Losing in Gainesville (9781940430331)

by Costello, Brian

  Stevie tries speaking, voice blocked by mounds of digested breadstick masticated in violent chomps. He holds out a “Wait a minute” right index finger, moves a stack of plates from what will be Jeremy Moreland’s side of the booth, motions with “Have a seat” outstretched arms, tries wiping the grease off Jeremy’s side of the table with a couple already soiled and crumpled brown napkins and succeeds in spreading the grease into circular smudges, swallows the breadstick and starts in with this torrent in the cadence, timbre and volume of a Florida used car salesman yelling about bargains in late night TV commercials, “Hey man, yeah, sit down and talk to me you probably know who I am ‘cuz I’m in here almost every day so you’re probably like ‘Y’all, who’s that who’s always in here tearin’ up the lunch buffet?’ Well I figured I’m here enough already so might as well apply here since I obviously like the food so much anyway this buffet’s the best in town so I saw that sign outside and figured why not?”

  Jeremy slides into the booth, looks over the plates stacked five-six high, littered with pizza crusts and the hard ends of marinara tipped bread sticks, overturned dipping sauces (Awesome Valley Ranch, Totally Dudical Honey Mustard, Mama Leona’s Fatten You Uppa Sour Cream and Chives, Peter Cetera’s Moderate Salsa, Kansas City Dude Squad Mesquite Barbeque Sauce, Paisan Geoff’s Zesty Garlic Butter), stray oregano and red pepper flakes scattered everywhere. “So. Stevie. That’s your name?”

  “Yeah buddy!” Stevie says, swallowing the last of the pizza while finishing the breadstick in his other hand. Jeremy Moreland hears the hick accent, sees the gold brah chain around Stevie’s neck and the buzzed black hair and laughs the kind of superior under-the-breath chuckle that comes naturally from the mouths of high school seniors who have been told that they were “gifted” their whole lives. Stevie hears the laugh. “That funny, home slice?”

  Jeremy says nothing, pretends to scan the yellow-papered, grease-smudged application for the first time. “And . . . do you have a last name, Stevie?”

  “Yeah I gotta last name and a whole lotta other information I could give you, butI ain’t gonna share that with you for reasons you know I know and I know you know, so I’m just going to keep that to myself for the time being.”

  “You’re saying you won’t give me your last name?”

  “That’s exactly what I’m saying!” Stevie pounds the table, rattling the plates and the napkin dispenser. “’Cause I heard this thing on the radio that the government takes that information and after that who knows what they do with it man! They get that, and they’ll know how to find me, and when—not if, when—society collapses, they’ll round me up with the rest of you suckers—”

  “Well,” Jeremy says, starting the scrawny-ass scoot out of the booth, “we can’t hire you without a last name, so if you don’t feel comfortable—”

  “It’s Walters,” Stevie interrupts, and Jeremy slides back across his side of the booth. “Steven ‘Stevie’ Raymond Walters.”

  “Thank you.” Jeremy writes in the new information in the appropriate lines. Stevie reaches for his massive red plastic cup and straw-slurps a mouthful of sweet tea. “I can assure you no one here will alert the government of your whereabouts should civilization collapse on us.”

  “You say that now,” Stevie says, “but man, don’t get me started.”

  “I hope not to,” Jeremy says, wishing for these three months to move faster, pissed Dale isn’t dealing with this. “What’s your address, Stevie Walters?”

  “Ok, well, that’s a whole other story. I was going to Santa Fe Community College, right? But I wasn’t likin’ it that much so I dropped out. My parents found out about this and they kicked me out—they live out in High Springs now—used to live in Gainesville—but they moved out there when I graduated high school a couple years back. So right now, I’m living with Alvin—he’s friends with my friend Mouse—and he’s got a trailer real close—but that’s not my home home, right? So I didn’t know if you wanted my home-home or like where I’m living now because I ain’t on the lease or any of the bills or anything. I mean, it ain’t like my parents would get mad if I was using their address for a job application—they just kicked me out ’cause I ain’t workin’ right now or goin’ to school so they’d probably be glad to see me applyin’—”

  “Your address now. In the trailer.” Jeremy hands Stevie the application, his pen. “Fill it in, please.”

  Stevie scrawls in the trailer’s address. “So why do you want to wash dishes for us, Stevie?”

  “You ever need money for something?”

  “No.” Jeremy says, trying to make the best of this, indulging both his mockery at those who have never taken Advanced Placement classes and the sumptuous thought of taking money from his savings account for the first time, far away from here, happy and not working for nonworking Dale.

