“Yeah?” I mumble.
“Yeah. You sold me.”
“I am a professional.” Ha ha ha. But she giggles at my stupid joke anyway.
I hit the cash register, give her the ten-percent-off friend discount, rounding down and knocking two dollars off on top of that. “Two dollars,” I say.
Our hands touch as she hands me the two singles. In a record store, like all used retail, you touch a lot of nasty people, with a lot of nasty possessions. Everything’s dusty, grimy, germ-ridden. This little touch—as fleeting as it is—is a welcome respite.
Put the record in the plastic bag. Hand her the plastic bag. “Thank you for choosing Electric Slim’s,” I announce, trying to sound corporate or something.
Sicily still laughs at my lame attempts at humor. “And thanks for the Lou Reed,” she says. “See you soon.”
“Yup.” I shrug. Hem. Haw. Twitch. Tick. Sicily leaves the store. And that, my friends, is how I talk to girls. Smooth, right?
“She likes you,” Boston Mike says.
“Ya think so?”
“No shit I do.” Boston Mike looks away, towards the front window, then mutters “Dumbass . . . ”
I take the price gun, fully intending to return to what I was doing before, pricing stacks of used records, but with a head awash in Old Hamtramck, and a body awash in adrenaline from what just happened . . .
“I should go talk to her, right? Like, right now?” I ask Boston Mike.
Boston Mike, I can tell, is building up to a flurry of furious Masshole cursings, but before he gets started, we’re rudely interrupted by one of our regular wino-ass garbage trawlers entering the store with a large stack of damp torn moldy jazz fusion records to sell. And it ain’t the good jazz fusion either, but like, the shit you hear at Kinko’s. Just awful. And this guy likes to chat us up while we go through his found shit, like he struck gold out in the crik and can’t wait to reap the rewards. “That’s Spy-row-gy-ra,” he informs us. “That’s a popular band from back before you were born probably. And that copy looks like mint condition, you ask me.”
Oh Lord. It’s like: How many stacks of limp-dicked, weak-grooved noodly records with ridiculously dated 1983 silver sequined, piano-scarved, kee-tar playing mew-zish-ee-ans must a record clerk thumb through, before you call him a man? The answer, my friend, is blowing out Kenny G’s tasty sax. But I digress, because, while I’m about to help sort through this latest delivery of slimy, smelly mold-vinyl, Boston Mike grunts, “Yeah. Go. Now. Do it.”
I hop down from the register and run out to the sunny-muggy outside of this tiny plaza parking lot.
She’s almost to University when I yell, “Sicily! Hey!”
She turns and smiles, and it’s all so easy and so not cool, so totally corny having to put yourself out like this.
I jog to her. (Yeah. “Jog.” Awesome.) “So you’re new here, right?”
“Basically. I transferred from a community college in Orlando.”
“Orlando?”
“Yeah. You know.” She shrugs and I nod. We all have complicated, ambivalent relationships with this state and her people and her cities. Love, hate, frustration, joy, bitterness, splendor, despair. There’s no place like it, but every place is like it.
“Well let me show you around. Let me call you.”
Sicily laughs. “So you do this to all the new girls who come into your store? Swoop right in?”
“Nooo!” I say this a little too forcefully, like the dork I am.
“I’m kidding,” she says, opening her black purse (The purse, it’s covered in a bunch of buttons of bands I can’t stand, but I can fix that, right? Of course!), taking a scrap of paper and writing down her number.
Of course, a couple jerkoff friends of mine on bikes have to ride by in the parking lot, cutting through from University to the student ghetto and yelling, “Drunk John! What’s up, man! You drunk? You gonna be drunk at the party later?” and I feel my whole being deflate into some like shriveled forsaken pool toy.
“Why do they call you that?” she asks.
“It’s a joke,” is the first thing that pops into my mind. “It’s a long dumb story. I’ll tell you some time.”
“Sounds good. Call me,” she says, and I say, “I will,” and she smiles, turns around, crosses University and steps onto the now-hectic campus.
And me, I stand out here wondering if my luck is going to change, or how will my bad luck continue. Could this be a change for the better? Not that things are bad now, you know, but I keep thinking of how it can’t stay like this for much longer. I’m getting old, man. Twenty-four? Shit, time to collect my punk rock social security, retire, move to Florida. Oh wait.
