“Please,” Jack announces. “One spoonful and one spoonful only. This must be shared with our patrons, who probably don’t deserve and will most certainly not appreciate the glory, the enchanting wonder that is this marinara sauce.”
Ronnie watches as the rest of the kitchen crew sample the sauce, each silently nodding in agreement with Jack’s eloquent, bombastic words as they let the sauce cover their eager taste buds.
“It’s really good, Jack. You’re right,” the dominatrix says. “Nice work, Ronnie. Now can we go get high?”
“Yes, we can go get high now. Ronnie: Well done,” Jack adds, one last pat on the back before everyone leaves him in the kitchen to continue tending to the rice, the sauce, cutting the artichokes, the tomatoes, the cherry tomatoes, and so on.
Only “Sweet” Billy DuPree remains, chopping parsley in the next station over.
“That sauce rocked,” DuPree says, in the low, gravelly, grave yet celebratory voice innate to all classic rock DJ’s, especially those who work for the more serious “rock is art” stations. “It was delicate yet dangerous, like David Gilmour’s guitar work.” DuPree looks up from his stack of half-cut parsley. “You like Floyd, right?” DuPree looks away, coughs out a laugh. “Shit, what am I talking about, you probably haven’t even heard Pink Floyd.”
“I like some of it,” Ronnie says. “The Syd Barrett stuff, mainly. I like Meddle and Soundtrack from the Film More.”
“Meddle?” DuPree laughs, wheezes, laughs, coughs. “Wow man, haven’t even heard that since they first did Meddle.” DuPree laughs again. “I almost can’t remember, man. Know what I mean?”
Ronnie had no idea, but ventures a guess. “You mean, it came out so long ago, you don’t remember it that well, and besides, you were high on drugs at the time?”
“Right,” DuPree says. Ronnie is fascinated by DuPree’s classic rock radio timbre—that voice you never hear or see, in the flesh. “Still man, if I had a dollar for every time we played ‘More Than a Feeling’ when they still had BJ 103: The Tongue here, I wouldn’t be cutting parsley right now, that’s for damn sure, brother.”
“I always wondered that,” Ronnie said. “Like, do classic rock DJs ever get sick of playing the same old songs, over and over again? I mean, I went through a Zeppelin phase, and a Pink Floyd phase, but I could easily go the rest of my life without ever having to hear ‘Black Dog’ or ‘Time’ ever again.”
“Sweet” Billy DuPree stopped everything he was doing to stare at Ronnie. For a moment, Ronnie thinks DuPree is going to fling his knife at Ronnie’s forehead for such blasphemy, but instead, DuPree coughs out a laugh and says, “That’s why I left, man. I mean, the station was going under anyway, but the DJs had less and less power every time somebody new took over the station.
“After a while, I had the feeling all they wanted me to play was Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin, with a bit of Skynyrd thrown in here and there, over and over again. Like a whole generation that prided itself on having an open mind and an embracing spirit decided they’d had enough change. Not that anybody wanted to hear that DEVO crap . . . ”
(And here, Ronnie wants to laugh, because he loves DEVO.)
“. . . But still, there were plenty of new bands out there worth playing, but management, and even listeners, didn’t want to know. I mean, radio gave the world ‘Surfin’ Bird’ and ‘Louie Louie!’ Do you think something like that could happen today? Hell no!
“And it’s not because the ’60s were so much better than today. They weren’t. Maybe even worse in a lot of ways. It’s because accountants, instead of DJs like me, run the show now.
“So fuck ’em,” DuPree says, returning to the parsley chopping with a couple crunchy thwacks with his knife. “I’d rather work here, pick up money on the side at the bowling alley for anybody who remembers me, instead of all that FM jive.”
Throughout DuPree’s spiel, Ronnie tosses in words like “Right” and “Right on” and “Yeah” and “Totally” and “Uh-huh” and “Oh for sure” and “Yeah man.” The rest of the crew returns to their stations, as high as they were before. There is so much more Ronnie wants to say to “Sweet” Billy DuPree, but he doesn’t know where to begin, and besides, there are white bean salads to make.
Rock and roll. If it doesn’t kill you, it tosses you out of the tour bus at top speed and leaves you on the side of a desolate Death Valley highway to rot. Or, to spend your late middle-age years chopping parsley at sunrise.
