Losing in Gainesville (9781940430331) (19 page)

“He does this all the time,” Paul yells in Ronnie's ear over the din of the continued “Doug Clifford!” chants.

Neal squats down, leaps behind the bar, throws on his clothes, yells, “Thank you! We're Doug Clifford! Good night!”

The short squat ginger-headed bartender looks to Paul, smiles. “You know what to do,” he says in an Irish brogue exaggerated for greater tips the way female bartenders accentuate their tits.

“Yeah yeah, I know,” Paul says, smiling in the familiarity of the routine. “Let's go, little brother,” he announces, right hand's fingers beckoning towards the exit.

And in the dizzy-drunk near last-call at The Drunken Mick, Paul leads Neal by the arm, Neal's pants pulled up but unbuttoned, t-shirt coiled around his neck, followed by Ronnie and William, as the “Doug Clif-ford! Doug Clif-ford!” chants fade and they step out onto the University Avenue sidewalk, to the car, home to bed.

 

•

 

No, there would be no Doug Clifford. Doug Clifford would be replaced by the next band concept. There would never be enough time to get to all the ideas. You could pull off two or three bands at once, but the others fell away into afternoons and nights like these—frivolous discussion where someone like Ronnie Altamont could believe it would be possible to actually get Doug Clifford off the ground. So many ideas fell to the wayside, getting no further than creative play, self-expression for self-expression's sake, impromptu late-night jams, or the idle talk of the potential members of Doug Clifford. Everywhere, kids talk this way, and they make ambitious plans and announcements and they want to believe that this is the band that will get off the ground, and who knows, maybe this will be the band to get off the ground, but just as likely it won't, it's more enjoyable to talk. Sometimes, the idea itself is better than any possible execution.

And there were no shortage of ideas. Freed from the confines and general horseshit of high school, stimulated enough by college and the young adulthood of post-college, anything seems possible. Brains bloom endless variations on the same four chords, the same 4/4 rock beats, music—in execution or theory—dancing between the gap of thought and expression the Velvet Underground once sang about. It's the limitations Melville lamented at the end of Chapter 32, “Cetology,” in
Moby Dick
: There's never enough time, and that's the colossal bummer of life, isn't it?

 

 

SWEAT JAM

 

In the corner of the spare square room soundproofed with red rugs nailed to the walls, Paul pounds eighth notes on the floor tom of his five-piece gold sparkled Ludwig drumkit, hitting the snare on the two and the four of the 4/4 beat. Like all drummers, he's the first in the room to get lost in the music, of this simple VU cavepound, eyes opened but not looking at anything . . . often when playing drums, Paul thinks of streets in towns he used to live, streets in towns he will never return. In Wekiva—the neighborhood he grew up in before going off to college—the twenty minute drive through the mammoth subdivision, the Duckpond to the left, the one-story ranch-styles on side streets that branched cul-de-sacs with bike trails winding through the jungle scrub. Hunt Club Boulevard—that was the name of the main thoroughfare and you don't get much more suburban that that—a four-lane road with only minor curves, winding home after school and yelling “Faggot!” at old people who were dumb enough to walk the sidewalks or “Skateboarding should be a crime!” at the skater kids. With the body memory of the drum beat, his mind wanders down those streets, tries taking stock in what he remembers and what he forgets. Cannonballs into swimming pools, that sensation of hanging in the air—dry—before falling, before the big splash. The hallways of their high school—the high school that has since been torn down and replaced by a newer, larger, nicer, more functional high school—the dirt and grime on the white tile of the old one, the rows of blue lockers, the clang of the lockers, the manic chatter, the drama and secrets and undercurrent of uncertainty masked by everyone with every step between classes, the three bong-bong-bongs of the tardy bell, the cheap portable walls put up to separate what had once been giant rooms, the library in the center of the school, spokes of hallways and classrooms orbiting. In the Fishbowl—the circular steps surrounded by windows of the painting and theatre classes—where the arty kids hung around before the classes started, the goth kids, the skaters, the punks with their liberty spikes and CRASS t-shirts, cliqued up because you needed a group to get through it. Paul pounds the beat and remembers all of this, remembers leaving school, getting in a car, driving down Sand Lake Road through the subdivisions and the open fields that would become subdivisions soon enough, the perpetually sunshiney afternoon of a Central Florida weekday as school lets out and no matter what you think or thought about it it stays in your memories.

