Losing in Gainesville (9781940430331)

by Costello, Brian

  “Moving?” Rick bellows across the twenty feet of humid air between them.

  “Yup,” Andy says.

  “Stayin’ in town?”

  “No. Off to New York. Brooklyn.” Since New Year’s, he had made

  three trips, falling in love with the pace, the places, the possibilities, hours upon hours of walking around, taking in each new block.

  “City?”

  “Yup.”

  “What’s up there?”

  “Got a new teaching job.” (Indeed, Andy has enough money saved for the summer, before starting the new teaching gig in the fall. If he can resist the temptation, the ease, of spending money every single time he sets foot outside of his studio apartment (literally one-fifth the size of where he has lived here in Gainesville, for, literally, twice the price), he can make this work. Difficult, but not impossible.

  “They got key lime pie up there?” Rick asks.

  Andy smiles, turns to face Rick after plopping the manuscript in the passenger seat. “I’m pretty sure they do.”

  “Is it good?”

  Andy laughs. And to the mix of sensory details unique to here, Andy adds sweet tea, seafood, and, why not, key lime pie to the ever-growing list of what he will miss. He steps into his Volkswagen, turns the ignition. “Good luck.”

  “Wanna smoke out before you go?”

  “No. Thanks.” Andy gives a final wave before shifting into reverse, hearing that final dirt crunch of the driveway.

  On the drive out of town, Andy takes in University Avenue’s little stores and restaurants, the bustle of the collegiates, the unknown familiar faces of the smalltown streets. He stops at the Chevron for gas. From the sidewalk, two students—a purple-haired punk rock boy and a pink-haired punk rock girl, shout his name, smile, wave, approach.

  “Remember me? Doug? I wrote the story about the chessmaster with, um, chronic flatulence?”

  “I do,” Andy says. In a class filled with stuffy English majors, Doug was a welcome bit of comic relief, a bouncing gawky goofball.

  “And I’m Lisa,” she says. “I wrote that story about that guy who’s addicted to betting on jai-alai and loses all his possessions?”

  “Ah yes,” Andy says. Andy recalls how—this was the fall semester before last—they sat closer and closer to each other with each new class—purple hair on the left, pink hair on the right, slowly moving until they were next to each other, hand in hand in the center of the auditorium by the final class. They were serious without being serious, productive but not pretentious . . . Andy’s favorite kinds of students. “Still together, I see?” Andy asks, and he hates how, well, professorial he sounds here. But, at the same time—dammit—he loves it.

  “We started dating in your class,” Doug says.

  “Where are you going?” Lisa asks.

  Andy tells them. They are impressed. “You belong there,” Lisa says. “You were the best teacher we ever had.”

  “What?!” Andy laughs.

  “No, really,” Doug says. “You were different. You cared. You acted like you didn’t care, but you cared.”

  Andy doesn’t know what to say. “Thanks,” he manages to mumble.

  “Well good luck!” Lisa says.

  Gas tank filled, nozzle replaced, Andy steps inside the Volkswagen, starts the car, drives off. In the rearview, Doug and Lisa wave. It’s almost enough to make him want to stay, but instead, he takes in University Avenue one last time—the buildings, the people, the flora and fauna, the sun, the light, the breeze—before the turn onto Waldo Road, and the start of the thousand-mile drive to the north.

  WHERE DO YOU GO?

  Each passing year, the bands and the fliers and the seven inches look more and more quaint, not as timeless as we believed them to be—but what is timeless is what it is between our ears. What it did to us, for us, when we needed it most. (As d. boon once howled: “mr. narrator? (this is bob dylan to me).”) This final house show Ronnie attends as an actual Gainesville resident is less an A-to-B movement and more a blurry blurred transcendent glimpse into better worlds. It doesn’t move in a real-time so much as that time and how it exists today beyond mere nostalgia, beyond the so-called “classic rock” of misbegotten youth that “Sweet” Billy DuPree spins at the bowling alley.

  Because, you see, Ronnie and me, we miss those days, we miss cramming into muggy living rooms watching our friends transcend genetics, background, conditioning, socialization, for those precious moments before we grow up for good, and we will grow up, no matter how we fight it into our 20s, and even our 30s.

