Losing in Gainesville (9781940430331) by Brian Costello Page B

your current girlfriend—who smiles back in that nineteen naïve-teen way of hers—all teeth and wide green eyes and dyed blonde short hair with a barrette in the front of the left part and granny glasses and still untattooed and still unjaded. You brood on how long all of this will last until she gets tired of your moods, your personality. You. It’s a busy, all-too-familiar night. The booths along the front windows are full, students hunched over text books, half-eaten slices temporarily set aside, families bunched around the tables, moms rocking strollers while dads try to keep their four year olds from kneeling or standing on the chairs in potentially dangerous poses as they reach over to sip from their Cokes. Some cheap hippie spent fifty cents to subject everyone to all thirty-plus minutes of the Allman Brothers’ insufferable “Mountain Jam” on the jukebox. The grease-laden underbelly of these red plastic trays, and the burnt cheese/sweaty meat stench of all these pizza pies in and out of the oven to the hungry Gainesville dining public. Outside, dozens of crusty-punks, indie-punks, emo-punks, hardcore kids, so on and so forth, all the little sub-genres too small to hang in their own little cliques, acknowledging each other in the Gatorroni’s outdoor dining area—pitcher after pitcher, often on the house thanks to their friends working inside. The humidity that never seems to go away, heightened by the kitchen’s heat, red bandana around your forehead not enough to soak the sweat.
    It’s almost like the tour never happened. You set the pizza down at the drunk guy’s table—some Gatorroni Loser who’s always out here in his finest street punk leisure wear. He doesn’t see the pizza because he’s too busy arguing that The Clash isn’t “punk enough” for his standards.
    Your drunk-ass friends, yelling and bouncing around the farthest outdoor dining table, call your name and wave you over. “We-heh-hell, Bill Collector himself, back from the worldwide tour,” Neil says, stepping off the barstool to face you and doff his New York Yankees ballcap—temporarily exposing the stubbled black hair receding higher and higher along the forehead. His brother Paul stands to his right, at the head of the table, pouring their fourth free pitcher into his cup, Neil’s cup, and the cups in front of the aptly-named Drunk John and Boston Mike. You know it’s the fourth pitcher and you know it’s a free pitcher because you’re the one who’s been walking them over to the table.
    â€œAw, c’mon,” Paul says, finishing the angled pour into Boston Mike’s plastic cup. “You know William goes by William now. Bill Collector was PUNK”—and here, Paul punches the table and rattles the cups and the pitcher—“but William, and just William? That’s hardcore, dude . . . ”
    You smile at this. In high school back in Orlando, you were in this band called The Dicks, and your “stage name”—you never played on any stages—was Bill Collector. The band was very short-lived, and not only because there was already a well-known, highly-regarded band from Austin, Texas called The Dicks that you had somehow never heard of.
    Drunk John punches you on the right shoulder, a light smack from a scrawny tattooed arm. “We heard all about Bloomington, Indiana, haw haw,” he says, and all you can do is shake your head from side to side and say, “Never again,” to which everyone at the table laughs at what you can only laugh at from a safe distance. You, curled into a corner of the typical punk house, reeking of post-show sweat and smoke, in clothes long unwashed, rolled into a mutli-stained off-white blanket like a filthy unhealthy burrito on the hirsute hardwood floor—pillowless, but whatever. The post-show party was there, full of denim-clad males mostly who wanted to