  “Well, I wanna kick ass and take names. I like to think of myself as a modern-day warrior, and if that’s what I am, then of course I need to learn karate.”

  “Karate.”

  “Yeah man.”

  “Modern-day warrior.” Jeremy leans back in the booth, idea fully hatched. “What does that mean?”

  “It means I’m a badass. It means, ok, let’s say you hit somebody smaller than you. Not that that’s gonna happen but let’s just say. You hit somebody who’s smaller than you who’s defenseless and all that shit—oh, sorry man—didn’t mean to swear—but what I’m saying is—if you did that I would hit you and fight you because that’s what modern-day warriors do. They kick ass. If I see anything like that I get like ‘It’s time to take out the trash: HI-YAH!’ ” . . . And here, Stevie smacks the table with the side of his right hand, knocking two plates off the edge where they land on the extra-cheese-colored linoleum with a loud wobble-wobble. “I’ll get that later, don’t worry,” Stevie continues. “I mean it would be good practice if you hired me anyway, right? So I’ve been trying to teach myself karate and other bad ass moves like wrestling—”

  “You’re teaching yourself karate?” Jeremy Moreland laughs in cracked pubescent guttural hee hee hees.

  “And wrestling too. It’s all part of being a kick-ass badass. It’s what I wanna do, and if I get good enough, maybe I can be an instructor or something. Teach kids how to be modern-day warriors.”

  There’s an awkward pause here. Jeremy wants to run to the back and laugh and laugh and laugh, but there’s this awkward pause to fill, and filling it is beyond Jeremy’s paygrade. He can’t wait for Dale to meet this guy.

  “Anything else I should know about? Prison time? Drug offenses?”

  “No man. Just tryin’ to be . . . ”

  “A modern-day warrior. Got it,” Jeremy says. He points to the application sopping up even more grease from Stevie’s side of the table. “I just need you to write down your Social Security Number, a couple references, and anything else on there you left blank, and then you’re hired.” Jeremy slides out of the booth.

  “Hell yeah, buddy,” Stevie says, extending a grease-laden hand to shake. Jeremy looks at it, smiles, turns away, says, “Your first job is to clean up your booth here.” He walks to the kitchen, turns, adds, “And clean yourself up before starting tomorrow at five.”

  From the open window between the kitchen and the pass, Table Replacement and Replenishment Coordinator Brooks Brody watches Stevie deliver the twenty-odd plates he had used during today’s assault on the buffet, walking back to his booth, swinging his arms in irregular unfluid air-karate motions. Jeremy approaches to the left, pats Brody on the shoulder. “You about ready to punch out and go home?”

  “Did you hire that weirdo?” Brody asks, watching the same back-and-forth of remnants to the counter, air-karate to the booth.

  “He’s a modern-day warrior, Brooks,” Jeremy says, smiling in malicious adolescent vengeance. “He’ll be Dale’s worst nightmare.”

  Brody shrugs.

  “Wipe down his table, and you’re out of here,” Jeremy says, basking in power, in anticipation for
tomorrow, for getting out of here in August.

  PLAY THE PIANO DRUNK LIKE A PERCUSSION INSTRUMENT UNTIL THE FINGERS BEGIN TO

  BLEED A BIT: THE BAND (NOT THE BOOK)

  So the audience stands there with all their tattoos, howling along to the songs, pulling their arms to the sides of their heads like they’re in a great deal of trauma. And maybe they are. Even the most privileged members of Western Civilization must get the blues from time to time. The shirtless band—Play the Piano Drunk Like a Percussion Instrument until the Fingers Begin to Bleed a Bit, they are called—you know, after the Bukowski book?—have beards and muscletone and short hair and tattoos and they are one of those—they call them emo bands—who, when they sing, put a lot of feeling into stretching out their vowels. This, ergo, expresses the pain and intensity and uncertainty of life. Whatever they are howling about is very important to everyone packed into the Nardic Track on that Thursday night. To Ronnie, it sounds like they are worked up over paper cuts, like they’re singing—“It hurrrrrrrrrrts / paaaaaaaaaper cuuuuut / feeeel the buuuuurrrrrrn / from the fresh copies,” but “It can’t be that,” Ronnie thinks, in the middle of the audience, silently, shyly, observing . . . and the dozens concaved around the band will soon enough be hundreds and soon enough be thousands.

