Losing in Gainesville (9781940430331)

by Costello, Brian

  “I love both places!” Randy Macho Man says, sweating and rolling his eyes to the back of his head. “You should buy some X, stop arguing, go to this party, meet some women.”

  “Quite the to-do list,” Magic says.

  “Goddamn UCF sausage parties,” Kelly says, and nobody disagrees.

  “I wanna kill this case before we leave,” Magic says, crushing the empty Dusch Light with his fist. “I want to be good and drunk before I get there . . . ”

  . . . And really now, there isn’t much that’s more pathetic than drinking too much before a party to the point that you can’t go to the party. Magic broke out the stooge pills, and now it’s a black gap of four hours later, and there is no party, and it’s only Ronnie driving Kelly back to his house, rambling on about, “If this was Gainesville, we could have walked to that stupid party, but you gotta drive everywhere here.”

  “Don’t blame me because Magic had stooge pills,” Kelly says, in and out of consciousness in the passenger seat, weaving forward and back, side to side, with every bend and bump in Alafaya Trail.

  “Yeah, yeah—too many stooge pills, too many crap drugs . . . did you see it in there?”

  “Yeah, I saw it. I see it every weekend.”

  “Mumbling slurring idiots, and Randy acting like everything was the greatest thing ever.”

  “So nothing’s changed since you left.”

  “No. It hasn’t.” Ronnie drives down Alafaya Trail, past his jungled alma mater, the bright shiny new apartment complexes and the bright shiny new plazas and hotels. They enter Kelly’s neighborhood. “Meh, the party would’ve been boring anyway.”

  “Yup.”

  A throb and a drain as the beer and stooge pills leave the body. The empty 4:00 a.m. streets, weaving through the verdure.

  “It’s all over here,” Ronnie says. “I mean, I admit that I did have some great times, you know? The school, my column, you guys, Maggie, everything? That campus over there . . . it used to be mine. So many warm afternoons doing nothing but writing, skipping class, sitting by the reflecting pond, talking to girls. Right when you settle in—comfortable—the world changes and it’s another flying leap into the unknown. The time is too short, too short. And transitional times like these, Kelly. Do we grow up? Get older? Mature? Evolve? What? I can’t go back. It can’t be done. What will happen to us? Do you wanna be the 25-year-old suburban burnout who buys Bacardi for the high school party? Of course not. Do I wanna be a 40-year-old with a mohawk? Fuck no! I mean, it’s just, what are we supposed to do here, in this too-short life filled with these tiny epochs you’re always having to shed? What do you think?”

  Kelly snores, mouth agape, leaning against the passenger window, drooling.

  “Well. Alright then,” Ronnie says, as they pull into Kelly’s driveway. He leaves him in the car, unlocks the front door with the key hidden beneath the welcome mat, stumbles and lurches through the house to the guest bedroom, climbs in, passes out/falls asleep.

  ASBESTOS REMOVAL FOR PROFIT AND CHARACTER BUILDING . . . THE BEST PLACE FOR THE PUSSY . . . STRIKING OUT IN THE BUSH LEAGUES . . . LOST ON THE FREEWAY AGAIN

  “Cain’t ya see? Ohhhhcain’t ya see? What that woman! She been doin’ to me!”

  Every bright beautiful morning, the undeniable smell of old spitcups, and the sounds of The Marshall Tucker Band’s Greatest Hits playing from a worn cassette. Eastbound on I-4, watching the billboards scroll by with oversaturated regularity. Up ahead, the asbestos removal gig, in some elementary school in sleazy old Daytona Beach. Ronnie rides bitch in a dirty white pickup truck between two recent high school graduates with soccer scholarships named Tommy and Bassanovich. Neither can harmonize, but the sentiment is clearly heartfelt as they wail “Cain’t ya see? Whoa whooooa cain’t ya see? What that bitch! She been doin’ to me-heeee!”

  The job interview was a formality. Kelly got him the job. The bosses, a husband and wife three houses down from Kelly, were cheerful enough. They were more southerners than Floridians, which meant that when they asked “How’re yew?” they actually meant it. The State of Florida required all prospective asbestos removers to take a test showing knowledge of asbestos, its power, its evil, and once Ronnie sat in that yellowed warehouse office and watched the required Nixon-era slideshow about the dangers of asbestos, he was sent off to work with the other “College kids like you,” as A.Q., the husband boss, told him, and Ronnie didn’t feel like correcting him.

