Gatorroni’s in SoHo is not in the art district of Manhattan. It’s on University Avenue, in a small shopping center by the railroad tracks, between a sporting goods store and a shop with the unusual name of “Stoney O’Bongwater’s: Purveyors of the Wackiest of Tobaccos.”
Ronnie has to admit: It feels pretty good to be a productive member of humanity again, to wake up at 6:30 in the morning and have someplace to be. From his house, it is a fifteen minute walk to the restaurant, past dew-drenched windows in the pale early morning sunrise. (Ronnie cannot recall the last time he had seen a sunrise and wasn’t too blind drunk to appreciate it.) The smells of food prep fill the air: Zesty Glaze Donuts, Viva Taco, Sesame Happiness Chinese, Szechwan Gator, Party Burgerz, This Can’t Be Hummus. The lingering tinge of the recently ended late night—stale beer and garbage. Nobody else on the street but construction workers and bums. The no-season Florida mornings are perfect, especially in Gainesville, the precious daylight hour before most people are out of bed.
His co-workers—among them, “Sweet” Billy DuPree, former late-night DJ for 1970s FM classic rock station BJ 103 “The Tongue,” and current disc jockey for “Rock and Bowl” nights at Gainesville Lanes—are perpetually stoned. Before work, break time, before clocking out, they pass around an endless supply of joints, sneaking off into the dining room in a quiet corner booth while Ronnie follows the caffeine rush and keeps working. Ronnie cannot partake. His boss—Jack, Jack the Fencer, a former world champion fencer for UF before faulty protective gear let through an unfortunate thrust to his right shoulder, robbing him permanently of the speed and accuracy he needed—always asks Ronnie if he wants to get high with him. He never comes right out and says, “Hey, wanna get high?” but couches it in the most ridiculous of insinuations:
“Hey Ronnie, we’re about to, uh . . . hop on the Mary Jane Train to Green Town, you in?”
or
“Hey Ronnie—we’re fixin’ to, uh . . . blaze a nature trail straight into the rec room of our minds. What do you say?”
or
“Hey Ron. We’re gonna take a little break so we can, uh, remove the dandruff from our psychic shoulders and face the stresses of the day with a clean scalp. Wanna join us?”
. . . To which Ronnie naturally replies, to any and all of these questions:
“What do you mean?”
At which point Jack the Fencer would lean in and whisper, “We’re going to smoke some marijuana. Would you like to join us?”
“I can’t, man,” Ronnie always says. “I can’t function stoned.”
Here Jack the Fencer would always chuckle, like he was privy to some top-secret information, then repeat the word “Function . . . ”
While his co-workers get high, Ronnie drinks cup after cup of coffee, often exhausted from the previous night’s fun—wired enough to fill buckets with marinara sauce, plastic bins with white bean salad, tubs of white rice (eating bowls of it on breaks with co-workers, drenching the rice in spicy Sriracha sauce). It feels good to be locked into the ethic he was learning while removing asbestos from schools in the Crescent City heat. His co-workers are two-to-twenty years past college age, and for that, Ronnie is grateful. They are interested in DJing or fencing, in fishing or bondage, in biking or boating—their only goals in life being comfort and the flexibility to devote time to what they love. The job is a laid-back trap, deep in the heart of the laid-back trap that is Gainesville.
But it is quiet, steady work, thankfully lacking the unpredictable annoyances of customers. It is enough to keep Ronnie busy, to forget Julianna, Portland Patty, and Maux, to try and move on with life, to pull out of the depression, to pay Ronnie enough money each week to keep him living in the Myrrh House, to keep him living in Gainesville.
THE LIGHT IN THE DORM ROOM
It’s one of those days at the record store when you’re reminded of that line from Monty Python’s Flying Circus: “Never kill a customer.”
Who are these people who walk through our door on Sundays? What planet are they from? Why don’t they bathe on that planet? Why do they have such shitty taste in music on that planet? You would think the customers at a record store would be cool, you know, rock and roll? Not here man, and not on Sundays. On the Corner by Miles Davis gets me through the tedium, the mindlessness, the assholes and jerkoffs and douchebags who come in here and stink up the place and don’t buy anything.
