Losing in Gainesville (9781940430331)

by Costello, Brian

  Ronnie’s voice, never as brave as his mind and body, even on good days, struggles to leave his throat. He chokes out, “I’m here to pick up what I left behind.”

  She shakes her head from side to side. “Oh no. No way. He told me to keep an eye on you in case you snuck in.”

  “And that’s why you have a rifle.” The panic subsides a little bit, replaced by a rising anger that someone would resort to this over something so silly.

  “It’s in the Constitution.”

  Ronnie isn’t in the mood, nor is he in the condition, to debate the pisspoor sentence construction of the Second Amendment. “I’m leaving,” he says. “Let me get my keys, and I’m gone.”

  “And don’t come back,” the woman yells after him as he climbs the steps to the front door, bends over, grabs his keys.

  Ronnie walks to his car, looks at Alvin’s neighbor. “Jesus,” he mutters, climbs into the car, starts it, backs out, and peels away in quadruple time, finally feeling his hummingbird pulse, itchy with burst sweat glands. And to think, Ronnie was hoping to finally get the chance to say “Thanks for everything!” to Alvin, and yes, “everything” entailed living rent and bill-free. The blandy apple green sedan has never gone faster than when Ronnie accelerates out of the wooded trailer park and the rundown sidestreet, back on 34th Street, too crazed to note once again the mix of sad southern poverty and hot pastel collegiate lifestyle apartment living.

  Ronnie will never see Alvin again, and eventually, when the shock wears off, will be of the mind that, in the big picture, he probably deserved to have a rifle pulled on him for his actions and inactions of the summer.

  Mouse will hear third-hand rumors from time to time, and pass them along to Ronnie. Alvin was arrested in a not-elaborate meat-stealing scheme with a grocery store butcher. Alvin finds a girlfriend at Waffle House one night who immediately moves in and makes Alvin her pimp, even bringing up her friends from South Florida to turn the trailer into a double-wide of ill repute. Alvin finds work as a camp counselor for disabled teens. Alvin moves to Alaska to work in a cannery. Alvin finds work roadying for the classic rock band Nazareth on a reunion tour. At the end of the day, any and all of these rumors were as absurd as the rumor that Alvin had two buttholes. Ronnie preferred imagining Alvin moving up to a duplex, or an apartment complex with a swimming pool and shuffleboard, maybe even a small home somewhere, as he and a wife who understands him quietly sit in the living room and watch television, expressing their skepticism regarding the veracity of the commercials breaking up the sitcoms with a nice long “Pfffffffffffffffffffffffffffff.”

  TEST TUBE BABY FROM A WALLA WALLA STREET

  “It’s not funny! Fuck!” Ronnie yells, standing in Mouse’s bedroom, telling him and Icy Filet what happened. Strangely enough, Ronnie feels more panic-stricken than he did when the rifle was actually aimed at the back of his head. Heart still racing, the unrelenting sensation of being on the verge of hyperventilating, exacerbated by their laughter, their absorption with each other rather than what happened to him twenty minutes prior. “I could have died!”

  They giggle as Ronnie acts out the action, giggle at each turn and twist of the story like it’s some kind of hilarious joke. In bed, in underclothes, fetally conjoined like bed-bound John and Yoko not taking their eyes off each other—Icy Filet stroking Mouse’s goatee, Mouse’s dentures reflecting the late summer sun through the bedroom’s soiled windows as he har-harrs. Mouse runs his fingers through Icy’s short black-blonde-red-green-blue hair.

  “She wasn’t going to use it, Ronnie,” Mouse says, still not looking away from Icy Filet. “It’s for show. She wanted the chance to justify having the rifle, and you gave it to her.”

  Ronnie looks to the low ceiling, the gargoyle masks and sloppy collegiate abstract art on canvases nailed to the walls. “Jesus,” he says. “You guys are high.”

  “We sure are,” Icy Filet laughs, still stroking Mouse’s goatee. “But that’s not the point. You should play him the tape, Mouse.”

  “Heh heh—yes!—heh!” Mouse quickly rolls out of his nauseatingly loving position in bed, hops one foot at a time into the living room, presses play on the tapedeck of his stereo, laughing like a gleeful sadist. “This is the best one yet, brah!” Mouse proclaims. “Listen to this while I run off to sit on the toilet, heh heh heh!”

  “Oh no,” Ronnie says, looking to Icy Filet, who continues gazing into the direction of where Mouse’s supine body once laid.

