“EVERY DAY . . . I SUFFER . . . UNDER THE TYRANNY . . . OF THE PATRIARCHY!” she yells, monotonical and strident.
“And it’s nice to see you too,” Icy Filet mumbles to no one, seated in the back, wondering why people can never start things off at open mic nights with nice greetings, simple hellos even, before jumping in with the world-hating.
“I WORK JUST AS HARD AS A MAN,” Miss Hillary X continues, standing at attention, head turning from one table to the next, accusing eyes searching for anyone gathered here tonight at Turn Your Head and Coffee who might be in cahoots with the phallocentrists. “BUT I DON’T GET PAID AS MUCH AS A MAN! I WORK SO HARD . . . BUT TO A MAN, MAN, I’M JUST HERE . . . TO KEEP THEM HARD! MY SUBSERVIENT PUSSY! MY MANHANDLED ASS! MY SLAVEDRIVEN TITTIES!” With each yell of her body parts, Miss Hillary X grabs said body parts and shakes them, dramatically.
Icy Filet remembers Hillary Johnson, aka, Miss Hillary X, from high school back in Lake Mary. Two years younger than Icy, she was the notorious editor-in-chief of the school’s newspaper—annoying and shrill—muckraking the quality of lunchroom pizza, and how there wasn’t enough of a break between classes to get to your next class on time. Somebody somewhere deemed her “gifted,” and everyone believed it, and at the end of the day, the principal and administrators were probably all-too-happy to allow her to use her AP college credits to start college one year early. But still, back then, no matter how insufferable she could be, Hillary was never this angry. Icy Filet analyzes potential causes—moving away too young, one-too-many Women’s Studies classes, or perhaps something much, much worse. Terrible things can happen in college, or even just walking down the street. Everyone needs an outlet—perhaps this is why we’re here tonight, Icy Filet thinks. And if it means indulging dreadful—what? spoken word?—well, it’s better than a lot of other ways people deal with their shit.
Miss Hillary Xs rant culminates in a final scream of “MY REVOLUTIONARY BREASTS SCREAM FOR LIBERATION.” Miss Hillary X lifts her white RESIST t-shirt, exposing budding breasts, nipples pierced with one glittering silver ring each. She raises her arms into the air, makes what may or may not be Black Power fists, tosses her shirt into the air, landing to her left, halfway between stage and tables. The audience gasps, applauds, woo-hoos, screams ecstatic affirmations.
“Oh God oh God oh . . . ” Icy Filet says to herself under the din of the audience. “Please don’t let me go on after her . . . ” Icy tries recalling her lines, her dope-ass rhymes. Her memory has succumbed to panic. She recalls nothing. “I’m screwed,” she thinks. “I should be back in the dorm studying.”
The Reverend B. Stoned returns to the stage. “Wow, man, that was truly inspiringly countercultural, wouldn’t you agree my brothers and sisters? Let’s lighten the mood now with some poetry by my favorite—bud! Heh heh heh!” (Here everyone except Icy laughs.) “Smokey Green!”
Smokey Green, dressed in the obligatory hippie attire, stands onstage in a thick patchouli cloud and reads his poem in the burnout dope dealing raspy voiced stock character in any film from the 1970s:
“See: Bud is my bud
Not the Bud that you drink
But the bud that you smoke
Take a toke
Smell the smoke
This ain’t no joke
Breathe it in
Feel the grin
the love will spread
check your head
you’re as high as the sky
you don’t need to fly
to climb aboard
and be with your bud, bud
Peace.”
Raucous applause. Icy Filet groans. She hopes—more than anything—that she will not be called up next. But of course, “And now, sisters and brothers,” the Reverend B. Stoned says, black fingernail polished right index finger following the sign-up sheet to the next name. “I believe this is the first time we’ve had a freestyle rapper here, but that’s cool, that’s cool. Welcome to our congregation . . . Icy Filet.”
She removes the Casio SK-1 from her UF orange and blue totebag at her feet, gathers her notecards off the table. The walk to the stage feels like the walk to an execution. She sets the SK-1 on the onstage barstool, approaches the mic. “Hi, my name is Icy Filet? I’m a rapper?” The audience laughs at this remark. “Um. I’m not trying to be funny. This is what I do. I rap. I’m from the mean streets of Lake Mary.” Icy Filet dresses in the “sexless librarian chic” style fashionable among indie-rock women in the mid-1990s. Short black hair parted in the manner of a 1950s accountant. Cardigan sweaters. Slouched postures. Thick nerd glasses. Shapeless black pants. Low-cut Doc Martens. She flips through her notecards, finds it. “OK. I’d like to start with this rap. It’s called ‘I Eat Pop Tarts.’ Thank you.”
