And this is the age when one should be fighting the good fight, you know? Join up with the Anarchists in the Spanish Civil War. Teach and inspire a class of underprivileged children. Manage a ragtag scrappy underdog little league team and take them to the championships. Something. Anything. To put ideals into action. To put aside whatever the Bible said about “childish things.” Hedonism. Guilt and shame over this bandless, novelless floundering, of having lived this kind of life several lifetimes over, sweating and groaning in the stupid pointless hungover imbalance of the late afternoon after.

What Ronnie doesn’t tell Kelly: How, much later in the night, well past the time the condom performed its final float and bob in the toilet water before being spiraled away forever, hours into the curled away post-coital pass out, Ronnie wakes up to the sounds of Laney’s violent heaving and vomiting of the Floridian Comfort. So much for loving the burn.

Something else Ronnie doesn’t tell Kelly: How the early morning sun shone through his windows like a tawdry blue leisure suit.

And another thing: Her tattoos suck. Same with the nose ring. They mar this otherwise beautiful girl. Hey, Nineteen.

And: When Ronnie shut off the tape that had been flipping back and forth all night, she asks, in a soft voice, not worn ragged and haggard—yet—from one-too-many nights likes these, “What is this we’ve been listening to?” He told her. Flipper on one side. Television on the other. “Never heard of them,” Laney said. “Of either of them.” Yup. Hey, Nineteen.

Actually: The morning ain’t that bad, really. They mumble smalltalk. Some laughs. She writes down her phone number on a piece of scrap paper on his desk, but they know, they both know.

Ronnie’s bedroom: It reeked of everything wrong and everything stupid about last night.

Kelly: After pizza, they walk back to Myrrh House. Kelly goes back into his truck and drives off, away, back to Orlando, still so so so stoked about everything.

Ronnie: Stretched out on the couch, waiting for the hangover to pass, cursing the meh of it all. Ok, maybe not profound acts of heroism, but the unrelenting thought that he should be giving something back to the world, already. This life in Gainesville, it can’t last. As good as it is, as good as it can be, too much of it is downright purgatorial. It can’t go on like this. There’s too much to see and do and be.

CLOWN VILLAGE

Ronnie wants to be left alone. He wants to hide in his room and read this Henry Miller book. He wants to stretch across this old brown musty cowboy couch, listen to Flipper and Television, crack open the novel, get to the part when ol’ Hank goes off on wild tangents on the cosmology of vaginal desire, or whatever. His room is the only place to hide; to even set foot in the living room means having to hang out with Roger; to even set foot onto NW 4th Lane means running into neighbors; and don’t even think about walking down 13th Street or University. The acquaintances are everywhere, and they will distract Ronnie from Serious Business. Ronnie considers himself, at his core, to be a Very Serious Person, with Very Serious Concerns. He needs more quiet nights. Instead, he wastes time with strange women, goes with the flow, passively follows along for the ride.

Ronnie Altamont is undisciplined. No shit, Sherlock.

The people who surround him now, many a year or two away from college graduation, never seem to do anything—sitting around for hours and hours watching movies, talking about nothing much at all besides this little world and the people who populate it—but they still pull off straight As and keep near-4.0 GPAs. Ronnie was never that kind of smart. Only by shutting himself off from the world could he get anything done. When he thinks of all the writing he needs to do, but not only that, all the necessary reading he needs to do, the imagined work takes on the shape of a mammoth, stratospheric pile, because he must read, to figure out how he can tell his stories and what he should tell about his stories and even if the stories are worth telling. Nights like these, Ronnie regrets not following Kelly’s initial advice, and moving straight to Chicago instead of this Gainesville detour, because, really, what can Gainesville teach him that five years at the University of Central Florida hasn’t already? And to even think about what is really worth telling, because nobody thinks goofs like him ever have anything meaningful to say about the world. This life in Florida, it lacks depth, importance, what DH Lawrence called “le grand sérieux.” It’s a sheltered life in a part of the world many consider to be “paradise,” where his only true escape and source of adventure has come through playing in bands, which in itself is a kind of luxury many in the world don’t get. There is nothing to see here, nothing to tell. Ronnie has been giving serious thought to giving it up. “It has all been said before,” he thinks, and laughs to himself because “It has all been said before” has been said so many times before.

Ronnie closes the Henry Miller, closes his eyes. He starts to fall asleep when he hears a pounding on the front door, followed by squeals from a recorder, maraca shakes, clanky pots and pans, and Paul’s voice, singing in the same melody as Andy Williams’ “Moon River,” “Clowwwwwwwwwwwwn Villlllage!” Feminine laughter. Cacophony from the recorder, the maraca, the pots and pans. Paul’s voice, again, only this time, imitating Luther from The Warriors, “Alllltamahhhhhhhhhhnt. Come out to . . . play-yayyyyyyyyyy!”

“Why does everybody imitate that guy in that movie?” Ronnie thinks.

“Please don’t open it,” Ronnie whispers, staring at the plaster cracks in the ceiling, hearing Roger’s heavy-fast trod to the front door.

The door opens. “Where is he? Where is he?” Paul yells, stepping through the Myrrh House front door. He knocks, opens, steps inside Ronnie’s room, flanked by Icy Filet on one side, who shakes an avocado-shaped maraca, and Siouxsanna Siouxsanne, blowing into a recorder.

“He’s reading!” Paul says, pointing at Ronnie. “Reading!” Paul steps to the couch, stands over Ronnie. “Altamont! There’s no reading in Clown Village! We’re getting you out of here.” Paul pulls at Ronnie’s left arm, sings, “We’re taking you back to . . . Clooowwwwwwn Villllllage.” He bends over, picks up the Henry Miller book off the floor. “Reading!” he scoffs. Paul tosses the book to his left, where it plops onto the loveseat between the closet and the bathroom.

Ronnie sits up, stands, sighs. “There better be beer in Clown Village,” he says.

“Rrrrrronnie Altamont, we’re lllllloaded,” Siouxsanna Siouxsanne says, punctuating this with shrill free jazz recorder squeals. She takes Ronnie by the right hand. “You have a fun name to say, Rrrrrronie Alllllllllltamont. It’s as fun as singing Clowwwwwwn Villlllllage! I’m llllllloaded.”

Shaking off the sleepiness and the solitude, Ronnie follows them into the living room. Roger stands in the middle of the room, looking through a video camera. “I think I need to document Clown Village,” he says.

“You fucking better,” Paul says, then sings yet again, “Clowwwwwn Villlllage!”

“Clowwwwwwwn Villlllllllage!” Ronnie repeats.

“That’s it, Altamont! That’s the stuff,” Paul says, and the five of them step out of the Myrrh House.

“I llllllllike you,” Siouxsanna Siouxsanne says, still holding Ronnie’s hand.

Clown Village is two blocks east of the Myrrh House, and it bears a striking resemblance to Paul’s house. In a tiny dingy living room with white wallpaper made out of 8½ʺ by 11ʺ show fliers from the six years Paul has lived in Gainesville, fifteen people—among them, Neal and Mouse—smoosh around a battered coffeetable crowded with several large jugs of cheap wine. Randomly, people yell-sing “Clowwwwwwwn Villlllllage!” in different keys, different tones, over the din of maracas, pots and pans, crash and ride cymbals on stands, drum sticks, tambourines, kazoos, slide whistles.

Ronnie steps up, joins in, bellowing “Clowwwwwwwwwwn Villlllliiiiiiiiidge” in the falsetto timbre of Jello Biafra from the Dead Kennedys.

“Best Jello Biafra imitation in town,” Neal announces, running to Ronnie, raising his right arm in the air like a cham-peen prize fighter.

Everyone cheers. Ronnie is sincerely honored by this.

Siouxsanna Siouxsanne is seated to Ronnie’s left. She wears a green knee-length dress, barefoot. Ronnie turns to her, smiles.

“I’m lllllllloaded!” Siouxsanna Siouxsanna announces, holding a glass coffee mug filled with red wine in her non-recorder holding hand.

“Oh yeah?” Ronnie says, stepping closer, standing over her.

“Yeah, Rrrrronnie! I am!”

“Good! Because, tomorrow, I’m taking you to Long John Silver’s for brunch!” Ronnie grabs a jug off the coffee table, hoists it in a “Cheers.”

Siouxsanna Siouxsanne stands, wraps her arms around Ronnie’s neck, kisses him on the left cheek. “I lllove this guy!” she announces. “At first, I wasn’t sure, but now?” She falls backwards onto the couch. Her eyes close, her head bobs up and down like somebody’s uncle trying not to fall asleep on the couch watching the sixth inning of an unremarkable baseball game.

Ronnie laughs, steps through his friends yelling “Clown Village!” meanwhile making an unlistenable cacophony of percussive clanks and honky squonks. He finds the tiny bathroom. The mirror is above the toilet. He catches his reflection as he empties his bladder, and the thought—wine-fueled as it is—hits Ronnie so hard, he has to say it aloud:

“This is our music.”

Ornette Coleman said it, and Galaxie 500 said it, and now Ronnie Altamont is saying it, and while he always knew what it meant—now, he really and truly knows what it means. He squirts out the last of it, flushes, zips up, washes his hands, keeps repeating, “This is our music . . . this is our music!” loving how you can vary the accented word, and it always works.

He rejoins the party, screams “Clowwwwn Villllage” still in a Biafra timbre, because he accepts that this is his role in this mess. The song has taken on a dirgelike quality now that everyone is beyond drunken stupor. What is the point of it? No one knows, nor cares. When Ronnie asks Paul a couple nights from now over at Gatorroni’s what he thinks Clown Village meant, he shrugs and says, “I was bored. It sounded like a funny idea at the time.”

Ronnie is so taken with this idea running through his head and what it means, he doesn’t care that by the time he returns to the couch, Siouxsanna Siouxsanne and Neal are kissing, fooling around. He needs to leave Clown Village, walk back to the Myrrh House, and ponder the epic possibilities of “This is Our Music.”

Which he does, wine-drunk and beyond happy, as the shredded voices and worn-out arms fade with each step away from Clown Village. The fog, the angst, the self-doubt disappear like the deep dark puddles on the roads those Florida summer afternoons when it rains for one hour and one hour only, and just as quick, the roads are dry again. In the Sweat Jam life, the stories are here. Right here. This is what he has and this is what he knows. Our music is the racket of Clown Village. Our music is the way Siouxsanna Siouxsanne says the word “llllllllloaded.” Our music is Maux’s studied misanthropy, Paul’s slacker buffoonery, Icy Filet’s hip-hop ambitions. It’s these flailing, brooding, self-absorbed, jovial, worry-free, generally happy motions up and down this good-enough purgatory along the one-lane streets of the student ghetto of Gainesville. Our music is All of This, and while none of it seems the stuff of Great Literature, it’s Our Music, and here is the time and place. They have their music, and Ronnie has his.

It’s this. It’s All of This.

One would think Ronnie, upon entering his house, would immediately run to the typewriter and begin to try and tell his stories, liberated as he believed he was from all litmag ambitions and English Department hang-ups on Big Lives and Big Themes. And indeed, inspired as he was, he ran to the kitchen, grabbed an Old Hamtramck tallboy from the fridge, took a seat at the desk in his bedroom, turned on the typewriter, opened the beer, drank the beer, and typed

“THIS IS OUR MUSIC”

in all-caps, because it was very important and should be typed as such. Unsure of what to say next, he turned on the Flipper/Television dubbed tape on the stereo, walked to his mattresses, plopped over, and passed out.

SHIT FROM AN OLD NOTEBOOK

“September 9, 1996. 9:30 p.m.

“There is no future in rock music; writing is where it’s at. I don’t want to be 35, with my life over, reminiscing about a tour, some records, etc. Reminiscing and living in the past is not the way I want to live. The past, and the people who were a part of it, tend to go their way, and I go mine.”

PORTLAND PATTY

Portland Patty wants to believe Ronnie Altamont is different as she watches him roll out of her bed and shuffle across the creaking hardwood floor on bare feet, out the bedroom into the hallway light, used condom between thumb and index finger like the tail of an unwanted fish on the verge of getting tossed back into the lake. She hears the toilet flush, the spray of the faucet, on, then off. Squeaking footsteps returning. His naked silhouette does not reveal the crumpled, unwashed clothing, the dirt eating into the sides of his glasses, the stubbly short black hair, the wine stains and condiment flakes caked around his mouth. What can she do with someone like this? So typical of Gainesville, but then again—maybe, she hopes—not at all.