  “You really do need to get high,” Icy Filet says to Ronnie, not moving her head to speak in his direction.

  Before Ronnie could tell her why that is a terrible idea, the music starts. The frequencies are lower than Mouse’s previous efforts, like an artified attempt to replicate the low-rider truck bass throbbing out of the subwoofers of any given Floridian weekend night. Initially, there is nothing but this rhythm, rattling the windows, and then, Icy Filet’s speak-sing:

  “Armor All-ed interior on a turtle wax face

  steppin' in the club like you came from outer space

  a Sun Ra Saturnalian with a Plutonian mind

  bitches steppin' up thinkin' that they fine

  Peter Paul and Mary, Don and Neneh Cherry

  your trunk is full of junk and you look like Cousin Larry

  jammin' on the one, run Forrest run

  Coffeemate creamer and a bear clawed sticky bun”

  Between the rhymes, the beat continues, the windows rattle, and over the din, samples from the television program Perfect Strangers: Cousin Balki, proclaiming over and over again, “A stitch in time saves ten.” Icy Filet resumes:

  “Test tube baby from a Walla Walla street

  Icy is my name and Mouse provides the beats

  we got a Coleman sax with a Danko bass

  American birth and Floridian grace

  Carol and Mike Seaver, Doctor Johnny Fever

  chillin’ in a hot tub with Eldridge Cleaver

  Terminator X, reps on the Bowflex

  Chex Mixmaster with a hankerin’ for Tex-Mex”

  The song is over in three minutes, finishing in a frenzied orgy of low bass beats, the opening bass line of The Band’s cover of “Don’t Do It” from The Last Waltz, and the opening harmolodics from the Ornette Coleman album Free Jazz. When it ends, Mouse sprints out of the bathroom, leaps through the bedroom doorway and dives onto the bed. He, stretches, reclines, laughs, turns to Ronnie. “Yeah? And?”

  “Your songs . . . these raps . . . they’re really starting to get better,” Ronnie says. “You know, it’s still very Beck, very Beckish and all, but there’s a bit of Doctor Octagon and Dylan thrown in.”

  “Oh, Ronnie,” Icy Filet says, pulling in Mouse to cuddle. “Such the little critiquer.”

  “Aw, well, you know,” Ronnie says, blushing, looking away from the bed. “It was actually kinda soothing, after getting a rifle pulled on me for the first, and, I hope, last time.”

  “Soothing!” Mouse repeats. A frenzy of smoochy-smooch lip thwacks between Mouse and Icy Filet. Between kisses, Mouse says, “If we keep at it, we’ll be sensations. Sensations!” Mouse uncuddles from Icy, rolls out of the bed, stands, announces, “I’m getting beer. To celebrate. Hooray for beer, heh heh heh!”

  “Sensations,” Icy Filet says to Ronnie. “It’s plausible, right?”

  “Why not?” Ronnie says.

  Mouse returns with three cans of Dusch Light, hands one to Ronnie. “Nah,” Ronnie says. “I’m going home. I need to forget this stupid day. See what Maux’s up to.”

  “She’s crazy, you know,” Mouse says.

  “Totally,” Icy Filet adds, reaching across the bed to grab a Dusch Light can from Mouse. She opens it, chugs, turns, rearranges the pillows so she’s upright enough to drink.

  “It’s what they tell me,” Ronnie says.

  “Good luck with that,” Mouse laughs, like he did when he offered Alvin’s trailer as a terrific place to live.

  RIDING ON THE METROGNOME

  You set the
Metrognome to the left of Ronnie’s front door, bang on the window, as the Myrrh poster with its black power salutes and burning draft cards glares at you like you’re The Man they’ve become. (And nevermind how you got here, how you lugged this three foot tall Metrognome—with his painted red boots, blue pants, green shirt, white beard, wise blue eyes, cherubic cheeks, and red hat with one upturned flap. You can always piece it together in the morning.)

  “Ronnie!” you yell. Bang the door again. Now that you’ve stopped running, everything spins. Dizzy, you step away to barf in the dirty side yard. It’s a rational barf, one of those barfs you’ve learned to anticipate, when your body tells you, “You know, William, I do believe I am going to vomit now,” and your brain responds, “Yes, body, I understand. If I could get you to give me a minute to find a decent place to throw up, that would be terrific, ‘kay?” When you find the spot, a patch of grass between red ant hills, it is simply a matter of bending over, “Bleeeeeeeeeahhhh” gags, splatter. You’re not doing this on the street, in a car, in front of the door, on someone’s rug. This is a good place and you are reasonable and logical—considerate, even—in your blacked out state.

