Read Online Losing in Gainesville (9781940430331) by Brian Costello - Free Book Online

circles, and you want to explode. His old friends would feel this way, and reach the point where they would have to move, and yet they came back. “So burned out,” Andy mutters to no one, stepping forward, drunk enough to do it, to walk until the waves rise and fall over his head, drunk enough to pass out, drunk enough to not swim ashore. The chill in knowing Anderson “Andy” Cartwright could be exactly the same person in ten years, in the same house, reading the same stories, dispensing the same tired advice students still—most of them—somehow took so much from—but to him, the words are tedious platitudes, and as a writer (a writer who didn’t write, so what did that make him?), he wonders if he believes what he says anymore.
    â€œTo pee or not to pee, haw haw haw,” he laughs, drunk enough to drown, but sober enough to turn around to push through the water back to the shore, to fall down and get up with each strong-enough wave smacking him in the back, hands breaking each fall digging into the wet sand. In the trip-and-fall out of the ocean back to shore, just another lush singing, the vodkathought, the seaperspective You could just leave enters his thoughts. It’s the 1990s, and there’s prosperity. Work a job, punch out, go home and forget about it, instead of adjuncting two classes a semester, struggling to pay off bills, never really off the clock, or becoming just another tenured asshole with some tiny office, just another dickhead academic on a sabbatical who accomplishes nothing because he’s accomplished nothing with his life—like one of those professors who dabbles with the same novel for thirty years. He could leave. Andy smiles at the prospect of this as he reaches the spread-out CLEARLY CANADIAN towel in the dry sand, falls onto the thick cotton, passes out.
    Two hours of a dreamless konk-out later, Andy wakes up sweaty, sunburned, and dehydrated. The high tide rolls in, up to pink shins, ankles and feet, the burn not in the painful stages yet, but by tonight . . . Andy’s grateful that many of the vodka’s toxins have been flushed out from the heat, and the hangover is little more than a disoriented sluggishness. He carries the sandy wet towel to the VW Bug, trying to piece together the afternoon’s dance along the edges of a blackout. Wind gusts in short bursts, from all directions, stopping and starting. Sandpipers scurry across the sand along the surf. Seagulls swoop in for trash kills, pelicans float overhead. Rides home from the beach are always damp, sandy, and silent. There’s no music when Andy leaves the beach, the little beachy surf shacks and t-shirt shops along the main roads in and out of every beach town, into the jungle again as afternoon turns into evening. It’s the Briggs and Strattonesque lawnmowery rumble of the VW’s engine and the no-thought of an as yet unprocessed unbrooded upon day.
    Well into the jungle-forest, halfway to Gainesville, Andy sees the pages he has tossed. Some are stuck to the road, flattened by traffic, others clinging to high weeds sprouting through the cracks along the shoulder.
    He pulls over, parks the Bug, steps out, walks to a stack of the pages scattered by the weeds and a guardrail, bends down to grab one, starts reading:
    â€œ. . . They called us ‘Sandwich Artists.’ Like Picasso with paint, like Coltrane with the saxophone, so Beth worked with the bread knife, and so I worked with condiment bottles. Artists of the sandwich. On our breaks, one of us would steal a cookie and walk to the far end of the minimall, sitting on the curb in front of the blacked-out windows where the tanning salon used to be. We split the cookie, split a cigarette, held hands, and laughed at ourselves, laughed at our customers, laughed at our ludicrous corner of the world, counting down each day closer to graduation. This was only a year ago, but the path seemed straighter,