Same diff.
HOW NOT TO ACE THE GRE’S
First, don’t prepare. In bookstores, you’ve probably seen those Vollman-sized test prep books filled with practice questions. Don’t buy them. Don’t even look at them. They will only help you succeed. Same with tutors, computer programs, CD-Roms, and DVDs.
Now to the night before. You haven’t been prepping up to this point, and there’s no reason to start now. In fact, why not throw a huge party? Ask one of your friends’ bands to play, the friend who recently quit being straight-edge, because you know he’ll have enough beer and liquor to knock out 10,000 Marines (or Keith Richards). His band will stink—coming up from Orlando and all—but no matter. Drink what he offers you, and try not to laugh at the other band—vegan jokers from Pensacola some scenester woman in town asked you to help out, soy ham and soy egger happy hippy punks who used your kitchen before the party to make sauceless pasta then sat in your bedroom staring at your haiku wall covered in haiku about Boom Boom Washington and Bam Bam Bigelow and asked, “This is cool, but have you ever heard of Charles Bukowski?”
Continue drinking. You don’t want to be alert and refreshed for the GRE, do you? If there are other drugs on hand, take those too, but nothing that requires serious time commitment. Showing up to take the GRE on, say, LSD, doesn’t sound particularly pleasant. But, as they say, whatever Christmas-trees your Scantron is fine.
Watch the bands. One of them should be at least decent. It is your house, after all, and this is a Gainesville houseparty. Tell everyone how you’re taking the GRE the next morning. Look how respectfully everyone looks at you. So punk! Way to go, Sheena!
Feel that beer, dulling your brain. No matter. It’s important to have total and complete faith in your unshakable intelligence, the kind of brains that slept through high school and still made it into a Florida state university. Don’t worry about it! You’re gonna ace this thing!
Now is the time to use this looming standardized test to your advantage. Since it is a party—your party—there should be girls there. There’s that girl you’ve had the hot-tot-tot-tots for a couple months now.
With the GRE, you have a readymade excuse to leave your party (but not too early—like 2:00 or 3:00, instead of 4:00 or 5:00). Ask that girl if you can stay with her tonight—you know, just so you can get a good night’s sleep before this very-important-my-whole-life-hangs-in-the-balance examination. She’ll naturally take pity and say yeah, and you know she has no couches in her house, only that magical miracle of a bed, and soon enough, you have to (awwww . . . ) leave your own party to the care of your roommate, and walk to her place, using what remains of your brain on this fine fine early early morning not towards any final prep for this test, but for thinking of how you will get her out of that black miniskirt.
Don’t sleep now. Whatever you do, don’t sleep. Stay up all night and put the moves on the girl you like so damn much. Maybe you’ll be luckier than Ronnie Altamont in this situation and not be with a girl coming out of a four year relationship and not ready for any kind of rebound sex just yet. No, not just yet, and not with you. But that’s ok, because it’s all in fun. Fun fun fun fun fun fun fun fun fun.
Now get up early and don’t eat breakfast. Why start trying to do well on the GRE now? Don’t bathe. Walk to the nearby campus and line-up for your seat. You won’t be hungry. You’ll be too tired, too hungover, for breakfast.
Only half-listen to the test proctor, who looks like a smarmy prick anyways with his clean clothes, combed hair, and glasses.
/> Now you have the GRE in front of you. Do your best, but by this point, your best couldn’t get you through the arithmetic quiz Walmart lays on its job applicants, so, you know what? Hurry it along. It’s multiple choice, and the odds of getting each question right aren’t the worst. You have better odds guessing these questions correctly than you did hooking up with that Gainesville scene nymphette earlier this morning.
Your goal is to be the first one done. It makes those around you, those driven fools determined to live out their dreams of facing thesis committees of tenured assholes, quite uncomfortable.
Now you’re finished and now you’re free. Enjoy the rest of the day, and don’t be surprised when, a few weeks later, you get your GRE test scores in the mail and you’re in the bottom third of almost everything. Hey, at least you tried, right? No. No you didn’t. But it’s fine, because you didn’t really want to stay in Gainesville, did you? And this stupid test, while lining the pockets of the college standardized test industry, failed, like school has always failed, to adequately assess your intelligence. On the other hand, it clearly showed your total inability to handle the demands of graduate school, then and there, a nonstudent in the student ghetto of Gainesville.
