Losing in Gainesville (9781940430331)

by Costello, Brian

  They don’t stay at the beach for long. Ronnie tries holding her hand as they walk off the beach onto the scorched mid-afternoon parking lot. “I hate that,” she says, flinging away his hand. “It’s stupid and disgusting.”

  The drive home (home!) is silence except for a cassette recording of “Tiger Trap” by Beat Happening, and Ronnie’s perfectly ok with letting Calvin Johnson’s mono-bass vocals do the talking as he drives and watches the same lush rural jungleside that had blurred past on the triumphant return to Gainesville from Crescent City. Only now, it’s so much better, because it feels like a much less alien land than before, because Maux’s here, and the fall holds a promise of all the possibilities he hadn’t yet experienced in his short stay so far in Gainesville. The students are back, and with them, the bustle of the college town and the promise of parties, after the tease of it in the dire spring and purgatorial summer.

  “Let’s go inside,” Ronnie says when he pulls his car into the dirt driveway to the right of the house. He doesn’t even need to ask because he knows Maux will stay with him.

  “Not now, Ronnie Altamont.” She leans in for a long kiss. Her lips are salty and sandy and sun-cracked and everything right about this part of the world. She backs away. “I’ll call you later in the week.”

  “Oh. Alright.” Ronnie shrugs, tries not to look surprised, watches her open the car door and walk away down NW 4th Lane. She turns the corner, crosses 12th Street—indigo hair, white shirt, blue cutoffs, pink skin, green Chucks—disappears through the walkway leading to a parking lot.

  Through the windshield, Ronnie stares at the vines, weeds, and scrub weaving through the fence in the back separating the Myrrh House from the glass company the next block over. Ronnie, alone, is suddenly overwhelmed by vertigo, by the anxious skittish feeling of having nowhere to turn in a foreign-enough land. Even now. Especially now. He hurriedly steps out of the car, enters his new house and falls asleep—in sandy damp American flag swimtrunks—on the mattresses stacked in his bedroom.

  THIS DALLIANCE WITH THE MAGGIE’S FARM THAT IS

  LIFE IN ADJUNCT ACADEMIA IS NOW OVER

  Another year for me and you / Another year with nothing to do . . . Professor Anderson “Andy” Cartwright has always found in Stooges lyrics what his colleagues find in, say, Toni Morrison. He sits inside his sputtering VW bug, engine coughing out death rattles, A/C cranked almost as high as the stereo, looking through the bug-stained windshield at the faculty parking lot. Returning to the familiar, to the first faculty meeting of the fall semester, one week before classes start. Another year for me and you . . .

  And so it begins. It’s a potent mixture of dread, resignation, and relief when the students come back to UF, to Santa Fe, to the Gainesville College of Arts and Crafts. The adjuncts return for yet another go-around, somehow surviving yet another broke-ass summer. Out of their aged cars they trod across the lots, shuffling off to take their seats in the auditorium, to await this year’s wisdom passed down from on high, wisdom that will surely sound remarkably similar to the wisdom passed down from on high last year, and the year before that, and the year before that. The administrators also return, to the next and closest lot to the campus, driving freshly-waxed status symbols, each with a bumper sticker on the back giving lip service to their leftist idealistic childhoods. Tanned, bright-eyed and flabby from their vacation homes somewhere far, far away. It’s another year for me and you / another year with nothing to do, Iggy sings in a weary wisdom well beyond his 21 years.

  This routine is such a contrast to the wide-eyed first-time lives of the students back on the streets and sidewalks in and around campus. Mom and Dad are here to help with the big move, as their freshmen children, zitty and apprehensive, wear their senior year high school t-shirts as they lug clothes, compact discs, and keepsakes from the minivan to their new home, the smaller-than-expected dormroom. They are nervous and awkward, fearful yet hopeful of the unknown immediate futures. Already, sorority pledges are led around by the neck from leashes held by future sorority sisters, as fraternity pledges run across busy intersections completely naked with the word “PLEDGE” painted on their backs in a nasty shade of poop brown body paint. Others less desperate to fit in immediately take to University Avenue, exploring their new city, freed from the cliques and drama of the hometown high school adolescent past. Book stores. Record stores. Thrift stores. Cafes.