“Sounds like pimp music,” some teenager in all black looking up to my perch behind the counter says, and it’s all I can do to not hit him on his zitty head with a hammer until his cretin brain squishes all over the grimy floor. Instead, I glare. “Never kill a customer,” the Pythons warn, and they’re right. Just sit here and lock into these fantastic beats. Tune out everything else unless these jerks actually need to ring up something they’re actually going to buy (on Sundays, it’s always something cheap . . . a two dollar used VHS tape, a one dollar punk rock button, a one dollar alternative rock patch to sew on their bookbag), and look forward to the evening.
“Ya wanna beah?” Boston Mike asks, the wet six-pack of Old Ham-Towns soaking through the brown paper bag.
“Y’know . . . I shouldn’t,” I say. I’m really trying to cut back. Yeah, ok, it’s about the girl. I don’t wanna be “Drunk John” anymore. I’ve been good. Better. No, really: I’ve been good! But this day man, these fucking . . . fuck it. “But perhaps maybe I should,” I say, reaching into the wet bag and pulling out a can. Boston Mike laughs as I pour it into my usual black mug used more for these beers than for coffee.
Two hours left before closing. I will drink two beers, be sober by the time we clockout. Until then, I’m going to pray for minor time travel. To be locking up the front doors, saying “Later” to Boston Mike, and walking out of this plaza, crossing the street, stepping onto campus as the sun sets behind the football stadium and those brick buildings housing all those academic departments. In twilight, past dutiful students marching to the library, past groups of students talking of their usual big-deal collegiate concerns.
I’ll round a corner and see her dorm building. It’s getting dark now; the streetlights are turning on. Second light from the right. Third floor. I’ll be up there very soon. Her dorm room, where she has spent the day studying, and (I hope) waiting for me. Up the stairs, past barefoot students lugging laundry. Down the third floor hallway. Knock on her door. I’ll hear her footsteps, running. Locks unlock. The door opens. She will hug me. She will look tired and I will look tired, but it’ll be alright. All the irritations will fade away. We’ll order pizza, play a boardgame, watch movies. The beer stores and bars and even Boston Mike will have to get by without me. I’m sure they will.
The nursed beers help the time pass as fewer and fewer jerks come in to bother me. All I really see is that dorm room, her dorm room. That light. These aren’t the things I’d like to talk about with Boston Mike, or the jokers over at Gatorroni’s by the Slice, but I don’t have to. For the first time in a long time, something good has happened, and we’ve only been together for three months, so I don’t wanna put too much into it, but I can’t help thinking this is the beginning of something better. Finally.
DEEP INTO THE WHAT-NOW
“Yeah.” Sigh. “I don’t think I can see you anymore,” your latest girlfriend tells you, over Sunday brunch at Gatorroni’s in SoHo, seated at a table plopped at the edge of the curb and the parking lot of what they call the front patio on an otherwise perfect late November afternoon. You’re on your second bloody mary, third cup of coffee, second carafe of water, and the tiniest of scrambled eggs and toast from the buffet—all of it free of charge, a fringe benefit from working at the other Gatorroni’s. Your friends serve all of this on this fine, fine day.
“Ok,” you say, somehow expecting it, not asking “why,” because you have a feeling you know why.
“It’s like, you haven’t been sober since before Halloween. Now it’s almost Thanksgiving.” She leans in, speaks in a near-whisper. “I wanted to take you ho
me to meet my parents.” She scoffs. Leans back. “That’s not going to happen. I can’t even imagine it.”
“Ok,” you repeat, staring at the glasses and liquids that are supposed to get you back to functioning like a productive member of the human race. You’re scheduled to work tonight. You’ll probably phone it in. No, you will phone it in. Sundays are dead anyway at Gatorroni’s by the Slice.
This brunch isn’t agreeing with you, or, more to the point, it isn’t agreeing with the beer, the whiskey, the wine, and the vodka you guzzled last night over six nonstop hours.
“Wait,” you say, leaping from the chair and rushing to the men’s room.
