“Well, that was great,” Ronnie says on the drive back to the trailer. “Best meal I’ve had in a long time.”
“I’m thinkin’ about watchin’ a movie tonight, pff,” Alvin says on the drive home. “Ya wanna watch it with me?”
Ronnie thinks it over as Alvin turns right off 34th Street onto the side street leading to the trailer park. After free Gatorroni’s beer, when William gets off work, they’ll show up at peoples’ houses, see what they are doing, or maybe they will end up at the Rotator. Nothing definite. With some food in his belly, it would make drinking that much easier.
“Naw, man,” Ronnie says. “I made plans.” Alvin parks the van. Ronnie immediately opens the door, hops out. Oh yeah. He almost forgets to say, “But thanks for dinner.” Alvin watches Ronnie get into his car and drive away.
“IT’S THE BEGINNING OF THE BEGINNING OF
THE END OF THE BEGINNING,” SEZ ROBBIE
ROBERTSON IN “THE LAST WALTZ” . . .
. . . is the quote I’ve been running around in my head lately after watching that movie at some hippie party at UCF (all the little subcultures hang out together on the fringes, so you end up being around hippies, no matter how, like, fuckin’, punk rock or whatever you are). At first, I scoffed at it, and I don’t remember much of the rest of The Band playing with all their old fart friends—once the roofies kick in alls I remember is a vague steady blunt surly torrent leaving my mouth and the delusion that my brain is finally making some truly wonderful and fearless connections re: my life and shit.
But yeah: What does that mean? I mean, I know it’s probably just some cocaine koan bullshit when Robertson says that, but, ok, let’s break it down:
We know it’s the beginning, but it’s the end of that beginning, but it’s the beginning of the beginning of that end of the beginning.
I‘m starting to think I know what he means by that, as me and Macho Man Randy pull up to what Ronnie tells me is called the “Righteous Freedom House,” one of these large old houses people here live in where bands play every weekend, one of those Gainesville punk rock houses Ronnie busts a nut over in his corny punk rock fantasies.
“This better be good,” I say before stepping out of Randy’s brown-exteriored, gold-interiored 1981 Chrysler Cordoba—you know, the car with the “fine Corinthian leather” ol’ what’s-his-name from Fantasy Island promises, only Randy’s car isn’t fine Corinthian anything—cloth seats blackened with dirt and tears from lugging amps and drum gear from one end of Orlando to the next, the paint job worn away by the sun—hood, roof and trunk dented by hailstorms—and somebody (Ronnie, probably) started calling it “The Poop Ship Destroyer” after that Ween song. Randy climbs out, looks across at me, over the pock-marked roof as I continue, “I have five roofies in my pocket, and I’m not afraid to take them if this isn’t.”
Of course, Ronnie couldn’t grace us with his presence to load in the gear, and actually—nobody’s here right now as we’re in that awkward time of after dinner and before the party when you wonder if anyone’s going to bother showing up, so Randy and I trudge back and forth from The Poop Ship Destroyer to the corner of the living room that’s been allocated as the place to plug in and set up by the scenester (the thing about Gainesville that I never understood was how everybody here kinda looks the same . . . it’s like that line in Quadrophenia: “it’s easy to see / that you are one of us / ain’t it funny how we all seem to look the same?” (And now you see why I’m not the singer for The Laraflynnboyles. If you think Ronnie’s singing is bad, and it is . . . )) with his black band t-shirt and hair dyed some bright unnatural color and very short on a frail vegan frame and they’re all nice enough, I guess—these wannabe prodigies of Ian MacKaye, and you can tell in their behavior, they’re always sitting there thinking “What would Fugazi do here?” but we trudge across the small treeless grassless dirt front yard into the large living room covered in (of course) show fliers and (of course) the iconic photographs of like Minor Threat sitting on the front steps of the Dischord House, Jawbreaker sitting on an old couch, some angry singer I don’t know doing that “breaking the fourth wall” thing all these angry desperate singers do when they run up to a crowd of equally angry desperate kids in the audience who gather around the mic to scream along to the words they’ve memorized like solemn Boy Scout oaths of forthrightness to the Den Leader, interspersed with pictures of Kiss and Iron Maiden and Van Halen that somebody here finds funny, and, come to think of it, I find it funny too, meanwhile Scenester dude stands over us as we plug in and set up asking questions like “So how’s the Orlando Scene these days?” and I pshaw and grunt a “Sucks” and Randy shrugs and says, “Yeah,” and Scenester dude presses on and asks us about different bands in Orlando and yeah, we’ve heard of these bands, they all have names like December’s Februrary and Car Bomb on a Sunday Afternoon, and I can’t stand those bands, but I try to be polite so I says, “Yeah, we’re not really into any of that,” and Scenester dude gets the picture.