  At the start of every academic year, Andy observes all of this, as he plays the role—an anonymous extra in the Big Picture, really—of the struggling adjunct professor waddling off to sit through a meeting he finds pointless, carrying a yellow legal pad and pen to take notes for a meeting he knows will not be noteworthy, but the meeting pays, and he needs the money.

  He should shut off the car, should fit the cardboard sunshade across the dash, and walk across the faculty lot, the administrator lot, onto the campus and to the meeting. But he can’t leave The Stooges for this all-too-predicatble routine.

  They will file into the white-gray auditorium and take their seats. They will sigh, “Ready for another year?” and sigh their responses. They will joke of how they already need a drink. Andy does not dislike his colleagues—and even personally likes most of them—but in the auditorium for the first meeting, it’s impossible not to feel as if Andy is sharing a miserable experience with them that nobody signed on for—busting ass for a Master’s degree only to work a no-future gig with a limited career trajectory. And yet, it’s somehow more comfortable to soldier on—year in and year out—than to actually find a teaching job with benefits, or to simply find another job that pays better, or to move away for more meaningful opportunities. And when the meeting starts, the administrators will take their turns at the podium, and they will say what they think the adjuncts need to hear, and the overall effect is the opposite of what is intended: Instead of making the adjuncts feel like they’re a part of the Organization, they are made to feel even less a part of the Organization.

  Andy can’t think about it too much; it leads down too many dark and depressing trails. And he knows the worst is when he’s teaching in the classroom, and it’s firing on all cylinders, and he’s at his best and that miraculous eye-wonder the students get when they connect the dots is in full effect . . . The worst because lingering beyond that magical moment, he knows it won’t matter to anyone in the department and in the institution beyond the department. To the institution, he is a cipher, in the ledger under “Seasonal Help.” That’s what gets him—loving a place and a job and an institution that doesn’t love you back. Andy imagines that most people, they’re mostly indifferent to their jobs and the jobs are mostly indifferent to them, but as long as those paychecks and benefits keep coming, it’s ok. But this gig is different. It’s an avocation, an opportunity to inspire and be inspired, even if everything circling around and outside it is dreadful, and you’re left feeling like you have no future, and that you’re not growing, as it looks to Andy when he observes his colleagues as they walk along to the first meeting of the semester, as it looks to Andy observing the administrators as they wait out the clock to retirement, as it looks to Andy when he observes himself.

  In the car, as The Stooges switch to “I Wanna Be Your Dog,” fear shoots from Andy’s brain to his extremities, settles into the pit of his stomach. It’s the contrast of these new students and these old teachers. It’s the fear Andy will never be the writer he wants to be, at the rate he’s going. That he will never amount to anything, especially if he sticks around. The politics of the place, the complexities in the politics of the place, the complexities in his relationship to the place and the people employed by it, will drive him crazy if he keeps thinking about it. It is this fear: That there is nothing—and will be nothing— new under the sun. This career is going nowhere, but he will not, cannot, leave Gainesville.

  In the summer, Andy found work painting apartments. What he loved was the simplicity of it. He’d work all day, then go home and write. The work stayed at work. There was nothi
ng to take home except old paint-stained clothing. His mind was free while the body worked, and when he got home, there was the typewriter. Unclogged and liberated from the hundreds of pages of student assignments each week, the lesson plans, the student conferences, the futile meetings, the phone calls, the letters, the thousand-and-one impositions on his time that the Department and the Institution demanded, Andy could devote all of his energy to what he most wanted to do. And there was so much to show for it—literally hundreds of pages of short stories only a draft or two away from being submittable, and he knew, sitting there in the car as the speakers blared Ron Asheton’s sacrosanct wah-wahs, and the A/C howled through the vents, and the dichotomy of the very old and the very new shared space on-campus, he will have no chance to return to any of these stories, no time to revise, hone, and yeah, craft.

  The idea to simply leave, to walk away and not look back, isn’t really an idea so much as it is an instinct. Painting apartments paid the rent and the bills. At the end of the day, the life of the adjunct is minimum-wage work. It is work he loves, yes, but that’s all it is, and even that, obviously, only goes so far. And it drains him of all creativity. The adjunct’s life is a perpetual limbo, and if he doesn’t leave now, he will never be a real writer, will never be what he believes he is put on this earth to do.

