It is there, in the creepy emptiness of the vacated apartment building’s master bedroom, when Andy sees the tray covered in hardening white paint with the brush dipped inside, he hatches a plan so completely idiotic, it just might work.
(But first, a brief, vaguely Melvillian discussion about the Floridian cockroach.
The Floridian cockroaches are nothing like those tiny German cockroaches you see on the walls of large northern city kitchens in the summertime. Floridian cockroaches are FUCKING MONSTERS! They are as large as a toddler’s shoe. Larger. Fucking Gregor-Samsa sized. Stomp on them. They live! What is crushed of them gets on your shoes, or, worse, in the case of Andy, the roach guts stain the off-white carpeting of the apartment that needs to be completely finished before the end of the work day so the property managers can show the place to prospective renters tomorrow morning. This is why Andy does not and cannot simply squash the roach with his painter workboots and get on with his day.
They’ve even been known to fly, and when they do fly, they fly straight for your face.
The Floridian cockroaches are one of many ungentle reminders of the jungle lurking beyond the civilizing effects of air conditioning. Developer’s delusions to the contrary, it is the Floridian cockroach who rules Florida. It was here before people moved in, and it will remain when we are gone.)
Andy scrapes the Wite-Out-consistency paint with the brush off the tray, holds the brush in his upraised right arm like an Olympic torch. In the living room, the roach has not moved from the tarp. If he picks up the tarp and shakes it, maybe the roach will leave, but it is just as likely to fly towards him and attack. Floridian cockroaches know no fear. They don’t scurry when the lights are turned on. They don’t run when they hear footsteps. They possess Viet Cong patience.
Andy stands over the vile bug, nausea typhooning his chest when his eyes meet the thing. It twitches. Andy steps backwards, flings the paint on the brush at the roach, white blobs landing on it with papery thuds. Another paint fling. Another. Five, ten seconds. The thing’s still breathing. It is now a white roach. It still breathes. It flaps its horrific wings, tries to fly, but can’t, weighed down by the gloopy paint.
“Oh God oh God oh God!” Andy says, stepping backwards. The white roach crawls two inches forward, deeper into a fold in the tarp, then stops. It inhales and exhales, antennae swaying to and fro.
“They’re swingers, but they must have roach spray,” Andy says aloud. Out of the living room window, the unused swimming pool, walls covered in paintings of upright alligators in orange and blue helmets encircled by a happily cursive “GO GATORS!” Through open windows, that carsick feeling of stuffy heat. These roaches. Academia. Painting. Life. Life in Gainesville. Andy wants five o’clock, home, the desk, the writing. The writing trumps all of this. All of this.
•
These days are rooms and rooms, walls and walls. Each workaday, Andy tapes off the trim, throws tarp over the greasy white carpeting, rolls white paint over stained, chipped, and tack-holed apartment walls. Fresh coats, for fresh faces. These days are the wet gloopy sounds of the rollers, the chemical pungence of the paint, the classic rock from the kitchen counter—fuzztoned guitar riffs from an old gray boombox covered in splotchy white blobs like a seagull-turded pier—existing in purgatorial fifteen song rotations that have sucked away whatever grandeur these songs once possessed, Aerosmith banished to hell and forced to sing “Sweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeet Emowwwwwwwwwwwwshuuuuuuuun” for all eternity.
Most days, Andy actually loves the work—perhaps more than he should—pleased with the undeniable evidence that something—no matter how minor—has been achieved each and every working day. Left alone to do a job. To paint, to simply work and look forward to what he has to work on when he gets back home.
An old friend who runs a successful house and apartment painting business gave him the job the summer before last, while Andy was deep in the dire poverty all adjuncts go through between semesters. Everyone else, out painting interiors and exteriors, are college kids. The potential indignity of being, by far, the oldest man on the job, was offset by the pleasant solitude.