When you’re done, your insides are a dizzy dry delirium. Now, this is the part where you’re supposed to leave the stall, wash your face and hands in the mirror, wipe the puke off your chin and your shirt, stare at your proverbial bloodshot eyes and five o’clock shadow, the greasy hair, the dirty clothes, and whimper, “What am I doing? What am I doing with my life? I need help!” With the notable exception of wiping the puke off your chin and shirt, you do none of these things. You shrug, you laugh a desperate “Hee hee hee” about the way it’s going, and think about that Bloody Mary on the table.
No, it’s no surprise that she’s gone when you return. You can’t blame her, can’t explain what’s been going on in your mind. As a boy, going with your father on weekends to the bar, drinking Coke after Coke after Coke while Dad talked to the bartender, surrounded by all those other old guys at the bar who kept yellowed newspaper clippings in their wallets of this play or that play they made in some high school game from their high school years so long ago. Telling their varsity stories. And when they’d start to get really drunk, they’d remember a few years beyond high school—what happened with girls at college or what happened in the service fighting wherever whichever president saw fit to send them. This tacit, unspoken agreement between all of them that the best years in life were over, and it was enough to sit here and make the best of it beneath the ESPN’s 1 through 4 broadcasting the eternal strivings of Youth on the bar televisions. Make the best of it, and wait to die. Over the years, as your dad got drunker, and the men got older, and you grew up so slow, too slow, always that silent envy of the old men, who always referred to you in third person, “How old’s Will getting to be now, Tom?” “Pretty soon, Will’s gonna be chasin’ girls, eh Tom?” Their lives were over, aside from these vicarious twinges from the next generation, and that bar was a pleasant-enough waiting room before death. You saw this, weekend after weekend, until you were old enough to have the option of saying no, you’re gonna go skate, and by that point, your Youth had a caustic air of insolent truth that no one in the old man bars wanted to face or confront. You vowed never to be like that, to think like them. It sounds so corny now, but when you wrote those three Xs on your hand with the black marker, it was your line in the sand, that you would always be young, no matter what, Straight Edge for Life, and time as portrayed by society with its Hallmark-greeting card parameters of “old” and “young,” was meaningless. Even after giving up on being straight edge around the time you realized the beer made it much easier to talk to girls, you always kept that belief that NOW was the best, and to look back was death.
Lately, since returning from the tour, you think you understand those old guys your dad drank with every non-working/sleeping hour. You see nothing—absolutely nothing—to look forward to. These hours are empty, directionless. Those guys delayed it by having children. You don’t want children. So what now? You drink your bloody mary, drink her bloody mary, stare at the remnants of a post-breakup Sunday brunch, all you want—all you really want—is what you had on Halloween.
You were dressed as that stand-up comedian from the 1980s whose shtick was to smash fruits and vegetables with a comically large mallet. Vodka drunk and dressed in black beret, black mustache, black curly-haired wig glued to the beret, black and white striped shirt, black pants, black shoes, and a garbage bag filled with produce, in the front yard of the Righteous Freedom House, you smash tomatoes, grapefruit, cantaloupe, watermelons, and the unveiling of each new piece of produce brings louder applause and laughter to everyone circled around you. With vodka, the body is light—indestructible—and it is nothing to swing the mallet as the rinds and pulp and juice spray all over the front yard, and it’s fun slipping in the mess. Inevitably, the front yard becomes a massive food fight, with produce remnants hurled into anyone who dares get involved, until the produce is too pulpy, too disintegrated, to pick up. Fun. Laughter. In the immortal words of Mick Shrimpton: “Have a good time, all the time.”
There isn’t much that is more ridiculous than the walk of shame on the morning after Halloween. Walking back to your house—dizzy and nauseous, heavy and destructible—you keep all of your costume on, the clothing stained, the mallet broken. On the couch, back at the party, some girl dressed like a Plus-Sized Wonder Woman, not your girlfriend, laying on top of you. Walking past Gatorroni’s, friends wave pitchers of beer to you. Of course you take it. You’re tired and you’re shaking and your body wants more, more, more. Kill the night. What else is there? The band is finished. Just this job in this kitchen . . . water bottles filled with vodka. What do you want? What do you need? What’s missing here? Nothing’s missing! Everything’s alright! It’s there, and I will drink it. To drink like this always leaves the element of surprise, the possibility that life will be less boring. Maybe those old guys remembered the time a beautiful woman once set foot in that bar—years ago—and hoped that such a momentous occasion would happen again, or perhaps they wanted to hear a new joke, a new twist on the sports on TV, something spontaneous, anything but the routine of responsibility. Yes, you understand. You never know how it will turn out when you drink. What impulses you will act upon, for good or ill. Too old to sing in bands anymore, like those guys are too old to play varsity football.