She turns around, switches on the SK-1. A tinny pseudo hip-hop beat circa 1984 blips and loops out the keyboard’s small speaker. Icy Filet turns to the mic, clears her throat, looks down at her notecards (not daring to look at the audience), and rhymes, in a cadence nervous and uneven:
“I eat Pop Tarts
every day now
it’s how my day starts
every way now
strawberry, blueberry
icing in my mouth
east coast
west coast
Pop Tarts north and south
toaster oven microwave
Pop Tart flava what I crave
eat it cuz it’s healthy
it could even make me wealthy
Yo I know—what I say ain’t true
Yo I know—but what I feel is right
Yo I know—Pop Tarts taste stew [And here, Icy Filet loses the thread, loses her place on the notecards]
Yo I know— Pop Tarts aiiiiight
Word.”
She steps away from the mic, the beat blipping its trebly syncopation behind her as she does a practiced nervous dance of one sideways lift from one leg to the next. She cannot look forward, even if the room is dark beyond the candlelight centering the tables. She shifts sideways as she dances, an awkward lurch to the barstool to turn off the SK-1. The beat is silenced between the two and three of the measure. She stands there, awaiting a reaction, applause, something. There’s an awkward silence, broken only by a loud whisper of “What the fuck was that?” and Icy Filet wants to cry, wants to grab the SK-1, toss the notecards and never look at them again and run back to the dorm and try and find some answer in her Psych 101 textbook that might explain what kink in her psycho-social development makes her aspire to be the whitest rapper in Gainesville, if not the entire world.
One rapid enthusiastic pair of hands clap and someone yells “Yaaaaaaayyyyyy!” as he runs up to her, and Icy Filet is convinced, irrationally but entirely, that it’s Charles Manson and he wants to kill her for what she just did up there, but then she remembers, oh yeah, he’s in jail.
“I’m Mouse!” this sudden fan whispers in her ear as he steps onto the stage. With both hands, he grabs her shoulders, adds, “And I’m sorry to have to go after you, because, heh heh heh, that was the best thing to ever happen here, dude! Seriously!” He loops her right arm like a chivalrous Charles Manson. “Let me lead you back to your seat,” and he—Mouse—has this goofy grin, and Icy Filet no longer thinks he looks like Charles Manson, but like someone more attractive than Charles Manson.
As they walk away, the Very Reverend B. Stoned returns to the stage, to the microphone, says, “That was . . . interesting,” in that sarcastic voice people get when they’re threatened by what they perceive as the not-normal. The audience laughs at this, at Icy Filet. She wants to cry; Mouse sees the hurt in her eyes.
“Fuck ’em!” he says before pulling out her seat at the table, then gently pushing her in. He leans in, whispers, “You did great. Don’t forget that,” and Icy Filet hasn’t completely given up yet on performing, on her ambition of the moment.
“. . . But I guess you never know what you’re gonna get when you come out to Reverend B. Stoned’s Open Mic Eclectic Jamba
laya Jam! Am I right?! Am I right!” The Reverend B. Stoned raises his arms in triumph, “Number One” index fingers pointing to the ceiling painted to resemble puffy white clouds on a bright blue day. Enthusiastic woo-hoos, all around. “And hey,” the Reverend continues. “Thanks to Turn Your Head and Coffee for giving us a space to exercise our First Amendment rights, because? If we didn’t have the First Amendment? We’d have a lot of problems, and we couldn’t do what we’re doing tonight . . . like, uh . . . rapping about Pop Tarts.”
Laughter. “Don’t listen to him,” Mouse says, hands on Icy Filet’s shoulders. “I’m nervous to have to go after you.”
Before Icy Filet has a chance to ask, “You’re doing something tonight?” the Reverend calls Mouse to the open mic to, “Do whatever it is Mouse does, because I don’t know if I understand it myself.”
