Losing in Gainesville (9781940430331) (11 page)

Back in the kitchen, you make more pizza, sneak more pitchers to Neal and all them. The dinner rush tapers off. The students finish their slices and take their textbooks back to the dorms. The families leave their tables unbussed and go home. With an hour to go until closing, your girlfriend with her bleach blonde barretted hair and giant too-young smile who's working to save money so she can have as many tattoos as everyone else working here, grabs you by the arm in the dishtank while you're trying to scrub burnt minced garlic from a skillet, says, “Let's go to the walk-in.”

You grab the mop and follow her out the back door, into the hot parking lot and into the walk-in cooler, thinking, Well, there are worse ways to be welcomed back to town. You wedge the mop into the inside door handle to prevent any unwelcome entry.

“I missed having you here,” she says, leaning in for a long kiss before grabbing you by the hips and gently pushing you backwards until you're against the cold shelves. She squats down, unzips your pants, grabs, strokes, sucks. Stacked on the opposite shelves are white plastic gallon-sized cylindrical bins where some prep cook lackey wrote “MARINARA 4/16.” Your head rolls backwards and your eyes land on these bins. One hand rolls over her hair, over the barrette, and the other hand grips one of the frosty vertical beams of the shelving. You moan. Someone pulls on the cooler and you yell “Go away!” The mop rattles with the violent pulls on the door but does what it was put there to do.

“Welcome back,” she says when finished. You smile, catch your breath, say nothing. She removes the mop, hands it to you. “Bye,” she says, opening the walk-in cooler as you wipe up with the white towel you keep in your back pocket for wiping down counters and tables. You pull up your boxers, your pants, zip, button. Open the walk-in and step into the heat once again, but instead of going back into the kitchen to start closing up for the night, you run to your car, open the passenger door, unscrew the Floridian Comfort fifth and chug. The booze squeegees and muddles your head. You spin around and look to the clouds and the sliver of a moon and wish you could be ten different places at once and ten different people at once and you want to laugh at this finite life and dance away the unshakable anxiety that keeps you up nights and leaves you a puddle of boozy drool—that this is as good as it will ever be.

You walk back into the kitchen. Your manager asks if you wanna spark another one. You smile, turn around, and it's back into the walk-in cooler, only, this time, you think you can actually start talking about the tour—all of its good/bad unboring/banal glory/futility.

 

 

SCENES FROM THE REVEREND B. STONED'S

OPEN-MIC ECLECTIC JAMBALAYA JAM

 

The wait. The insufferable wait to perform at Reverend B. Stoned's Open-Mic Eclectic Jambalaya Jam here at Turn Your Head and Coffee, an off-campus coffeehouse on the University Avenue entertainment strip. Icy Filet (neé Chelsey Anne Cavanaugh) studies her carefully prepared notecards by candlelight in a far corner of the tiny square room, periodically sipping a soy Americano from a large green mug—this wait a nerve-wracking ordeal of hot and cold flashes, sour stomach nausea rumbles, a general itchiness. Maybe she should cross her name off the sign-up sheet. She looks away from her notecards, mouths the words, and always—always—forgets everything past the first four lines. This is no way to be a freestyle rapper, she thinks, breathes in, breathes out. I need to leave.

“Greetings, to all my brothers and sisters of this funktified congregation,” the Reverend B. Stoned bellows in a voice that is one-third televangelical preacher, one-third game-show announcer and one-third stoner-whispering-some-conspiracy-theory-about-the-government (Icy Filet recognizes him from his picture on all the fliers around campus—black beret with the two short black braids sticking out the back, black priest shirt and white clerical collar, pink-tinted John Lennon sunglasses, black fu-manchu rounding his round face, the tie-dyed kilt and the knee-high combat boots), and the dozen-odd patrons seated in the wobbly round candlelit tables in front of the stage clap politely. “Are you ready to hear gospels of nonconformity and antidisestablishmentarianism?” The applause increases, and two of the rowdier audience members Woo-Hoo! to this.