Ronnie climbs back into this queen-sized bed that has been half-empty for far too long. While this little house and this little patch of dirty flat front yard conspire with the palm trees and the sunshine to remind her she is a long way from home—in distance, in time—here in bed, she can almost believe she’s back home in Portland, but only if Ronnie Altamont is really and truly different.

“Are you staying?” Portland Patty asks.

“Is that ok?” Ronnie asks through the narcoleptic groan of wine-sleep.

“Sure,” she says, trying to sound unconcerned, noncommittal. She stares into the darkness, a long way from home. “I mean, I don’t mind, but what are you going to say to Maux?”

Portland Patty looks to her left, to Ronnie. His answer is a snore, a phlegmatically redundant inhale and exhale. In her own wine-spiral, Portland Patty remains unsure of what, if anything, she can possibly do with a boy like this.

•

“Roger says you’re sleazy,” Portland Patty says, the next morning, as Ronnie stretches out his legs and yawns, trying to piece together how he ended up here in this bed, an actual bed, off the ground and everything, grateful for the Saturday morning and its lack of merciless snooze buttons. Portland Patty reclines to his right, hand propping head up. “He also says you drink too much, and you’re moody. Other than that though, he says you’re a nice guy.”

“That so?” Ronnie laughs. “He told me you were an acid casualty.” He turns to face Portland Patty. Green eyes peeking out of lower back-length straight blonde-brown hair. He had forgotten what it was like to be with a girl with long hair. Lanky-long, with tattoos covering all the skin from the right wrist to the right shoulder, swirls, patterns, reds, blacks, blues. “He says you’re weird and kind’ve a hippie and that you’ve done too many drugs and they scattered your brain.”

Portland Patty laughs a hearty insincere “Oh ho ho then!” and adds, “Must have. Why else would I have ended up waking up next to you?”

“Hey-ohhhh!” Ronnie says, in his best Ed MacMahon bellow, tossing the thin red blanket over her head, this blanket that had provided unneeded warmth as they slept off the drink through another night of Florida’s endless late summer.

“But he also said you were nice,” Ronnie added.

“With friends like these . . . ”

“Um, who needs dildos?” Ronnie finished.

Portland Patty laughs, sincerely laughs this time, at the stupid-strange joke. There is a refreshing lack of awkwardness to this morning-after. In bed, unclothed and hungover, talking in a leisurely back-and-forth.

“So why do they call you ‘Portland Patty?’ ”

“Why do you think?”

“You’re from Portland?”

“That’s right, Ronnie Altamont. I am from Portland.”

“Oregon? Maine?”

“Oregon.”

“That’s a long way to go. School?”

“I had to get out of Portland,” she says, conspiratorially. “I had a lot of trouble in that town. ”

“Really?”

Portland Patty laughs. “No. It was school. I wanted to live someplace different. And it doesn’t get much different than this.”

“Fine, but why not just Patty?”

“There’s already a Punk Rock Patty, a Puking Patty, a New Orleans Patty, and a Heroin Patty. Having a Portland in front of my name separates me from these. It makes it easier to gossip, as people like to do here, as I’m sure you’ve noticed.”

“Yeah. Totally.” Ronnie leans forward, shakes his head. “Sleazy? My roommate called me sleazy?”

“What’s this I hear about you and Maux?”

“He told you about her too?” Ronnie rolls his eyes, blurts out “That fucker!” before he can stop himself.

“No. He didn’t. She’s crazy.”

“She’s not crazy. She’s ludicrous. How do you know about it?”

“I’ve seen you two around. At parties. At shows. She’s crazy. If she’s not crazy, she’s mean.”

“Nah, she’s just ludicrous. And I should break off whatever it is we’ve been doing. It hasn’t been much.”

“Do what you want,” Portland Patty says.

“Right now? I want to go back to sleep,” Ronnie says. Instead, he stretches out in bed once more, still trying to piece together what happened yesterday, and how he ended up here.

Portland Patty leaves the bedroom, steps into the kitchen to make coffee, too sleepy, too hungover, too soon, to decide if Ronnie Altamont is different.

•

Yesterday. Ronnie was relaxing across the larger of the two beige couches in the living room, reading some book about the seven habits of highly effective Celestine Prophets. As the perfect fusion of the self-help and pop mysticism genres, this was a popular book in the mid-1990s. Not that Ronnie wanted to be like a highly effective Celestine Prophet; one of Ronnie’s co-workers at some point (in one of the dozens of jobs he blew through at the time) lent it to him upon finding out that Ronnie Altamont enjoyed reading. These are always the books co-workers lend you when they find out you like reading. It was an otherwise boring Friday afternoon. With the semester underway, the temp job at the used college bookstore was winding down. Ronnie was reduced from a high of 60 hours three weeks ago, to 20 hours this week, with ten next week, and it’ll be five after that, before a somewhat sad parting, as it’s been one of the better gigs Ronnie has held.

On the smaller of the two beige couches, Roger leaned into his handheld tape recorder, communicating valuable insights, as some Finnish film played on television.

“As a metaphor for nuclear holocaust, Djkajollskjoldj’s masterful use of taxidermied animals in an abandoned hunting lodge suggests the indomitable force that is life itself, even in the midst of such large-scale annihilation. Furthermore, when—”

“We gotta go,” Ronnie said, closing the book, flinging it behind him into the open space between the front door and the couches.

“You made me lose my thought, Ronnie,” Roger said, setting the microphone onto the coffeetable, turning off the tape recorder. “I have a paper due.”

“It was a bad thought anyway,” Ronnie says, standing. “Let’s go to Orlando.”

Roger paused the VCR, freezing the Finnish film on the split image of a mushroom cloud and a stuffed grizzly bear towering over a crying little girl with blonde braids. “Orlando. Why?”

“It’s Friday?” Ronnie said.

“That’s not a good reason,” Roger answered, moving to unpause the remote.

“I need to pick up a final check I never received from the asbestos gig. If I pick it up today, I can cash it. I’ll buy you dinner.”

Roger stopped the VCR; the TV screen changed to blue. “Let’s go. Whatever. That was a dumb movie anyway.”

“There ya go, dude . . . That’s the stuff, the spirit, the ol’ whathaveyou,” Ronnie said, grabbing his keys off the mantle.

They stepped out of the house. Ronnie locked the front door. This girl with long brown-blonde hair, a black t-shirt with the stark fundamentalist white lettering of a local hardcore band, and frayed black pants cut off right above the knees pedaled up to them on her bike. There were always people like her in the Gainesville Student Ghetto, riding down these streets, looking for something to do, people to talk to, conspirators in the time-killing.

Roger waved. “Hey Portland Patty,” he said. “We’re going to Orlando for the afternoon. Ya wanna go?”

“Ok,” she said. With that, she locked her bike to a post holding up the roof’s overhang above the front door.

“Don’t think about it,” Roger muttered to Ronnie as Portland Patty moved ahead of them.

“Think about what?” Ronnie said, already running to the car to unlock it for Portland Patty, to open it for Portland Patty, to turn on the charm and introduce himself to Portland Patty, who smiled and shook his hand before climbing into the back seat of the blandy apple green sedan.

“Good,” Roger said.

Southbound. Gainesville gives way to Payne’s Prairie, and the immense prairie gives way to the horse farms. Through the rear view mirror of his blandy apple green sedan, Ronnie steals glances at Portland Patty. The omnipresent Florida sun has given her complexion a brown-freckled tint around her green eyes. Freckles dot her long narrow nose, and the lips . . . the lips the lips the lips . . . neither thick nor thin but with a kind of citrusy juiciness, exaggerated perfectly by an overbite and two slightly bucked front teeth.

Portland Patty stares out the window at the passing scenery. All three of them are silent, lost in the reverie of the trafficless road winding through the jungles, the open spaces, the giant skies, the hotels, the motels, the timeshares, the billboards, the swamps, all the wonders of an almost-homeland viewed through dirty windows, their silence layered by the sounds of the full-blasted air-conditioner, and the Arizona-echo of the Meat Puppets’ second album, its cavernous country-punk ricochets bouncing and rolling through the hiss of an old cassette, always the perfect soundtrack to the Florida countryside.

Not until they enter Greater Orlando, as the hypnotic tranquil countryside is broken up by the spectacle of the endless commercial districts, does anyone speak.

“So. How do you like Orlando?” Ronnie asks, looking at Portland Patty through the rear view mirror as they wait at the 87th stoplight at State Road 436.

“I feel like a part of my soul has been stripped away,” she says, as off-handedly as if she were discussing a slight change in the weather. “Not to sound too dramatic or anything.”

“No,” Roger says. “There’s a lot of nothing in this everything.”

Ronnie takes in the intersections, the gas stations and churches and plazas and parking lots. “I can’t beat it up anymore,” he says. “I’ve lived here. I know what it is. It’s a city of cheap salesmen, of swampland realtors who pitch their mission statements like eighth graders bullshitting their way through book reports.”

Traffic scoots forward, ever-so-slowly. “Yikes,” Portland Patty says.

“Not to sound cynical or anything,” Ronnie adds, smiling, fearing he’s blown it.

“Can I use that in one of my screenplays?” Roger asks. He turns around to face Portland Patty. “You know I write screenplays, right?”

“No, I didn’t,” Portland Patty says.

“Yeah, I’ve written several so far. Mainly, I’m concerned—perhaps even obsessed to a fault, with the struggle of the individual in a consumer-driven . . . ”

“Yeah, you can use that in your next screenplay,” Ronnie interrupts, turning up the Meat Puppets. Portland Patty laughs.

Ronnie finds the asbestos removal office, located in the back of an industrial park. There’s no one there he recognizes. AQ is on a site. Tommy and Bassanovich are in college now, presumably learning the truth about the pussy in the great Middle Western college towns.

Ronnie cashes his check, takes Roger and Portland Patty to an appalling Mexican restaurant on 436 called Jalapeño Larry’s. Roger sits across from Ronnie, Portland Patty to his right. Jalapeño Larry’s was close enough to UCF, and Ronnie would often take Maggie there for dinner. They basked in the ridiculousness of it. Mexican restaurants are always bad when they have a Spanish name every gringo can understand. Ronnie loves the idea of taking Portland Patty and Roger here. So bad, it’s great.

The server is one of those insanely unreal polyethylene types you find in almost every restaurant in Orlando, trained to pretend like the very idea of serving you your food and reading lines from the script dictated from Corporate is putting her on the verge of the greatest orgasm of her life. Hot sauce on the table with names like “Sandman Unsane’s Tex-Mex Weapon of Ass Destruction” and “Colonel Capscium’s Dirty Dawg Poblanogeddon.” Lite alternative rock on satellite radio. Walls of televisions, literal walls of televisions making laser noises as they go from one sports highlight to the next, reported by some smug douche from the Northeast. This dining area, one of countless autopiloted nightmares masquerading as a good-time party atmosphere here in Central Florida.

On the back of the menu, “El Statement del Mission.” Ronnie flips his menu over, points, says, “Here. Read this. Everything you need to know about Orlando is right here.”

The chips and salsa are served. Ronnie, Portland Patty, and Roger read “El Statement”:

“Jalapeño Larry’s is an Acapulco-style cantina del fiesta specializing in distinctive frozen drinks. These drinks are created by an expert team of experienced bar operators and are hand mixed with pride.

“The décor of Jalapeño Larry’s is designed to inspire laid back thoughts of an amazing tropical environment. The beautiful faux roof around the bar is reminiscent of sitting on the porch of a Mexican bungalow, and the mix of tropical colors and light woods creates a relaxing and welcoming feeling. Tongue and cheek warning signs about the potency of Jalapeño Larry’s frozen drinks add humor to the walls, along with photographs of partygoers of the past and present. Lighthearted Acapulco-inspired artworks cover the downstairs dance floor walls as well as the balcony upstairs. With over 55 televisions, a sound system, and a state-of-the-art intelligent light show, Jalapeño Larry’s is the perfect location to have some drinks and dance until morning.

“For lunch or dinner, la cocina at Jalapeño Larry’s can’t be beat. Our tacos, burritos, and quesadillas are made-to-order, and for the health conscience [sic], there are many vegetarian options, including our world-renowned Caeser [sic] Salad.

“While you are sitting at the bar you will notice the famous wall of frozen drinks. Perhaps the most well-known (and well-consumed) of these celebrated concoctions is something we call “The Suicide.” With five liquors and five fruit juices, you have never experienced a frozen drink like this.