Neal stands to his brother's right, picking at a red Fender bass plugged into a buzzing Peavey bass amp. His mind doesn't wander around in memories of past places the way Paul's does—he needs to hold this together—as the bass man, as the bridge, the link, between the drums and the guitars. It's more of a channeling of the spirit of Mike Watt—of the Minutemen, of fIREHOSE—of locking into what's happening and finding the freedom in it and the spaces to not just lock down the rhythm and bridge the gap from drums to guitar—but to figure out ways to get to the top two strings and the upper frets—not to show off, but to find the right sounds, the right counterbalance to the guitars, because everyone knows the guitars want nothing more but to wank and noodle and dick around, so this is an anchor that will give them not just the low notes of the chords they play, but a larger framework to do something that is both tasteful and creative. He puffs out his cheeks and exhales like Mike Watt the way guitarists might windmill like Townshend. He moves in spasmodic forward lurches, backbone sways waving from the base of the spine to the neck as the fingers on his right hand pick-pluck the strings. It has to start with Watt for Neal, because Watt opened up the possibilities of the instrument for Neal, and that led to Mingus, to Jimmy Garrision, to Rockette Morton. Day-to-day life is nervous energy channeled into right and wrong places, but here, with the music, it's all focused on this, and every distraction, every good and bad memory, all the drama of the Great Gainesvillian Soap Opera, fades to nothing.

William, all he wants to do is plug into the Crate amp in the corner and stand to the left of Paul, pedals cranked up all the way, and stab at a detuned off-white Fender Squire so it makes cloudy feedback of dense black and white noise. He doesn't really know how to play guitar, only picking up chords here and there from friends while sitting around some late-night front porch party, so he tries following the cavepound rhythm, smiling in sweat and angular side-to-side hip swivels, never more convinced that MOE GREEN'S FUCKING EYE SOCKET is over, because the simple enjoyment of it, at its base, of making music with friends, died somewhere on that ill-fated and pointless tour. If anything, instead of dreaming of where he was, or where he is, he thinks of where he will be, if he can figure out how to get out of here.

Ronnie tosses around the phrase “Sweat Jam,” used by Neal before they went to Paul's gray-teal, wood-rotting, plaster-peeling student ghetto house, walking over from Gatorroni's with a case of Old Hamtramck, as he follows Paul's rhythm and bounces around Neal's foundation, a beat-to-hell black and white Fender Squire plugged direct into a Peavey amp with a small amount of distortion and a small amount of reverb, throttling the instrument with pick strums and fist punches, trying to find new sounds, the high white sounds of life itself. Sweaty forehead, sweat-stained t-shirt, wet hair. Ronnie lived in the all-encompassing now, the brilliantly beautiful now. The music they made in the sweat jam was Ronnie's life—one loud long song jumping around in keys and tempos, bright then droning, repetitive then chaotic, but always loud and always sweaty. Each day, each moment—he thinks as he jumps around in the three foot diameter of space he has between Neal and William and in front of Paul in that tiny red-rugged room—is a glorious sweat jam, a cliffdive into the unknown, no matter what happens with his writing and his band, here in Gainesville.

Life as a sweat jam. Yeah. Ronnie can live with this.

THE LARAFLYNNBOYLES

 

Here comes another god-damned taint-chafe of a Florida summer, and The Laraflynnboyles, the band Ronnie Altamont left behind in Orlando, are planning a tour, a fruited-plain circle through the Southeast to the Midwest and back.

Each day, Ronnie would pace the trailer's filthy kitchen, shifting his weight from one foot to the other on the unstable linoleum flooring, vibrations shaking Squeaky the Gerbil's cage to the edge of the sticky kitchen counter, corded powder blue phone pressed to Ronnie's ear (Alvin paid off the phone bill with his first paycheck washing dishes for Otis's Barbelicious BBQ's Archer Road location), talking with the bass player—John “Magic” Jensen—about all the wonderful shows they would play, as if the band still existed, as if the tour was as inevitable as Florida summer sunshine. How beautiful the names of the cities sounded in their larynxes, on their tongues, through their teeth, through moving lips! Louisville! Cincinnati! Saint Louis! Columbia!

