“What do you have?” Ronnie asks, staring at the gray monitor screen on the dust-free white desk, the paper-stuffed off-white printer to the right of the wide and dense monitor with a menu awaiting orders to print the novel that would change the world, as Ronnie makes one last dummy check for any mistakes.
“Beer. Wine.” The way she stands there, smiling. Ronnie had always considered Chloë to be like this overweight gothy broad (Yeah, Ronnie thought it was hilarious to say “broad”) with the requisite fixations on Morrissey. Here she is now, living in Gainesville, in the Duckpond neighborhood—this relatively upscale neighborhood of professors and graduate students—standing there, smiling.
“Wine.” Ronnie had learned that having a drink or two after donating plasma was the equivalent of three or four drinks.
“What kind?”
“Whatever.”
She returns with two long-stemmed wine glasses half-filled with chardonnay (Ronnie guesses), sets his to the left of the keyboard. “Have you ever had a spritzer?” she asks.
“Spritzer?” Ronnie repeats, not taking his eyes off the screen.
“It’s wine and Sprite.”
With his left hand, Ronnie lifts the glass. With his right hand, he clicks the “print” button with the mouse. The printer screeches, then whirs. The glasses clink.
“Cheers,” Chloë says. She makes a big production out of sniffing the wine before sipping it, sounding to Ronnie like someone trying to breathe with a bad cold.
She wears too much eye make-up, Ronnie thinks. It’s a painful purple, thick, layered on with a trowel. Same with the lips, the blush, the purple streaks in the bangs of her dark hair, framing her fat pale face, wrapping around the beginnings of that double chin. Still fat, but less gothy, Ronnie decides. Goth-casual? Sure. He decides Chloë is one of those girls who act thirty the moment she obtains a driver’s license. That thirtiness only grows worse with each new rite into adulthood. She has one month left in college, and she acts and behaves like Ronnie’s idea of somebody’s mom. The depleted plasma levels and the lack of food help the wine kick in immediately.
The manuscript prints, one slow page at a time. This house. The interior decoration is straight out of an interior decorating magazine. Color-coordinated walls match furniture, match plates, match curtains, match clothes. Not green: Avocado. Not purple: Plum. But you strip that away, you have these worn hardwood floors, thoughtfully planted Spanish moss dangled shade trees (in Central Florida, they never considered the importance of shade trees as they were tracting out their own take on suburbia—keeping a palm tree or two (and those don’t shade shit) for decorative purposes only), and the distinguished venerable overall charm to the place, with its front porch and soft yellow exterior paint, a house that had weathered more during the past fifteen years than those Central Florida homes had. Ronnie can ignore the feng-shui and all the obnoxious color-coordination, and dream of someday living in a Gainesville house like this, should he ever be fortunate enough to escape the trailer. He tries and fails at recalling the other time he was here, loaded on roofies after The Laraflynnboyles played a chaotic houseparty in the student ghetto, three years ago.
•
It was a tiny little house—Paul’s house at the time—so small that the bands played in the kitchen and only about fifteen people could cram into the living room to watch the performance. It’s one of those houses in punk rock lore where everyone figures quite rightly that they’re going to tear it down in a couple years, so there’s really no need to clean anything, to mop away the sticky black grime on the linoleum floors, and if there are cracks or outright holes in the plaster on the walls—why, it’s nothing a flier from some enjoyed Nardic Track show from the recent past won’t fix. Wille-Joe Scotchgard’s drums are pressed as far into the kitchen as possible, with his back to the oven where he has to consciously avoid brushing the knobs that turn on the gas stove’s burners. John “Magic” Jensen plays the bass, wobbling from side to side—head a dumbed-down mix of stooge pills and stooge drink—bleach blond glam metal rockwig atop his head—and Ronnie, without the wine now blocking the vision—if his mind at the time hadn’t been filled with stooge pills and stooge booze—one little prod from someone there who does remember—and Ronnie could see the view from the floor, underneath about ten bodies who dogpiled him gleefully after he made one comical/not comical leap into those who had packed into the room to see them—guitar face-up on the dirty floor, open detuned strings plucked by random hands, as random voices sing into the microphone and mic stand that have also fallen to the floor—the sweat dirt old beer smoke stench—and through the gaps in the legs and arms, Ronnie looks to the rhythm section, who look back—Magic peeking through the feathered-metal bangs of the wig, and Willie-Joe leaning up over the drums to make sure Ronnie’s alright, and he’s actually better than alright, because his girlfriend is somewhere in here, and his friends are everywhere, and he’s in a band, and outside in the front yard, they stand in groups of three, four, or five, as the Gainesville Police cars are parked along the edge of the yard, officers waiting for anyone to take one step off the property with an open container. Ronnie often forgets about this, forgets about catching a ride (with whom?) to the Duckpond to stay at Chloë’s, and they sat in a circle of eight or nine or ten, Ronnie in Maggie’s lap, Maggie wiping the kitchen floor grime off his face with a borrowed dishtowel, softly asking, “Why do boys with big brains do such dumb things?” to which Ronnie can only smile because he said everything he had to say in the performance and is ready to pass out like this.