You feel that brainrush of the booze coming on once again, here at the brunch table on this otherwise perfectly warm late November afternoon, you’re reminded of that song you heard in a movie somewhere, that 1920s song where the characters happily drone What’s the use of gettin’ sober / if you’re only gonna get drunk again? You belch. Ha. Ha. Harrrrrrrr.
The server, whatshername, in the fancy white shirt and black tie and black apron, that reddish brown hair long, curled, ponytailed. Nnnnnnugget! She fills your pint glass with the bloody mary mix she carries in a pitcher.
“You’re the best,” you say, smiling your smile. She will do. Yes, she will do.
“Rough night last night?” she asks. You know what you smell like, what you look like right about now.
“Well, you know, ha ha, you weren’t there, so yeah, it was rough, you know.” You almost visibly cringe at this corny dumb line, but you’re charming—you still have your charm—and you can make this work.
“Ha,” she says, an emotionless laugh. “I can’t go out, then work here the next morning. I stayed in and watched movies.”
“Sounds like you need a rough night then. When are you done?”
“A couple hours,” she says. She gets more and more beautiful, with each sip of the bloody.
“Meet me at Gatorroni’s later,” you say, still smiling that smile. “I’m working tonight. I’ll hook you up. Pizza. Drinks. Whatever. It’ll be nice to talk.”
“What about . . . ?” she says, pointing at the empty chair across from you.
“Her?” Scoff. Pshaw, pshaw! “Just a friend. Seriously though, meet me after work.”
“Ok definitely,” she says, and you know that’s Gainesvillese for “I’m probably going to flake out on you.”
You laugh. “See you then.”
She leaves you to your hangover cures and your thoughts. The future. It’ll be like this, only it will get worse, until you become what you always hated. You may as well embrace it. It is, after all, your birthright.
INCREDIBLE MARINARA, AND WHY
“SWEET” BILLY DUPREE LEFT RADIO
> “Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention please,” Jack the Fencer announces, right hand on Ronnie’s shoulder, tongs in left hand upheld like an Olympic torch.
The morning crew gathers around Ronnie’s section of the kitchen, between the cooktops with bubbling pots and the cutting boards lined in front of industrial-sized containers of herbs and spices.
“I beseech each and every one of you to feast, first, your eyes, and second, your palette, on this incredible marinara sauce contained inside this rather ordinary looking clear plastic bucket,” Jack the Fencer announces, with a little too much Shakespearean flourish for 7:30 in the morning, heightened by the fencing stabs he applies with the tongs.
Everyone in the kitchen gawks, Ronnie standing to the right of Jack the Fencer, waiting for the other shoe to drop, wondering if it already has.
“Note the bold red, contrasted with the perfect arrangements of whites and yellows from the onions and garlic. The interplay between the smooth and rough between the sauces, juices, and the chunks of diced tomato. A hint, a tantalizing tease, if you will, of the green flakes of herb sprinkled delicately, sublimely, across the top.”
“That’s great, Jack,” the dominatrix of the crew said, a towering Scandinavian beast of a woman covered in tattoos.
“Hold on, hold on, my alpha female mistress of the dark,” Jack continues, still swinging the tongs in his hands, like he was in the UF gymnasium and these were the Southeastern Conference Fencing Championships, and not an ordinary Tuesday at Gatorroni’s in SoHo. “Note the confident swirls of the sauce, the inevitable intangible results of assertive stirring and accurate measurement.
“This bucket of marinara sauce, my friends and colleagues in the culinary arts, is the desperate, hard-earned expression of an artist at the peak of his powers. But let us sample and confirm with our mouths what our eyes have already told us.” The crew grabs spoons, scoop samples, tastes.
Losing in Gainesville (9781940430331) Page 38