“Chicago!” Magic says, and, for once, the dude sounds happy, like he's sincerely excited by something. (And no, it matters nothing to them that the show they've booked isn't in Chicago, per se, but in some basement called the “Drunk Skum House” in the far western suburb of Aurora, Illinois.) Because Magic, he's like those guys in college who are always one year away from graduating with a philosophy major he knows he's never going to apply towards much beyond endless sardonic waxings on the human condition between bong swats while slouched in an exhausted blue couch covered in cigarette burns while watching hour after hour of the retarded sexual development of Tony and Angela on
Who's the Boss?
or Cousin Balki's unfortunate mangling of common sayings on
Perfect Strangers
or the incurable nerdishness of one Steve Urkel on
Family Matters
. It is no great stretch for Ronnie to imagine Magic down there in the slow hours of this nasty-muggy June afternoon, a cigarette burning in the right hand, a beer can in the left, waiting for the call from whichever X-ed out raver-junkie had the good drugs this week. Only, on the phone, there's something in the way Magic exclaims (yes, exclaims!) the word “Chicago!” Like it means something. Ronnie can almost imagine the depression that Magic always tries self-medicating away melting on its own. A smile in the eyes behind the black-framed rectangular-lensed glasses, in the normally scowled mouth. Maybe he even straightens up a bit on that blue couch, turns off the sitcoms, combs out the knots in his long black hair, changes out of the t-shirt and cut-off shorts that hang off his skeletal frame, changes out of those clothes he lives in for days, actually looks forward to something beyond the next drug delivery.

“Then we'll still move up there next year,” Ronnie assures, because it was always the plan to take the band to Chicago, to get out of Florida and move to Chicago.

(And what do you think they possibly imagine about Chicago, about the day-to-day and night-to-night realities of living there? John and Ronnie had traveled to Chicago once—to visit Chris “Chuck” Taylor, The Laraflynnboyle's original lead singer, an avuncular improvisational actor who lived with six other roommates in a half-built loft space in the South Loop neighborhood filled with the sounds of Orange Line trains taking sullen commuters from downtown through the Southwest Side before stopping at Midway Airport, late nights punctuated by the gang war gunshots, from various exotic firearms, resonating through the streets and alleys. None of that mattered, because it was Not-Florida. It wasn't Chicago, but merely the idea of an immense city of endless possibility.

They knew nothing of crumbling brick three-flats with water-stained ceilings, of parking tickets given out to feed a corrupt machine. About corner taverns and hipster bars where everyone knows everything about nothing much. Ronnie—In that fluorescent-lit multi-stenched kitchen, yellowed and gerbilly—wearing stained khaki pants, a short-sleeved, sweat stained holey blue t-shirt, unfashionable hiking boots, oversized glasses—has no idea. He idealizes the Midwest as some plainspoken, levelheaded tell-it-like-it-is magic land of pragmatism, and romanticizes Chicago as this city full of big booming life bursting with Roykos, Superfans, Blues Brothers, Ditkas, Albinis—when, really, all it is is Not Florida, USA—some promised land where he could be successful at what he loved.)

“We'll play out all the time. Make some money at it, maybe even make a living at it,” Ronnie continues, peeling his hiking boots off the floor of the kitchen, looking out the dusty kitchen windows at the trailers up and down the street.

“I'll make sure Andrew's on board. No worries,” Magic says, talking about Andrew “Macho Man Randy” Savage, the Laraflynnboyles drummer, an affable stoner with a taste for video games and hanging around doing as little as possible.

“We'll talk soon,” Ronnie says, and adds the word, “Stoked!” before he hangs up the phone, runs to his room, picks up his guitar, starts plucking frantically strummed barre chords—looking forward to the near-fruition of a long-held ambition, an obsession going back to adolescence, if not earlier.

 

•

 

It starts very young—at four or five even—when it's easy to imagine yourself as the lead singer of a stadium-packing rock and roll band, between gigs as homerun record-setting golden-gloved shortstop, rushing record-breaking all-pro running back, Mars-exploring astronaut, and puppy-rescuing fireman. The rest of childhood to puberty is a potato sack race between vocations. Fireman? It doesn't sound glamorous enough. Football? Those practices are no fun at all. Astronaut? You don't get to Mars with a C-average in science. Baseball was the last to go. Ronnie's eyes went myopic around the time his family moved to Florida, and the new place was too hot to bother with the Pony Leagues, and besides, by that point, music offered some kind of map through adolescence's chaotically inextricable terrain.

