Losing in Gainesville (9781940430331) (18 page)

“Did you date her, like, in a relationship?” Ronnie asks.

Relationship. “He had a relationship with her poon hole,” Paul says, and you try not to laugh. You fail.

One fifty cent mug of beer after the next. The Rotator skirts the border between the college town and the rural hinterlands. It's an XYZ Liquor Lounge officially named JP Mc Jelloshotz. The buzzing sign above the front entrance is a white-light background with a drawing of a bow-tied penguin wearing sunglasses shaped in the odd-angled style of the 1980s. Some impoverished punk rocker discovered they had mugs of beer for fifty cents, and here you are. The stools around the circular bar—and the bar itself—spin a complete orbit in one hour. The more you drink, the faster the room spins. Or so it feels. Aside from the lack of sawdust on the floor, the large square room around the rotating bar looks like a roadhouse in a 1970s film about renegade truckers with CBs riding around the country with precocious chimpanzees. The place oozes with seventies gimmickry; you sense the ghosts of mechanical bulls past upon entering. “The scene” took it over from the old day laborer rent-a-drunks who used to sit in these stools and spin after a hard day of scrapping drywall or whatever the hell they did all day, and your generation will devote their lives to supporting whatever you perceive to be a kind of authenticity rooted in recent history.

“So many nnnnuggets tonight,” Paul says. Then, he switches into the clipped cadence he affects when moving into pure sarcasm. “Oh! The nuggets! The nuggets!” His squinty brown eyes dart from one girl to the next—seated at the bar, dancing on the dance floor.

“What's a nugget?” Ronnie asks.

“Aw, you know, dude—cute girls!” Paul says.

“It's a porno mag,” you say, facing ahead, an offhand comment to stir the pot.

“William, you know it's more than that.” And here, as he has so many times before, Paul holds forth on the nuances of nuggetry, “as opposed to mere hotness” he declaims to Ronnie, that “je ne sais quois” he repeats less like someone with an air of pretension, but more as someone with the air of one-too-many 50-cent beers who has come across a phrase he finds funny. You half-listen—having heard this so many times before—and you think of quitting MOE GREEN'S FUCKING EYESOCKET, of quitting music altogether and moving on. To what? A wife? Kids? Thoughts inconceivable only one year ago. Ronnie, he asked about Maux. She sits on a stool by herself, in the corner under neon signs suggesting you drink beer, as if anyone who would come into this place would need prodding in that regard. A pint of Fancy Lad Irish Stout (you know her drink habits—Fancy Lad beer, Van Veen vodka) is wedged between her cream-dream thighs exposed from that short shiny indigo skirt.

“I'll be back in a minute,” you say, rising from the stool, stepping off the rotating bar, feeling like a kid trying to hop off a decelerating merry-go-round. Paul continues his lecture on nuggets, and Ronnie hangs on every word, mouth agape, nodding.

Maux doesn't notice you at first. She is glaring at the floor. She looks up as you approach, suddenly smiles, catches herself smiling, scowls.

“Why are you here?” she sneers, unclenching the pint glass from her thighs. Head to toe, this indigo vision from the planet Krazy. And who do you think you are, thinking you could meet the marrying kind here in Gainesville, where the women are as crazy and flaky as the days are hot and generally pointless?

“I don't know,” you say, pulling up a bar stool and sitting down. For once, you answer honestly. “Why are you here?”

“I don't have any friends, remember?” she says. “I hate people, remember?” You remember. She sips the Fancy Lad from the pint glass, recrosses her legs. “Oh, and I broke up with Philip.”

“I'm sorry to hear that,” you say.

“No, you're not,” Maux says, and you laugh. “This Charming Man” by The Smiths bounces out the speakers, and all the women in the room run en masse to the dance floor.

“You're right,” you say. You're not in the mood for the typical Gainesville duplicity.

She empties the pint glass, hands it to you. “Let's get out of here,” she says.

Sometimes, like now, Maux has the right idea. “Where to?” you ask, hopping off your barstool.