THANKSGIVING
At dusk, Ronnie walks around the Student Ghetto, thoroughly enjoying the desolation of cleared-out Gainesville on Thanksgiving. Ronnie turned down a flight to Hilton Head to stay with his parents because he is scheduled to work early Friday morning, but really, he turned it down for the same reason he turned down various invites to attend “orphan” Thanksgiving dinners—he would rather be alone.
Not since summer has he really felt that Gainesville was his. The stillness of the streets makes him smile. He passes Maux’s hideous giant cinderblock of an apartment building, wonders how she’s doing. This leads to thoughts of Julianna, Portland Patty, Maggie. There’s no emotion guiding the thoughts, as he walks through the silence, the darkened little houses with the bombed-out dirt yards littered with lawn furniture, the chipped-paint porches, the tree-canopied strange streets he never bothers exploring. He hopes they’re well, wherever they’ve gone.
At University and 13th, the streetlights are almost pointless. Ronnie jaywalks east across 13th, passes the gas station, Gatorroni’s by the Slice. The bookstore. A different General Lee’s Pizza place. What’s Ronnie thankful for?
Of course, his mother asked him that when she called earlier. He couldn’t say at the time, grunted an “I don’t know. Nothing?” but then said he was thankful to have a job again, but it wasn’t a definitive answer, and Ronnie, now, really wants to know.
He turns right where the Boca Raton Subs store is empty, dark, and closed. Back onto an empty residential street, he’s thankful for all of this. For everything. For being alive. He’s thankful for heartbreak and failure and for getting the chance to learn from them. He’s thankful for getting the opportunity to teeter on the edge of bankruptcy. To teetering on the edge of sanity, sobriety, stability. For the adventure possible in each waking moment. If he could ever get things right again, he would be more appreciative, now that he’s seen the opposite of success, wealth, long-term love. He would appreciate those who smiled, no matter how much they suffered from within and without. He would be a better person than that snarky prick who acted like he was some kind of hot shit on-campus genius big shot destined for great things.
These aren’t the kinds of words Ronnie’s parents—or anybody’s parents—really want to hear on Thanksgiving. But Ronnie is thankful for all of these things, and thankful for everything Gainesville has shown him, and now that he has learned what he needed to learn here, Ronnie walks back to the Myrrh House, and begins to plot his escape from this life.
MAUX, ONCE MORE
“Where have you been, asshole?”
Good ol’ Maux. Indigo hair. Indigo clothing. Swigging vodka. She follows Ronnie into the kitchen as he stands at Mitch’s counter, pouring more nog—thick, off-white, boozy, and potent—from a clear green glass pitcher.
“Nice to see you too, Maux,” Ronnie says. She is within striking distance. Or kissing distance. From the living room, the party chatter of the Yankee gift exchange. In Mitch’s kitchen, a wiped down orderly arrangement of someone who actually uses their kitchen to cook, as opposed to Ronnie’s kitchen, which was more of a place to store beer, brew coffee, and throw away fast food wrappers.
“Aw, you know I’m kiddin’.” She taps him on the right bicep with her right fist.
“Wocka wocka,” Ronnie says.
Maux steps back. “Seriously though. Where have you been?”
“Around.” He sips from the nog. “Out. About. Here. There. Thinking about moving. The girls here are bonkers.” Ronnie smiles at Maux, punctuates his remark with a loud and lengthy belch.
Maux smiles at this. “Hey man, you were the one who went off with that Portland Patty fee-male.” The way she says “fee-male” makes him laugh. He can’t help it.
“Yeah, well . . . you know.”
She punches him on the arm again. “You disappeared, Ron.”
Mitch invited him three days ago, as they sat on the roof before another Sunny Afternoons practice, telling Ronnie to “Bring a shitty gift because it’s a Yankee gift swap.” Fair enough. Ronnie brings a round fake porcelain goose that doubles as an egg holder, ends up with a VHS compilation of videos from the glamorous metal band Trixter. He breaks about even.