So far, this life outside of academia has proven to be the change Andy so desperately needs. There are no shortages of houses and apartments that need repainting. The summer is always the busiest—everyone moving out at the end of May and moving back in in August, but the work never stops. Kids flunk out, screw up, get evicted. Gainesville is not a rich town, and it is transient. It is always hot, always sweaty in these empty apartments, but Andy does not mind. With teaching you are never fully off the clock, but with housepainting, going home for the day means leaving work at work, where it belongs.
•
In the property manager’s office, the woman sits her fat ass at a desk, punching buttons on a calculator with fat fingers, excessive purple eye shadow sweating in the humidity. Her husband is plopped on one of the two folding chairs in front of the desk, gray-black armpit hair bushy out of a lumpy purple tank top, gray Michael McDonald hair and beard, flipping through a magazine. Was he reading something like Southeastern Swingers Quarterly? Probably.
“Roach spray? We just sent in the exterminators!” the man drawls, standing up, tossing the magazine on the desk. Andy sees that the magazine is actually called Modern Property Manager. But that doesn’t mean they’re not swingers, doesn’t mean they’re not going to ask Andy to join them in some sick shit. Andy’s 37 after all, not much younger than they. It’s not that they’re swingers. It’s a free country, etcetera. But the way the woman always looks at him, giving him something like what the English call “the come-hither look,” as in, “Andy, come-hither! Me and my husband want you to join us in the heart-shaped bed!”
“Let me get you some spray,” the man says. He steps into the storage closet. Andy avoids the woman’s gaze the way he tried to avoid looking at that goddamn roach.
“How’s the painting coming along?” the woman asks. She peeks up from the calculator through perm-curly gray hair.
“Fine,” Andy says, eyes cast downward as if he’s studying the fascinating patterns from the off-white paint splotched on his workboots.
“Do you need anything?” She leans backwards in the office chair, chubby hands folded behind her fat head.
“Need?” (Need?) “No, I’m fine. Thanks.”
“You sure? It must get hot up there. You by yourself today?” That come-hither look.
“I’m fine,” Andy says, looking to the storage closet.
She swivels to Andy, exposing curdish white cellulitic thighs. “Guess you can’t escape the bugs down here, hmmmm?”
“Guess not,” Andy says.
“Happy hunting.” The man reemerges, tosses Andy the giant cylindrical roach spray can.
Andy nods, leaves immediately.
•
The roach has not moved from its spot on the tarp—still inhaling and exhaling, antennae quivering, alert. Andy shakes the full can of roach spray. “Kills Bugs Dead” is what the can promises. Andy has little faith in the can’s self-assurance. This is a Floridian cockroach, after all.
Andy pops the top of the can, stands above the roach, extends his right arm, aims the nozzle, sprays with a right index finger. A chemical mist envelops the white roach. It starts twitching. Five seconds of spray. Andy stops. The white roach curls, flips on its back, legs twitching in every direction, antennae in forward lunges like swimmer’s arms. Andy waits another fifteen seconds. He is fascinated by the white roach’s struggles, its ceaseless movement. The white roach has not died yet. Andy sprays again, for ten seconds. Steps back. Observes. Fewer legs twitch, the antennae hang limp. But the legs keep moving. The hiss of the can, hollowed as the spray empties. Andy shakes the can. It won’t die. He sprays for ten more seconds, soaking the spray up and down what passes for its face, this row of legs, that row of legs.
Andy stands over the roach between his workboots, pleads, “Why won’t you die?”
It is down to one leg
moving in a slow counterclockwise motion. This goes on for five minutes. Ten minutes. The antennae hang limp; the other legs do not move. That one leg, refusing to drop.
Andy is fascinated with the roach, how it finds this roach life so much more preferable to the unknown, even painted white, with a nervous system choked with pesticide. If I was covered in white paint and paralyzing poison, I would offer no struggle. I would surrender. Die quickly. But the white roach, it wants to live. What do I care if it’s in here? I don’t live here. It wasn’t bothering me until I panicked.
