Losing in Gainesville (9781940430331)

by Costello, Brian

  “I’ll be back in a minute,” you say, rising from the stool, stepping off the rotating bar, feeling like a kid trying to hop off a decelerating merry-go-round. Paul continues his lecture on nuggets, and Ronnie hangs on every word, mouth agape, nodding.

  Maux doesn’t notice you at first. She is glaring at the floor. She looks up as you approach, suddenly smiles, catches herself smiling, scowls.

  “Why are you here?” she sneers, unclenching the pint glass from her thighs. Head to toe, this indigo vision from the planet Krazy. And who do you think you are, thinking you could meet the marrying kind here in Gainesville, where the women are as crazy and flaky as the days are hot and generally pointless?

  “I don’t know,” you say, pulling up a bar stool and sitting down. For once, you answer honestly. “Why are you here?”

  “I don’t have any friends, remember?” she says. “I hate people, remember?” You remember. She sips the Fancy Lad from the pint glass, recrosses her legs. “Oh, and I broke up with Philip.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” you say.

  “No, you’re not,” Maux says, and you laugh. “This Charming Man” by The Smiths bounces out the speakers, and all the women in the room run en masse to the dance floor.

  “You’re right,” you say. You’re not in the mood for the typical Gainesville duplicity.

  She empties the pint glass, hands it to you. “Let’s get out of here,” she says.

  Sometimes, like now, Maux has the right idea. “Where to?” you ask, hopping off your barstool.

  “What did you say to me when we hooked up?” She slides off her barstool and faces you, knee-high indigo boots, that indigo sleeveless miniskirt, those long lithe arms and that edible neck, the slope of the chin, the cheeks, the indigo lipstick, the indigo eye shadow, the short angry shock of indigo hair. Your erection is profound, this almost leaky menacing high-maintenance wand of hormonal desperation pushing against the black denim of your cut-off below the knee pants, even when she quotes you and imitates you in your Kermit-the-Frog-as-Ian-Mac-Kaye voice, “ ‘Let’s go back to my apartment and listen to music?’ Let’s do that.”

  Nothing is long-term, and not much even makes it to short-term here, so who cares. Who cares if your nineteen year old girlfriend, the biggest nothing of all since coming back from tour, is asleep in your bed at home. Waiting for you after closing Gatorroni’s.

  “We’re going to listen to music at your place instead,” you say, setting the empty pint glass on your bar stool, and then you think it’ll be funny to imitate Maux’s raspy teenage boy snotty tone, so you say “There’s some dumb stupid horrible band staying with us right now who I hate,” and she has to laugh, and you have to laugh, and it’s a discreet sneak through the crowd of women dancing to The Smiths. You avoid eye contact with all of them, because if they figured out what was happening, well. The last thing you need is another ex-girlfriend co-worker at Gatorroni’s by the Slice. You don’t look up and over to Paul and Ronnie, because you don’t want them to see you leaving without them, and maybe they see you and maybe they don’t. You don’t want to have to explain anything to anyone.

  You make it out of there without any interactions, stumbling across the white graveled parking lot in this pathetic little corner of this “mixed up muddled up shook up world” (so you sing to yourself from a song the title of which you can’t recall) to your hail-damaged white Honda coupe, the racquet-ball-sized hail leaving black dimples on the roof and hood. Maux finds her car—something cold and teutonic—and it’s a ten minute drive back to town. You follow the red square tail lights as the darkness of the rural road slowly brightens into college town streets. You arrive at her student ghetto apartment, and you shrug, get out of the car, think/don’t think about what you’re doing/not doing, and how it’s so easy to get into a rut here, and too easy to drink the days and nights away. Easy . . . easy . . . easy. Two steps inside, and Maux has her indigo lips all over the right side of your face.

  DOUG CLIFFORD: THE BAND (NOT THE DRUMMER)

  Ronnie leaves the plasma center, crook of his right arm bandaged, wallet’s emptiness temporarily assuaged with a ten and a five, drives over to William and Neal’s coach house, nothing to do on a weekday afternoon, pulls up the dirt driveway, white clouds billowing behind him, parks in front of the white shack they lived in, gets out of the car, steps inside because the door’s open and a familiar old record is playing.