A WELCOME STABILITY, A SHARED LOATHING
Ronnie finds a temp job at one of the off-campus used textbook stores. For 24 consecutive fourteen-hour days, he assembles photocopied articles taken from academic journals, fits them into brown plastic binders, then shrink-wraps them into copypacks assigned to upper-level classes from all disciplines. The hours are long, but after dish washing, plasma donation, and asbestos removal, sitting on his ass in an air-conditioned office with two kindly southern-accented grad students is the proverbial can of corn. Beyond this, skimming literally thousands of published thesis papers all day—with their constant usage of words like “bathetic,” “epistemological,” “tautological,” “psychosociopolitical,” and “post-Joycean”—is enough to inspire Ronnie to consider going to grad school. Why not?
By the time work is finished, it’s generally 9:00 or 10:00 p.m. Ronnie punches out each night, then walks straight to Maux’s apartment, or else she’s already at the Myrrh House waiting for him. They hang out, drink vodka, watch old movies, sleep (and only sleep), then Ronnie leaves for work the next morning, and Maux eventually leaves for class. There is a welcome stability to this. Ronnie is as settled as he has ever been in Gainesville, happy to be with a girl again, even if all it is is “hanging out,” even if she puts on this cold, spiteful, abrasive persona that Ronnie cannot take seriously. She tries so hard to hate everyone and everything, and it only makes him laugh. If this hatred was real, she would have ulcers, Ronnie thinks. She would be on her deathbed. It’s protection. It’s hiding under self-invented identities. Everybody around them does it to one degree or another, including Ronnie, especially Ronnie.
Living closer to the University, it is easy to see the effect tens of thousands of students have on the town. Shops empty in the summer are now packed. The sidewalks are no longer deserted. Gainesville offers those away from home for the first time unfettered adventure, and those away from home for the first time offer Gainesville unfettered adventure.
Each day, Ronnie makes new friends. They attend his parties. He attends theirs. Each night, leaving work, he runs into these new friends on University Avenue’s sidewalks, and they tell each other what they know and what they’ve heard about this or that person, this or that band, this or that girl.
One night while sunk into the old gray quicksandy couch in the living room of her cluttered might-as-well-be-a garret, Maux shows Ronnie the scrapbook in which she keeps all the comics she has drawn for the student newspaper. Her first published comic, from September, 1994, is a one-panel of a group of beret-clad “smug poetry majors” (so says the cartoon cloud above them, with an arrow pointing) standing on stage in a circle, reading “swill” (so says another cloud), holding journals with their left hand while their “dead-fish handshake” right hands stroke their “tiny dicks,” while their “self-satisfied” audience sits behind tables observing the moment with glowing smiles. The caption above this scene reads “THE REVEREND B. STONED’S ECLECTIC CIRCLE JERK.”
“The hate mail for that one was glorious,” Maux laughs.
Page after page, a balancing act between satire and misanthropy. Everything and everyone in town (she never bothers with politics or celebrity) is a potential target for derisive, mean-spirited laughter. And yet, it is still funny. Ronnie enjoys it—laughs from the gu
t, laughs out of shock, laughs because it’s good—even if he feels he needs to wash the nihilism off of him when they’re finished. It reminds Ronnie of what he used to do and who he used to be at UCF, columns veering between silly and caustic, writing about what he thought he knew, inspired more by zines than anything he read in English Comp fiction anthologies, trying to be gonzo and almost succeeding, except it ultimately didn’t matter because Ronnie didn’t want to pursue journalism in any form after graduation—not like anyone in “the real world” would have him, and besides, there was the band and the novel-in-progress and Henry Miller saying “Always merry and bright!” and his girlfriend to sustain him through the penniless post-graduation months, except when they didn’t, and here he is now, with someone currently experiencing the same notoriety he once knew.
She turns to a page that instantly catches Ronnie’s eye: This typical Gainesville scenester type hanging from a gallows, his wallet chain used as the noose wrapped around his neck, quite dead, holding a pen in one hand and a coffee mug in the other as vultures swoop in on a collision course with the eye sockets and rabid coyotes and laughing hyenas wait drooling at his feet. Below this, the caption reads, “THE COFFEEDRINKER FANZINE SUCKS,” in letters drawn in the same cut-and-paste “ransom note” font as the local punk fanzine itself.