  There would be so many parties after these, in so many different places, and they were never that much different from town to town, and after a while, it is easy to grow jaded as we get older, but in the precious fantastic moments of youth, these house shows border on sacrosanct, tempered from piousness thanks to the accompanying wanton hedonism. When it’s really right—when I’m playing or Ronnie’s playing or you’re playing—don’t you wish you could hold those moments a bit longer? When people like you and me forget the mundane daily existence and become something else? An honest expression, even when it’s ironic.

  Music was the center of our lives.

  Ronnie won’t remember the bands who play tonight at Righteous Freedom House, he won’t remember the so many acquaintances he will never see again, the sort-of friends with whom he hardly exchanges words, but they share what we share no matter what becomes of us later. Some died way too young, some become too boring for words. But in the forever-now of the 1997 Gainesville house party, we’re still there, downing beers and cheersing friends and sweating in our own juices as the bands put it all out there.

  Yes, the bands in Chicago and elsewhere are much better, but the house parties were never as glorious, because these were the first. It was the miracle—the goddamn miracle—of your friends expressing themselves.

  It’s as real as this February Chicago morning—me, looking out the front windows of the rehabbed two-flat, the dirty snow on the ground, the leafless trees, the cadaver sky, as King Uszniewicz and His Uszniewicztones counter it with their cover of “Land of 10,000 Dances” honking out the stereo. It is the shortest of body highs, but a lifetime of mental shifts forming you into what you thought you could be.

  In our own small ways, we reached our American dream for a nanosecond or two, and it had nothing to do with money or property or sports or cars, and everything to do with simply getting ourselves right in our place in the world, expressing the heretofore inexpressible through music, and when you do get that right, it’s hard to go down from that, back to the world of dishwashing, of the cubicle, of balancing the books.

  Maybe there is more to life than starting bands, seeing bands, listening to music, but we didn’t think so at the time. What the hell did we know then, besides living for these frozen moments, these chances that the band plugging into the sockets of these old houses, trying to tune while their friends stand there heckling and laughing, would be the greatest thing we would ever see? You never know, right?

  And to come down from that . . . Where do you go . . . where do you go?

  IN THE PARKING LOT, LISTENING TO “HOOTENANNY”

  You’re sitting in your car in the afternoon sun crying while listening to, for the fifth time today, the Replacements’ album Hootenanny. The engine is still running, max A/C blows against your not-cool tears. “Treatment Bound.” The last song on the album. Yeah. No shit. Your organs throb in pain and you feel sick and sweaty and shaky. Parked in the far corner of the hospital parking lot, drunk and high and cored out.

  What will they say when you walk in? On the passenger seat floor, an Evian bottle filled with vodka. You reach across and down, unscrew it, put it to your lips. There. Better/Not Better. We’re gettin no place . . . as quick as we know how, Westerberg sings. We’re getting’ nowhere . . . what will we do now? It almost makes you laugh. Yeah. No shit.

  What would be easy to do—the easiest thing—would be to go home and sleep it off.
You’ll be fine. You’re too young to be anything but fine, even as your old friends are starting to look away when you enter the room. Night after night after night of hazy—if outright nonexistent—recollections. You need all of this simply to maintain. You finish the vodka, toss the Evian bottle out the window (it’s fun throwing bottles when you’re vodkafucked) and the eighteen-year-old self, the one who rejected all of this to create something on his own, that kid—that kid you’ve been doing your absolute best to ignore since returning from the tour—shouts in your head that no, this is not alright, and no, you will not be fine, so instead, you shut off the car, and Hootenanny is silent. Don’t look in the mirror. Don’t look in the reflections. Move. Out of the car. Stumble across the lot to the hospital’s front doors and try to come up with the words to say it.

  DRUNK JOHN AND SICILY

  That’s right, shitdicks, we’re leaving town—me and Sicily. We’re moving to New Orleans. She’s transferring to Tulane, and I got nothing keeping me here. Sooo . . . as we say here in Gainesville: “Screw it.”