  Honestly, Ronnie doesn’t get it. He never will. His band, The Laraflynnboyles, sounds nothing like this. He doesn’t wax emotional about every stupid thing that has gone wrong in his life. He doesn’t want to, and can’t imagine what it would accomplish if he did. He isn’t sure how “feeling” and “sincerity” means stretching out your vowels when you sing—or, how there is a direct correlation between the two. But that’s what Gainesville seems to believe with the fervency of Eastern mystics. Because the way the band sings and the way the audience sings with them and how everyone is on the verge of tears at the minimum and mass catharsis at the maximum has the air of the fervor in a tent revival. At shows, Ronnie used to get bumped by kids dancing. Now, here, he’s getting bumped by, to his left, some pork-skinned joker wearing nothing but camo cutoffs half-covering a pair of plaid boxers and at the feet the inevitable pair of black Chucks—he keeps crouching down then crouching up, hands behind his head, pulling his head into his chest—and to his right, some bleach-blonde short haired squat-bodied girl shrieking the words and punching the air at the start and end of each elongated word that’s sung by the band. This band will be successful; they will hit thousands of kids all over the world in just the right place at just the right time. Ronnie drinks can after can of Brain Mangler malt liquor, leans against load-bearing poles in different parts of the tiny square room, surrounded by strangers, thinking of what he would sing about if he accepted this as valid, as something he could do without wanting to laugh.