Maybe I could save it. Give it some kind of hospice comfort before he passes on. Andy’s mind searches for symbolism, for the metaphor of the great white roach, forgetting how much he hates symbolism for the jive speculation of halfwit high school English teachers that it is. He could unroll what remains of the toilet paper in the bathroom, gently pick it up, take it outside, leave it in the shade of a bush.
The white roach’s last twitching leg drops. With the toilet paper, Andy picks it up, flushes the white roach down the toilet, watches it circle and circle, bobbing defiantly from the hole before it’s swept away.
From the kitchen, the 7/8 shuffle of Pink Floyd’s “Money” plays for the sixth time that day. The master bedroom needs a fresh coat of paint. And I’ve wasted too much time. I need to leave.
Andy stands there thinking about what he has and has not done so far. When the anxiety subsides, he opens another gallon of paint and pours it into the tray.
•
“Damn, son,” says the Michael McDonald property manager/swinger when Andy tosses him the can. “Musta put a hurtin’ on that thing!”
“It wouldn’t die,” Andy says.
“Don’t gotta tell us,” the woman says, still tapping buttons on the calculator, scribbling numbers in a ledger sheet.
It’s nearly five when Andy finishes painting the apartment. He returns the ladder, leans it against an open wall in the office. “Alright, well, see you tomorrow. I’ll start on the next building then.”
“Wait a minute,” the woman says, punching a final sequence of buttons on the calculator. She looks up at Andy. Smiles. “Any plans tonight?”
“I have plans!” Andy blurts out, stammers. “Big plans. Tonight.”
“Oh, well, that’s too bad. We wanted to invite you somewhere.”
“Can’t!” Andy blurts out again. He wants to vomit.
“On Wednesday nights,” the woman says, that come-hither look in full effect, “we have our weekly prayer meeting, at our house.”
“Bible study,” Michael McDonald adds.
“Yeah. Busy,” Andy says, smiling, almost laughing that this is all they want from him.
“Hand him them little books we got,” the woman says. Michael McDonald opens the file cabinet, sticks a hand inside. He walks up to Ronnie, hands him six of those Chick Tracts, insanely Christian comics that equate everything on God’s green earth with Satanism—rock and roll, homosexuality, Jews, Islam, Catholicism, consumerism, Marxism, mainstream Protestantism, etc, etc.
“Oh, so you’re . . . ” and Andy really wants to say “not swingers after all, but run-of-the-mill Florida religious nuts?! Whew! What a relief!”
“That’s right,” Michael McDonald says. “We’re evangelicals. Pardon us, but we thought it seemed like maybe you need some spiritual guidance, the way all of us do.”
“You’re so quiet!” the woman says. “We thought this would help you in your times of trouble. Have you been saved?”
“Oh. No thanks,” Ronnie says.
“Well, when you change your mind, when you’re ready to let the Lord into your heart, we’re just a phone call away,” McDonald says.
Andy nods. “Yup.”
“Go forth in the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, and stay blessed, Andy!” she says as Andy leaves.
•
A glass of red wine—Malbec—the bottle within arm’s reach. John Coltrane’s Impressions on the box. A typewriter in front of him, the page left off at that point he couldn’t wait to return to all day, as he painted and killed the white roach and brooded on life, death, and whatever spiritual guidance meant and how it applied to him, exactly.
Andy raises the glass. “To the white roach,” he says. He sips the wine, the sleepiness, the annoyances of work disappearing. He sets the glass down, leans into the typewriter, fingers on the home row, thumbs on the space bar, dives in. He’s going to leave town. Soon. He needs to save money, needs to write and have some stories to show for all the wasted years, all the time and energy dissipated and squandered when he should have been here, doing what he’s doing now.
GATORRONI’S IN SOHO
Once the six-week whirlwind with Julianna has ended, Ronnie wakes up one warm mid-November weekmorning alone, emotionally drained, and as financially wiped out as he has ever been in this past lost year.