  The Stooges’ first album transitions into the extended creepy slow chanting of “We Will Fall.” Professor Anderson “Andy” Cartwright shifts the car into reverse, backs out of his spot, shifts to drive, smiles, sputters out of the parking lot.

  Ahead is the brilliant uncertainty of a future not carved out in semester-long increments. Ahead is the great not-knowing. The fear dissipates. The anxiety and resignation are no more. Andy has rejoined the kids on the sidewalks, each second a new beginning instead of a downward spiral. To assert control again, to welcome the new, to be reborn into the image of what he wants to be, needs to be. This is all that matters. Andy pulls into the driveway of his house, immediately shuts off the wheezing Bug and the whirling pound of the Stooges’ “Little Doll,” and in a succession of 1975 Carlton Fisk World Series victory hops from the car to the front door, reenters his house, back to the story in the typewriter, back to life.

  DRUNK JOHN MEETS A GIRL

  The girls coming into the store today are—“Don’t make me say ‘pissa,’ John. I don’t talk like this to amuse you. They look fine, ok? Fine,” Boston Mike says, and I couldn’t agree more.

  Measuring our time in 20 minute album sides. Me and Boston Mike, together once again on a beautiful Sunday morning in late August, and it’s beautiful because the kids are back in school, and by kids, I mean girls, and by girls, I mean nnnnuggets.

  We’re making the best of it, stuck behind this depressing-ass counter. Mike throws on Avail, I throw on Archers of Loaf. He throws on the Wipers, I throw on Royal Trux. When that’s over, I scour our used bins and pull out a not-mint copy of “Street Hassle” by Lou Reed, and goddamn if this isn’t hitting me just right.

  As Lou Reed talk-sing-moan-pleads, “Leave me leave me leave me leave me leave me aloooooone,” Boston Mike and I sneak sips of Old Ham-town tallboys and assess the new wave of nnnnuggety freshness taking their first awkward parentless steps off-campus into Electric Slim’s to find their deplorable ska or emo or major label poppy punk, wallet chains a’ dangling, so fresh-faced and uncorrupted by the drama in this scene to which they shall surely succumb.

  “Hey Mike,” I say. “See the bleach blonde in the stupid Candlebox t-shirt and the acid-washed denim shorts? In two months? She’ll have a mohawk, maybe even her first tattoo. She’ll be the biggest Play the Piano Drunk Like a Percussion Instrument Until the Fingers Begin to Bleed A Bit fan in town.”

  Boston Mike laughs. “These freshmen, it’s always at the halfway point in the semester when they get their first mohawk, right?”

  “Yup. Just in time for Thanksgiving. It’s like ‘Take that, Mom, Dad, and Suburbia! I make my own rules now!’ Oh, and see the dyed black short stuff with the December’s February t-shirt flipping through The Cure CDs? It’s such a minor sideways step in the ol’ youth culture to go from goth to emo, right?”

  “Naw. We gotta cure her of that.”

  “It can’t be done. Nobody takes us seriously here,” and I’m right. But suddenly man, it’s like, all at once, the summer, and the feeling like the town is yours and yours alone ends. The parties pick up, old friends come back, and everything’s no longer at the mercy of summer’s lethargy, it’s at the mercy of that giant university there across the street. Yeah, I earned my degree there, two years ago, and like all English majors, I now work retail. Sorry about my luck, right?

  “What record is this?” this uber-nnnnugget asks, all punk rock and everything. Short black hair. White skin. Black t-shirt of one of those Oi bands where the lettering is all army stencil and spelling out all kinds of working class anarcho-syndicalist platitudes. She peers up at me behind the counter with these big dark eyes.