Through a combination of practical elimination of childhood dreams, and emerging passion, Ronnie Altamont finds rock and roll. At first, his only source was MTV—the J. Geils Band, Quiet Riot, Van Halen. From there, he tunes into the “Album-Oriented Rock” stations that would later be relabeled “classic rock,” where bands like Led Zeppelin, Boston, and Pink Floyd—then, as now—played in an eternal loop. Compared to the music of the mid-1980s, classic rock was, indeed, classic. The popular music of 1986-1990, Ronnie's high school years, slogged through an endless succession of soulless, talentless swill. Ronnie ignores all of this and obsesses on the
storm und drang
of The Who.

Here's when the dream (Since this aspires to be The Great Floridian Novel, perhaps it should be called The Dream) really possessed Ronnie, because The Who—and Pete Townshend in particular—were accessible in ways the other so-called “classic rock” bands could never be. While bands like Led Zeppelin and the Stones in particular were often essentially saying “I have a big dick and enjoy sex with lots of women”—Townshend said: “I have no idea what I'm doing or even how to express it.” Here, for Ronnie, was the teenage wasteland of the mind, heart, and glands.

High school. What was that bullshit but one big daydream of drawing band logos all over folders? Putting the head down on the desk and drooling in sleep as the teachers went on and on about topics that weren't rock and roll and were therefore unimportant? Songs—lyrics, guitar solos, bass lines, drum fills—ricocheted around Ronnie's skull like dozens of pinballs. Waiting for the final period of the school day—marching band—to go bash a snare drum for an hour. Then, it was home, and straight to the bedroom to brood on some inaccessible girl-crush, as The Who played from the nearby stereo, every night and all weekend. That plea: “Can you see the real me? Can ya? Can ya?”
Quadrophenia
as the soundtrack to hours staring at the popcorn ceiling required in all those hastily-built Florida suburban homes, thrown up in an attempt to keep pace with the Great Yankee Migration of the 1980s. Textbooks, as uncracked as they were when he got them in August, rarely left the morass of his locker, where pictures of Townshend and Moonie in leaping drumsmashing windmilling glory adorned the locker door's interior side. High school. It wasn't glory. It wasn't disgrace. It was nothing but a daydream. A Bartlebyesque refusal.

All that changed with the drums. Ronnie constantly practiced, and studied Keith Moon in particular. He absorbed everything about The Who—every Townshend leap, Entwistle flurry, Daltrey pose, and especially Moonie's ability to make the whole kit shout in tumultuous waves. He read every book he could find on The Who, reread those books, owned every Who album (even the bad ones), and, somehow, this led to discovering punk rock (because Townshend liked the Sex Pistols and the punks from that time generally liked The Who). It wasn't through the punk rockers in his high school (although he would eventually be friends with most of them—William, Neal, and Paul, among others), who seemed at the time like another bland choice in the salad bar of high school cliquedom. It was like this solitary quest to find the songs and the bands that got it—“it” being whatever it was you go through as a teenager—right. By the time 1990 came around, the discovery of bands—old and new—local, American, English, whatever and wherever—was Ronnie's drug, the thing that got him high and excited to live. At some point during this time, Ronnie switched to guitar, finding it cheaper and easier to carry around than a drumset.

Bands started and ended quickly in that time, with names like The Adjective Nouns, Murderous Kumquats, and Poop, none of them very good. Two weeks before graduating high school, Ronnie meets John “Magic” Jensen through the singer of one of these interchangeable bands. With Magic, Ronnie finds, for the first time, someone who shares his musical obsessions, who has spent similar hours flipping cassette tapes in his bedroom, supine on the bed, staring at the ceiling. For Magic, these obsessions are eclipsed only by his love for marijuana. Ronnie and Magic are inseparable. Magic taught himself to play bass, loves the music of Frank Zappa and Jane's Addiction the way Ronnie loves the music of The Who and (by that point) The Buzzcocks. Magic turns Ronnie onto the Dead Kennedys, Ronnie turns Magic onto the first two Ramones albums, they both watch the bands in
The Decline of Western Civilization
, and knew that somewhere—not where they were—but somewhere—was a better world of live music and danger and adventure. Magic rarely left his room. The room had his bong, his bass, his music, his pornos, the TV. He would sit in a red recliner, stoned, watching
Star Trek: The Next Generation
on mute, studying Natasha Yaar's tits with the Butthole Surfers providing the soundtrack. There was nowhere else to go and nothing else to do, and the life they saw glimpses of through the music and the TV wasn't where they were, so they were bored all the time (not knowing that there were far worse things in the world than boredom) and they had no idea how to alleviate it—naïve and generally understimulated—sitting in the darkness of Magic's bedroom where the aluminum foil covered the windows and blocked the sun of those insufferably hot days. Magic sits in his room where the TV is never off, and mutters perceived truisms like “Life doesn't suck, it's just boring,” and “They're fuckers man, fuck
'
em.”