“Although Jalapeño Larry’s is an easygoing hangout spot, by nightfall the nightlife party atmosphere in Jalapeño Larry’s can rival any local entertainment venue. Whether it’s “fantastico” food, “loco” DJs, drinking games, talented local musicians, unique frozen cocktails, famous drink specials, titillating servers and bartenders, or just a place to have a drink, Jalapeño Larry’s is what you’re looking for.”

“I was thinking about maybe getting a distinctive frozen drink from the famous wall—and maybe even having the unique experience of drinking ‘The Suicide,’ ” Ronnie says, “But that sign over there says, ‘Slippery When Wasted,’ and I don’t want to hurt myself.”

“Relax, Ron,” Roger says. “It’s a tongue and cheek sign. That means you won’t—really—get slippery when wasted.”

“Yeah, Ronnie,” Portland Patty adds. “Relax. You should be inspired to have laid back thoughts by the design.”

“You’re right,” Ronnie says. “I’m a little worked up here, but who can blame me? I’m in anticipation of the intelligent light show. I’m so sick of light shows that are a little bit on the dumb side, if you know what I mean.”

“Who isn’t?” Portland Patty says. She’s never been to Orlando before. It seems like the type of place where irony was your best defense. “For my part, as a vegan and therefore health conscious, I want my only option, the, uh, See-zer Salad.”

“But the dressing probably has anchovies,” Roger says, “and it has paramesan--”

“Yeah, I know,” Portland Patty says. “Guess I’m guacin’ it.”

As they talk like this, their “titillating server” arrives, announcing, in the loud sportscaster tone of the Very White, “Alright, Señors y Señorita! Here are your implausibly extreme frozen drinks!” Ronnie receives his plastic cup of Rebel Yeller, described in the menu as “A muy loco blend of FloCo, SoCo, Margarita Mix, with a dash of casselberry juice.” Roger receives his plastic cup of Fun y Spontaneity, described in the menu as, “Jalapeño Larry sez: ‘Me gusta this intoxicating mix of Everclear, Lime Gatorade, and Absolut Nectarine vodka!’ ” Portland Patty receives her plastic cup of Hace Mucho Calor y Frio, described in the menu as “So cool, it’s hot, so hot, it’s cool, this certifiably awesome blended drink combines Crème de Menthe, Crème de Cacao, vermouth, tequila, and a few secret ingredients from our ‘Instituto del Bebido’ that is guar-olé!-teed to leave you in an ecstasy of sweats and shivers.”

Ronnie raises his plastic cup, smiles. “To Gainesville,” he says.

“Cheers,” Roger and Portland Patty say, pressing their cups into his.

“So why did you take us here?” Portland Patty asks after a wincing sip from her Hace Mucho Calor y Frio.

“What?” Ronnie extends his arms, looks around. “You don’t like it?”

“It’s fine, I guess,” Portland Patty says. “I don’t know, I’m thinking there has to be better places. Does this have sentimental value for you?”

Ronnie looks away, to one of the unavoidable TVs. What he doesn’t want to talk about is, how when these stupid drinks kicked in, how hard they would laugh, how every volley back and forth between Ronnie and Maggie was some kind of comedy gem in a language only they could understand. They were the kinds of inside jokes where they would choke and howl and snort and cough and gasp, so funny to them and only them. Ronnie isn’t going to discuss it.

“Ronnie hates Orlando,” Roger says. “He thinks he’s some kind of dissident, or like an exile, living in Gainesville. There are plenty of places we could have gone. There’s a strip of Vietnamese restaurants here that are awesome, but Ronnie would rather find a place that proves his point.”

“Oh, touché,” Ronnie says, sneering, booze already kicking in. He grabs a handful of tortilla chips, throws them at Roger’s head. Roger laughs, tosses the chips aside, combs out his hair.

“You think you’re an exile?” Portland Patty says. “Try living here when you’re from Portland.”

“People always come to Gainesville from Portland,” Roger says. “It’s like a whistle stop on the Trustafarian circuit.”

“Whatever,” Portland Patty says. “Anyway, none of this,” and here, she extends her hands out to the décor of Jalapeño Larry’s, out to the concrete beyond the restaurant, “is Gainesville. We can agree on that, right?”

“No,” Ronnie says. “It isn’t.”

“I’ve been everywhere,” Portland Patty continues. “Not much out there is better than Gainesville.”

“That’s fucking depressing,” Roger says.

“Maybe it is,” Ronnie says. “I mean look at this.” Ronnie points at the menu. “Even these menus. This desperate striving idiocy of these United States.”

“You shouldn’t be so cynical,” Portland Patty says.

“Only when I’m here,” Ronnie says. He turns to look her in the eyes. “Normally, I’m a lot of fun.” And here, ok, there’s something in the way Ronnie Altamont says this which makes Portland Patty start thinking that maybe Ronnie is really and truly different, and not the different of all these other guys hanging out and hanging around on the streets and front porches.

“Gainesville’s meaner than you think,” Roger says. Ronnie laughs. By “mean,” Ronnie assumes Roger means all the gossip and inevitable petty horseshit indigenous to every small town.

“I’m serious,” Roger says.

“It’s not that bad,” Portland Patty says. Ronnie notices, really notices, her smile. It’s never triggered by anything in particular, but by everything in particular. “People are always talking, but you don’t have to listen.”

“You’ll see,” Roger says. Ronnie and Portland Patty look to each other. They both start laughing. It’s nervous laughter, seemingly apropos of nothing.

“Excuse me,” Portland Patty says, standing up, a little wobbly, as Ronnie notices. “My muy loco drink is making me have to use el baño, comprende?” She giggles. Ronnie giggles. She walks away.

The moment Portland Patty is out of earshot, this is the moment when Roger leans in, whispers, “She’s a total acid casualty.”

“Really?” Ronnie says. “She seems alright.” The food arrives, a tamales dinner for Ronnie, a taco salad for Roger, and guacamole for Portland Patty.

“I heard she’s tripped hundreds of times, dude. Thousands.” Roger leans back in his chair, speaks louder, “So you don’t get any ideas. She’s not a, you know, punk rock nnnnugget, and I know what that means to you.”

It is too late for Ronnie not to get ideas. Sometimes, the entire state of Florida seemed like one big acid casualty, the way people talked about spending their entire high school and early college years on daily acid trips. If Roger is trying to get Ronnie to think twice, he’s failing.

“What about Maux?” Roger adds.

Ronnie shrugs. When Portland Patty returns, it’s Ronnie’s turn to excuse himself. He can only imagine what Roger is about to say about him. He’ll probably bring up Maux. Asshole.

Inside the door marked “CABALLEROS,” Ronnie washes his hands, breathes in, breathes out, tries not to look in the mirror, tries not to think about anything. He is in love again, the way he always thinks he’s in love again. He thinks he knows what is next. He isn’t worried about Roger. All he needs to do is get back to Gainesville, and it will be alright.

“How’s the food?” Ronnie asks when he returns.

They both shrug.

“I need another drink,” Roger says.

Another round for Roger and Portland Patty. Ronnie switches to water. Rather than trying to get the girl drunk, as so many other dipshits do, Ronnie wants to get his roommate drunk. He’ll talk and talk, and get increasingly surly, all of which finally culminates, as Ronnie knew it would, in him standing up and announcing over a quarter-eaten taco salad:

“Let’s leave this dump. I need to get back. This place sucks.”

“Alright,” Ronnie says, smiling. “Let’s go.” He picks up the bill, glad to, just once, actually take care of a bill.

Through Orlando’s inexcusable early rush hour traffic, they eventually make it back into the countryside, in the light of a grape and honey hued sunset. Roger talks, and talks, and talks. Turning back to Portland Patty, he talks of screenplays, of films he’s seen, of films he wants to see. He goes on lengthy tangents, following every thread of his thoughts, devoid of filter between brain and mouth. Roger is going for it, using everything he has—his brains, his thoughts, his intellect. Ronnie has tuned him out; Portland Patty throws out the occasional “Really?” or “Oh,” and this encourages him. Roger is drunk. He gets drunk easily. Ronnie knows this much about his current roommate. Two cups of Fun y Spontaneity, and he’s in blotto speech, telling it like it is about film, about films, about film criticism. He goes on, and on, and on, until the halfway point of the trip—in beautiful Leesburg, Florida, while passing an orange juice processing plant, he turns and immediately falls asleep. When Ronnie sees he’s asleep, he looks up in the rearview mirror, to Portland Patty, who smiles at him. Ronnie smiles back, makes the “whew!” gesture of a right hand wiping imaginary sweat off his forehead. Portland Patty laughs at this gesture. The Meat Puppets get them home, back into the beauty of North-Central Florida.

Ronnie drops off Roger first. He wakes him up. “We’re home, buddyboy!” Ronnie says.

Roger opens his eyes, makes that jolt-gasp sound people make when they wake up on travels to find they’ve arrived at their destination. “Oh! Here!”

“Yup. Home. See you soon.” Ronnie says.

Roger looks to the backseat. Portland Patty is still there. “Bye, Roger,” she says.

Roger looks to Ronnie. Ronnie gives a barely perceptible nod, as if to say, “Time to go now. Time to go.”

Without a word, Roger opens the car door, steps out, slams the door. Ronnie immediately puts the car in reverse, leaves NW 4th Lane for Portland Patty’s house, north on NW 13th Street, past the high school, the Wal-Mart. She lives in a brown duplex. Ronnie pulls in the driveway, about to ask her out, when she looks at him, in the rearview mirror and asks, “Do you want to come inside, listen to music?”

Ronnie shuts off the car.

Music is always the catalyst for getting the boys and girls into each other’s homes, the ostensible, weighted, lines you read between. The wine helps—in this case, a jug of unlabelled Chablis poured into Empire Strikes Back collectors’ glasses from Burger King—Ronnie sipping from a Boba Fett glass, Portland Patty from Lando Calrissian.

Music. Drinks. It was the only diplomatic way we knew how to get to sex.

(The blasé coldness, the self-preserving cynicism of the smug mid-20s onward hasn’t sunk in yet.)

•

“What’s a Volvo-driving pirate’s favorite radio station?” Portland Patty asks. She sits across from Ronnie at Long John Silver’s, cardboard pirate hat pulled down across her forehead.

“Pirates don’t drive Volvos,” Ronnie says between bites of hushpuppy.

“Will you just ask ‘What?’ please, Ronnie?” She looks so perfect in a pirate hat, he thinks, the long blonde-brown hair flowing out and around the brim. (Maux would never go to LJS with him: quote, “That place sucks and it’s nasty.”)

“Ok, Ok, what?” Ronnie manages between chomps of tartar-drenched fishflanks, flakes and chunks dripping out his mouth. “I mean, I know, but I want to hear you tell me.”

“NPArrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.” She laughs and snorts at her own joke, laughter an exhaled melodious tittering hee-hee-hee followed by inhaled free-jazz saxophone goose honks.

Ronnie laughs, more at her reaction than the joke itself. “Jesus, that was awful.”

“Aw, c’mon, Ronnie!”

He reaches across the greasy table, swipes the cardboard pirate hat off her head, hair trailing behind the hat and above the table. He puts it on, yarrs out an, “Avast, why aren’t ye eating any seabiscuits, ya scallywag?”

“I told you I’m vegan. And you took me here anyway.”

“Yawn.” Ronnie cannot explain his sudden obsession with Long John Silvers. It occurs to him that it’s one of those fast food chains that are everywhere, but it doesn’t seem like anyone actually goes there to eat. Even this afternoon, lunchtime on a Saturday, no one’s eating here except for this pink-faced flat-topped overalled farmboy-looking kid, sitting in the front, looking out the nautical windows at 8th Avenue. Thinking this way, Ronnie got it into his head that it would be hilarious to take girls here. On dates. As a litmus test. Because if they couldn’t put up with Long John Silvers, they wouldn’t be able to put up with much of anything else about Ronnie, and it would save the trouble of attempting a relationship.

“I can’t eat anything here.”

“Yawn.”

“Shut up, Ronnie.”

“Yawn.” Portland Patty reaches across the table, punches Ronnie in the chest, with a right arm swirling with kaleidoscopic, even hypnotic tattoos from shoulder to wrist, retakes the pirate hat.

Ronnie laughs. “What are you going to eat then, matey?” he asks.

“I’ll eat later.” She refits the pirate hat on her head. “I had heard you liked this place.”