  I really hate that cliché about love, you know, the one some knowing authority who’s inevitably like a fuckin’ sassy urban single lady in her mid-30s spouts off between sips of boxed wine and handfuls of Hershey’s Kisses, all like “Honey, you’ll find love when you least expect it.” Because, you’re at a bar, you’re at a party, you’re out buying groceries or walking around, it’s always on your mind. It’s like when you’re talking about blinking and you can’t stop paying attention to when you blink, you know? Shit, it’s why I go out at night. You think I go out and drink this much so I can talk to my dumbass friends? No. I keep hoping to meet somebody, but I’ve met everybody here and I know everybody here that’s worth knowing, except for this tiny-tiny window when there are new, heretofore uncorrupted girls like this nnnnnugget looking up at me—here at work when, I can tell you, love really is the last thing on my mind—standing here at work—sipping beers and flipping records—head and mind in a hungover daze and mindlessly checking out the new girls in town like it matters.

  “It’s ‘Street Hassle,’ ” I try to smile, as the backing vocal ladies on the record harmonize “Hey nonny nonny, hey nonny nonny, hey nonny nonny, hey nonny nonny.” These nonsense words convey it so much better than I ever could, and the beer’s no help. “Lou Reed,” I mumble, reaching over and down to hand her the record cover.

  “Cool,” she says, turning it from front to back, smiling a giant, hundred-tooth smile. “Can I buy it?” So pure, so unmired in the maelstrom of Gainesville’s bullshit.

  “On CD or vinyl?” You’re no doubt expecting, since I’m a record store clerk and all, that this is some kind of coolness quiz on my part—like, if she says “vinyl,” I’ll know she’s perfect, and if she says “CD,” I’ll forever look down on her for wanting the medium preferred by the stupid masses, but honestly, I don’t give a shit if she wants the thing on a fuckin’ CD, LP, betamax, 8-track, 12th generation cassette dub. But it does my heart good when she does say “Vinyl,” after all.

  I remove the needle from Street Hassle, place the record back into its unwieldy cheap plastic sleeve, and it’s me staring at her staring at Lou Reed staring at her through aviators and holding a cigarette.

  “He looks serious,” she says, and she laughs this laugh, a soft girlish giggle, and I have to laugh, a soft drunken heh-heh, because she’s laughing, and the beery bravado—why do I even bother drinking?—isn’t needed, and I’m as vulnerable as I’ve been in a long, long time.

  “He is serious,” I laugh, taking the record cover back from her and inserting the sleeve. “Serious dude,” I add—sounding as inarticulate as ever. Fuck.

  I feel like I need to do something to make her laugh, and all I can think to do is hold the cover of Street Hassle to my head—I’m one of those idiots who gets a kick out of sticking album covers where there’s a life-size headshot of the performer up to my head—and saying in a goofy voice, “Hey, look at me, I’m Lou Reed! I’m crazy! I’m taking a walk on the wild side!”

  I can’t
hear any laughter; I hate myself. This constitutes a “good idea” in my dumbass head. I lower the record, and Boston Mike is giving me one of those looks he gives when he’s amused at my failed attempts at interacting with the world at large. I can’t even lower the album enough to face the nnnnugget, assuming she hasn’t walked out, freaked out over whatever it is I’m trying to do here.

  But then I do set the record on the counter, and she’s still smiling, looking at me, grabs the record and says, “I wanna do that.”

  She holds Street Hassle up to her head, and it’s the head of Lou Reed, glaring at the camera, over the body of this young punkette in her oi band outfit, who’s laughing out, “Heyyyy, I’m Lou Reed. I smoke cigarettes and wear sunglasses. Look at me, guys.”

  We’re laughing at this, and when she lowers the album, all eyes turn to Boston Mike, who shakes his head at both of us all like, “I’m not doin’ that. No way.”

  She extends her hand. “My name’s Sicily,” she says.

  “Sicily?”

  “I’m Sicilian.”

  “Ok.” I feel stupid and awkward and as you can probably tell, I wouldn’t know how to talk to girls if you stood behind them with cue cards and gave me an ear piece through which you could tell me the perfect Casanovan expressions. I think that’s why I earned the “Drunk” in my name. Drunk John. After a few beers, I stop caring about how I don’t know how to talk to anyone.

  “And you are?” her expression like she’d expected me to volunteer this information earlier. I tell her.

  “Nice meeting you, John.” She sets Street Hassle on the counter. “I think I wanna buy this.”