•
Three years later, and Maggie’s gone, the band is on a downward spiral, Ronnie has graduated, and here he is in Gainesville, printing a manuscript he feels he has no choice but to believe is his ticket out of this rut. “What’s your book about?” Chloë asks, leaning into Ronnie, one fat boob brushing his back.
“Aw, man, I don’t know,” Ronnie says, leaning away from the fat boob, not taking his eyes off the gray screen showing the novel’s title page. He loathes this question. “It’s about a lot of things.”
Chloë leans in closer, boob brushing his back again, face inches from his right cheek. She smells like the perfume counter at the mall. “That’s not a very good answer, Ronnie.”
“Yes, Chloë. I know.” When sober, Ronnie doesn’t entirely dislike Chloë, but now? “It’s about Orlando, basically,” Ronnie manages.
“Oh. Can I read it?” Chloë asks, wide hips already swiveled to the printer, hands already reaching to the twenty printed pages.
Ronnie moves his hands to block Chloë’s. “When it’s published, you can,” he smiles.
The phone rings on the opposite side of the bedroom. “Be right back,” Chloë says, patting then squeezing Ronnie’s shoulder.
“Oh hi!” she says—too loudly, too loudly—into the phone removed from its cradle on the nightstand next to the bed. She plops onto the bed, left hand holding the phone, right hand running fingers through her hair. “Ronnie Altamont is over here. Yeah! He’s printing out a book! Yeah, he wrote a book! Me neither . . . ”
Ronnie sits in front of the computer wishing the book would print already, wishing he could mail it away, ready to flee Florida for the small press that would easily get his work out there. This Orlandoan notoriety, its final residue manifested in the first and last namedrop, was tiresome, because—really now—he was less than nothing. Some bum, knowing little except not to trust any social acquaintance who speaks of him by his first and last name, because the “glory days” of three years ago, or even one year ago, when his name mattered to anyone, are over.
“Ok! Hmmmm, bye bye!” Chloë says before an indecorous roll off the bed and back on her own two goth casual sensible black-shoed feet. She replaces the phone in its cradle, straightens her clothes. “So. That was Diana,” she announces. “She wanted to tell you ‘Hi.’ ” Diana. She went to UCF with Ronnie. She sang in one of those emasculated bands that have one-word names like “Break” or “Collaps
e” or “Banish.” Ronnie honestly couldn’t remember. They weren’t “punk,” and therefore, Ronnie didn’t care. At Chloë, he smiles and nods, as is his style when memories are gone or ideas can’t be followed.
“Where are you sending the book?” Chloë asks, returning to Ronnie’s right side with her mall perfume counter stench and her fat.
“It’s this small press in the Midwest,” Ronnie says, almost turning to face Chloë, but too enthralled that the book—his book—was actually printing. “One of my,” and here, Ronnie shrugs in false modesty, “fans,” because he had a few, much to Ronnie’s surprise, when he wrote that opinion column of his back at UCF, where he ranted and raved and sometimes was funny and other times was just caustic, and looking back on it now, he suspected the administrators were simply ignoring him, knowing that someday soon, Ronnie would be out of there, either with a degree or dropped out, and they probably predicted he would be in the exact position he was in now, “suggested this press, and it looked interesting, so . . . ”
“Why don’t you put it out with Random House or something?”
Because they’re not ready for what I gotta lay on society! In Ronnie’s head, there lived a burnout hippie, and while most of the time said burnout was just a comic invention, at least once a year, their thoughts coincided. This was that time for 1996.
“It looks interesting,” Ronnie repeats.
“Well, that sounds good then.” Chloë leans away, smiles. “More spritzer?”
“Ok.”