  So Ronnie rides between Tommy and Bassanovich—between two soccer scholarship earners leaving for school in Kansas somewhere within the month. Tommy always drives. He has the lanky grace of a forward, which he is. Bassanovich has the squat strength of a goalkeeper, which he is. It is impossible to determine their hair color or style, as they both are never without blue ball caps pulled down over their foreheads. They try growing five o’clock shadows, but their faces are still stuck in a baby-smooth 2:30 in the afternoon.

  Every morning, they pass the Speedway, then get close enough to the beach to smell it—out there somewhere beyond the garish hotels forming a pastel wall between the land and the sea. Living in Central Florida is the feeling of having to work while the rest of the world vacations.

  In the summer, the asbestos removal gigs are in schools. The buildings are from the 1950s, and the floor tiles are always old, urine-hued, and presumably asbestosy. The school they are driving towards is in the middle of a rundown Florida beach neighborhood of tiny duplexes and dirt front yards.

  Asbestos removal is, theoretically, simple: Remove every single floor tile from the school—the classrooms, hallways, offices, storage rooms, bathrooms, auditoriums, gymnasiums—so there is no longer even the slimmest chance of kids breathing in and catching asbestosis. The tiles are removed using special heating machines. Ronnie, Tommy, and Bassanovich each have their own machine. There is a metal handle on each pushcart. In front of the handle is a green console with digital times and readouts of the temperature of the heating unit. Between the four wheels is the three-floor-tile-by-three-floor-tile heating unit, three inches thick. When the machine is hot enough, they push over nine floor tiles, waiting the 15-45 seconds it takes to melt them and unglue the tiles from the concrete floor beneath. When melted (discernible by a death-like tinge of burning black smoke), the machines are rolled to the next nine tiles, and as these are heated up, they grab long metal scrapers and force them under the melted tiles until the tiles are scraped away.

  Sometimes, it is like “flipping pancakes” (the oft-repeated comparison during the training session), but other times, to Ronnie, it is like scraping blackened and burnt asbestosis-laden death by chemical warfare, especially when the tiles cling stubbornly to the floor below. It is scraping and occasionally stabbing the floortiles. When separated from the floor, the tiles are placed in black garbage bags covered in skull and crossbones warnings re: the toxic waste contained inside.

  “Hey Altamont,” Tommy asks as the three of them stab with their metal scrapers at a particularly nasty patch of tiles stubbornly glued to the dark concrete flooring of a second grade classroom. “How’s the pussy in Gainesville?”

  Working in a dude squad scene like this, sweaty with an idle brain, of course they’re going to talk women. Something about the question struck Ronnie as absurd. Like equating pussy with the weather, or fishing, but it was no time to be cerebral, so he shook his head from side to side like he was imagining this second grade classroom, with its A-Z penmanship lessons scrolled around the upper walls, its blackboards, its overhead projector, its cartoon animals offering sage wisdom on everything from crossing the street to washing your hands, was full of vagina—a pulsing pink sea of orgasmic vaginas gaping and spreading.

  “You know the best place for the pussy?” Bassanovich says between grunts as they continue stabbing at the floor tiles that will not break, will not melt, will not separate from the floor.

  “Where?” Ronnie was genuinely curious.

  “Lincoln, Nebraska,” Bassanovich answers.r />
  “Really?” Ronnie wants to laugh, but for all he knows—seeing how he’s never been to Nebraska—Bassanovich could be right.

  “Yeah man! That’s what the other players told us when we visited their campuses last spring. They say the pussy there is like . . . like swarms of flies.”

  “Flies with tits,” Tommy adds.

  Ronnie thinks of Gainesville girls, horny work thoughts, as he counts down the days until he can go back.

  The summer sun is unrelentingly brutal, reflecting off the cars and the sandy yards surrounding the school. The work is hard, but it feels good to do something physical, something that does not require thought. To do something—anything—after months of latent, dormant energy dissipated in unlucrative pursuits.

