Losing in Gainesville (9781940430331) by Brian Costello Page B

figures he will be broke a lot, be hungry a lot, lonely, depressed, but he won’t mope about it and scream it out at some show. He will laugh. These bands work in limited spectrums, and after you’ve heard and processed, say, Captain Beefheart or Albert Ayler, it’s hard to go back.
    Ronnie leaves the Nardic Track, and stepping out of the muggy show and into the relative cool of the Gainesville spring is in itself a glorious moment. He walks past groups of sweaty punk kids standing around in gossipy packs or sitting on the steps of the Hippodrome Theatre (a beautiful olden Greco-Roman column-heavy building) across the street, staring at Ronnie, not quite in a “Who the fuck is this guy and what the fuck is he doing here?” but more of a “Who let you in here?” kind of vibe you get anywhere anyplace the crowd is tight-knit and everyone in that circle knows everyone else’s story. He attempts a smile and a “What’s up?” to a couple dudes with skateboards sitting on either side of a girl with shaved green hair and cat-eye glasses. They say nothing.
    In the car, Ronnie thinks it’s funny to freestyle emo lyrics like he heard tonight: “I don’t know . . . anybody heeeeeeeere / I shoulda peeeeeeeeeed before I left the shoooooooooow / now I gottaaaaaa gooooooooooo / man, I gottaaaaa goooooo/my blaaaaader screeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeams / to meeeeeee.” Through the small downtown, past the closed restaurants and closing bars and grills, the manic action of novice drunk kids acting like novice drunk kids. At Main and University, a flip-flop stepping brunette-with-blonde-streaks skin-covered skeleton girl in an orange and blue University of Florida t-shirt and matching pajama bottom screams “I’M SO DRUNK AND HAPPY I WANNA PUKE EVERYWHERE” while leading a pack of similarly attired friends across the intersection. Ronnie sings as he drives back to the other side of town, past a university he does not attend, down streets he does not know, as the college gives way to the residential neighborhoods. University Avenue begins its slow metamorphosis into Newberry Road, and the plazas and strip malls and apartment complexes begin.
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    PAYPHONE CALL TO MR. AND MRS. ALTAMONT
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    â€œLook, I walked out. It wasn’t a fun place to be, you know? The owner was this mustachioed Ay-rab cokehead who was always trying to grope the servers at the end of the night while everybody else who worked there had had a few drinks and I’m back there slaving away trying to wash the last of the dishes and plates so I can go home, because God forbid the lowly dishwasher gets to have a drink with the rest of the crew. I mean, sometimes they’d give me a bottle of Budweiser or something, but I mean, Budweiser gives me headaches, so I can’t even drink that. But not only that, it was like, so pretentious, how everyone just had to have their water with lemon, like the lemon makes a difference, and the customers were always calling everything ‘fabulous’ in like these haughty Newport, Rhode Island inflections, like earning five figures from commissions in the Central Florida real estate market gives you the right to act like you’ve made it into the upper echelons of the Really Rich.”
    Right View. Right Thought. Right Speech. Right Behavior. Right Livelihood. Right Effort. Right Mindfulness. Right Concentration. As her son goes through this litany of complaints, Mrs. Sally-Anne Altamont makes a list, in spite of herself, of all the ways in which Ronnie is not following the Noble Eightfold Path. Where to begin?
    â€œRonnie.” Sally-Anne’s voice is firm, serious, a tone she hopes conveys how badly she wants him to stop ranting, just this once. But he’s always ranting anymore; in recent years, an anger, a caustic bitterness, sarcasm at everything and everyone. Where does it come from? They are retired now, Sally-Anne and her husband