She grabs the glasses, tromps off to the kitchen. She returns, sets Ronnie’s to the right, in front of the printer. Ronnie sips. They are, um, spritzy. The printer continues from one page to the next. Chloë pulls up a chair next to Ronnie, grabs the stack of pages from the printer.
“No!” Ronnie yells, grabbing her fat arm. The hostess giggles. Coquettishly. She thinks Ronnie is flirting. She reads aloud from the manuscript. “It’s like when Darby Crash howled ‘. . . dementia of a higher order . . . it felt like a passport away from this futile reality’ . . . ?’ ”
It’s the question mark at the end that gets Ronnie. As if she’s saying, “What?” He yanks the pages from her hands, yells, “No!” again, much louder than he intends. “Jesus!” he adds before he knows what he’s saying, “Will you step off, bitch?!” As he pulls the pages away, he knocks over the wineglass. It shatters on the hardwood floor between them. Wine and Sprite spills across the room.
There are exactly five seconds of silence. The coquettish giggling stops. The smile disappears. “I’m . . . sorry, Ronnie,” Chloë says, steps back from the computer, from the mess. “I didn’t mean anything.”
Ronnie holds the crumpled stack of pages in his hands, as the printer keeps on whirring. “I know you didn’t,” Ronnie finally says. He holds out the stack of pages, stands, office chair rolling into the shards on the floor. “I’ll clean this up. You want to read this? Here.” Ronnie offers the stack of papers. “Sorry. I was just . . . nervous. I shouldn’t be.”
“I don’t.” Chloë steps away, 180s out the bedroom door. It looks like her shoulders are shaking as she leaves, but Ronnie can’t think about that.
The print job is only halfway finished, and Ronnie can’t leave until it’s done. He wishes the printer would move faster, hopes the ink and the pages hold out. Then he will leave and they can both forget about it. Ronnie can’t think about why he doesn’t want Chloë—or, perhaps, anyone—reading his book. He can’t think about why he’s so hateful to this person who has been so kind and hospitable to him. As the print job finishes, Ronnie grabs handfuls of tissue paper from the box next to the phone’s cradle on the nightstand, throws the wine glass shards and spritzered paper towels into the garbage back in the next-door bathroom. Down the hall, Ronnie can see Chloë—Chloë’s back anyway—seated on her couch watching CNN in the living room, seemingly enthralled, or perhaps moved to tears, by Bob Dole giving a speech somewhere.
Who-knows-how-long later, when The Big Blast for Youth finally reaches page 536, Ronnie gathers it up, practically runs out of that bedroom, down the hall, to the front door. In the doorway, Ronnie turns to Chloë’s sobbing back. “Um.” Ronnie begins. “Thanks for everything. And hey: thanks for the spritzer.”
“You’re welcome,” she says, devoid of feeling, not turning away from Bob Dole on the TV. “You can show yourself out.”
Ronnie feels like the chump he knows he is, shrugs, turns and steps out of Chloë’s house, carrying his precious, precious manuscript to the car. He never sees her again.
•
Sobering, only a little, on the drive to the post office, Ronnie wonders why he apologized. Who takes pages from printers and reads them without permission? No, really. Who does that? Feelings of guilt dissipate into the near-summer humidity of the Gainesville weekday afternoon.
The line at the post office in the student ghetto is a swift moving nonordeal of students picking up care packages sent by Mom and checks sent by Dad. When it’s Ronnie’s turn, the bulky ashen black late middle-aged mailwoman weighs the package, assesses the postage, takes Ronnie’s money.
“It’s the book I wrote,” Ronnie says, wishing she would ask about it.
“A book? You mean like Stephen King?” She holds the package for a moment, like it might mean something more than what it is.
“Uh, yeah, I guess.” Ronnie shrugs, takes his change. He walks away, wishing he could have told her about how it was on its way to getting published, after so much work, so much writing. And how it only needed one draft.
Do I really need to tell you that the publishers never make it down to Gainesville to track down Ronnie? That they don’t even mail a rejection slip? The days turn to weeks turn to months, and the black mailbox bolted next to the front door of the trailer never has its mouth stuffed with advances on future earnings or galleys or proofs or whatever they’re called.
Ronnie will sit in his sparse white room and listen to the Germs growl and bleed through hand-me-down speakers at the foot of the mattresses while he broods on the unmagical epiphany that writing—his writing—could no longer be this easy task of writing some stupid column while drunk on Brain Mangler malt liquor for some right-of-center University too conservative to be hip to the gonzo style of Thompson and the other New Journalists Ronnie was blatantly ripping off, as is the style of so many young men sitting down to write for the first time. This novel—The Big Blast for Youth—all 536 pages of it—wasn’t anything but practice, and it would surely take lots and lots of practice before anything could even begin to happen.