  “Ronnie!” Neal says, standing in the middle of the tiny dirty beige living room with the low ceiling, shirtless and hairy, in nothing else but blue shorts. The coach house feels like a mid-August afternoon where the breeze—such as it is—doesn’t stop the heat. “We’re starting a Creedence Clearwater Revival cover band, and we want you to be the drummer.”

  “Who else is in it?” Ronnie asks, walking the five steps to their battered gray sofa, stepping around Neal and falling onto the couch as John Fogerty sings “Oh Lord/stuck in Lodi uh-gaaaaain” through snap-crackly-popped vinyl.

  “Nobody. Yet. Just me and William.” Neal moves to the open doorway, looks out to the sand and the dirt of the driveway, air-bass guitaring, turning to his right at the wobbly black disc on the turntable on the opposite wall of the couch where Ronnie slouches with his bandaged arm and the bloody-dotted cottonball pressed into the crook of his arm. If Ronnie wanted to change the music, he could do so almost without getting up from his seat—only a matter of stretching himself over a cracked and ancient orange coffee table cluttered with stacks of random artbooks, a label-free jug of red wine, and an opened gatefold brown and black record cover—CCR’s Chronicle—dotted with tiny green marijuana flakes.

  “What’s the drummer’s name?” Ronnie asks. Like any self-respecting American, Ronnie loves Creedence Clearwater Revival, and finds it impossible to fathom anyone—anyone!—disliking their music. And Ronnie knows he can pull off these rhythms without any problems.

  Neal turns around, steps to the coffee table. “Good question.” He picks up Chronicle, flips it over. “Oh! Of course. Everybody knows it’s Doug Clifford.” Neal laughs, extends the album to Ronnie’s face, points to the liner note that has his name. “Doug Clifford, dude.”

  Ronnie laughs, takes the cover out of Neal’s hands, stares transfixed at Doug Clifford’s shagginess, the brown mop top and the relief pitcher moustache. “So I’m Doug Clifford?” he asks.

  “The band’s Doug Clifford,” Neal says. They laugh. Neal adds, in the shy burnout voice of the musician with the microphone in every independent rock and roll band ever, “Hey what’s up? We’re Doug Clifford? We’re from Gainesville?”

  Neal flips the record, and they sit on the couch passing the label-free red wine jug, taking in the sounds, talking about Doug Clifford, the band that wasn’t a band yet, that would, in fact, never be a band.

  William steps out of his bedroom—yawning, stretching—groggy from a hungover nap. Short blond hair in bedheaded clumps, wrinkled white t-shirt of some old hardcore band with a cheap-o black silkscreened image of the buzzcut-headed singer in mid-howl, left hand grabbing the mic, right hand balled into an angry punk rock fist. William sits between Ronnie and Neal, blue work pants cutoff below the knees skidding against the worn fabric of the couch, keys jangling in a right side belt loop. He leans forward, grabs the wine bottle, drinks, studies Chronicle.

  “Should we grow mutton chops and moustaches for this?” he asks. Ronnie laughs at the idea.

  “Naw, dude,” Neal says. “We’ll just wear flannel. No need to be glitzy.” He leans forward, points at the cover. “Doug Clifford would want it that way.”

  The afternoon dissipates into evening. They empty the wine bottle and Chronicle ends, and then Neal throws on Cosmo’s Factory and then Willie and the Poor Boys, and it doesn’t matter if some of the same songs are repeated—they are starting a CCR cover band so it is paramount to gain an even greater familiarity with the material.

  Paul walks in the door, “Oh, CCR . . . I too can hear the bullfrog calling me
. . . ” He stops to look at these three giggling on the couch. “You guys are llllloaded!” Paul says.

  “It’s Doug Clifford’s fault,” Ronnie says, fully feeling the spirit of the wine, of the music.

  “Well I’m going to the Drunken Mick if you want a ride.” Paul shakes his head, laughs. “Looks like I got some catching up to do.”

  “Maybe Paul should be Doug Clifford, and you can be Stu Sutcliffe, Ron,” Neal says, as they stand and stumble out the door, leaving the record to end on the bummer jam “Effigy.” “You can play other instruments, and Paul only plays the drums.”