Polite applause, over which Mouse yells, “Thank you! Thank you!” and blows kisses to the audience like a venerable Hollywood starlet waving to fans before climbing into the limousine. He runs to the darkness to the side of the stage, grabs an amplifier and electric guitar, carries them to the stage, plugs in the amp, slips the hot pink strap through his head, connects the cable from the guitar to the amp, connects a distortion pedal to the mic cable, connects another cord from the pedal to a coffeehouse amplifier ill-equipped for much beyond the quiet poetic intensity of the average singer-songwriter. Mouse turns everything on. The guitar shrieks violent open-string vibrations, and the distorted microphone howls painful white noise. Mouse shimmies in place to these sounds for five seconds before screaming into the microphone, voice modulated into monstrous distortion. He drops his pants, tosses the guitar in the air. The guitar lands on its body, clanging layers of noise into the tortured amplifier, neck thwacking into the worn red duct-taped stage floor. Under his smudged blue thrift-store pants are diapers. Pants around his legs, he hops like a leprechaun around an Irish spring. He slips out of his teal flip-flops, dances out of his pants. He reaches into the diaper and pulls out a knife. The guitar still howls and Mouse still screams. He grasps the knife handle, extends his arm, stabs his chest repeatedly. The audience screams. It’s too dim to know for sure that it’s one of those toy knives that sink into the handle with contact. Half the audience, circled around the tables closest to the stage, use this as an opportunity to leave the room post-haste. Mouse screams another psychotic howl—no, um, “lyrics” to any of this, simply extended shrieks and howls—then steps to the amplifier, reaches behind it, removes two bags of flour, a large red bag of Bugles snacks, and three packages of bologna. He tears into the flour bags, shakes them across the front of the stage as the guitar clangs shrill feedback from the vibrations of Mouse’s steps. White dust clouds reflect candle light, overhead stage lights. Through the thick flour flying and landing everywhere, Mouse opens the Bugle bag, grabs a handful, smashes them into his plain white t-shirt, stuffs some down his diaper, chews some, spits them out on stage, hurls handfuls at anyone he can make out through the darkness and the low-visibility flour. He opens the bologna packages, wipes his brow with the slimy gray meaty circles, flings them up and out like tiny Frisbees. Now out of food, Mouse removes the microphone from the stand, falls to the stage and rolls around, screaming a sustained guttural banshee screech, body crunching over Bugles, skidding over bologna, flour sticking to damp skin, guitar sustaining an endless rumbling white howl through the long-suffering amplifier.
The audience has long fled the room. Only the employees, the Reverend B. Stoned, and Icy Filet remain. Icy has never seen anything like this in her nineteen years, insides an adrenalized mix of terror and exhilaration.
The Reverend B. Stoned runs to the stage, screaming, “That’s enough, man!” as three of the bigger members of the kitchen crew run up to the stage, turn everything off, pull him away and drag him outside by his knotty long Manson hair as Mouse yells back, “C’mon, Reverend, it’s all in fun, heh heh—it’s freeeeedom, maaaaaan, heh heh heh!”
“Don’t come back here, ya fuckin’ weirdo!” the Reverend B. Stoned yells after him. In the empty room, the Reverend stands in front of the stage, kicking at the mess on the floor, kicking up flour clouds. He curses, shakes his head, finally walks off.
Icy Filet approaches the stage, grabs the pants, the guitar, the effects pedal, the amplifier, the cables. It’s a cumbersome two-handed carry job, made that much more difficult by general performance-art sliminess caked on everything. She limps like a bag lady out the front door, in time to see the kitchen crew storm past, calling Mouse all kinds of names, and Mouse himself, supine on the curb as the University Avenue foot traffic glares and mumbles as they walk by.
Icy Filet cautiously approaches him. He’s covered in flour, Bugle Bits, bologna strands in his beautiful scraggly hair. He still wears the diaper. His face has the purple chubbiness of the recently punched.
“I couldn’t find your flip-flops,” she says, standing over him now, unsure of what else to say.
Mouse, fetally positioned facing the street, rolls onto his back, moans, looks up, recognizes her—the rapper!—and a slow smile creeps across his face, lips widening, opening to what Icy thinks are two rows of gorgeously mismatched teeth. “Why thank you, Pop Tarts.”
Icy Filet looks away, flushed face, sweaty palmed. “That was really amazing,” she says.
Mouse smiles, pulls himself up. “Glad you liked it.” He stands, plucks a piece of bologna out of his chest hair and tosses it onto the street. “Let me call you sometime.”