“What did you say to me when we hooked up?” She slides off her barstool and faces you, knee-high indigo boots, that indigo sleeveless miniskirt, those long lithe arms and that edible neck, the slope of the chin, the cheeks, the indigo lipstick, the indigo eye shadow, the short angry shock of indigo hair. Your erection is profound, this almost leaky menacing high-maintenance wand of hormonal desperation pushing against the black denim of your cut-off below the knee pants, even when she quotes you and imitates you in your Kermit-the-Frog-as-Ian-Mac-Kaye voice, “ ‘Let's go back to my apartment and listen to music?' Let's do that.”

Nothing is long-term, and not much even makes it to short-term here, so who cares. Who cares if your nineteen year old girlfriend, the biggest nothing of all since coming back from tour, is asleep in your bed at home. Waiting for you after closing Gatorroni's.

“We're going to listen to music at your place instead,” you say, setting the empty pint glass on your bar stool, and then you think it'll be funny to imitate Maux's raspy teenage boy snotty tone, so you say “There's some dumb stupid horrible band staying with us right now who I hate,” and she has to laugh, and you have to laugh, and it's a discreet sneak through the crowd of women dancing to The Smiths. You avoid eye contact with all of them, because if they figured out what was happening, well. The last thing you need is another ex-girlfriend co-worker at Gatorroni's by the Slice. You don't look up and over to Paul and Ronnie, because you don't want them to see you leaving without them, and maybe they see you and maybe they don't. You don't want to have to explain anything to anyone.

You make it out of there without any interactions, stumbling across the white graveled parking lot in this pathetic little corner of this “mixed up muddled up shook up world” (so you sing to yourself from a song the title of which you can't recall) to your hail-damaged white Honda coupe, the racquet-ball-sized hail leaving black dimples on the roof and hood. Maux finds her car—something cold and teutonic—and it's a ten minute drive back to town. You follow the red square tail lights as the darkness of the rural road slowly brightens into college town streets. You arrive at her student ghetto apartment, and you shrug, get out of the car, think/don't think about what you're doing/not doing, and how it's so easy to get into a rut here, and too easy to drink the days and nights away. Easy . . . easy . . . easy. Two steps inside, and Maux has her indigo lips all over the right side of your face.

 

 

DOUG CLIFFORD: THE BAND (NOT THE DRUMMER)

 

Ronnie leaves the plasma center, crook of his right arm bandaged, wallet's emptiness temporarily assuaged with a ten and a five, drives over to William and Neal's coach house, nothing to do on a weekday afternoon, pulls up the dirt driveway, white clouds billowing behind him, parks in front of the white shack they lived in, gets out of the car, steps inside because the door's open and a familiar old record is playing.

“Ronnie!” Neal says, standing in the middle of the tiny dirty beige living room with the low ceiling, shirtless and hairy, in nothing else but blue shorts. The coach house feels like a mid-August afternoon where the breeze—such as it is—doesn't stop the heat. “We're starting a Creedence Clearwater Revival cover band, and we want you to be the drummer.”

“Who else is in it?” Ronnie asks, walking the five steps to their battered gray sofa, stepping around Neal and falling onto the couch as John Fogerty sings “Oh Lord/stuck in Lodi uh-gaaaaain” through snap-crackly-popped vinyl.

“Nobody. Yet. Just me and William.” Neal moves to the open doorway, looks out to the sand and the dirt of the driveway, air-bass guitaring, turning to his right at the wobbly black disc on the turntable on the opposite wall of the couch where Ronnie slouches with his bandaged arm and the bloody-dotted cottonball pressed into the crook of his arm. If Ronnie wanted to change the music, he could do so almost without getting up from his seat—only a matter of stretching himself over a cracked and ancient orange coffee table cluttered with stacks of random artbooks, a label-free jug of red wine, and an opened gatefold brown and black record cover—CCR's
Chronicle
—dotted with tiny green marijuana flakes.

“What's the drummer's name?” Ronnie asks. Like any self-respecting American, Ronnie loves Creedence Clearwater Revival, and finds it impossible to fathom anyone—anyone!—disliking their music. And Ronnie knows he can pull off these rhythms without any problems.

Neal turns around, steps to the coffee table. “Good question.” He picks up
Chronicle
, flips it over. “Oh! Of course. Everybody knows it's Doug Clifford.” Neal laughs, extends the album to Ronnie's face, points to the liner note that has his name. “Doug Clifford, dude.”