“That’s hilarious!” Ronnie howls, pointing. “That guy hated my old band.” It sounds weird and unpleasant, Ronnie referring to the band in the past tense, to not be in a band at all. Indeed, Ronnie remembers the lower-case stream-of-consciousness review of their show at the Righteous Freedom House in the pages of Coffeedrinker: “The Laraflynnboyles are typical of the insincere irony of Orlando and their cornball act doesn’t inspire me to fight the problems plaguing our ugly world.”
“I hated your old band,” Maux laughs. “But yeah, I used to date him. Briefly.”
“What? That guy?”
“He said he liked my drawings. Really, he just wanted to get in my pants. Can you imagine? A male with ulterior motives? Whatever, he was terrible and awkward in bed.” Maux lightly punches Ronnie in the arm. “You should be glad he hated your band. Wear it as a badge of honor. In a town of emo whiners, he’s the whiniest.”
Ronnie laughs, sips from a glass filled with far more vodka than tonic. “Yeah, why is everybody so emo here?”
“I don’t know. I hate emo.”
“Finally. A hatred we both share.”
Maux laughs at this, closes the scrapbook, tosses it to the floor, shifts closer to Ronnie.
“Could they be any more passive-aggressive?” Ronnie continues.
“Such a narrow definition of what constitutes sincerity,” Maux says.
“All that whining and moaning and groaning.” Their thighs touch, fingertips moving ever-so-closer.
“Could they take themselves and their oh-so-precious feelings any more seriously?”
“Wahhhhh. I don’t live in a ghetto.”
“Wahhhhh. I don’t live in a developing country.”
“Wahhhhh. I don’t get to live in a concentration camp and instead I get every material need fulfilled.”
“Wahhhhh. I don’t have a terminal disease.”
“And so full of false modesty, always like, ‘Oh we suck, thanks for enduring our set . . . ’ ”
“Phony self-deprecation.”
“Jeez, Maux,” Ronnie says, leaning in, hands on Maux’s thighs, faces inches apart. “I’m so . . . turned on right now.”
Maux whispers, “Me too,” before passionate kisses, a sprint to her bedroom . . .
In bed, after they’ve finished, Ronnie turns to Maux and says, “Just promise me one thing.”
“What?”
“Promise you won’t draw me as a dead man if we stop hanging out.”
Maux laughs that pre-teen weasel laugh of hers, punches Ronnie in the arm. “It’s my ace in the hole buddyboy. That’s why you better treat me right.”
Ronnie laughs, wondering if he will treat Maux right. He has his doubts.
THREE MILE MORNING RUN ON THE BEACH
“Do you think he means it?” Sally Anne asks her husband, five steps into walking off the three mile run on the beach. She’s thoroughly unwinded as Charley, still catching his breath, has actually been thinking the same question, the answering machine message replaying in his head.
Was their son sincere when he left the message on their answering machine last night saying he was happy? They didn’t hear it until this morning—out for dinner the night before as Ronnie called, heard the recording of Sally Anne’s “Hahhh! We cain’t come to the phone right now, but if you leave a message, we’ll call you back thanks!”, cleared his throat and after an extended “Uhhhhm” that almost went on for too long, said, “Yeah hey! Mom and Dad . . . just calling to say hey. Things are going pretty good here. Working, making friends, started hanging out with this girl, so that’s cool. Settling in. You know. But yeah—feeling happy to be here. Happy. Yeah. Everything’s good. Enjoying Gainesville. [sigh] Definitely. Alright, well, talk to you soon.”