It's too late now to take her name off the list, or so Icy Filet believes—too anxious, brain increasingly manically feverish with each sip from the soy Americano, to listen to the Reverend B. Stoned's opening monologue in which he preaches the virtues of marijuana legalization. Unsurprisingly, no one disagrees; Turn Your Head and Coffee is an inevitably lefty/libertarian coffeehouse. Icy Filet could leave. Why does she want to do this in front of strangers applauding platitudes like “Don't let our dreams for marijuana legalization go up in smoke! Legalize, don't criminalize!”?

As the enthusiastic applause begins to fade, the Reverend B. Stoned preaches into the microphone, “Brothers and sisters: Lift up your hearts and open your mind, soul, and ears to the righteous tirades of my sister in spirit, Miss Hillary X!”

Miss Hillary X steps onto the six inch high stage, approaches the mic stand—a waifish young woman of seventeen with bright blue short hair, a white t-shirt with the word RESIST! screenpainted across in Courier New font. Spiky wristbands on both wrists. Red plaid pants with suspenders between the legs. Combat boots wrapped in chains so they dramatically clunk with each step. A practice-makes-perfect scowl with a Sid Vicious sneer. She glares at the crowd, removes the mic from the stand.

“EVERY DAY . . . I SUFFER . . . UNDER THE TYRANNY . . . OF THE PATRIARCHY!” she yells, monotonical and strident.

“And it's nice to see you too,” Icy Filet mumbles to no one, seated in the back, wondering why people can never start things off at open mic nights with nice greetings, simple hellos even, before jumping in with the world-hating.

“I WORK JUST AS HARD AS A MAN,” Miss Hillary X continues, standing at attention, head turning from one table to the next, accusing eyes searching for anyone gathered here tonight at Turn Your Head and Coffee who might be in cahoots with the phallocentrists. “BUT I DON'T GET PAID AS MUCH AS A MAN! I WORK SO HARD . . . BUT TO A MAN, MAN, I'M JUST HERE . . . TO KEEP THEM HARD! MY SUBSERVIENT PUSSY! MY MANHANDLED ASS! MY SLAVEDRIVEN TITTIES!” With each yell of her body parts, Miss Hillary X grabs said body parts and shakes them, dramatically.

Icy Filet remembers Hillary Johnson, aka, Miss Hillary X, from high school back in Lake Mary. Two years younger than Icy, she was the notorious editor-in-chief of the school's newspaper—annoying and shrill—muckraking the quality of lunchroom pizza, and how there wasn't enough of a break between classes to get to your next class on time. Somebody somewhere deemed her “gifted,” and everyone believed it, and at the end of the day, the principal and administrators were probably all-too-happy to allow her to use her AP college credits to start college one year early. But still, back then, no matter how insufferable she could be, Hillary was never this angry. Icy Filet analyzes potential causes—moving away too young, one-too-many Women's Studies classes, or perhaps something much, much worse. Terrible things can happen in college, or even just walking down the street. Everyone needs an outlet—perhaps this is why we're here tonight, Icy Filet thinks. And if it means indulging dreadful—what? spoken word?—well, it's better than a lot of other ways people deal with their shit.

Miss Hillary Xs rant culminates in a final scream of “MY REVOLUTIONARY BREASTS SCREAM FOR LIBERATION.” Miss Hillary X lifts her white RESIST t-shirt, exposing budding breasts, nipples pierced with one glittering silver ring each. She raises her arms into the air, makes what may or may not be Black Power fists, tosses her shirt into the air, landing to her left, halfway between stage and tables. The audience gasps, applauds, woo-hoos, screams ecstatic affirmations.

“Oh God oh God oh . . . ” Icy Filet says to herself under the din of the audience. “Please don't let me go on after her . . . ” Icy tries recalling her lines, her dope-ass rhymes. Her memory has succumbed to panic. She recalls nothing. “I'm screwed,” she thinks. “I should be back in the dorm studying.”

The Reverend B. Stoned returns to the stage. “Wow, man, that was truly inspiringly countercultural, wouldn't you agree my brothers and sisters? Let's lighten the mood now with some poetry by my favorite—bud! Heh heh heh!” (Here everyone except Icy laughs.) “Smokey Green!”

Smokey Green, dressed in the obligatory hippie attire, stands onstage in a thick patchouli cloud and reads his poem in the burnout dope dealing raspy voiced stock character in any film from the 1970s:

“See: Bud is my bud

Not the Bud that you drink

But the bud that you smoke

Take a toke

Smell the smoke

This ain't no joke

Breathe it in

Feel the grin

the love will spread

check your head

you're as high as the sky

you don't need to fly

to climb aboard

and be with your bud, bud

Peace.”