Ronnie laughs, takes the cover out of Neal's hands, stares transfixed at Doug Clifford's shagginess, the brown mop top and the relief pitcher moustache. “So I'm Doug Clifford?” he asks.

“The band's Doug Clifford,” Neal says. They laugh. Neal adds, in the shy burnout voice of the musician with the microphone in every independent rock and roll band ever, “Hey what's up? We're Doug Clifford? We're from Gainesville?”

Neal flips the record, and they sit on the couch passing the label-free red wine jug, taking in the sounds, talking about Doug Clifford, the band that wasn't a band yet, that would, in fact, never be a band.

William steps out of his bedroom—yawning, stretching—groggy from a hungover nap. Short blond hair in bedheaded clumps, wrinkled white t-shirt of some old hardcore band with a cheap-o black silkscreened image of the buzzcut-headed singer in mid-howl, left hand grabbing the mic, right hand balled into an angry punk rock fist. William sits between Ronnie and Neal, blue work pants cutoff below the knees skidding against the worn fabric of the couch, keys jangling in a right side belt loop. He leans forward, grabs the wine bottle, drinks, studies
Chronicle
.

“Should we grow mutton chops and moustaches for this?” he asks. Ronnie laughs at the idea.

“Naw, dude,” Neal says. “We'll just wear flannel. No need to be glitzy.” He leans forward, points at the cover. “Doug Clifford would want it that way.”

The afternoon dissipates into evening. They empty the wine bottle and
Chronicle
ends, and then Neal throws on
Cosmo's Factory
and then
Willie and the Poor Boys
, and it doesn't matter if some of the same songs are repeated—they are starting a CCR cover band so it is paramount to gain an even greater familiarity with the material.

Paul walks in the door, “Oh, CCR . . . I too can hear the bullfrog calling me . . . ” He stops to look at these three giggling on the couch. “You guys are llllloaded!” Paul says.

“It's Doug Clifford's fault,” Ronnie says, fully feeling the spirit of the wine, of the music.

“Well I'm going to the Drunken Mick if you want a ride.” Paul shakes his head, laughs. “Looks like I got some catching up to do.”

“Maybe Paul should be Doug Clifford, and you can be Stu Sutcliffe, Ron,” Neal says, as they stand and stumble out the door, leaving the record to end on the bummer jam “Effigy.” “You can play other instruments, and Paul only plays the drums.”

“Aw, man,” Ronnie moans. “I was really hoping to be ol' Doug.”

“Well we can't all be Doug Clifford,” Neal says as he locks the front door. “Such is life.”

Everyone they would see at the Drunken Mick, everyone they would talk to at the Drunken Mick, they would figure out a way to work Doug Clifford—the band that would never be a band—into the conversation. “Doug Clifford drank Fancy Lad Stout, so that's what I'm gonna have too.” “Doug Clifford likes girls like you, has anybody ever told you that before?” “Yeah, I don't know if I can see your band this weekend. Doug Clifford said it wasn't very good.”

“What's all this Doug Clifford malarkey?” Paul asks Ronnie, sitting at the Drunken Mick as Neal, on the other side of William, serenades all passersby with random snippets of CCR songs, culminating in illogical drunken laughter and a “Doug Clifford!” plea.

“It's our new band,” Ronnie informs him.

“Really?” Paul says.

“Sure!”

“Uh-huh.” Paul shakes his head. “It's all talk. Next week, it'll be something else.”

Before Ronnie can contradict him, the wine and the Irish stout drowning out any counterarguments to the undeniable fact that yes, Doug Clifford will get off the ground and yes, Doug Clifford will be a real band, Neal stands on the bar, completely naked, a gorilla-hirsute body soft shoeing across the mahogany bar, yelling, “This one's going out to Doug Clifford!” He raises his arms in triumph, sings, “I wanna know! Have you ever seen the rain!” He shakes his dong up and down, round and round.

Ronnie leaps off the barstool, laughs, preparing for a fight somewhere, or jail time—something—but instead, the roomful of drunks, scenester kids Ronnie hasn't met yet, collegiate-y types seated at the tables throughout the room, all chant “Doug Clif-ford! Doug Clif-ford! Doug Clif-ford!” until the bartender—long used to these antics, coaxes Neal down, bundled clothes in hand, trying not to smile.