“You heard I think it’s funny to go here?”

“Everybody knows about Ronnie Altamont.”

Ronnie shrugs, expels a bitter pshaw. He has a first and a last name here now too. He can’t escape it. “Everybody hates me here,” he says. “I’m not emotive enough. Too weird. Too drunk. Something.”

“You seem nice.” Portland Patty, she means this, trying to hide her amusement at the way he eats this greasy fried offal. “You’re different, I think.” She’s almost convinced, by virtue of being here at Long John Silver’s as opposed to all the more obvious spots they could have gone to eat. But then, maybe they would see Maux, so maybe he isn’t that different. Maybe he thought of the one place he knew he would run into no one.

“I’m nice. I’m different,” Ronnie repeats, deadpan. He looks at her, bugs out his eyes, stabs one of the tartar and malt vinegar-soaked fish flanks with the plastic spork he holds in his left hand, holds the fish flank aloft and loudly proclaims, “I AM THE AYATOULLAH, OF ROCK AND ROLLAH!”

“Put that down,” Portland Patty says. “You’re ridiculous. I’ve seen that movie.”

“It’s who I am, and that’s what you haven’t heard about me yet,” Ronnie says, slowly lowering the fish flank. “That’s my rank, baby.”

“Whatever.”

Ronnie wonders how long until she discovers the truth. How will he blow it this time? With Maux around, and that other girl he spent the night with, he can definitely guess.

Ronnie drives Portland Patty home. They exchange phone numbers. Kisses in the car, as the same Meat Puppets tape from yesterday still plays, Curt Kirkwood moaning, . . . there’s a lot out there but don’t be scared / who needs action when you’ve got words?

This is too easy. They both think this—Ronnie driving away, Portland Patty standing in the driveway, watching him leave, tattooed right arm upraised in a brief wave, fingers up and down, up and down.

•

Mac Arthur’s Park is melting in the dark / all that sweet green icing / flowing dowooooon . . .

It’s one of these typical Florida afternoon downpours, where the drops hit like thousands of water balloons. Ronnie is walking home from the used college textbook store gig, belting out the Richard Harris classic “Mac Arthur Park,” an attempt to laugh through the rain soaking his clothes and glasses, to laugh at the realization that the job is now, officially and inevitably, finished, and the money would be running out very soon. The students are settled in their classes—books purchased, books returned, books sold. The copypack orders are filled. Ronnie had hoped to stay on permanently—for once, after finally learning, through the magic of asbestos removal, that he was a hard worker, and, also for once, his bosses liked him—but it was seasonal work, and the season was over.

Someone left a cake out in the rain / and I don’t think I can take it / because it took so long to bake it / and I’ll never have that recipe uh-gayne / oh noooooooo.

Jobs. Oh, the jobs. And the guitar. It hasn’t been touched in months. Ronnie thinks he hid it in the closet before a party so it wouldn’t get stolen, but he’s really not too sure. The writing. Only when thoroughly drunk, home from whatever, he scribbles illegible words in ninety-nine cent notebooks on whatever drunken drama feels so terribly important at that moment.

What now, what now? Ronnie walks down University for home. He passes the feminist bookstore. A familiar voice behind him. “Where are you going jerk? And where have you been? Jerk.”

Maux stands in the threshold, cracking the door open and closed enough so the motion detectors continually beep.

“Lost my job today,” Ronnie says, standing in the rain, beyond the saturation point, accepting that he is going to be drenched until he finds shelter. He shrugs, holds out his arms, points at the rain. “Stuck out here. What are you doing?”

“Nothing.” With a tip of her head to the store behind her, a wicked smile spreads across her face, and she adds, “I’m just checking out what the dykes are reading these days.”

“Wow. That’s really classy, Maux.” Maux laughs that meanspirited preteen boy laugh of hers. Ronnie would like to have a meeting between his mind, his heart, and his dick, in which the mind and the heart collectively kick the dick’s ass while saying, “Walk away. Turn around and walk away,” but the dick still—still!—trumps everything, and says, “Look at her. Look at those long white legs and that short black dress and the tight yellow t-shirt and the pale skin and the indigo hair uh humina humina humina . . . ”

Thus conflicted, Ronnie says nothing.

“Aw, I’m kidding, Ron,” Maux says. “Get outta the rain, dumbass.”

Ronnie is about to step into the shelter of the feminist bookstore, when he hears the Teutonic buzz of a Volvo car horn. He turns. The passenger side window scrolls down.

“Need a ride?” Portland Patty asks, leaned over, peeking through the half-opened window.

Heart, mind, and dick, for a refreshing change, are in unanimous agreement.

“Sure!” Ronnie shouts, runs to the green Volvo station wagon. “See you later,” he waves to Maux, opens the door and hops in.

“Who’s the hippie, Ron?!” Maux yells behind him. Ronnie doesn’t answer. Portland Patty pulls back into University’s traffic.

•

In Portland Patty’s, her tiny duplex that smells of soy sauce and incense sticks, there are posters and fliers on the wall, of Jawbreaker, Husker Du, Minor Threat, Fugazi, Rites of Spring, dozens upon dozens of local bands. Ronnie, drenched, sits on Portland Patty’s couch and studies the names, the images, the Sharpie writing, the fonts, the faces.

She hands Ronnie a Mickey Mouse beach towel. As he dries off, she warms up leftover soup, some vegan concoction Ronnie will find impossibly flavorful.

“Feeling better?” Portland Patty asks, setting the soup bowl on the coffeetable, sitting next to Ronnie on the couch.

“Feeling good!” Ronnie says, leaning forward, towel wrapped around his shoulders, slurping up the soup. On the record player, some overly distorted, overly whiny modern punk song, a lament offered up to the Bitch Goddess responsible for all this unrequited love plaguing our world.

He finishes the soup in no time. Ronnie Altamont turns to Portland Patty, smiles. He places his damp head in her lap, and falls asleep.

For the second time in three days, Portland Patty watches Ronnie sleep. Inhale. Exhale. He’s so disheveled. Dirt eating into the hinges of his glasses. Broth crusted along the edge of his mouth. Crumpled, unwashed, undry clothing.

What will she do with a boy like this? There is Maux, and there is Roger telling her he’s sleazy. What she knows for sure is, is that he’s some kind of goof. Will he leave Maux? Is he worth the trouble? The time?

She removes his glasses, sets them on the coffee table, places her hands on his not-clean hair as he sleeps. “Are you different, Ronnie?” she whispers. “Are you really different?”

MAUX CALLS RONNIE

“Hey! What’re ya doin’? Fucker.” Maux sounds drunk. Vodka-drunk.

“Sleeping,” Ronnie yawns into the blue corded phone plugged in by his mattresses. “It’s 4:30.”

“So did you call or somethin’?”

“No.” Ronnie turns, pulls himself upward, wakes up, realizes why she’s calling. Yes, of course. “But come over.”

“You’re weird.” Ronnie yawns a second time, almost hangs up. “I’m just callin’ ya back. Fucker.”

“I told you I didn’t call.”

“Oh. Well.” Darkness. The every-night looped cassette of Television and Flipper is on the guitar solo to the Television song “Elevation,” a fierce electric bounce before the song quietly implodes, puts itself back together. “Why can’t we talk? Who’s the hippie?”

“The hippie?”

“Yeah, that twat I saw you with who had the long hair and the Volvo. In the rain. Fucker.”

Silence.

“Guess what?” Maux says, every word a sloppy slurred groan.

“What?”

“I hate hippies.”

“I don’t care.”

“What?”

“Nothing, man. Are you coming over or what?” Ronnie turns onto his back, phone pressed to his left ear, reaching the pinnacle of his 4:30 a.m. alertness, returning to weaving in and out of sleep.

“No, Ronnie.”

“Then what do you want?”

‘What about that hippie?”

“Then I’m going over there.”

“No, Ronnie, but please tell me about that hippie—”

Ronnie yawns. “She’s a friend. You’re a friend. We’re all friends.”

“Friends.”

“I don’t know. What do you want from me, Maux?”

“I haven’t seen you in a while. We’re hanging out, right?”

“Hanging out? Sure.”

“So what are you doing with that hippie?”

“I’ll call later,” Ronnie says, hanging up before Maux’s drunk ass can respond.

What’s funny about it is that even if Ronnie had told her everything, she wouldn’t remember what they talked about in the morning. He closes his eyes. Out of the speakers, Tom Verlaine sings, This case is cloooosed. Ronnie cannot sleep. What does Maux want? What does Ronnie want? And Portland Patty. He needs to say something, do something. Make a stand. Make a choice. The last definitive choice Ronnie has made was moving to Gainesville. Everything else has been reaction, chance, a passive going with the flow Ronnie is almost foolish enough to believe is “Zen.” What is it really? Ronnie is afraid of the answer. It’s easier to let it happen. It’s easier to spend time with both, to avoid classifications, to not think and to ride it out and let the events take care of themselves. So why worry? Go to sleep.

Marquee Moon ends; the tape deck whizzes through the silence afterwards, flips the tape to the other side. Ronnie cannot go back to sleep. The only way is to roll out of bed, go into the living room, throw on one of Roger’s artfilms, some three-hour Bulgarian epic, stretch out on the living room couch, and not think about any of this. Within five minutes, the film knocks him out.

HIPPIES . . . CHEAP WINE . . . INDECISION

“Look at you, all dressed up,” Portland Patty says. “You almost look employable.”

“Almost,” Ronnie repeats, and then lets loose a “Pffff,” exactly like his old roommate Alvin. For once, he has combed his hair, is wearing clean clothes, has removed the gunk eating into his glasses. He’s in khaki slacks, a red Oxford shirt, and a green necktie as he trudges up and down University filling out job applications. Only the dirty black low-cut Chucks—and the general air of looking like a temporary department store employee in a department store at Christmas—give him away as someone who might not be just another regular normal collegiate looking to have a regular normal job. Even if he had the money, Ronnie would not think to buy a new pair of dress shoes.

He runs into Portland Patty as he’s en route to inquire about a bus boy position. She’s standing in the Gatorroni’s parking lot, conversing with a group of hippies. Gingham-dressed, tie-dyed, Birckenstocked, dirty-dreaded hippies. Six of them, smiling and laughing, playing with those stupid flippity sticks hippies are always playing with. Some are even barefoot. The air is poisoned with fucking patchouli.

Ronnie is happy to see her, even as she interacts with these disgusting creatures from a rival subculture. She introduces him to them. They smile and wave. Ronnie nods and glares. Ronnie looks around. It’s bad enough he’s dressed like this, but to be seen consorting with the enemy—well—that would be the end of Ronnie Altamont. There were too many neo-hippies in Gainesville, passing through on their way to commune with the Ocala National Forest. While they weren’t as abundant in Gainesville as they were in other college towns, there were too many for Ronnie’s liking. He has to leave. He has to leave now.

“Later,” Ronnie grunts, walking fast, back to the sidewalk, back to University, anticipating the ugly gossip of fellow travelers in the rock of punk, seeing him in such unsavory company.

“Hey wait!” Portland Patty calls after Ronnie. Ronnie walks, looking straight ahead.

“Friends of yours?” he asks when Portland Patty catches up, past the bookstore where Ronnie used to work, walking past the school newspaper offices. All thoughts of applying for the bus boy gig vanish. He has some money left. The financial situation is not as dire as it could be. This is so much more important. He can’t/won’t be involved with no hippies.

“Ronnie!” Portland Patty says, laughing. “We went to high school together. They’re traveling the country, stopping off for a drum circle somewhere. We met for lunch. Now they’re leaving.”

“Drum circle?” Ronnie shakes his head from side to side as he walks, brain a bubbling cauldron of 1980s hardcore rage. “What the hell. You’re a hippie?”

“A hippie?” Portland Patty stops and faces Ronnie. “You’re not actually joking, are you? You’re trying to come across like you’re joking, but you’re not.”

“A hippie,” Ronnie insists, turns to walk.

Portland Patty grabs him by the arm. “This is stupid,” she says. “They’re old friends, Ron. Not that this matters, but in middle school? I tried to be a hippie. Then in high school? I tried to be goth. In college? Here? I went to punk shows. Then, I grew up, and now I do whatever the hell I want. That’s how it goes. Last June, I graduated. Now, I work at a daycare center.” She steps back, begins to pivot to leave. “This is so stupid. But if it makes you happy—fine—I’m punk rock. I’ve been going to shows at the Nardic Track since I moved here in 1990. You’ve seen my posters, you’ve seen my fliers. I’m the biggest goddamn punk rocker you’ve ever met. I’m sorry I didn’t stab my old acquaintances who happened to be passing through right in their stupid hippie faces. Ok? Because punk fucking rock. That’s the best, right Ronnie?”