“What?” Icy Filet says, and it’s not that she didn’t hear what he just said, but more like all she can think is that if this is his way of meeting girls, it’s insanely elaborate.
“Let me call you.”
Naturally she’s a little hesitant. But then she remembers Mouse, pre-performance, running up to congratulate her after her sucky (her word) attempt at freestyle rapping. “Do you have any paper?”
Mouse gestures at the mess he’s made of himself, his pantlessness, and chuckles. “Don’t seem to, ah, have anything on me, heh heh heh.”
Icy Filet unzips the white vinyly MC Hamtramck pen pouch she found at an Orlando thrift store—her favorite late ’80s/early ’90s rapper himself, in his trademark crushed velvet purple jumpsuit, big glasses, pulse beats shaved into his scalp, with the thought cloud above him (which he points to) that reads, “U Push It Real Good, Wild Thang”—pulls out a notecard and a pen. “Mouse, right?” she asks, handing him the card with her phone number.
“That’s right, Miss Icy Filet, my favorite rapper. I’ll call you soon, and we’ll dance a’ dance, take a chance, look askance, you know what I’m saying to you?’
Icy Filet does not, or isn’t clear on the details maybe, but says she does anyway. “Bye,” she says, waving, walking westbound on University, back to the dorm, SK-1 jutting out of her UF totebag.
“Thanks for getting my stuff,” Mouse yells after her.
“Word, yo,” Icy Filet says, head and heart spinning in the afterglow of first-times.
FIVE YEARS
Another Amateur Sunday here at fucking Electric Slim’s Used and New CDs and LPs . . . me and Boston Mike standing here behind the counter dealing with lazy illiterate cocksmacks who couldn’t find the new Celine Dion CD if you led them by the hand to the “D” section, removed the new Celine Dion CD from the bin, placed the new Celine Dion CD in their germ-ridden unwiped hands, raised said germ-ridden unwiped hands two inches in front of their cattle-blank eyes and said, “Here. Here is the new Celine Dion CD.” Sundays at the record store . . . it’s like an endless parade of cretinous twats marching in and out through our glass front door . . . me and Boston Mike watch them walk outside along the plaza sidewalk and we see them and pray “Please, please don’t come in here” . . . but God ignores us . . . laughs at our petty requests . . . it’s the cattle march of the UF student body getting their nose rings—figuratively, but might as well be literally—yanked by our beloved music industry towards whatever insufferable dogshit
they’ve seen fit to mass produce and ship our way . . . it’s the ox-dumb rural-ass mouthbreather country folk waddling into town to do their “big city” shopping—fat fucks in NASCAR t-shirts ogling the poster racks in the corner . . . you know, like thong-clad women bending over rows of Camaros as the flame-fonted caption reads, “Haulin’ Ass!!!” or the one where the caption reads “Your Tub or Mine?” in watery lettering as the feathery peroxide blonde with the shapily body emerges from a wooden tub painted in the Stars and Bars, all naughty bits strategically covered in soap suds . . . it’s old drunks stumbling into the store to stand by the counter and talk loudly at us about how they were fortunate enough to see whatever played-out-not-that-great-to-begin-with classic rock garbage live in concert and everything back in 1979 . . . and speaking of garbage, Sundays are for some reason the big day when the nasty garbage pickers like to come in dragging crates of records with more scratches than grooves, shredded covers reeking of rotten leftovers and roach droppings . . . and then these jerks have the nerve to get all flabbergasted because we won’t pay like top dollar for their precious finds . . . real rarities like Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass’s Whipped Cream and Other Delights, Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, and Reader’s Digest Presents: Sounds for Easy Listening, Volume Three . . . in the middle of all this wheezing farting monument to human ugliness, egg-shaped moms stroll in thinking if they hum off-key renditions of the hit song they want to buy for their kid’s birthday (on the cassingle format, natch), we’ll get all “Name That Tune” with it and help them out . . . our friends who make up our customer base on every other day of the week are nowhere to be found . . . sleeping off last night’s parties . . . bicycling from one barbeque to the next . . . but not me and not Boston Mike because somebody’s gotta work this counter on Amateur Sunday, and the bills—oh, the damn bills!—never go away, so fuck it, fuck these asshole customers, and fuck me.
Losing in Gainesville (9781940430331) Page 9