  He watches this band, the third of three (the first some pop punk band who sang only about girls around town they had crushes on, with titles like “She’s the Publix Cashier Girl,” “She’s the Zesty Glaze Girl,” “She’s the DMV Eye Test Girl”; the second some ska band who sang about whatever it is ska bands sing about), thinks about what kinds of songs he would sing if he could indulge in this level of self-pity onstage. Thoughts of Kelly, who left the trailer three days ago, the bandages around the forehead gone with no traces except for a jaundiced peeled look to the covered skin, standing by his truck in front of the trailer in the eerie Jonestown silence of the late afternoon heat and humidity, his parting words: “Good luck, and try not to starve to death.” Ronnie laughed at this, in the doorway of the trailer. “Hey, thanks! You too! And the next time you dumpster dive, look out for ants.” Kelly winced, still feeling the receding welts across his tongue. “You can always come back,” he offered, like an exasperated father, before sighing, looking up to the trees, muttering a final exasperated “Jesus Christ, dude,” and stepping into the truck. Ronnie watched as he drove away, back to the lonely house, to another dead-end job, to a comfortable nothing, with one less friend. He deserved a song in the style, subject matter, and presentation of Play the Piano Drunk Like a Percussion Instrument Until the Fingers Begin to Bleed a Bit. If anyone did, it was Kelly. Or in the trailer, Alvin deserves a song. Alvin—who Ronnie imagines sitting there in his moldy barrel living room chair, holding a dandruffy gerbil in his pudgy hands. “This here is Squeaky,” he had said the first time Ronnie met Alvin’s furry little pet. Alvin extended Squeaky outward with his stubby arms. “Wanna pet it?” “Uh, no. Thank you,” Ronnie huffed, haughty, uncomfortable. Stevie was in the middle of the room, sweat marks expanding across his black t-shirt, trying to copy the moves in some Jackie Chan film, bending over to pick up the VCR remote and rewind the movie and show the scene again and again—Jackie Chan hi-yahing a bank safe—a sharp pop that instantly craters the safe at the point of impact—Stevie, who, Ronnie thinks, probably deserves an emo song too, was swinging his fists and karate kicking the air in uneven flailings. Meanwhile Squeaky slipped out of Alvin’s hands, landing in the dirty shag carpeting, running—ratlike—straight towards Ronnie. “Eeeeeeeeee!” Ronnie squealed, high and girlish, as the gerbil beelined towards his feet. Stevie’s hand dropped, fat ninja-like, to the rug, plucked Squeaky by the tail with a hearty “Hi-yah!” and lifted him off the ground. The poor gerbil dangled as Stevie held it between index finger and thumb. Ronnie watched, heart racing, as Stevie walked Squeaky to Alvin, placed him back into his hands, announcing to one and all in that redneck-who-doesn’t-know-he’s-a-redneck timbre and cadence Ronnie had grown to fear and despise, “Ya see that shit, hoooweeee! I am a badass muth-ur-fuck-er! Ooooo!” Alvin held Squeaky in his hands, pulled him close to his face, scolded, “Pffff. You shouldn’t do that, Squeaky. You’ll scare Ronnie. Bad gerbil. Bad! Gerbil! Pffff!” The tableau was too bizarre for anything more than a mumbled “I’m going to my room now” from Ronnie. There could be emo songs for Kelly, for Alvin, for Stevie. As the scene in the Nardic Track transforms more and more into something like those cathartic masculine reclamation camps in some desolate part of the Rocky Mountains where men dress in pelts and yell to the heavens until they feel the testosterone again, Ronnie Altamont thinks of himself as a good subject for an emo song, brooding on what happened after the strange incident with Squeaky, when, before going into his room and locking the door, he stopped in the bathroom, giving in to the compulsive need to wash his hands and face several times a day in the brief time he had lived with Alvin and Stevie. He wiped the water off on his navy blue Docker slacks (Ronnie never really tried very hard to incorporate punk fashion into his daily routine, especially in Florida), sized up the Ronnie in the mirror—that faded vermillion dye job (one of the few concessions to looking like the kind of person who listened to the kind of music that obsessed him throughout his late teens and into his mid-twenties . . . and he paid the price for looking so ridiculous, thanks to black hair peeking out where the dye didn’t take, neck and scalp stained vermillion where the dye did take), black-framed glasses rusty and corroded at the hinges with binocular lenses caked with gunk along the edges, the unavoidable Florida tan, the scruffy face of an incompetent shaver, nose average in every way miraculously unbroken in light of all the provocative words he’d ranted back at UCF, flabby chin (despite the depression-fueled weight loss), broad slouched shoulders, a fraying old blue t-shirt ready to give up and dethread with the rest of his shirts, bony arms, small hands pressed against the nasty crusty bathroom counter, slacks stanky from freeballing, unfashionable hiking boots given out of pity and charity by Kelly. He too could be a walking talking emo song . . . Hell, even to get into these shows he’s had to donate plasma, take the money, buy one twenty-five cent Little Lady Snack Cake for lunch and one twenty-five cent bag of Cheese Canoodles for dinner—so yeah, he could write emo album after emo album . . . if only he could take any of this seriously. Always, always, the desire to laugh in the face of futile despair like this—emo bands like Play the Piano Drunk Like a Percussion Instrument Until the Fingers Begin to Bleed a Bit are indicative of the times—these self-loat
hing 1990s where people have no compunction about walking around in shirts with the word LOSER or ZERO in big letters . . . where all these “alternative” bands tepidly whine about their lives . . . Ronnie, as the “new kid” in the tiny little punk club where the bands play like this and moments are shared that Ronnie can’t understand . . . the only salvation is how they actually laugh with each other between the songs and at the end of the set . . . the way the space between performer and audience is nonexistent . . . the one thing they all agree on is knowing that in the end all of this is nothing more than moments between friends, many of whom could just as easily (and had before, and will again) plug in and play. These were friends—hugging, arms around each other, singing, screaming, sweating, palzee walzee friends, and Ronnie doesn’t know where to begin with anyone, has yet to see any of his old friends who grew up with him in Orlando then went off to college here and started bands. Everyone in the room is a potential friend, but Ronnie doesn’t know how to go about it, and this is also funny to Ronnie. Not only the lyrics, but the music was like nothing The Laraflynnboyles played . . . how all the bands in Gainesville played the octaves of the chords rather than the Ramones chords and/or the Minutemen 9th chord syncopation he loved.

  No, Ronnie doesn’t think he will suffer all that much in Gainesville. He figures he will be broke a lot, be hungry a lot, lonely, depressed, but he won’t mope about it and scream it out at some show. He will laugh. These bands work in limited spectrums, and after you’ve heard and processed, say, Captain Beefheart or Albert Ayler, it’s hard to go back.

  Ronnie leaves the Nardic Track, and stepping out of the muggy show and into the relative cool of the Gainesville spring is in itself a glorious moment. He walks past groups of sweaty punk kids standing around in gossipy packs or sitting on the steps of the Hippodrome Theatre (a beautiful olden Greco-Roman column-heavy building) across the street, staring at Ronnie, not quite in a “Who the fuck is this guy and what the fuck is he doing here?” but more of a “Who let you in here?” kind of vibe you get anywhere anyplace the crowd is tight-knit and everyone in that circle knows everyone else’s story. He attempts a smile and a “What’s up?” to a couple dudes with skateboards sitting on either side of a girl with shaved green hair and cat-eye glasses. They say nothing.