Ronnie looks down, sighs, stammers, “I don’t know, man.” Hands on hips. Then he gesticulates as he says, “I guess so. But jazz is good too. Some country. Glam. Hard rock, under the right circumstances. I don’t even mind psychedelic music, as long as it’s got an edge to it . . . ”

Portland Patty laughs. “God, you’re a dork,” she says. Thinking about it later, it was one of those answers that make powerful arguments in either direction re: is Ronnie any different from the rest of these jerks circled around the bands, shaking their heads as they cross their arms and watch.

“Let’s go,” she says. “Did you drive?”

“Naw,” Ronnie says. “I’ve been walking around trying to get hired. I’d rather spend the money I have left on beer instead of gas.”

“I’m parked at Gatorroni’s. You can lead the way, since you’re so punk, so full of your punk convictions.”

“That’s right,” Ronnie laughs. “I am.” Along the sidewalk, Ronnie smirks with Sid Vicious lips and yells, “I ‘ate Thatchuh!” at passersby. She laughs, but she really laughs when he yells this to a group of gutter punks stomping down the street, even flashing the two fingered “Piss off” sign with both hands before one of them answers, “Whatever, yuppie. Give me your money.” In his shirt and tie, Ronnie joins in the laughter, throws them his spare change, and Ronnie and Portland Patty walk off arm in arm, singing “Anarchy in the UK,” with the Johnny Rotten “Rrrrrright! Now!” rrrrrolls and everything.

•

On the way to her house, they stop at the liquor store. Ronnie buys a bottle of Wild Irish Rose. It’s all he can afford; he counts the money in his wallet and the change in his pockets, standing in front of the XYZ Liquor Store counter as Portland Patty waits in the parking lot. The bottom shelf is where the cheap wine is. There’s Night Train, Boone’s Farm, Mad Dog 20/20, Thunderbird . . .

“What did you get?” she asks when he returns.

“You don’t want to know,” is all Ronnie says, and off they go.

Indeed, as Ronnie tastes it once again, and Portland Patty is given her first exposure to Wild Irish Rose, the only way they can keep from complaining about it, the only thing keeping Portland Patty from being “flus-trated,”8 is to joke about the taste, acting like parodies of aficionados in Napa Valley.

“There’s a syrupy consistency, conjoined with a high octane fuel bouquet,” Portland Patty says, as Ronnie looks through her records, finds Galaxie 500s This Is Our Music, and throws it on the box, still obsessing over that expression and what it means.

“Yes,” Ronnie says, joining her on the couch, sharing and sipping from the same Empire Strikes Back collector’s glasses—Lando Calrissian and Boba Fett. “There’s a bilish finish that leaves a chunky film on the roof of your mouth.”

“Ah, yes,” Portland Patty says, “with just a hint of river bottom sediment.”

Ronnie Altamont laughs, a happy kind of laughter he hasn’t had since Maggie left him. From the stereo, Dean Wareham sings of the Fourth of July, and Ronnie and Portland Patty taste the cheap slime of the Wild Irish Rose on each other’s tongues, and it isn’t so bad, it isn’t so bad at all. He kisses her and thinks, yes, I should end it with Maux, whatever it is we’re doing, I should end it. This is entirely too perfect. To be here in this house, laughing and drinking wine and kissing, it’s better than anything that has happened or could ever happen with Maux. He could start here and leave the past, all of it, behind. With Portland Patty, he could stay here in Gainesville. He could build a new life, forget about Orlando, forget about this directionless living masquerading as what he had called the “sweat jam,” and move forward.

Yes. He could. And he would meet with Maux tomorrow and let her know. Ronnie was a punk with conviction, and he would give it to her straight.

MAUX DRAWS RONNIE

At Maux’s. All day before this, hiding out in his room from Roger and his films and the outside world’s tendencies to simply open the unlocked front door and let itself in, Ronnie planned on not coming in, on standing in the doorway and saying “Let’s just be friends . . . it’s not you, it’s me . . . you deserve someone better . . . I’m not ready . . . it’s just not working out . . . ,” walking home, then calling Portland Patty to see what she’s up to. But then Maux stood there, looking like she did—black t-shirt sorta covering black panties and clearly no bra underneath, and that’s it—and he couldn’t.

So. Instead, he sits on Maux’s ancient sofa, kissing-gropes interspersed with silence, sipping vodka tonics as her muted television plays Fellini’s Amarcord.

She shows him the only record she owns, a copy of Thriller. “I got this for my eighth birthday,” she tells Ronnie. “Look at what I drew on it.”

Ronnie takes it from her, holds it closer, tilting it to get better light. The word “POOP,” drawn as a black-markered thought cloud next to Michael Jackson’s Jheri curled brain.

“See! Even then, I had it,” Maux says, taking the cover back from Ronnie.

“You sure did,” Ronnie says. “You sure did.”

“I have something else to show you,” she says. She runs into her bedroom. Ronnie thinks, “Ok. This is it.” He has to say something. This must end.

Maux returns with a thick scrapbook. She retakes her position on the couch, flips from page to page. It’s every cartoon she has ever drawn for the school paper. Dozens, if not hundreds, of drawings. He doesn’t focus on any particular piece, but instead soaks in the vast output, the collection itself. For all her faults, Ronnie thinks, Maux is the only person in Gainesville he knows who actually produces something seen by thousands each week. She is always producing. Always drawing. In Gainesville, the bands come and go. Aspiring filmmakers talk more than they film. Poets don’t rhyme. Dancers don’t dance. And Ronnie, he isn’t doing a thing. But Maux is always drawing something.

She flips to the last page. “Look at this one.”

A fresh white sheet glue-stuck to the page. It’s a sketch of Ronnie, drawn from memory, of a photograph he gave her of him wearing a fake Japanese headband while making the “Hi-yah!” gesture with his hands. For once, the drawing is more realist than caricature. Surrounding the drawing are ten of Maux’s favorite haiku taken from the haiku wall in Ronnie’s room—haiku about Sanford and Son, Dee Dee Ramone, Emmanuel Lewis, EPCOT Center, and the wonder of large breasts, among others.

“It’s going to be in the paper next week,” she tells Ronnie. “I wanted to surprise you.”

Ronnie smiles. He wants to tell her that this is the nicest thing anyone has done for him in a long time, and while it’s true, the words don’t formulate. “I’m speechless,” is all he can muster.

“You hate it?”

And there’s so much Ronnie could say and should say but doesn’t say right here, because he broods on the question, on this lowering of that hate-filled wall she’s always putting in front of him, and everyone else. Ronnie understands her. He thinks he understands her. She has to defend this gift—this vulnerability, this gift of observation, this something beyond what most people have.

“Naw,” Ronnie manages. “It’s awesome.” (He wishes he can say more, has forgotten why he was going to tell her that it was over.)

Maux leans in, hugs Ronnie, kisses him on the cheek. “I’m glad you don’t hate it. I thought you would. Hate it, I mean. Most boys hate my renderings of them.”

Instead of dumping her, he spends the night. Not even Ronnie Altamont is obtuse enough to dump Maux—here, now. The classifications and the labels—as he opens his eyes at sunrise, as she sleeps in gentle breaths to his left—they strike Ronnie as idiotic. Some social construct designed by locust-eating Christians 2000 years ago. Why can’t we be polygamists? Who gives a shit, if everyone’s happy? Why can’t we have harems; why can’t we have, as Lou Reed sang in “I Wanna Be Black,” a “stable of foxy little whores?” Who made these rules, and why do the people who enforce them look so miserable as they sing their hymns? Why do we have to have these definitions: “friends,” “more than friends,” “boyfriend/girlfriend?” We know what we want and need, so why all the complications and lovesong hokum?

Oh, Ronnie. Is there anything you won’t rationalize away?

SALTY SNACK TELEMARKETING OR PIZZA DELIVERY

You know the job market is bleak when your best options are between telemarketing or pizza delivery. Into the semester, as all the other positions have been filled, there is nothing in the classifieds other than these two. Ronnie thinks, often: Man! Dude! If I could only get a real gig in Gainesville, the place would be as perfect as I could ever hope for. To have a real job, like, some kind of office job with all the usual benefits, would be, with Gainesville’s low cost of living, like being a millionaire! True enough. But his choice is down to the only available options: Telemarketing or Pizza Delivery.

Telemarketing. He is hired, quickly trained, given a cubicle in a large windowless room filled with hundreds of other cubicles, where he sits in front of a green computer screen as the phone calls random numbers. Ronnie is hired to survey callers about, you guessed it, salty snacks.

There is a bleak gray Orwellian pallor to the call room. The walls reverberate with the dull chatter of questions like:

“When shopping, how often do you purchase salty snacks?”

“What kinds of salty snacks do you buy?”

“Salty snacks salty snacks salty snacks?”

Ronnie Altamont’s entire career in the field of telemarketing lasts seven calls (and seven hang-ups), one hour, three minutes, and forty-two seconds. For the first time, he cannot reconcile that he spent five years to earn a college degree, in part to avoid shit work like this, and here he is in some forlorn callbank center on the outskirts of this town he moved to so he could plug away at his “art” with less hassle, but instead he’s asking probing questions to the American public re: their spending and relative infatuation with salty snacks. It’s not even that he thinks he’s too good for the gig, but he simply can’t do it, won’t do it, doesn’t want to ask anyone about salty snacks. He feels the seconds ticking away in his too-short life.

He walks out of the large dismal room without a word, never more happy to step outside into the parking lot of a rundown shopping center.

This leaves pizza delivery. Ronnie is hired by the General Lee’s Pizza Cavalry chain, driving around with a car full of piping hot peetz made in their Newberry Road location. What Robert E. Lee has to do with pizza is anyone’s guess, but people generally appreciated the tip of the hat to their southern heritage. Until the late 1980s, there used to be more of a “Dukes of Hazzard” theme to the place, the name as much a nod to the speedy automobile Bo and Luke Duke drove on the TV as it was to the great Civil War General. This was back when General Lee’s Pizza Cavalry promised in their commercials, “Hot and Fresh Pizza Delivered to Y’all’s Door in Thirty Minutes or Less or It’s Free.” Before too many drivers, not wanting to cost their employers any business-slash-lose their jobs, wrecked their cars, hit pedestrians, died.

Ronnie spends a dinner shift getting trained, riding shotgun in this black Celica driven by a high school senior named Kenny. Kenny gives the grand tour of Gainesville’s gridded streets, and like many involved in the lower echelons of the pizza delivery industry, Kenny smokes dope like a Rastafarian.

He wears a peppermint-striped mushroom cap, black Stone Temple Pilots t-shirt, too-big jeans hung halfway down his ass, exposing red boxers, the chain wallet dangling to his side. Clearly, General Lee’s Pizza Cavalry didn’t bother with uniforms.

“Don’t smoke, huh?” Kenny says, after Ronnie declines the joint Kenny holds out, the joint he damps down with wet thumb and forefinger before opening the door and running the pizza to some parent, some college kid, some party.

“Nah,” Ronnie says. “It makes me paranoid, neurotic, and miserable, but, ironically enough, it curbs my appetite. I smoke pot, and I can’t eat for days.”

“Take it from me, my man,” Kenny says as they turn into some neighborhood on the heretofore unexplored west side of town, “it’s an indispensable tool in this profession.”

“You’re an indispensable tool in this profession,” Ronnie wants to say, but keeps quiet, taking in what passed for suburbia in Gainesville. Pot. It is impossible for Ronnie to conceive of doing anything like working while high. Even breathing while high was a neurotic endeavor.

They pull up to some house in some neighborhood far west of anyplace Ronnie would ever want to go in Gainesville. As Kenny goes to the front door, Ronnie stares at the Bob Marley air freshener dangling from the rear view mirror, green black and yellow, Bob Marley exhaling a smokestack of dope smoke. On the radio, alternative rock growls and blares from some lousy station out of Jacksonville. Ronnie kinda hates Kenny the way he kinda hates 98 percent of this immediate world. Like so many Floridians and so many teenagers, so many people, Kenny thinks he’s much more clever than he actually is. Ronnie sits in the passenger seat of this Celica, brooding on all the wrong moves he’s made in life to end up here. He didn’t think that this was how it would turn out, thought the book and the band would wow the world to the point that he could get by, doing what he loved.