Possessed of such daunting knowledge, the yellow legal pads and spiral notebooks Ronnie used to spend hours filling were left to fend for themselves by the stacked mattresses in his bedroom. For far too long, Ronnie would write next to nothing besides drunken declarations of love and hate for various people, before passing out in the bedroom, and who knows, maybe that is also a kind of practice, even if nothing will emerge from those pages but loose, illegible, self-absorbed notes.
ALVIN AND MOUSE, DALE AND STEVIE,
STEVIE AND MOUSE
Pffffffffff . . .
I mean, I told him not to punch my wall, and I told him not to drop his boot on Ronnie’s table because if Ronnie sees that, he’ll get mad. So that’s what I said to Stevie when he knocked on the door—pffff—I have the note right here. Ronnie helped me write it. It goes:
“Dear Stevee
you are not welcum heer
you dont cleen your mess and dont pay bills
so you cant stay here anymore. Alvin.”
I put what he had into two plastic bags—pfff, he didn’t have much—and left it by the door. Hoping he’d get the hint. No, he still knocked on my door and it’s late at night—so why’s he gotta bother me so late? I didn’t want to answer—pfff—but he kept knocking, yelling like, “Let me in man, I wanna talk to you, it’s important, I need to ask you something,” and going on and on like that the way he always does. Ronnie’s right, and you’re r
ight, Mouse—Stevie never shuts up.
But he did get real quiet when I opened the door and he stood there in that stinky black Misfits t-shirt he’s always wearing, looking like he just got off of work the way there was new sweat on top of the old sweat smell of him. He says like, “Hey Alvin, c’mon man, let me in, this is a joke right?” and I tell him that no, it ain’t a joke, because me and Ronnie, we don’t want him living there.
He’s gotta ask me, “Why?” and I tell him. Pfff—I tell him, “You broke Ronnie’s table, you put a hole in my wall, you don’t pick up after yourself, and you don’t pay rent.” And that’s all true, Mouse. Ronnie had to point it out for me to really see it, I got so used to it. Around everywhere he sits, there’s dented coke cans, used Q-tips, used tissues, potato chip bags, McDonald’s wrappers covered in ketchup, mustard, and pickles. All of it goes around him in a circle where he sits and it stays there.
But Stevie doesn’t say anything about that, instead he talks like—pfff, “Well Ronnie don’t pay nothing.” Then he tried stepping into the trailer but I wouldn’t let him in and he’s going on talking: “Ronnie told you to do this, didn’t he? Too good to talk to us, too good to leave his room, and he talks you into kicking me out. Where’s his money?”
So I have to tell him that me and Ronnie—me and him—we made an agreement that he would live there, that he was Mouse’s friend he brought up from Orlando. Because that’s what you and me and Ronnie agreed, Mouse.
Because you should have seen it when Ronnie came into the living room and saw the table Stevie broke. I mean, the table, Stevie broke the glass top in two—right down the middle—but he thought if he could stack one part of the glass on top of the other part of the glass—Ronnie wouldn’t notice, but it’s the first thing he says, Mouse. Ronnie never leaves his room. He sits in there all day, or if he does leave, he goes out the back door. Stevie was always asking “How come he never sits out here with us when we’re watching TV or playing Sonic the Hedgehog?” and I always told him—pff—cuz it’s always so dirty in here and in the kitchen, and Stevie, he don’t say nuthin’ to that but like, “So?” and now that he is out, maybe I will try and clean and maybe Ronnie’ll wanna be out there now—pfffff. But that’s the first thing he asks, stepping out there and he’s still got a pen in his hand ’cuz I know you were sayin’ that he’s a writer so maybe that’s what he does all day, but he sees the table and walks over to it, lifts up the porno mags Stevie put there to try and cover the table cracks, turns to me like he wants to kill me and he asks me, you know, “What happened to my coffee table?” and I ain’t gonna lie, Mouse, so I tell him. I’m sitting there in my chair watchin’ Jim Carrey being funny, and I tell him, and that’s when he tells me that Stevie needs to leave and I even told Ronnie that I even told Stevie not to show me his modern-day warrior moves because, pffff! You know he don’t know karate.
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