  At 3:30, the work is done. The rides to Orlando are the same as the morning rides to Daytona, only they are tired, and there is more traffic. Everything about I-4 reminds Ronnie of the past, of high school road trips to and from the beach, goofing off in backseats while a friend drives, blasting The Who as Ronnie stares into a girl’s eyes, some bronzed flirtatious Florida girl starting to learn of the power her body wields, Ronnie as among the first of many in a long line of teenage wastelanders at the mercy of mania and confusion and angst and various internal and external forces seemingly beyond their control.

  Now, it is dirtier, sweatier, and definitely minus girls—only old Big Gulp cups half-filled with tobacco juice (this is the summer when Tommy and Bassanovich take up chewing tobacco), and the Marshall Tucker Band singing “Heard it In a Love Song,” until the familiar Colonial Drive exit appears, and it is back to Kelly’s, to scribbled journals and television, X-ing off another day until his return to Gainesville.

  •

  The Daytona gig was finished. A.Q. transferred the boys to the schools of Crescent City, Florida. One hour north of DeLand. Forty-five minutes southeast of Palatka. Near Pierson, San Mateo, and Welaka. Never heard of it? Well, sorry about your luck, and you obviously know nothing of bass fishing, because Crescent City is “The Bass Fishing Capital of the World.”

  They were put up in a motel along the shores of a beautifully large blue and presumably bass-filled lake, with ten dollars per diem for meals. All Ronnie cared about was that he was one hour closer to Gainesville.

  Before leaving, Kelly gave Ronnie a gift: A gray typewriter he stole from the hotel where he now worked.

  “Don’t you worry they’re going to miss it, and suspect you?” Ronnie asked as he received the gift.

  “Not really,” was Kelly’s answer, and that was enough to satisfy Ronnie. “Just put it to good use when you get back to Gainesville.”

  With that, Ronnie got into his car and left Orlando, bags packed, with no intention—seriously this time, like not even for a week or a month or anything—of ever going back to live.

  In Crescent City, the hours are too long—12 to 14 hour days of scraping and stabbing and pounding on old-ass floor tiles in eerily vacant classrooms—to fraternize with locals and to find out what was beyond Crescent City’s small-town façade. Crescent City, for Ronnie, was work, in miserable humidity heightened by the green machine’s 500-degree temperatures melting the tiles. Crescent City was horrid, shitty work in quiet backwoods, and with each passing day, Ronnie loved it, more and more.

  Not necessarily the work itself, but the work ethic. The effort felt good. Necessary. Thoughts while working hard like this, so clear now: The novel was unpublishable. It was awful. The Big Blast for Youth was awful. The Laraflynnboyles were over. The tour wouldn’t happen. It didn’t matter. There will be new books, new bands. Ronnie will return to Gainesville, buff from all the work, with legions of adoring women suddenly noticing him, noticing his pockets stuffed with cash for the first time . . . There would be no more brooding. The discoveries of life would happen through doing rather than thinking, and if these long hours weren’t “doing,” nothing was, even if asbestos removal wasn’t exactly a career path Ronnie would seriously consider, even if this would be over soon. Because, before Crescent City, Ronnie was unsure of whether or not he could actually bust his ass at something. At anything. Now he knew he could, as the sweat poured and muscles ached and the curses rained upon the stubborn floor tiles as Ronnie, Tommy, and Bassanovich stabbed with their metal scrapers.

  Beyond these lucid epiphanies, Ronnie, Tommy and Bassanovich filled the endless hours with talk, lies usually, of this girl or that girl they banged that one time. Then, Ronnie would buy beer and whiskey, and together they drank and life was one big dream for the future, a future filled with soccer, of touring bands, of records and goalllls and songs. There was no room for doubt. Spit cups filled. When the booze kicked in, Ronnie played his guitar, and all three sang the classic rock Tommy or Bassanovich would request, culminating in:

  “Cain’t ya see? Ohhhh cain’t ya see? What that bitch! She been doin’ to me-heeeeee!” Nobody else stayed at the motel, so it was easy to be loud, to sing out to the silence, as the sun set beyond the IGA grocery store across the street. And when the booze really kicked in, they would make up their own songs, songs with titles like “Asbestos Removing Motherfucker Blues” or “No Pussy in Crescent City.” When the exhaustion of the day matched the drunkenness of the night, they would pass out as Olympic athletes competing in Atlanta won or lost on TV. After not enough sleep, they would start it all over again, waking up to the phone’s jarring wake-up call.