Raucous applause. Icy Filet groans. She hopes—more than anything—that she will not be called up next. But of course, “And now, sisters and brothers,” the Reverend B. Stoned says, black fingernail polished right index finger following the sign-up sheet to the next name. “I believe this is the first time we've had a freestyle rapper here, but that's cool, that's cool. Welcome to our congregation . . . Icy Filet.”

She removes the Casio SK-1 from her UF orange and blue totebag at her feet, gathers her notecards off the table. The walk to the stage feels like the walk to an execution. She sets the SK-1 on the onstage barstool, approaches the mic. “Hi, my name is Icy Filet? I'm a rapper?” The audience laughs at this remark. “Um. I'm not trying to be funny. This is what I do. I rap. I'm from the mean streets of Lake Mary.” Icy Filet dresses in the “sexless librarian chic” style fashionable among indie-rock women in the mid-1990s. Short black hair parted in the manner of a 1950s accountant. Cardigan sweaters. Slouched postures. Thick nerd glasses. Shapeless black pants. Low-cut Doc Martens. She flips through her notecards, finds it. “OK. I'd like to start with this rap. It's called ‘I Eat Pop Tarts.' Thank you.”

She turns around, switches on the SK-1. A tinny pseudo hip-hop beat circa 1984 blips and loops out the keyboard's small speaker. Icy Filet turns to the mic, clears her throat, looks down at her notecards (not daring to look at the audience), and rhymes, in a cadence nervous and uneven:

“I eat Pop Tarts

every day now

it's how my day starts

every way now

strawberry, blueberry

icing in my mouth

east coast

west coast

Pop Tarts north and south

toaster oven microwave

Pop Tart flava what I crave

eat it cuz it's healthy

it could even make me wealthy

Yo I know—what I say ain't true

Yo I know—but what I feel is right

Yo I know—Pop Tarts taste stew [And here, Icy Filet loses the thread, loses her place on the notecards]

Yo I know— Pop Tarts aiiiiight

Word.”

She steps away from the mic, the beat blipping its trebly syncopation behind her as she does a practiced nervous dance of one sideways lift from one leg to the next. She cannot look forward, even if the room is dark beyond the candlelight centering the tables. She shifts sideways as she dances, an awkward lurch to the barstool to turn off the SK-1. The beat is silenced between the two and three of the measure. She stands there, awaiting a reaction, applause, something. There's an awkward silence, broken only by a loud whisper of “What the fuck was that?” and Icy Filet wants to cry, wants to grab the SK-1, toss the notecards and never look at them again and run back to the dorm and try and find some answer in her Psych 101 textbook that might explain what kink in her psycho-social development makes her aspire to be the whitest rapper in Gainesville, if not the entire world.

One rapid enthusiastic pair of hands clap and someone yells “Yaaaaaaayyyyyy!” as he runs up to her, and Icy Filet is convinced, irrationally but entirely, that it's Charles Manson and he wants to kill her for what she just did up there, but then she remembers, oh yeah, he's in jail.

“I'm Mouse!” this sudden fan whispers in her ear as he steps onto the stage. With both hands, he grabs her shoulders, adds, “And I'm sorry to have to go after you, because, heh heh heh, that was the best thing to ever happen here, dude! Seriously!” He loops her right arm like a chivalrous Charles Manson. “Let me lead you back to your seat,” and he—Mouse—has this goofy grin, and Icy Filet no longer thinks he looks like Charles Manson, but like someone more attractive than Charles Manson.

As they walk away, the Very Reverend B. Stoned returns to the stage, to the microphone, says, “That was . . . interesting,” in that sarcastic voice people get when they're threatened by what they perceive as the not-normal. The audience laughs at this, at Icy Filet. She wants to cry; Mouse sees the hurt in her eyes.

“Fuck
'
em!” he says before pulling out her seat at the table, then gently pushing her in. He leans in, whispers, “You did great. Don't forget that,” and Icy Filet hasn't completely given up yet on performing, on her ambition of the moment.