Well. It didn’t.

Back to delivery. After the training sesh with this high school kid Kenny, Ronnie is ready to deliver the peetz. Ronnie worked in this gig back in Orlando for a summer, delivering for a contemptuously unmentionable corporate chain, before quitting then writing about his boss in his school paper opinion column, calling the man “a lazy lump of shit for brains plopped onto a lazy shit for heart and soul.” Delivery was like riding a bike, only now, said bike was a sputtering blandy apple green sedan on its rapid descent into being driven into the ground through a combination of Ronnie’s negligence and utter automotive incompetence.

The shift: Saturday, Game Day, 10:30 a.m. to 1:00 a.m.. The customers: collegiates and post-collegiates and families all about the gimme gimme pregame show slices, gimme gimme game day pizza, gimme gimme post-game party food. Gimme gimme this, gimme gimme that, as the late great Darby Crash once barked. To the suburban homes, moms with their seven year old sons, moms opening the doors, sons always yelling, “It’s the pizza dude!” and the moms smiling in that indulgent way moms smile, saying, “Hey, it is the pizza dude!” and Ronnie tries smiling at this heartwarming tableau as the mom next says, “Give the pizza dude the money, dear!” and the kid gives Ronnie the cash and Ronnie gives the kid the pizza and the mom says “What do you say, dear?” and the kid says, “Thanks pizza dude!” and everyone laughs and the mom gives a “Thanks for tolerating us” kind of nod with her head and Ronnie thinks of a) what he will invest in with his one dollar tip, and b) how they really train them young in Gainesville re: conducting the pizza transaction. There’s the suburban homes, and then there are the collegiate apartment complexes up and down Archer Road and Tower Road, nestled far away from the crime and crack and horror of real poverty lurking in the residential neighborhoods on the outskirts of the UF campus. Game day parties where the hosts and partygoers become increasingly generous with their food and beer as the day goes on. They answer their doors, “What’s up, pizza’s here!” and let Ronnie in, leading him through narrow hallways past fresh new all-off-white living rooms packed with orange and blue adorned football fans yelling at the TV screen or laughing at the commercials on the TV screen and Ronnie leaves the pizzas on the inevitable Kitchen Island as they try and talk to Ronnie about the “big game” and Ronnie tries pretending he isn't too, you know, like, punk rock to give a shit about it, takes the money and hustles out the door, and the tips are usually a little bit better than most places, especially as the day goes on. The tips from upperclassmen parties or recent graduates are always better than the underclassmen, who almost always want exact change. Game day: Some SEC bigdeal the people have been looking forward to all week, and as Ronnie walks through apartment complexes and courtyards, up and down these residential streets, he hears the cheering, the curses, the slow hand-claps for the good plays. Interspersed between the game day, calls not football-related: Pre-med students on study breaks—twenty pound anatomy textbooks, bleary eyes, gifted with an unfathomable (to Ronnie) drive and motivation; metal kids in black Megadeth t-shirts taking the pizza at the door, cumulonimbus marijuana clouds behind them, guitars wrapped around them; weekend mechanics emerging from underneath the hoods of their El Caminos, paying in oil-smudged money; bridal showers where the ladies drunkenly flirt and inform Ronnie that only one of them is getting married; senior citizen book clubs, day care centers full of kids who dash from their Twister and Chutes and Ladders and converge upon Ronnie. They all want pizza. Everybody wants pizza on Game Day Saturday.

The cassette in Ronnie’s car: an endless loop of Bad Brains, Flipper, Spoke, Television, Sonic Youth, Thin Lizzy, Crime, Gary Numan, Guv’ner, Superchunk, Crowsdell, Thinking Fellers Union Local 282, Polvo, Urge Overkill, Naiomi’s Hair, Melvins, Unrest, Beat Happening, Fudge Tunnel, Tsunami, Bratmobile, The Scissor Girls, Spinout. Fourteen straight hours of nothing but, one side to the next, morning to afternoon to night to late night. Ronnie was on the older end of the spectrum of delivery drivers at General Lee’s. He had worked with older drivers. They were generally lost souls, struggling to make ends meet and/or lost in a permanent marijuana cloud that makes everything that’s just ok eternally tolerable. Alone with nothing but this mixtape for company, four hours in, Ronnie finds this an alien, alienating gig—he’s too old to do it, but too young to be good at anything else. Soon enough he’s started taking people up on offered beer.

As the early afternoon progresses to mid-afternoon, it is clear from the general spirit of the parties he is delivering pizza to that the Gators are winning, and winning big. The tips from the apartment parties and backyard or courtyard barbeques are increasing. Everyone wants to be Ronnie’s—The Pizza Dude’s—buddy.

“Hey man, sucks you gotta work today,” says some shirtless guy with short blond surfer hair and aviators, conveying the authority of the host who’s having this party outside in the back space between the clusters of apartments.

“What can you do?” Ronnie shrugs, hands the dude the pizzas.

“Well the Gators won. Ya want a beer?”

“Sure.” Maybe it will make him feel better.

“Hold on, dude!” the guy says. “Set the pizzas on the picnic table.” To his friends, he announces, “I’m gettin’ the pizza dude a beer!”

Everyone cheers at this. This is Ronnie’s last delivery before going back to the store for the next round. Why not? He sets the pizzas on the picnic table. This beautiful blonde—so so so Floridian with her tan and fluorescent green bikini, not like beautiful in some California centerfold polyethylene kind of way, but in a natural, not even trying, not even caring kind of way—turns to Ronnie, holds out a thermos. “Hey,” she slurs. “Pizza dude. You want some FloCo?”

Floridian Comfort. Ronnie takes the thermos, unscrews it, takes a healthy swig.

“Sucks you gotta work,” she says.

Ronnie says, “Yeah,” and before he can even start to think he has a chance, the host shows up with the inevitable blue Solo cup of foamy beer, hands it to Ronnie, leans in, kisses the blonde. Blond on Blonde. The pinnacle of Floridian beach culture.

“Yeah, I used to deliver at General Lee’s,” the surfer host tells Ronnie. “The Game Days were the worst. And you don’t even make any money.”

“What?” Ronnie had already made twenty something deliveries and the day wasn’t halfway through. He was eagerly anticipating returning to the Myrrh House with a small fortune.

“No, you get tips, and what, seventy-five cents a run?”

“Right,” Ronnie says.

“Yeah. Fuck that. Between what you pay in gas, and the wear and tear on your car, you’ll be coming home tonight with less than minimum wage.”

Ronnie says nothing.

“Which is fine, if the tips are good, and the deliveries aren’t a long way to go, and you got a new car. Then maybe you’ll make money. But this is Gainesville.”

Ronnie says nothing.

“Looks like you could use more beer,” the surfer host says, and his girlfriend laughs, holds out the thermos of FloCo, adds, “This too.”

Ronnie takes the thermos, extends his emptied blue Solo cup.

“Yeah man, it’s tough to make a living here,” the host says, returning with the filled cup.

“No shit,” Ronnie says, and he’s never meant it more. “What do y’all do?”

“School,” the host says, and his girlfriend nods and says, “Yup.”

“I’m really a musician,” Ronnie says. “And I write. I have parties. We have a big house in the student ghetto. Y’all should come by.” He holds out his cup. “And give me one more. For the road.”

“You got it,” the host says, taking his cup.

The party is clusters of surfer types talking about the usual party topics. Ronnie wishes he could stay. “Give me some more of that,” Ronnie says, pointing at the blonde’s FloCo thermos.

“You sure you’ll be alright to drive?” Her concern breaks his heart.

“Totally,” Ronnie says. He smiles. “I’m fine.”

“Well. Ok.” Ronnie grabs the thermos, sips again, feels that rush. “Whoooo!” he says.

“Here ya go, brah,” the host says returning with the newly filled blue Solo cup.

Ronnie takes it. “Yeah, dude, I live in the Myrrh House. It’s on NW 4th Lane. Look for fliers, ok?”

“You got it dude,” the host says. “Later. Thanks for the pizza. Good luck with it.”

Ronnie shrugs, walks back to his car. The sharp-dull numb from the beer and FloCo leaves him in a giddy eternal-now focus. The host gave him a ten dollar tip. Ronnie takes note of that in the car, as the mixtape returns to life. Ronnie honks as he pulls away, one last sight of that blonde, there on the picnic table. The party waves back. As Ronnie leaves, he bites his fist like Squiggy from Laverne and Shirley, one last tribute to that girl he knows he’ll never see again.

Ronnie drives back to General Lee’s to pick up another round of pizzas, muttering about “No money? Fourteen and a half hours for less than minimum wage? Fuuuuuuuck that, man. Fuck that.” He sneaks sips of the beer as the car moves, keeps it hidden at stop lights, wedged between his sweaty thighs.

He decides to give it one more round, to see how it goes, and if the tips are bad, if nothing’s as good as that party, he will go home. Deep breath, look normal, look sober, now run back into the store.

“Finding your deliveries alright?” the manager asks, some husky nineteen-year-old-looking-guy, standing behind the counter, conveying an authority, but a lax, stoned authority Ronnie doesn’t mind and doesn’t hate.

“Totally,” Ronnie says, collects the stack of six pizzas next in the delivery queue, and hustles back to his car.

The city’s grid is easy navigating. Streets run north/south, avenues east/west. And then, between, there are places and courts and terraces and circles, to say nothing of the winding depths of the serpentine apartment complexes. You kids today, with your GPS systems and cell phones. Pizza delivery has benefitted so much from 21st century technology. You would have to really try (or live in Boston) to get turned around and lost delivering pizza these days. But way back in the fall of 1996, the pizza delivery driver settles for maps pinned to the front of the store, with directions shouted by the dispatcher like a quarterback in a touch football game: “Ok, run straight, turn right there, go straight there, then turn left can’t miss it.” And if you did miss it, there were payphones, if you could find them.

Ronnie figured it out easily enough. But then, he had a few drinks. He knew enough to not get so drunk, he’d wreck the car, get pulled over, hurt himself or others, but there was enough alcohol to impair his sense of direction. Halfway through the run, he’d confused his trails and lanes and so ends up at a payphone in front of the entrance to the Publix on University and 34th. Usually, what happens is, you calmly explain the situation, and the customer calmly gives you directions and everybody’s happy.

“You’re where?! Where’s my pizza?!”

On the other end of the phone, this young, entitled college male voice. So demanding. So serious with the pizza.

“I’m at the Publix, on 34th Street . . . ”

“Wait a minute. You’re all the way over there?! I want my pizza! Now!” (In later years, Ronnie will hear a similar tone from one George W. Bush.)

“You’ll get it, dude. Give me directions and I’m there.”

“I’m not eating cold pizza—duuuude!” George—let’s call him George—exaggerates the word “dude.” Ronnie has spent a lot of time thinking of the expression “The customer is always right,” and after years toiling in customer service, he has learned that the rest of that expression goes, “The customer is always right, but the customer is quite often a fucking asshole, regardless.”

“Are you stupid?” George continues. “I want my pizza! Now!”

“Well fuck you then,” says Ronnie’s mouth, before his buzzed brain puts up any roadblocks.

Silence. Then: “What did you say to me?” A shrillness to match the entitlement. Shock. George wasn’t expecting this.

Ronnie follows his instincts, which tell him to press forward and make no apologies. “Look dude: You’re a pussy, and your pizza’s still warm, so I’m going to eat it. No pizza for you.”

Ronnie hangs up, looks around. The salmon and teal-aproned bagboys push shopping carts into the store. Families waddle through the automatic doors. Blasts of air-conditioning. Smells of produce and bleachy mop water. A little girl in a pink dress bounces up and down the scale on the entryway to the store.

Ronnie wants to recall exactly where he is as he does this.

On the drive back to the Myrrh House, Ronnie removes the six pizzas in his car from the two insulators, places them in the front seat, tosses the two stars-and-bars clad red pizza insulators out the window. He has six pizzas, and while he feels sorry for the people on the route after George who wouldn’t get their pizzas until they called the store to find out what happened, the anticipated pizza party that will soon happen, when Roger sees what he has, when Ronnie calls almost everyone he knows (except Maux and Portland Patty), trumps everything.