True to form, Ronnie shows up the moment everything is finally set up. He’s with William, Neal, and Paul, and it’s like some kind of high school reunion with our hearty ha ha has and backslapping embraces. Ronnie seems happier. He looks like hell—disheveled hair, smelly unwashed clothing, an underfed weight loss—but he does seem happier the way he stands around us smiling, looking from me and Randy to the other guys. He always wanted to be a part of something. I think that’s why he wrote that retarded opinion column for the school paper. I really do.
Anyway, Paul, who communicates entirely in inside jokes, volleys about five inside jokes my way in about twenty seconds, and it’s like we’re all seventeen or eighteen years old again having a late night at the Denny’s on State Road 434 back in Orlando, only, instead of ten of us taking up the largest booth in the restaurant, ordering nothing but a basket of fries and ten glasses of water, it’s six years later, and we’re living whatever short-sighted dreams we had back then of playing in bands. It’s really all we ever talked about, aside from girls.
Neal steps up to Randy, rubs his recently emerged beer belly. “Looks like Tara’s keeping you well-fed, heh,” and as he rubs, he pokes Randy’s belly and punctuates it by saying, “Heh! . . . Heh!” until Macho Man Randy shoves him away, laughing (the dude doesn’t have a mean bone in his body) and says, “Fed and fucked, dude. You know how it is . . . ”
“I only know about the second one,” Neal says, and we laugh. It really is great being around these dudes again. It almost makes me want to like Gainesville. Almost.
Anyway, they show up with a case of Old Hamtramck, and they’re already drunk, so it looks like me and Randy have some catching up to do before we start playing. People slowly start showing up, peeking into the empty living room, taking one look at us, realizing they don’t know us, then stepping out to shoot the shit in the front yard. I shotgun three beers in a row, and my friends—oh, my friends!—they circle me and cheer me on in a way that’s sincere in its ironical references to collegiate dude squad bro-ham peer pressure. It’s like we’re making fun of it even though it’s exactly what we’re doing.
“Watch this, fuckers . . . ” I say, feeling what I wanted to be feeling right about now (and those roofies are weighing down my right jeans pocket), and my key pokes a hole in the middle of the Old Hammy can and the beer floods my throat and my brain turns energetic and sluggish all at once as the heaviness of the suds fills my chest and when the can is empty, I crush it against my skull a la Ogre in Revenge of the Nerds, and my five friends cheer me and suddenly we’re all chanting “Nerds! Nerds! Nerds! Nerds!” for no reason, except, if there’s one thing we have in common, it’s that we like to start ironical chants with each other after we’ve been drinking. When the drink takes hold, we love to yell. And now, I’m ready to play, because, honestly, I don’t give a fuck if we sound good or not. Fuck these people. Fuck Gainesville. These smirking phony tattooed up scenester types with their identical hair and identical dress, standing in their little
clusters of small town self-important drama. What Ronnie sees in any of this, I will never know. Behind the amp, I pull out the roofies and pop three into my mouth, chase it with the beer. Great. Let’s rock.