  •

  “Oh,” Randy Macho Man adds. “Also, Tara’s moving in with me. We wanna get serious.”

  Sometimes, others have to tell you things you already know. Things you don’t want to admit to yourself.

  “I quit,” Ronnie says, hanging up the phone. Not that booking the tour was going all that swimmingly anyway—expensive motel calls to far-away cities and various show booking punk rock types with varying levels of sincerity, forthrightness, and competence. He rolls off the bed, stands, looks out the front windows at the empty motel parking lot, the quiet road, the streetlights illuminating the late summer silence.

  At the Denny’s in Gainesville, that post-show brunch where they sat in silence save for the occasional pleas to return to Orlando, Ronnie knew it was over, but he kept mailing off cassette recordings, kept bugging these people listed in the Maximumrockandroll “Book Your Own Fucking Life” directory who set up shows in clubs, basements, living rooms, trailers, drive-ins, Laundromats, wherever. Long gone were those calls between Ronnie and Magic, when they’d dream and plan and practically be on stage already, in Chicago, in each city, playing, touring, living this dream Ronnie has had since forever. Of course, the drummer would be the one to overtly flake out on the whole thing—tracking down Ronnie in his Crescent City motel hermitage to tell him that like he’s gotta work, dude, and that like it’s time and money he doesn’t have and not only that but you don’t even live here anymore anyway so what’s the point? Ronnie could hang up on Macho Man Randy, could curse him and all drummers as flaky and flighty and completely unreliable, but in the end, all Macho Man Randy did was tell a truth no one else would verbalize. Magic was too passive-aggressive to say anything. Ronnie was too deluded.

  Ronnie grabs his guitar, opens the front door, sits on the motel sidewalk and strums. Tommy and Bassanovich had left an hour before to check out the night life of Crescent City. Ronnie, downstroking Ramones chords, listening to them bounce off the emptiness of the teal and salmon stucco of the motel, off the palm trees, the swamps, the lakes, the bass inside the lakes, guitar sounds as incongruous to the environment as Ronnie felt. “53rd and 3rd” was a long way from Crescent City, Florida.

  Ronnie strums, thinks back to six years ago, to June of 1990, of entering Club Space Fish night at the Beach Club for the very first time, leaving the quiet of open black suburban night space for downtown, on westbound I-4, parking on Magnolia, walking up Washington to Orange, and hearing the live music for the first time, screaming out of the amps from the tiny stage, and it was nervous like anything’s nervous the first time
you do it, but really, it felt right, to be seventeen and seeing bands, and Ronnie laughs at how they would mosh, even to bands who weren’t really moshing bands, but they thought that’s what you were supposed to do, and enough people joined in that it wasn’t the worst thing that they moshed like that, and the way the last band played, the way they jumped and sweated and yelled and sang and lost themselves in the moment, opened up this new reality for Ronnie: more than anything, he wanted to be on that stage, he wanted to be the one with the guitar singing and strumming and playing his own songs, in his own band, with friends who rehearse in spare bedrooms littered with empty beer cans and obligatory posters of inspirational bands and playboy centerfolds and all the usual crap bands hang on walls for inspiration or humor or horniness’ sake. And that last band who played . . . what happened to them? Nothing. That’s what happened. They quit. They got regular jobs. If they’re not married in 1996, they will be married soon enough, with kids and a mortgage to follow. If that’s what happened to them, why would The Laraflynnboyles—a band nowhere near as good, Ronnie readily admits—be any different? What did Ronnie think would happen? It was a band started for fun—in college—and now that college is wrapping up, to continue is pointless. Years later, once he will actually finally go on tour, Ronnie will realize that to tour with Magic and Macho Man Randy would have been a goddamn nightmare. But here in Crescent City, Ronnie strums Ramones chords and feels as lost as he did as a teenager, sitting in his room strumming Ramones chords—lonely, bandless, directionless. He needs to play in bands. More than writing, it gives him an identity, a social outlet, a creative outlet. Without bands, Ronnie is depressed, unfocused.

  Tommy and Bassanovich return with a 12-pack of Old Hamtramck and a fifth of Floridian Comfort whiskey, Tommy tall enough and therefore old-enough-looking to pull off the ID that says he’s 22.

  “Might as well’ve stayed here, for all we could find going on,” Bassanovich says, leaning against the back of the truck as Ronnie plays.