Ronnie is sobering up. He stops at the XYZ Liquor Lounge. Before entering, he takes one slice from George’s pizza out of the box in the passenger seat. Not too hot. Not too cold. Delicious. Unconsciously, Ronnie knew that this was the only way to deal with fools. Not just in writing, but in person. It was a turning point, a good turning point, whether Ronnie was aware of it or not, and now he will go home and eat pizza with friends, chased with Old Hamtramck tallboys.

LOST, LOSING

In her kitchen, Portland Patty rolls the dough for the vegan pizza. A glass of red wine—Shiraz—to her left, a mixtape flipping from one side to the next, a mixtape she made then titled oreGONE, xmas, ’95.9

Waiting for Ronnie, the tape reminding her of home: Last Christmas, with the mixtape finished, she’d borrowed Mom’s car and drove to Sauvie Island, lost in the once-familiar of the scenery, of summers between high school years with long-gone friends, driving out of the city, through the railyards and industry on one side and the mountains (mountains!), cliffs (cliffs!) and woods (Ok, Florida has that, but c’mon! It’s not a foregone conclusion like it is back there . . . ) on the other, getting baked at the beach (on real weed, not this North-Florida skunky-dirt oregano), then floating in the Columbia River, the evergreen trees, the blue of the sky a blue you don’t see anywhere else but in the Pacific Northwest, floating in the water, spinning in circles, Washington state right there on the other side, the Walton Beach crowds packed in in the mid-afternoon beach, the dune behind them, the Van Gogh farmland behind all that. Or at Collins Beach, drunk, stoned, horny, seventeen, “clothing optional” with a whole crew of friends, but with Miranda, they hold hands and conveniently drift away far enough from the pack to kiss, and to act on it for the first time, and why was that the only time? With Miranda, with women. She stopped off at both empty beaches last Christmas and wondered about this, among many other things, as people do when they go home for the holidays and get away from family and all the other obligations long enough to take stock of the distance in time between when you lived your life here and when you come back and see how you don’t live your life here and the stupid places don’t change in the same ways. She knew herself, even then, enough to know that when she wasn’t drunk, stoned, and horny at a “clothing optional” gay and lesbian beach, it wasn’t an honest feeling. It was kicks, in the moment. And they drifted apart—her and Miranda—her oldest friend, going back to fourth grade—because, as her friends told her in the drama of the days after, Miranda wanted so much more. And over time, through the transition to high school to college (and choosing to go as far away as possible, to start completely fresh, thinking you actually could start completely fresh, as if genetics and memory don’t have something to say about your identity) to post-college, everybody goes their own ways, to the point where even at Christmas and New Year’s, nobody gets together anymore. So at Christmas, it’s too cold and there’s been too much time passed to do much of anything but drive around Sauvie Island and listen to this tape and confront the sinking realization that Portland isn’t home. Not anymore.

She’s waiting for Ronnie to finally show up. Dinner, wine, this Cassavettes movie she rented. It’s almost 8:30, and she’d been expecting him at 7:00.

She rolls the dough (the yeast lives, and the wine lives, but she sleeps at night just fine even if she’s slaughtered bacteria . . . everyone has their limits, Portland Patty concluded, the first time she was confronted by one of the more fundamentalist members of the vegan sect about her role in the bacteria holocaust), cuts the green, red, and yellow peppers. Soy cheese. Tomato sauce. The important thing is to keep moving. Listen to the tape, think of someplace far away, like Oregon, last Christmas, alone in the car where nobody knows you and nobody sees you and you have no name, no nickname, no one to be and nothing matters and nothing hurts.

He’s with Maux. Why? And why does Portland Patty care? What is she doing, anyway? To see the big picture, to think of the endless succession of losers she’s dated in this town, who drink and play in bands and say a lot of nice things until she lets them into her bedroom. When it’s done, they look like they want to take on the world and win—alone—and she’s left in bed wondering why she went on the ride and why she can’t just enjoy these fleeting moments for what they are. Older now, she’s become how Miranda was, eight years ago, always wanting something more, behind the words, the faces. And just like with Ronnie, she always wants to know if they are different, and so far, they never have been different.

Sip the wine. Preheat the oven. To think about them—that bitch—who everyone in town knows is a total bitch—together—in any capacity—is enough to make her end it. Tonight. No. Not tonight. But the later he is, the more likely it will end tonight.

No calls. Not from Ronnie. Not from anyone. Evenings like these, if you’re not careful, it’s like vertigo, to be so far from home, and to know that home as you knew it no longer exists. In bed, it overwhelms you, almost asleep. It’s a jolt that shakes your chest and legs. You’re nowhere, and no one’s around to make that go away.

She slides the dough into the oven when the doorbell rings. Finally. She shuts the oven, walks to the front door.

The fucker smiles as she opens the door, and he immediately waddle-bumbles inside. A smile, a squeezeless hug, and it’s “Hey lady, can I come in?” even as he’s five steps in the door. “Sorry I’m late,” he says, “I was at the Drunken Mick getting berated by Neal and Paul. They won’t shut up about . . . ”

“Who?” Portland Patty interrupts, shuts the door, walks towards him, “oreGONE xmas ‘95” continuing behind her.

“Nothing.” Ronnie stumbles to the couch. “No one. Maux. But . . . ”

“What about her, Ronnie?”

Ronnie falls backwards, lands on the couch, leans back, puts his hands behind his head with fingers clasped, smiles the smile of the overserved. “Aw, you know, they think we’re dating. But we’re not dating. We’re friends. That’s all. Fffffffffffriends!” He laughs, he smiles, he unclasps his fingers, extends his arms into an embrace and says, “I like you. They like you. Isn’t that nice? Isn’t it? Nice? Right?”

Portland Patty has to smile. Beneath the attempts at charm, the rumpled yet almost “punk” clothing, there was a lush—a great big comical lush—like the kind they used to draw in caricature in the 1930s—with red clown noses and floppy holey shoes and a stick with a knotted handkerchief holding his meager possessions. Portland Patty recalls a song from when she was a kid, a song from the kids’ show The Electric Company—“I’m just a clow-wow-wowwwwn / who’s feeling dow-wow-wowwwwn / since my baby left tow-wowwwwwn.” They were teaching kids about the “ow” sound in words, but maybe it was about Ronnie, or Portland Patty, or everyone in Gainesville flopping around doing nothing all the time. Ronnie the Lush. She promises that, no matter how annoyed and angry she gets with Ronnie, to keep that nickname to herself. She doesn’t want to saddle him with it, as someone with a faraway, long ago, hardly remembered hometown in front of her name.

“Well. The pizza’s almost ready if you want some.”

“Hell yeah, brah.”

Ronnie picks up the VHS cover of the movie Portland Patty rented. Opening Night is the title. He flips to the back, closes one eye so he can focus on the words, laughing in perceived recognition as he reads:

“. . . The master narrative of all of Cassavetes’ films is to force characters to shed their own skins . . . the discovery of who we really are can begin only when our routines are disrupted . . . we must be forced out of our places of comfort . . . not to break down, to maintain your old routines at all costs, to hold onto an established definition of yourself with a death grip . . . is to be truly damned.”

Portland Patty removes the pizza stone holding the newly formed crust from the oven, sets them on the kitchen counter. She spreads the tomato sauce, sprinkles the soy cheese, plops the peppers, puts it back in, as oreGONE, xmas ’95 plays “24” by Red House Painters and the lyric and I thought at 15 I’d / have it down by 16 / and 24 keeps breathing in my face / like a manhole / and 24 keeps pounding at my door . . . And now, she’s twenty-five. Years of never having it down, years of fleeting thrills and nothing substantive.

When it’s cooked, removed, cooled, she cuts the pizza into slices, divides it between two plates. She carries the plates into the living room. Ronnie’s head is tilted back. He smiles as he snores, mouth agape. It is too ridiculous to be angry. She sets the plates down, goes into the kitchen, stops “oreGONE xmas ’95,” carries the bottle of Shiraz into the living room, turns on the TV, the VCR, starts the movie, cranks the sound to drown out Ronnie’s snores, eats, drinks, drinks, drinks, tries to enjoy this fleeting man and this fleeting moment, so far from home, so far from home.

•

Yes, at the bar, Paul and Neal were trying to give Ronnie all kinds of shit about Maux and Portland Patty. It was the primary topic of conversation during the Drunken Mick’s all-you-can-drink Happy Hour from 5:00-8:00 p.m.

“Maux’s gonna kill you,” Paul said, seated to Ronnie’s left, facing Ronnie, slapping him in the arm with each gesticulation, black Caesar cut and sideburns, hunched over the bar, head tilting to Ronnie, to the mirror behind the liquor bottles, back and forth in nervous darts. “She knows about this, and she’s going to kill you. Then, while your body is still warm, she’s going to draw a brutal caricature of you in the paper.”

“Haw haw haw,” Ronnie said. Both brothers were plying him with whiskey shots, Paul on the left and Neal on the right.

“And Portland Patty’s cool,” Neal said, less fidgety than his brother, but no less strident, concerned, nagging. Neal’s approach is to buy Ronnie beers, shots, to make up for the awkwardness of talking this way, after they showed up at Ronnie’s house and flat-out told him, “We’re taking you to the Drunken Mick to let you know how fucking stupid you are.”

“You can’t do this, Ron,” Neal added, waving to the bartender for another shot, another beer, fingers pointing in Ronnie’s direction.

Ronnie downed the shot. “You don’t understand, man. Maux, she doesn’t really wanna date. Portland Patty, I just met her. So so what?”

“So you’re a dumbass,” Paul said, slapping Ronnie in the arm.

“What would Doug Clifford do?” Neal said, then to the heavens, shouted, “Why can’t you think of Doug Clifford?” Hairy black arms in the air, hairy black hair, hairy black eyebrows, lamenting upward, “Why doesn’t anybody think of Doug Clifford?”

Ronnie laughed, numbed into drunken intuition, but no less resolved. That final shot pushed him over the cliff. The mouth and the brain were in sync, and Ronnie talked and talked and talked, gibberish along the lines of:

“Haw haw haw, naw I can’t decide because actually it ain’t a bad arrangement you know because Maux she keeps the distinctions blurred like and really at the end of the day I like being in her apartment and I’d do more with Maux if she only gave me the chance but then there’s Portland Patty she’s great too and yes greater than Maux I think but I don’t like to you know unattach myself to girls to like breakup and end things and not only that but having two bodies makes up for having, heh heh heh, nobodies, got me? Haw haw haw?”

Nevertheless Neal and Paul continued to berate him in a steady stream Ronnie only half-listened to, lllllllloaded as he was, not feeling all that happy in this alleged Happy Hour. Through the whiskey and beer haze, Ronnie caught phrases like “fucking moron,” “juvenile excuses,” and “selfish drunkard.” The last phrase catches his ear and sends his thoughts spiraling down, down, down. Why did he have to drink like this? Christ, he was lllloaded! Was it mere boredom, Floridian boredom? Was it believing he was a writer, believing that this is what writers did—they drank, almost as much, if not more, than they wrote? Because he was still young—even if 24 was pushing it? Tradition? Genetics? Personal choice? Maybe it was all of that, but really and simply: Ronnie enjoyed it. He laughed a lot, felt relaxed, made connections he believed he could not get any other way. He gained experience. It got him to the state he wanted to reach as a person, someone who could freely talk, who could be fun, someone with the confidence to trust his intuition. It melted frivolous annoyances and stresses. It put life firmly in the present. Righting the balance of the world. Or, as it did in the past year, it numbed pain. It left Ronnie ok with sitting in his room despondent and disconnected, blasting the Germs, the Stooges, Crime, DMZ, Television, Flipper, tuning out bad breakups, finding and losing jobs he hated, awkward transitions into the world of post-college. He hadn’t done anything terrible—yet—and the great times far outweighed the surly and alienating times. He didn’t physically need it. More than anything, it was, you know, just something to do.

Blacked out. Neal and Paul dropped Ronnie off at Portland Patty’s. They were still telling him what to do and how to be as he opened the passenger door and lurched down her driveway to the front door, turning, yelling to them, “There’s nothing to end! Doug Clifford thinks you guys are fags!” He fell over, onto the grassy-dirt of the front yard, stood, brushed himself off, knowing that inside, there is pizza, and Portland Patty will be ok with this. Why wouldn’t she be? Everything was alright.

. . . So when he wakes up on Portland Patty’s couch, in total darkness except for a VCR digital clock reading 3:36 a.m., it is still alright, even with the slight headache and the massive dehydration. He feels through the darkness, finds the hallway, finds Portland Patty’s bedroom. He climbs into her bed.