Throughout the party he avoids Maux, avoids looking at her as the guests sit in a circle in Mitch’s cramped living room. Paul, Neal, William, Siouxsanna Siouxsanne, Mouse, Icy Filet, Rae, and a dozen-odd others Ronnie doesn’t really know that well talking and laughing in the sluggish bright hazy throb of a nog-buzz. Ronnie doesn’t want to try and iron out whatever happened between him and Maux. He knows he’s partially at fault, but only partially. If that.
But the funny thing is that, of course, as the hours whiz along and the party evolves into rolling laughter and loud talk, the bad ideas start to turn into totally awesome ideas. So the next time they happen to be in the kitchen alone, as she opens the freezer to take out more ice for the nog, he stands next to her, leans in, whispers, “Sorry I disappeared, Maux. Let’s get caught up. Let’s get outta here. Let’s listen to mus—”
“Listen to music?” Maux scoffs. “That line is as phony as your Chicago accent.” She turns away from the freezer to face him, smirks, scowls. “But let’s get out of here. Drinks at Drunken Mick. My treat. Since I’m assuming your writing career is still nonexistent?”
“Hey, you’re hurting my feelings.” They walk out of the kitchen and pass through the living room without anyone realizing they had left until whoever is stuck with the fake-porcelain-egg-holding goose will pick it up to take it home, and someone will ask “Where’s Ronnie?”, and no one will know and it will suddenly occur to them that he hasn’t been seen for a while now, and Maux isn’t around either, and then Mitch will say, “Oh no. Them two, again?” and someone else will see the Trixter VHS on the coffee table and point out that he left it there, and by the time they put it all together, Ronnie will be at a stool at the Drunken Mick next to Maux, both slurping from pint glasses filled with more vodka than tonic.
The bar isn’t terribly crowded. It is December and finals and the final end-of-semester celebrations aren’t in effect yet. Groups are scattered around the tables spread throughout the room, plus a couple old drunks near the front door.
“So,” Ronnie says.
“So,” Maux says.
“Let’s talk,” Ronnie says, leaning in, placing his hand on her thigh right above the knee, moving up . . . up . . . up.
“Yeah, talk,” Maux says, grabbing Ronnie by the wrist and pulling away the horny hand. “I just want to talk to you, Ron. I don’t really have any friends around here anymore.”
Ronnie laughs, leans in, tries repeating the move with the hand, and as Maux blocks the thigh-grab with her hands, he says, “You know . . . that’s not my problem.”
�
��Not your problem?!” Maux swivels away from Ronnie, stands off the barstool.
“Goodbye, Ron.” She starts to walk past Ronnie to the exit.
“Aw, c’mon! Why do you gotta be so bitter all the time?” Ronnie asks.
She turns to Ronnie, each word out of her mouth slow-slurred and carefully annunciated: “Don’t be one of them. I thought you were better than that.”
Ronnie chugs what remains of the vodka tonic Maux bought him, steps off the stool, stands up, faces her. “I don’t understand you.”
“I understand you,” she says. “You’re a loser. Goodbye.”
Ronnie raises his right arm, waves his right hand like he’s bon voyaging on a cruise ship, hopes she doesn’t turn around, even goes so far as to think, “Don’t look back.” And when he thinks “Don’t look back,” it makes Ronnie think of Bob Dylan playing an electric guitar for folkies, and he’s drunk enough to yell to her back, in his best/worst/most parodic Dylanese: “I don’t belieeeeve yew. You’re a LIAR!”
At the exit, she turns, one last time. All that indigo. Nnnnnnugget. Ronnie smiles at her. Maux smirks at him. Stupid Ronnie. Of course this is how it would play out. When she sobers up, she’ll blame the drinking, holiday loneliness, how they can’t give what the other one wants, her inability to hate Ronnie as much as she should. But now, she knows and he knows it can go one of two ways as they look at each other in these challenging smiles and smirks. She walks out the front door.
Ronnie will never see Maux again. In two months, she will move to Atlanta. Around that time, Rae will inform him that Maux scribbled a list in one of the ladies’ room stalls of The Puzzled Pirate Saloon of “People I Will Miss in This Shit-Shitty Town,” with Ronnie’s name in the top two.
There will only be two names, but hey.
10 Yes, this is a stylistic/structural parody of the Tennessee Williams short story “Two on a Party.”
Losing in Gainesville (9781940430331) Page 39