  “Aw, man,” Ronnie moans. “I was really hoping to be ol’ Doug.”

  “Well we can’t all be Doug Clifford,” Neal says as he locks the front door. “Such is life.”

  Everyone they would see at the Drunken Mick, everyone they would talk to at the Drunken Mick, they would figure out a way to work Doug Clifford—the band that would never be a band—into the conversation. “Doug Clifford drank Fancy Lad Stout, so that’s what I’m gonna have too.” “Doug Clifford likes girls like you, has anybody ever told you that before?” “Yeah, I don’t know if I can see your band this weekend. Doug Clifford said it wasn’t very good.”

  “What’s all this Doug Clifford malarkey?” Paul asks Ronnie, sitting at the Drunken Mick as Neal, on the other side of William, serenades all passersby with random snippets of CCR songs, culminating in illogical drunken laughter and a “Doug Clifford!” plea.

  “It’s our new band,” Ronnie informs him.

  “Really?” Paul says.

  “Sure!”

  “Uh-huh.” Paul shakes his head. “It’s all talk. Next week, it’ll be something else.”

  Before Ronnie can contradict him, the wine and the Irish stout drowning out any counterarguments to the undeniable fact that yes, Doug Clifford will get off the ground and yes, Doug Clifford will be a real band, Neal stands on the bar, completely naked, a gorilla-hirsute body soft shoeing across the mahogany bar, yelling, “This one’s going out to Doug Clifford!” He raises his arms in triumph, sings, “I wanna know! Have you ever seen the rain!” He shakes his dong up and down, round and round.

  Ronnie leaps off the barstool, laughs, preparing for a fight somewhere, or jail time—something—but instead, the roomful of drunks, scenester kids Ronnie hasn’t met yet, collegiate-y types seated at the tables throughout the room, all chant “Doug Clif-ford! Doug Clif-ford! Doug Clif-ford!” until the bartender—long used to these antics, coaxes Neal down, bundled clothes in hand, trying not to smile.

  “He does this all the time,” Paul yells in Ronnie’s ear over the din of the continued “Doug Clifford!” chants.

  Neal squats down, leaps behind the bar, throws on his clothes, yells, “Thank you! We’re Doug Clifford! Good night!”

  The short squat ginger-headed bartender looks to Paul, smiles. “You know what to do,” he says in an Irish brogue exaggerated for greater tips the way female bartenders accentuate their tits.

  “Yeah yeah, I know,” Paul says, smiling in the familiarity of the routine. “Let’s go, little brother,” he announces, right hand’s fingers beckoning towards the exit.

  And in the dizzy-drunk near last-call at The Drunken Mick, Paul leads Neal by the arm, Neal’s pants pulled up but unbuttoned, t-shirt coiled around his neck, followed by Ronnie and William, as the “Doug Clif-ford! Doug Clif-ford!” chants fade and they step out onto the University Avenue sidewalk, to the car, home to bed.

  •

  No, there would be no Doug Clifford. Doug Clifford would be replaced by the next band concept. There would never be enough time to get to all the ideas. You could pull off two or three bands at once, but the others fell away into afternoons and nights like these—frivolous discussion where someone like Ronnie Altamont could believe it would be possible to actually get Doug Clifford off the ground. So many ideas fell to the wayside, getting no further than creative play, self-expression for self-expression’s sake, impromptu late-night jams, or the idle talk of the potential members of Doug Clifford. Everywhere, kids talk this way, and they make ambitious plans and announcements and they want to believe that this is the band that will get off the ground, and who knows, maybe this will be the band to get off the ground, but just as likely it won’t, it’s more enjoyable to talk. Sometimes, the idea itself is better than any possible execution.

  And there were no shortage of ideas. Freed from the confines and general horseshit of high school, stimulated enough by college and the young adulthood of post-college, anything seems possible. Brains bloom endless variations on the same four chords, the same 4/4 rock beats, music—in execution or theory—dancing between the gap of thought and expression the Velvet Underground once sang about. It’s the limitations Melville lamented at the end of Chapter 32, “Cetology,” in Moby Dick: There’s never enough time, and that’s the colossal bummer of life, isn’t it?