Nothing comes of the bands they start because, well, drummers are drummers. And not only that, good drummers were impossible to find. There were plenty of people with drumsticks—and some of them even had drumsets—and some of them could even keep beats—but none remotely shared Ronnie and Magic's interests.

Finally, after they'd both started attending the University of Central Florida, they find a drummer in Willie-Joe Scotchgard, who actually plays the viola, but knows how to keep a beat. School lets out, and early summer is always a terrific time to start a band, so Willie-Joe drives home to Lakeland and brings his drums back to the living room of the second floor of some remarkably tolerant apartment complex in UCF's student ghetto, and it is here, the four of them (“Chuck” Taylor still living in Orlando, an alum from Ronnie and Magic's high school, old friend and dopesmoking buddy from the drama club Magic dabbled in, Magic's interest explicable in that the girls were much cooler and better looking than they were in the marching band) buy six-packs of Falstaff Beer (on sale for two dollars at the nearest Publix), and goof off the evenings and nights beered up enough to play the dumb songs Ronnie and Magic had written.

The songs are satirical, silly. Maybe they're a punk band. Maybe they aren't. (“Jesus, who cares?!?” Magic yelled after Ronnie voiced his concerns, and that settled it.) Ronnie names the band The Laraflynnboyles, after the actress on
Twin Peaks
, because Ronnie sees in her what he never could quite see in all those peroxide plasticine Florida women—someone beautiful with an inner vulnerability, and yeah—goddamn right—it's all projection, but you gotta understand: Ronnie had to find everything alone, the way all kids in exurbs with the guts to think for his/herself must do when slogging through the Great Adolescent American Mindnumb
.

The songs: Country-Western odes to their Altamonte Springs hometown (remarkably similar to The Kinks' “Willesden Green”), songs with one-line lyrics repeated over and over (“Sweaty Hands”—whose only lyric was “Sweaty Hands: Whenever I see you I get sweaty hands,” a tribute of sorts to Flipper's “Sex Bomb”), the requisite 90s is-this-ironic-or-is-it-not-quite-ironic-but-something-in-between-irony-and-earnestness covers of Kiss (“She”) and .38 Special (“Hold On Loosely,” Chuck Taylor's star turn, the way he'd point like Elvis and shake his comically avuncular frame at the smattering of ladies in attendance at each show as he sang, “You see it all around you/good lovin' gone bad.”), songs about this big white 1970 Chevy Impala driven by a girl Ronnie briefly dated, who would pick him up and take him to all the weird little clubs and bars and (true) chili bordellos dotted across Orlando's landscape as they made the cute little inside jokes boyfriends and girlfriends make while listening to a cassette of Lou Reed on one side and Screaming Trees on the other endlessly flipping back and forth between the two, she politely indulging the “I will always be punk” rants he would veer into from time to time, as was the style of the early-to-mid 1990s), a song Magic wrote called “Chilean Sea Bass” (that being a metaphor invented by Paul to describe cute girls), the entire presentation—when they had shows—layered in a thick Kiss rock and roll swagger, like if Kiss had one too many beers before playing. It was funny to them to act like Kiss—it was funny for Ronnie to howl Paul Stanleyisms like “I know everybody's hot! Everybody's got the: ROCK AND ROLL PNEUMON-EE-YAAHHHH!!!” as Magic shook his fist and growled “Ohhhhhhh yeahhh-ahhhhhh!” like Gene Simmons. They were laughing at their childhoods of bad MTV, bad bands, bad music, at being sold a bill of jiveass rock and roll goods.