  I’m removing the second of the two speakers from the front windows of the apartment, and it’s a little sad, to think of all the incredible times I’ve had when all I did was sit on the front patio of this house, going inside only to flip records and grab more beers. But it can’t last and I can’t stay. I can’t.

  “Looks like the last of it,” my girlfriend says from the middle of the front room, holding a broom, sweeping away the years of accumulation under now-removed couches into one scoopable pile.

  I smile, cradling the giant speaker. To leave Gainesville, it’s like launched rockets requiring so much force to overcome the gravitational pull. Into the unknown. Because New Orleans, to me, might as well be one of those planets Roger Dean was always painting on Yes album covers (yeah, I worked at a record store!) for all I know about it.

  We talked about it and talked about it when Sicily got accepted. Aside from me, Gainesville wasn’t working out. I’m applying to grad school. I’d like to teach college. I could see myself doing that. Easily. Anyway, it’s way more appealing than ringing up compact discs purchased by morons as I’m perched behind the counter of that fucking record store, muttering under my breath to avoid completely losing it.

  The bedroom, my old bedroom, is empty now. Even the fliers have been taken down, most thrown away. The records are boxed up and packed. With the last speaker pushed inside, the U-Haul is filled.

  I take one last walk through the house, trying not to dwell on the memories in each room (even the bathroom), the ghosts of old friends I may never see again. It’s that time of year when everyone leaves for summer, some never to return. I always kept track of who came and went, who had moved on, and who, like me, never left. Until now. This girl. She saved me. I could have been Drunk John forever. At 30, 35, 40, and on and on. She saved me from my own stupidity. From a comfortable life filled with regret and past-tense talk.

  I don’t mean to sound too dramatic here, you know, I mean, I may end up back here within three months. Maybe I’ll miss it, and maybe I’ll hate New Orleans, and I’ll find I actually belong here. Nothing wrong with that, right? Happens all the time.

  “It’s getting late,” Sicily says, standing on the patio as I lock the front door for the last time. “We have a long drive ahead.”

  I pull her in for a long hug, a long kiss. It’s a late morning, and I’ve spent it noticing everything I may miss, and I try not to think about it. This quiet familiar little student ghetto street where every fourth or fifth passerby is an old friend. I gotta remember that my future isn’t here. It isn’t sitting at Gatorroni’s after a shift at the record store, scoring pitcher after pitcher until I’m standing up on the table karaokeeing Angry Samoans songs. I mean, I’m sure I could do that in New Orleans anyway. Easily—ha!

  Most moments, you want to forget as quickly as possible, and you try and beer it away and hope the beer replaces it with some better time. Not this moment. I want to hold onto it like I hold onto Sicily. Hold this moment close, a last toehold on the familiar, the feeling of being saved and set free all at once. I love her.

  And she is right. It is a long drive ahead. We let go. The future is one step off a rickety wooden front porch away. She holds my hand and I don’t look back.

  SUMMER OF WORK

  Bobby stacks the moving boxes by the front door of the common room of what the University charitably classifies a “dorm suite” as Youth of America by the Wipers blasts out the speakers of his boombox, when his dad—the very picture of suntanned venerable grayhaired pink-Oxford-shirted Floridian success, steps into the doorway and says, “What the hell’s this you’re listening to?”

  Bobby shrugs, nearly expels a long, dramatic, “Fuuuuuuuck,” but checks himself.

  “The guy ain’t even singin’,” Dad says, and now Bobby holds back a few other choice phrases.

  It’s going to be a long summer.

  “Let’s hurry it up,” Dad says, picking up two of the lighter boxes, walking out of the common room, towards the minivan.

  There isn’t much left to pack. Throw the remaining clothes into a garbage bag, and that’s it. His dorm room is back to how he found it back in August. Thin-mattresssed bed frames. Two desks facing each other, a kind of barrier between Bobby and his now-former roommate. On his roommate’s side, gone are his cheesy posters of Lamborghini Countaches and Pamela Anderson. On Bobby’s side of the room, gone are the flyers of the local shows he attended. In the common room, gone is the ironical beer can wall.