The show goes about how I figure it will. I’m drunk, feeling the pills slowly kicking in, forgetting whole songs as the set progresses, weaving in and out of consciousness, weight shifting from one foot to the other. Ronnie ain’t much better, and actually, he might be worse, because he was at some bar for three hours before showing up to play. Macho Man Randy wasn’t the best drummer to begin with, and now, he looks green with beer sickness, like he might throw up on the drums so when he hits them the puke hops and leaps the way glitter does in those glam metal videos of our youths. Only Paul, Neal, and William bother watching us, and all they do is yell the words “Rock! Beats!” (whatever that means) over and over again while throwing their empties at our heads. The scenesters peek in through the front screen door long enough to smirk at our band—this band we’ve been doing for so fucking long now called The Laraflynnboyles—and who even knows what that’s referencing anymore?—who even remembers Twin Peaks?—and no wonder they’re completely indifferent to our stale band with our stale jokes (our Kiss between-song banter of “How’s everybody doin’ tonight! Yeah? Who wants vodka and orange juice?” or whatever the hell we’re saying tonight) pointing out via wornout satire the, this just in, stupidity of the music we call Rock and Roll. And yet, at the same time, it’s like, we’re just having fun here, and isn’t this what it’s ultimately about? See, that’s what pisses me off the most about Gainesville. These doctrinaire fuckin’ . . . Gainesville scenester types. So humorless. So unable to relax and have, you know, f-u-n. Yeah, we suck. So what? I’m up here, trying, no matter how drunk we might be right now. We took the time to try and do this, and do I hope maybe someone will like what we do? Of course. It gets nervous; I get fucked up. But when I bother thinking about these Gainesville scenester types, all I can think is: Fuck them. And fuck Ronnie too, if he thinks this is some paradise of music and art. Motherfucker’s just trying to relive college. Because, really, what else does he have?
Finally, our set ends, culminating in a grand finale that lasts twenty minutes, everything this rock and roll fermata, where we try and sound like The Who, windmills and all, only, this time, I would really like to smash my bass guitar and be done with all of this. It’s an endless volley of beer cans from our friends, and I smile, and I do the math, and I think, yeah, I can afford another bass guitar, so fuck it.
I unplug and keep the fermata going on my bass. I walk out of the living room of the Righteous Freedom House, back into the screen door, somehow navigate the three steps to the dirt yard, and I’m still playing the bass even though it’s no longer plugged into the amp, and everyone stops to look at me. I pluck open strings with my right hand and make the devil horns with my left hand, because I know that joke is old and these jerks will hate that as much as they hate The Laraflynnboyles. This is a red Epiphone bass, the only one I have. Six years ago, I worked all summer, busting my ass delivering pizza, to buy the thing. I’ve spent so many hours playing it, in practice, alone in front of the television, or in front of the stereo while trying to learn a new song, rewinding tapes over and over again to make sure I got it right. But I’m feeling this fermata right now more than I’ve ever felt anything. I can’t stand being ignored like this. My anger and frustration with this audience, with my life, with everything, supersedes my attachments, and I raise the bass with both hands, then my right hand wraps over the left hand at the upper neck and I swing downward. The bass guitar makes a funny sound when you smash it into a dirt front yard. There’s a hollow vibration from the wood, from the metal, from the force. I swing and smash and swing and smash as people clear out, some running out to the street, everyone cheering now (they’re cheering), but try as I might, the fucking thing won’t smash. The dirt is too soft, the neck and the body of the bass are too thick. I can’t stop now. I have to destroy this thing. I hear the guitar in the other room stop playing, then an abrupt stop, even the drums stop, and Ronnie and Macho Man Randy stand in the doorway and I’m too fucked up to care how they’re looking right now, and I hold the bass aloft once more and yell to them “Thank you! Good night! And goodbye!” just like fuckin’ Robbie Robertson in The Last Waltz, turn around, run out to the street, and the solid road is all the bass needs to splinter, crack, break until only the strings connect the neck to the body. I’m under a street light, and it’s like I’m under a spot light, and I hear enough “Woo-hoos!” and “Yeahs!” from these dumbass scenesters in the yard to know I’m doing right here, that this makes up for our lackluster set. Victorious, I toss what’s left of my bass towards a drainage grate across the street, where it almost falls into the hole, but dangles on the edge, a little bit short.
And that’s the last thing I remember before waking up outside of Neal’s coachhouse in some lawnchair with Randy sitting next to me as The Minutemen’s Double Nickels on the Dime plays from inside. I come to, ask Randy, “What time is it?”
“2:30,” he says. He punches me on the arm. “How ya feelin’, Townshend?”