  “William? You alright?” you hear after the front door half-opens.

  “Yesh! Hang on!” you manage between heaves, one index finger upraised. “Uh minnit, dude!”

  That’s it: Once more, and you’re done. You always feel better after you throw up the booze. You turn around, try rising to a standing posture.

  “Rrrrrrrronnnie!” you announce as you round the corner. “Ya gotta let me in. I got something for you!” You point towards that heavy-ass gnome you’ve been lugging all the way from . . . somewhere.

  “Get in here,” Ronnie says, laughing. Laughing at you. Of course he’s awake. As you know, the blessing and curse of living in a party house in the student ghetto is that people come by at all hours. Tonight, or, this morning, that someone is you.

  “This is important Rrrrrrrronnie!” You lift and hold this twenty pound . . . fuckin’ . . . whatevertheshit . . . dehhhhhh . . . then you set it down again.

  “Oh yeah?” he says as you stumble through the door.

  “Ronnie, Ronnie, Ronnie Altamont,” you continue, standing in the entryway. “What I have here is a gnome. But . . . but . . . it’s not just any gnome. It’s a mmmmetrognome.”

  Familiar girlish weaselly laughter from the back of the living room, and when you step in, you see Maux. She laughs her mean laugh as she stares at you. “You’re ridiculous, William. You drink like a dumbass, dumbass.”

  Ronnie carries the metrognome into the house, sets it in the middle of the living room. Roger rises from the long couch, hops over it, runs to the metrognome. “Let me rub it,” he says when he arrives, bending over to pat its stomach. “For good luck.”

  The three of you stand around the metrognome, but Maux, she glares from the couch. Through the booziness, her seething unrelenting dislike shoots across this large living room. She hates you now. Why? You don’t care. It’s just her style. But you, you have a metrognome. And you’re drunk. So. Whatever.

  “Alright, William,” Ronnie says in an indulgent tone. “What exactly is a metrognome, and how is it different from regular gnomes?”

  “See, that’s the thing,” you start to explain, but as you begin putting it into words, all like “See, you got this gnome, this gnome I stole, from somewhere, then you put a metrognome inside it in the hole there at the bottom, then stick some mics around it and . . . voila!” you realize what a stupid idea it is.

  Ronnie laughs, repeats the word “Metrognome,” then asks, “You want a beer?”

  “Of course I wanna beer,” you say, but by the time Ronnie walks across the living room and into the kitchen, you’re on the floor, sitting next to the Metrognome, stroking its ceramic beard. Ronnie sets the Old Hamtramck tallboy between you and your Metrognome. You lean back, stretch out, lay on your back.

  “Maux, you suck,” you yell, turning, left side of your face on the cool dirty hardwood floor. “Everybody knows it except Ronnie. You’re a mean person!”

  “Thanks, rummy!” Maux shouts from the couches.

  “And Roger,” you continue, because you’ve made these connections now and you need to share them because they need to know these things about themselves because you won’t say it in the morning and you may never say it or even think it again. “You want to be a film critic? If that isn’t duller than dogshit, I don’t know what is.”

  “Hey! Thanks! Thumbs up! Two big thumbs up!” Roger says, back at the couches with Maux and Ronnie.

  “And Ronnie? Well, you’re ok, for now, because you took me and the metrognome in when nobody else would answer the door.”

  “Yup. I am one of the good ones” Ronnie says, smirking at Roger and Maux. “Better than these dicks, anyway.”

  “What? We’re the dicks and Ronnie isn’t?” Maux says.

  “Yeah,” you slur. “That’s about what I’m saying . . . right now.” You think how Ronnie better appreciate it, as the floor feels grimy and grainy and footsteps approach and a blanket falls on your curled-up nausea-twitched body. Ronnie, yeah, he is one of the good ones, you think, but that’s only temporary, because, because, beeeecause, he’ll like get corrupted by . . . fuckin’ Gainesville . . . but the metrognome . . . oh metrognome . . . oh, metro, metro, metro, metro, metro, metro, metro, metro, gnoooome.