“Hhhhhey,” Ronnie mumbles, nasty old booze breath, clothes reeking of bar smoke. Portland Patty turns away as he pulls up the covers, tries draping his arm around her shoulders. She stares into the darkness, looking away from Ronnie, as much on the mattresses’ edge as she can be without falling out of bed.

•

In the morning—is it morning? afternoon? does it matter?—Ronnie feels a poke and a nudge. He is awoken from dreams of sitting in sunset jungles underneath palm fronds blowing in hurricanes. He opens his eyes. Portland Patty stands over him, saying, “Ronnie? Ronnie? I think you should leave.”

Ronnie stretches, yawns. “Leave? Why? I’m still tired. I was kinda drunk last night, huh—heh heh?”

“I just. I don’t know. I’ve been thinking.”

“Thinking.” Ronnie repeats. He looks at Portland Patty. She looks serious. Grave, even. Sad. “You look serious, Portland Patty. Grave, even. Sad.”

“You should stay with Maux. You like her.” Portland Patty steps back from the bed. To say those words, her sad mood melts. Confidence takes over as she says, “I can’t go along with whatever it is you’re doing, here, with me, with yourself.”

“What am I doing?” That sinking feeling of knowing he would be leaving a bedroom, a girl, probably forever.

Portland Patty opens the blinds, lets in the ever-present sunshine. “Well, you’re not doing anything, Ronnie. That’s the problem. I like you. But you’re not doing anything.” She wants to tell him he’s like all the others, which is what’s so disappointing, disheartening.

“I do like you, Ronnie Altamont,” she continues, “but I think I want to be alone now. Please leave.”

Ronnie, half-asleep, fully hungover, rolls out of bed, lands on his feet, pats his body like someone trying to recall in which pocket he kept a pen. He moves like some slapstick goof in a forgotten silent movie. Portland Patty stands by the window, reminded of why she liked him. She wants to laugh, comes close to taking it all back, wants to keep him. But there is Maux, and this slacktastic lifestyle of leisure just like all these boys in Gainesville. She wants to forgive him his youth and inability to think beyond today, as he looks in the mirror and ruffles his hair like he’s trying to straighten out bedhead in the clumps of that growing-out brown mess.

He turns from the mirror, looks to Portland Patty. “I’m sorry.” he says. “You’re right.” He extends his arms, makes doe eyes, and in a move Portland Patty suspects is practiced, he asks, “Friends?”

She nods. “Friends.” She steps away from the window, around the bed, to Ronnie. This shouldn’t hurt.

He steps back. “Well. Goodbye,” he says. He smiles, like he doesn’t believe her, like this isn’t real. “See you at the shows.” He turns, walks out of the bedroom. She hears his steps across the carpeting through the living room, to the foyer, the open and shut of the front door. She falls into bed. Tears. It isn’t Ronnie—not entirely—it’s hope meeting reality, the way it always does with her.

Ronnie begins the long walk through the heat, humidity and sunshine down 13th Street, south towards home. Portland Patty will change her mind. Even if she doesn’t, there’s always Maux, or that girl on her bike there, or those girls on the sidewalk, or the girl in the Volkswagen next to him at the stoplight. Nothing is serious. Nothing is ever serious. To take anything serious means taking life serious, and why would you do that? There is only fun. Fun is the ideal. Fun is the center. If it isn’t fun, there’s no need to bother.

It feels like hours, but it’s really only 45 minutes until Ronnie makes it to NW 4th Lane, but instead of going into the Myrrh House to brood on Portland Patty in hungover agony, he thinks the better move, the smarter move, is to keep walking, past the Myrrh House and through the parking lot shortcut, two blocks to Maux’s. Maux will make this ok. He wants to be with Maux anyway, and who cares what anyone else has to say about it? Her apartment will be nice and dark, vodka will be in the freezer, and she’ll show him her latest drawings. Then, they will climb into bed and ignore this stupid, stupid world.

He parks, walks up to the second floor of her dismal apartment building with its motel walkways and motel railing, knocks on her door.

“What do you want, douche?”

“Let me in.”

“Why aren’t you with the hippie?”

“The hippie? She’s just a friend. Let me in.”

Maux opens the door. She’s wearing this silver-sequined miniskirt, newly-dyed indigo hair. He wants her. So. Bad.

“I’m not letting you in,” she says. “I can’t do that.”

Ronnie smiles, digs deep for the charm. “Aw, c’mahhhhhn. I’m only friends with her. That’s nothing. I want to see you, Maux.”

“You’re like the rest Ronnie.” She looks past Ronnie, in the direction of UF it seems, but it could be anywhere behind Ronnie. “I mean, I don’t hate you, but what we’ve been doing? It’s a farce. I mean, friends of mine—and I do actually have some friends here, Ron—overheard your drunken bullshit last night at the Mick and told me all about it. They always thought I was too good for you anyway.” She looks at her watch. “I need to graduate. I need to get out of here. I can’t waste any more time.” She looks at him, sneers. “I mean, this is a college town, Ronnie. You graduated college. What are you even doing here?”

Ronnie wants to answer, “To write! To play music!” but he can’t say that. He shrugs. “I like it here. I’m going back to school.”

“No you’re not,” Maux says, shuts the door.

Ronnie faces the gray metal door where Maux had just stood. He knocks three times. “Maux? Maux? Hey, I just want you to know? This is fine. I mean, I understand, but I’m wondering. You’re not going to draw me, are you? I don’t want to be in the paper. I mean, the haiku drawing is fine. I just don’t want a caricature of me like, I don’t know, a flounder? Floundering around as a medium fish in a small pond? I’d say you could use any of these ideas, but I’d prefer you didn’t. All I’m saying is, these things happen, but don’t draw me, ‘kay? Maux? Maux? Alright. Well. Later.”

Maux sits in the dark of her living room, listening to this nonsense on the other side of the door. She wants to laugh at what he’s saying, almost wants to let him in, to tell him, “Get in here, jerkoff. You’re not even worth drawing, and I wish I hadn’t drawn you and all those stupid haiku you write.”

Instead, she listens to him walk away, turning her thoughts towards graduation, to escaping Gainesville, to whatever is beyond all this dumb childish futile whatever.

JULIANNA

Julianna reclines on the couch, watching the sunset light filter through the sliding glass back patio doors of the apartment she shares with her boyfriend. She has almost finished the fourth tall glass from a now-emptied box of white wine, holding the glass with both hands on her fatter-than-it-used-to-be midsection. Some ’70s cop show, all sideburns and implausible shootouts, story-arcs to its predictable outcome on the unwatched muted television in the corner. New Zealand indie-pop from the early 1980s whispers out the speakers in every corner of the room. After coming home from work today, a quick glance in the rear view mirror revealed her first gray hair, a barely perceptible white thread in the blond, but there just the same.

The apartment is on the third floor, in a beige and pastel building surrounded by the twelve identical buildings that make up the apartment complex. Julianna straightens up, finishes the white wine, takes the five steps from the couch to the tiny back patio. The breeze is a warning of the cold to come. This is only the beginning. She has never been outside of Florida for the fall and winter months. How do people stand it? Why do people stand it?

The view from the patio: parking lot, swampy retention pond, and, directly across, an apartment building. It wasn’t even a bad day at work. It was a nothing day. Julianna’s boyfriend of ten years waits tables at night. Since the summer months, he has been coming home from work later and later. New friends from the restaurant who Julianna has yet to meet. In the morning, as she leaves for work, he’s asleep, hungover, guilty of something he’s too dumb to hide. Scott reluctantly moved up here when Julianna got the job, but he’s hit his stride—friends, a new life, reinvented as someone he wasn’t in Gainesville: a dick. At least that’s how Julianna sees it. When he comes home, she knows he’s been cheating, but doesn’t say anything, and she knows that when Scott sees her, he sees a past he’d rather forget. He has carved out a niche here, but for Julianna, there is nothing but this too-small apartment, and their basset hound, Charlie, who always looks how she feels anymore.

There is nothing to do in Charlotte, North Carolina.

There is nothing but this job for the tiny academic press, translating Russian Criticism into English for advanced Russian Studies students sprinkled across the North American continent. She sent them her resume on a whim, not thinking it would be her ticket out of Gainesville. Finally. It was the change she thought she needed. Seven months later, after doing nothing but translating all this criticism, she’s not sure. It isn’t simply criticism of literature, existence, the government. It is criticism of everything. Toilet paper. Bank tellers. The tonality of door bells. Nothing escaped the critical eye of these Russian theorists. Every facet of existence, no matter how mundane, should and must be critiqued. Julianna has nightmares of a world like this, filled with people yelping yelping yelping about every interaction in the consumer economy. Wasting their intellectual capacities, their advanced educations, on assessment. To waste your life on knocking down rather than building a better world. What if everyone fancied themselves a Russian critic? Pop culture. Restaurants. Toll booth operators. Cheese graters. Bars. Dandruff shampoo. A world of critics. The job, immersing herself in this level of criticism, is nightmare enough.

It is tedious, lonely work, sitting at a desk in a windowless corner, the only non-native Russian working in the pale dusty windowless office. But it pays better than any job she ever had back home, by far. With benefits and everything. And there was talk—drunk talk, yes—of marrying soon, buying a house, having kids. That thought, now, makes her laugh the laugh of the beyond-bitter.

She starts shivering as the sun fades behind the apartments. 45 degrees is the low tonight. It rarely gets this cold in Florida. She thinks of home. Is this everything? Benefits and security. Plans. A lifetime of translating Russian Criticism.

Across the parking lot, beyond the retention pond, in the third floor apartment in the building across from her back patio, the lights are on and the blinds are open in the living room. College students in backwards ballcaps and oversized sweatshirts—three men, two women—play the drinking game Quarters, howling like morons every time a quarter bounces off the coffeetable, hunching over the action like gamblers at the roulette wheel.

Julianna had never played Quarters, always thinking of it as that stupid game high school slutty girls play with frat boys instead of just getting drunk, but she can’t stop watching. As the night goes on, they’re louder, more animated, the noise echoing across the spaces between the apartment buildings. It isn’t the drinking game, and it isn’t even their excitement—their ridiculous excitability with each bounce of the quarter—that has her entranced like a voyeur.

“You’re having fun!” she yells, an accusation, although not loud enough to resonate past the parking lot and retention pond.

Charlie gallop-flops to her side, barks, then moans in a way that has always sounded to Julianna like abject resignation to his fate.

Where is the fun here, she thinks? The parties? The shows? The records flipped from one side to the next all night long. The . . . cute boys.

Yeah. The cute boys.

The impulse hits Julianna like an instinct. A conviction. She needs to leave. Now. Otherwise, she’ll be like this at 35, 40, until death. That one gray hair is only the beginning. And Scott . . . he’s practically done everything but come home with the proverbial lipstick marks on his collar to show that he’s cheating, that he’s moved on, away, become someone else, somewhere else. She has money saved. Credit cards. That blue Corolla in the parking lot below. If she leaves, she’ll make it to Gainesville by morning. She doesn’t know if that’s where she’ll stay, but Gainesville’s where you go when you don’t know where else to go.

She brews a pot of coffee, drinks glass after glass of water to sober up. She packs her clothes, CDs, plates, glasses, utensils, books, as much as she can cram into the Corolla. Without the least bit of coercion, Charlie walks down the three flights of stairs, climbs into the passenger seat.

On scrap paper, Julianna scribbles a quick note, tapes it to the door:

“I need to leave. I’m not happy. You’re not happy. Goodbye.”

Interstate 95 South is desolate, black except for the distant red circles of the far-off semis. She drinks coffee after coffee. Each mile closer to home, each passing hour, the decision feels better.

In the dark orange sunrise, she crosses into Florida, sees the longed-for scenery, the lonely pines and live oaks, the Jesus billboards and Zero Tolerance for Drugs signs. She pats Charlie on the head as he sleeps through the trip.

Sunshine glares off the vacant early morning Jacksonville skyline. Gainesville is one backwoods backroad away, and all she knows is that whatever happens next won’t be boring.

⁷ For a sample of haiku from the Haiku Wall, please see Appendix E

⁸ When, later, during an argument more about him instead of dirt-cheap wine, she tells him that that means, you guessed it, flustered and frustrated all at once, Ronnie answers, honestly, “Yeah, I’ve made a lot of people close to me feel that way.”

⁹ See Appendix F for the track listings