  SWEAT JAM

  In the corner of the spare square room soundproofed with red rugs nailed to the walls, Paul pounds eighth notes on the floor tom of his five-piece gold sparkled Ludwig drumkit, hitting the snare on the two and the four of the 4/4 beat. Like all drummers, he’s the first in the room to get lost in the music, of this simple VU cavepound, eyes opened but not looking at anything . . . often when playing drums, Paul thinks of streets in towns he used to live, streets in towns he will never return. In Wekiva—the neighborhood he grew up in before going off to college—the twenty minute drive through the mammoth subdivision, the Duckpond to the left, the one-story ranch-styles on side streets that branched cul-de-sacs with bike trails winding through the jungle scrub. Hunt Club Boulevard—that was the name of the main thoroughfare and you don’t get much more suburban that that—a four-lane road with only minor curves, winding home after school and yelling “Faggot!” at old people who were dumb enough to walk the sidewalks or “Skateboarding should be a crime!” at the skater kids. With the body memory of the drum beat, his mind wanders down those streets, tries taking stock in what he remembers and what he forgets. Cannonballs into swimming pools, that sensation of hanging in the air—dry—before falling, before the big splash. The hallways of their high school—the high school that has since been torn down and replaced by a newer, larger, nicer, more functional high school—the dirt and grime on the white tile of the old one, the rows of blue lockers, the clang of the lockers, the manic chatter, the drama and secrets and undercurrent of uncertainty masked by everyone with every step between classes, the three bong-bong-bongs of the tardy bell, the cheap portable walls put up to separate what had once been giant rooms, the library in the center of the school, spokes of hallways and classrooms orbiting. In the Fishbowl—the circular steps surrounded by windows of the painting and theatre classes—where the arty kids hung around before the classes started, the goth kids, the skaters, the punks with their liberty spikes and CRASS t-shirts, cliqued up because you needed a group to get through it. Paul pounds the beat and remembers all of this, remembers leaving school, getting in a car, driving down Sand Lake Road through the subdivisions and the open fields that would become subdivisions soon enough, the perpetually sunshiney afternoon of a Central Florida weekday as school lets out and no matter what you think or thought about it it stays in your memories.

  Neal stands to his brother’s right, picking at a red Fender bass plugged into a buzzing Peavey bass amp. His mind doesn’t wander around in memories of past places the way Paul’s does—he needs to hold this together—as the bass man, as the bridge, the link, between the drums and the guitars. It’s more of a channeling of the spirit of Mike Watt—of the Minutemen, of fIREHOSE—of locking into what’s happening and finding the freedom in it and the spaces to not just lock down the rhythm and bridge the gap from drums to guitar—but to figure out ways to get to the top two strings and the upper frets—not to show off, but to find the right sounds, the right counterbalance to the guitars, because everyone knows the guitars want nothing more but to wank and noodle and dick around, so this i
s an anchor that will give them not just the low notes of the chords they play, but a larger framework to do something that is both tasteful and creative. He puffs out his cheeks and exhales like Mike Watt the way guitarists might windmill like Townshend. He moves in spasmodic forward lurches, backbone sways waving from the base of the spine to the neck as the fingers on his right hand pick-pluck the strings. It has to start with Watt for Neal, because Watt opened up the possibilities of the instrument for Neal, and that led to Mingus, to Jimmy Garrision, to Rockette Morton. Day-to-day life is nervous energy channeled into right and wrong places, but here, with the music, it’s all focused on this, and every distraction, every good and bad memory, all the drama of the Great Gainesvillian Soap Opera, fades to nothing.

  William, all he wants to do is plug into the Crate amp in the corner and stand to the left of Paul, pedals cranked up all the way, and stab at a detuned off-white Fender Squire so it makes cloudy feedback of dense black and white noise. He doesn’t really know how to play guitar, only picking up chords here and there from friends while sitting around some late-night front porch party, so he tries following the cavepound rhythm, smiling in sweat and angular side-to-side hip swivels, never more convinced that MOE GREEN’S FUCKING EYE SOCKET is over, because the simple enjoyment of it, at its base, of making music with friends, died somewhere on that ill-fated and pointless tour. If anything, instead of dreaming of where he was, or where he is, he thinks of where he will be, if he can figure out how to get out of here.