  •

  You open your eyes to a purple early morning. You are on a floor staring at the pointed red boots of a garden gnome. Disoriented. No past nor present. The images of the last few hours begin to sharpen into clarity. You recognize your surroundings—Ronnie’s living room—and why you’re not in your bed. Beer. Tequila. Whiskey. It was Neal’s idea, at the Drunken Mick. The Metrognome.

  You scoured the neighborhoods west of the university, Neal driving, your head outside the passenger seat window, scanning, in search of a gnome, any gnome, to steal, to use, for, um, performance art?

  “We’ll out-Mouse Mouse!” Neal ranted. “It’ll be the greatest performance ever!”

  “Yes! Yes!” you agreed, imagining setting the Metrognome on a barstool at the stageless performance corner in the Nardic Track with a microphone placed close, the hidden metronome inside the Metrognome. Nothing but the click click click sound, through effects pedals cranked over the cranked PA. Brilliant.

  When you found the gnome, in the middle of this large front yard in front of a house that even had the audacity to look like a cottage from the British countryside, you knew you would open the door as Neal’s car still coasted along at a fast-enough speed. You tried a military-style rolling out, but fell sideways then rolled into the grass from the road, and that’s why your pants are stained at the knees and your shirt is filthy. You run across crunchy Augustine grass blades until you put your arms around the gnome, lift with the knees, then run. Only, it’s more of a gasping gallop across the crunchy Augustine grass. It’s silent except for your panting, Neal’s idling sedan, and the late-night sprinklers across all those lawns. It was too funny and too ridiculous to ask why this is funny and ridiculous. You toss the metrognome in the back, return to the passenger seat, and off you go, laughing-laughing-laughing.

  Hours later, you lift yourself up from Ronnie’s living room hardwood floor, and you’re not sure if the joke is even all that funny, or if it’s anywhere near as funny as you thought it was last night.

  You had gone with Neal to his house to drop it off, but then you had what you thought was a better idea. A better idea!

  “Later,” you yell, at the intersection on University, where the stadium—the swamp, Oh! The Swamp!— is on your right. You open the car door, step out, reach into the back for the Metrognome, your Metrognome, hoist him, and sprint away. Neal shouts after you, “That’s ours! That’s our metrognome!” but you keep huffing and puffing down University before taking a left into the Student Ghetto. From there, the drunkenness increases, and how you avoided pursuit by Neal and how you ended up at Ro
nnie’s will remain a mystery.

  Now, you leave the Myrrh House. You walk down NW 4th Lane, turn left on 13th Street. The metrognome will stay at Ronnie’s; you’re too tired to lug the stupid thing back to your place. Neal will ask about it, will give you grief that you didn’t bring it back to the coach house. Let him get the stupid metrognome. It was his idea anyway, the dick.

  Throbbing head. Burning stomach. A head full of regrets. Unfocused eyes. How many times has this happened, and how many more times does it happen?

  Walking, shuffling, stumbling, limping past all these quiet apartments and houses where people had the sense enough to at least make it home and not sleep on someone’s dirty-ass hardwood floor. Home. Sleep it off. There will probably be a party later on tonight. No, there will be a party later on tonight. You can pick up the metrognome later. Or, you won’t. Who cares.

  THE AMBITIOUS FILM CRITIC AND THE FLOUNDERING ORLANDO EMIGRANT

  Roger clears his throat, lifts the hand-held tape recorder to his mouth, begins speaking in his “serious academic” voice:

  “What is immediately apparent in Sympathy for the Devil is Godard’s fervent belief in art as revolution, be it the evolution of a Rolling Stones song in the studio, graffiti on the walls of a bank building, the whole love and consumption diaspora of contemporary life, art as a realm in which to critique the most fundamental elements of modern Western Civ—Ronnie! You need to wake up! I can’t concentrate with you snoring.”

  “Sorry, dude . . . sorry.” Ronnie abruptly jolts awake on the smaller of the beige couches pushed together to form an L. He yawns, stretches, reclines. “Why don’t they cut out all that agit-prop bool-shit and show only the Stones footage. That’s the only good part in this.”

  “See, Ronnie? You’re too ignorant to understand.” Roger would say this often to Ronnie’s deliberately obnoxious questions. “These films cannot be expressed any other way.” As Ronnie would learn, Roger plays the Film Theorist Superiority Card as gratuitously as a New Yorker playing the countless variations on We Can Get a Bagel at 3:00 a.m. and You Can’t.