The run—from their house, past the other beach houses, turning back once they get into the part of the beach where the hotels and the hordes of tourists start dotting then crowding out the sand—was, for Charley, a reflection on this message. You need a decoder ring trying to figure out what Ronnie actually means, what’s true and what isn’t, the inflection behind the voice—if it’s a forced brave front or if he really and truly is what he says he is. More to the point, if existence is suffering as the Buddha says, has Ronnie learned to accept this? He could never put that into words to his son, how conditions would never be ideal, and would often be nowhere near ideal, and for Ronnie’s generation, the answer was to wallow in it, to writhe in it, to get angry but to do nothing constructive about it. Maybe he was wrong about the generation—he loathed such blanket generalizations on age groups born in a certain time—but Charley had read some of Ronnie’s old columns for the school paper. Where did that come from? The cynicism, the sarcasm, the despair, the bitterness? Like the saying goes . . . send ’em to school and buy ’em books . . . the unfinished part of that expression, of course, hangs out there to be filled in by every member of the older set witnessing the lack of commonsense and experience in children. There are people in the world who will always need something to complain about, who aren’t content unless they’re, well, bitching about any old thing. They could own their own island in the South Pacific, with their dream home, and one thousand harem women of all beautiful shapes, hair color, skin color, and charming personality, fulfilling every material, psychological, and—yes—sexual need, and they’d complain that the sky wasn’t the right shade of cornflower blue. Something. Anything. Charley has spent the last few years wondering if their son was becoming that kind of person. And so, the rare upbeat answering machine message, after so much sulking and brooding and sneering, is unexpected.
When he has finally caught his breath enough to answer Sally Anne’s question, Charley shrugs, smiles, slaps Sally Anne on the ass. “Let’s go inside,” he says.
TIME’S UP
Ronnie has knocked several times on the front door to the trailer. No answer. Alvin’s van isn’t parked on the dead-grass makeshift driveway.
It’s a Sunday late-morning day off, the first day off in weeks. Roger is at work. Maux is studying. At the kitchen table, drinking coffee and thinking about nothing much at all, Ronnie remembers he still has the keys to the trailer.
He had forgotten to return them during the hasty move out of the double-wide. In the sweat of August, in under half an hour, Ronnie tossed his possessions into the cab of the pick-up he borrowed from William, taking out everything except some plates and, more importantly, his vinyl copy of the Buzzcocks’ Spiral Scratch EP. He figures he can return the keys, remove (and presumably, scrub the months of filth off of) the plates and find that copy of Spiral Scratch—whose songs had been burning holes in his mind as lyrics like “they keep me pissin’ adrenaline” and “I’ve
been dying in the living room” have ricocheted around his mind for weeks now.
Into the dying blandy apple green sedan. The old drive back from “the action” to the trailer. University to SW 2nd Avenue, winding through football practice fields and law schools and the great Floridian verdure. From there, side streets bisecting softball and baseball fields, and the Harn Museum of Art, where, last summer, broke and underfed, when he should have been looking for a job, Ronnie studied the Lachaise sculptures on display with William. Up ahead, good old 34th Street. It will be great seeing Alvin again. He was so understanding about Ronnie’s situation. Anyway, it will be a chance to say a more relaxed and lengthy goodbye to the trailer and its many smells.
Ronnie reaches into his right front pocket of his jeans, pulls out the keys, finds the trailer key, puts it into the lock, when he hears the unmistakable pump of a rifle, followed by a loud, authoritative “FREEZE!”
In the chest-caving, ball-tingling panic of the moment, Ronnie recognizes the voice as belonging to the Gulf War veteran butch lesbian neighbor, she with the rusted brown truck parked outside adorned with the “TED KENNEDY KILLED MORE PEOPLE WITH HIS CAR THAN I HAVE WITH MY GUN” bumpersticker. Hands shaking, Ronnie drops the keys.
“Step away from the door, sir!”
Ronnie steps back, slowly steps backwards down the stairs, hands up, because that’s how they do it on the TV when characters get guns pulled on them. A surprisingly rational and calm mindset takes hold inside Ronnie. He has a rifle pointed at his back. Pointed at him to prevent his retrieval of a Buzzcocks EP.
Ronnie turns around. The woman stands to the immediate left of her trailer, like she just emerged from around the corner, rifle raised to shoulder blade, angry eyebrows furrowed over the rifle stock, finger on the trigger.
She lowers the rifle. “He don’t want you comin’ ’round here no more.” Her hair is buzzed spiky, blonde-gray. She wears a black sleeveless t-shirt that reads “DYKER BIKER” in white iron-on lettering, and camo cutoffs.
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