At first, I have no idea what he’s talking about, then I remember. The bass. I groan. My heart sinks. I have a nauseous feeling that throbs from my temples to my balls. I lean forward. Hands on my head. I tally the damage. Shotgunned five beers, drank several more, popped five roofies, smashed the bass.
“Think we can fix it?” I ask, knowing the answer. Randy laughs. Yeah. That’s what I thought. I stand, stretch, feel the vertigo and the spinning—the black sky and the palm trees, sand pines, live oaks, closing in, here in Gainesville again, in the patch of dirt separating this coach house from the front house, our cars parked at haphazard angles, as d. boon sings “as I look out over this beautiful land I can’t help but realize I am alone.” I face the street, over and down the small incline of the driveway, the occasional car rolling by, turn around, look into the coach house, where Neal air-drums, air-guitars, air-basses, one after the other, Ronnie behind him, jumping up and down on the couch, William and Paul passing a whiskey bottle back and forth. Neal sees me, yells, “He’s awake!” runs out to me, carrying by the neck the remnants of my bass—the top half of the neck, strings linking the neck to what remains of the fractured body, some wood, some wires.
“This was the greatest thing I’ve ever seen,” Neal tells me, and he hands me my bass, my baby, the only thing in life I care about. “You’re heroes now. Gainesville won’t shut up about it.”
“Well they didn’t show it.” I say, trying to figure out a way to hold what remains of my bass in one hand, without the rest of it either falling into the dirt or swinging into my shins.
“Aw, dude, you know. Extreme times, extreme measures. It was beautiful. Heroic.”
“Whatever,” I say. “Give me a beer.” I shuffle back to my lawn chair.
“You got it, dude,” Neal says, runs in, runs out, hands me an Old Hamtramck. I open it, take one sip, and as Randy starts talking about how it “Looks like Gainesville finally likes us,” I don’t get a chance to tell him why I don’t care and why it doesn’t matter anyway, because the next thing I remember is waking up, face buried between a musty brown couch pillow and musty couch cushion, the evil morning sun broiling and burning through the blinds.
“IT’S THE BEGINNING OF THE END . . . ,” CONTINUED
“Hungover,” Magic answers when Ronnie asks how he’s feeling as they sit at Denny’s before Magic and Macho Man Randy leave for Orlando. Fresh coffees steam out of bottomless mugs. They look out the window next to their booth. The bicyclists and joggers and power walkers of all ages rule the 13th Street sidewalks. The Laraflynnboyles share a communal hatred for the kinds of people who get up to these activities on Sunday mornings like these. “You should move back, man,” Magic continues.
Ronnie shrugs. He isn’t thinking about the band, or moving back. He’s thinking of last night, of Siouxsanna Siouxsanne, of when
they finished the show, and suddenly almost everyone decided the band didn’t completely suck, thanks to Magic smashing his bass.
He found her outside, leaning against the back of a car parked in the driveway, a bottle of wine on the roof. They talked. She seemed impressed by what had just happened—and everything about the way she looked was so arty, so practiced and tidy and neat and beautiful, like English women in the alternative music videos girls like Siouxsanna Siouxsanne studied obsessively . . . and Ronnie Altamont, he is none of these things—he is disheveled, his clothes anti-fashion, his hair unkempt and uncombed, and he stood there in post-gig sweat and stink thinking maybe he had a chance because he just did something worthwhile maybe, so he handed her the haiku he kept in his pocket, written on a now-damp piece of scrap paper, the kind of haiku he wrote for every girl he had liked for the past several years, each haiku a variation of any of the following:
“siouxsanna siouxsanne
stunning, let’s go out sometime
so bee-yew-tee-full.”
Siouxsanna Siouxsanne paused to read it.
“Thanks,” she said. “I like this. It’s funny.”
This should have tipped Ronnie off, he now thinks as they sit at the Denny’s waiting for their food. These Florida girls, the way they say something is funny without laughing or smiling so you don’t know if they actually think it’s funny or not. The haiku is always a litmus test. If they laugh at this, they’ll laugh and put up with everything else about Ronnie.
“Well?” Ronnie had asked, suddenly painfully conscious of how sweaty and gross he was, post-gig.
“What?” Siouxsanna Siouxsanne said, reaching over to raise the wine bottle, tipping it to those full red lips, sipping, swallowing.
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