Ronnie could almost believe she never happened. He spends two days and two nights in his room, drinking cheap wine with scrounged change she’d left behind, laying on his back, staring at the ceiling. Shortly after the sunset of the second night, Mitch comes by with a twelve-pack.
“I heard what happened,” he says. “Put some music on and we’ll go up on the roof.”
Ronnie shrugs.
Before climbing the tree up to the roof, Ronnie turns on and turns up the stereo, throws on Destiny Street by Richard Hell and the Voidoids. On the roof, they split the twelve-pack.
“So. Gone like that, huh?” Mitch works up the courage to finally ask, around beer three.
“Yeah,” Ronnie chugs a deep guzzle, tries formulating what he wants to say, but the words leave his mouth before he can check himself. “That was real, right? I mean, I have no proof, except a memory constantly assaulted by this stuff,” he says, pointing to the beer can in his hand. Julianna’s friends who used to come around are gone. Neither of them took any pictures of their travels; they didn’t take any pictures at all.
“Yeah, Rahhhn. What the hell happened to you?”
“Don’t know,” Ronnie says. He stands, and for two seconds—one, two—he considers jumping off the roof. Or, better yet, rolling off and seeing what happens. But it isn’t high enough. He wouldn’t die. He’d only get hurt. And he has no health insurance. It would only make everything worse. He drains the can of Old Hamtramck, steadies himself, rolls it down the roof in the exaggerated manner of a professional bowler, burps.
“I gotta get some sleep,” Ronnie says to Mitch. “You can stay up here if you want.”
“Cool,” Mitch says. He watches Ronnie edge downward on the roof to the edge, step across to the tree, climb down. “Jesus,” he mutters, then repeats, “What the hell happened to you?” Ronnie. Mitch is nineteen, Ronnie is 24, and anymore, Ronnie is becoming everything Mitch doesn’t want to be, with living, with women, with working . . . shit, with everything. Actually, everyone around him is everything Mitch doesn’t want to be. The students. The co-workers at the restaurant where he busses tables. The customers. His friends. It’s like nobody knows what the hell they’re doing. No mentors. No paths to follow. He finishes his beer, tosses it over his head, listens to it roll down the roof’s opposite slope. This could be him in five years, and the very thought of it sends him clattering down off of the Myrrh House roof and straight home.
•
Late morning, Ronnie wakes up. As the coffee brews, he stands in the living room, noodling around the fretboard of his guitar in Black Flag-style solos. Thinking.
Rent. Bills. In the middle of this binge, Ronnie Altamont had managed to find the time to apply to every restaurant, retail store, and bar he could find. Eviction looms, as usual. He wouldn’t put it past Roger to pile up his belongings on the curb on December 1st. Maybe it’s all over here. Leave a goodbye note and flee like you did from Chris Embowelment back in Orlando.
Why not? There are no jobs here. The music scene isn’t what it was, and is transitioning into something he isn’t interested in. He isn’t writing. The reasons he mov
ed here don’t exist anymore. So leave then. Go back to Orlando and follow Kelly’s advice from way back at the beginning of this futile endeavor: Save money. Move to Chicago already. Why the hell not? After eight months of under-, un-, and temporary employment, survival here ain’t in the cards.
One Greg Ginn style chromatic solo later, Ronnie unplugs the guitar, turns off the amp. The coffee is ready, and as the pop and hiss fades from his amplifier, he hears the voice of rescue on the answering machine, “. . . from Gatorroni’s in SoHo. You turned in an application to us earlier in the month, and we were wondering . . . ”
“Hello?”
Early morning prep cook. 20-30 hours per week, depending on the season and upcoming reservations. Starts at 7:00 a.m. Sharp. You want it?
All plans to leave, poof, like that, gone. What is this, his eighth job in as many months? Who’s keeping score?
•
For what little it was worth, this would be the best job Ronnie would work in Gainesville.
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