  Bobby remembers when summers were fun. When he was really young, when you could get out of school around Memorial Day, and the idea of ever going back to school seemed unfathomable. Summers when going inside for anything was the worst kind of punishment. Now, the summers are working and saving money, living at home, stuck in a boring town with no more friends.

  He walks down the sidewalk between his dorm building and the girls’ dorms. Girls lugging laundry baskets downstairs to their own summer fates of hometowns, jobs, the drearily familiar. Everyone takes one final glance at the new and the youthful. Bobby crosses the sticky blaze of the parking lot, tosses his things into the back of the minivan. His dad waits, impatiently.

  Back to the sidewalk, he hears the last thing he needs to snag—the boombox. Bobby indulges one last glance at where he spent this past year, shuts the door, jogs out.

  The long lithe sinewy women lounge around in the university’s grass in cut-off shorts, absorbing the summer sun. It’s so easy, really. College. Even when it’s difficult, it’s learning new things around somewhat intelligent people. It isn’t the front counter of Eckerd’s Drugs, ringing up purchases from the pissed-off elderly, the depressing break room with its desperate no-talk to fill the tedious hours. Summer is now a waiting game of earning money, saving money, going back to his bedroom at home and listening to The Wipers, counting down the days to go back, X-ing the calendar’s passing days.

  Bobby climbs into the minivan’s passenger seat and Dad pulls away before the door’s completely shut. “Have a good semester?” he asks.

  “It was fine,” and Bobby could talk about, say, losing his virginity in that room, the girl he met who started talking to him at that party in the student ghetto, where the bands played, where the partygoers shouted along to every word. He could talk about discovering punk rock in Gainesville, of all the people he met from it, but none of that will be discussed.

  “I hope your grades are good,” Dad says as they pull out of the campus, south onto NW 13th Street. Bobby turns, looks. Out the minivan’s dirty back window, the campus—with its girls, youth, energy, epiphanies, discoveries—fades away. Summers suck now. Summers are working, sleeping, sweating, looking and finding nothing to do. Already, Bobby is planning ways to get through it. Maybe I’ll learn guitar while back home. Write some songs. Start a band. Why not?

  Until then, Bobby turns back around, away from the campus, through the love-bug smeared minivan windshield as Dad steps
on the accelerator, into the Floridian countryside. Bobby’s heart sinks.

  RONNIE AND CHARLEY

  “Now, Ronnie: Are you sure you want to do this?”

  His dad (oh, good ol’ Charley) waits until it is way past too late to ask this question. Because it is, after all, way past too late.

  Ronnie has sold his blandy-apple green sedan for the equivalent of two month’s rent in the Chicago apartment. He has made all necessary arrangements with his roommates-to-be, has let them know he will be in Chicago this time next week. He has begun packing his books and records into boxes collected from the XYZ Liquor Store.14 He has reserved a U-Haul. Put in his two-week’s notice at both jobs. Has spread the word about the Going-Away Party. Compared to the move to Gainesville, the move out of town is a calm and deliberative process. And yet, somebody still has to ask, “Are you sure?” Arriving, it was Kelly, and leaving, it is good ol’ Charley Altamont, retired teacher, born-again Buddhist and practicing vegan, and Ronnie’s father.

  Before Ronnie can answer, Charley laughs his little southern-style chuckle-while-talking “I know . . . I know! All I’m saying, son, is that if you’re not sure, and if it doesn’t work out—because it might not, and that’s ok—you can come back.”

  “Ok, Dad,” Ronnie says, but inside, Ronnie thinks of how there have been so many times he felt bad about what he did. How he left Orlando. How he lived in Gainesville. But what if Ronnie hadn’t moved into that trailer and followed Kelly’s advice? What if he broke down and admitted to his father, “No, I’m not sure I want to do this.” After all, in a few short months, Ronnie could be lonely and miserable. And very, very cold.

  There is safety and warmth in the womb, security in what you know and who you’ve known. But then they want to tell you who you are and what you can and cannot do, and how you’ll always be, and when Ronnie senses that happening in his environment, his first reaction—from his skin, to his bones, to way down deep in the coiled double-helixes of his DNA, is to get the hell out.