Gainesville
matty weaver
Gainesville
By matty weaver
20
I feel a tap on my shoulder and turn to see a purple-haired faerie in a skeleton onesie. Her grin stretches across her face and her eyes are open wide; she is beautiful, crazed, full of mischief. She waves a bottle of orange juice in my face, HAS ALCOHOL scrawled across the side in faded Sharpie. Her wings bounce on her back as she rocks from heel to toe, the smile never dropping from her face. I shake my head and thank her, holding up the beer in my hand, and without a second word, she’s off into the crowd, looking for someone else to take her deal. She opens the door to the balcony and disappears into the night. Over the din in the hotel bar, I hear cheers rise from outside before the door closes.
I feel something heavy, some gargoyle of nostalgia perched on my shoulders, shifting its weight as I turn back to a friend I haven’t seen in years. He tips his can against mine, the sound of the aluminum clink muted by the softness of a koozie, and he talks about his weekend: all the bands he’s seen, the jerk tofu he had for lunch at the Jamaican place, the tightness of the crowd during the hardcore/ska band Folly’s set. His hair is matted against his forehead by layers of dried sweat and grime. There’s mustard or curry sauce on his shirt. He’s radiant, impossibly so for a hotel bar in Gainesville, Florida at 1 a.m., but he shines bright like the sun, his happiness and excitement contagious. The interior lighting of the room is dim, cheap chandeliers casting shadows where pillars rise between tables shoved together, covered in bottles and cans and plastic jugs, whiskey and vodka and tequila, Pabst and Miller and Bud, orange and cranberry and fruit punch. The room is packed with people, each reminiscing about their own weekend, saying their goodbyes before heading home when Monday begins.
It is October 30th, 2022, the last night of The Fest, a music festival that’s celebrating its 20th anniversary (with one year skipped due to the Covid pandemic in 2020, dubbed “The Fest That Never Was”): thousands of people and hundreds of bands gather in Gainesville, Florida for a weekend, sometimes four, once five, mostly three days around Halloween. It is my ninth year, my ninth Halloween weekend in Florida, drinking, watching bands, seeing old friends, not sleeping, feeling nostalgic for every year I attended and every year I missed. It’s a sadness I can never quite see, though its grip tightens every year. Sometimes, I think I never want to leave. Sometimes, I wish I had never come.
There are lots of songs about being alone and being lonely, and the differences between the two. I sometimes think I don’t deserve to be happy in these moments, surrounded by friends, some I see once or twice a year, some I see every day, and some I only get to talk to at Fest. I think: maybe my friends don’t like me, or don’t enjoy being around me, a rejection narrative playing on loop in my head. It is something I am trying to unlearn, this fear that exists in me as a primal instinct, to feel shame and guilt and fear over being rejected, because on our own, humans are weak: we need community. There’s a section in the graphic novel, “Seek You,” that talks about the biological reasoning behind these feelings: in one panel, there’s a drawing of a text conversation, the back and forth between two people, one asking for connection and the other rejecting it in simple ways: “. . . been busy!” “I’m tied up, sorry!” The panel concludes with this line: “Evolution shoved us into molds that caused us to feel not only unsettled by rejection, but also mortally threatened,” the author writes. “There’s a reason that, short of execution, banishment was the harshest punishment a king could bestow.”1 I feel mortally threatened in these moments, despite knowing that the people in these spaces are my friends, and we share many things in common. Life, for the most part, is good, and I am able to love and be loved. The pain of rejection is one of my own creation, one that I use as a way to keep myself low, as I was taught to do in my childhood by a stepfather who seemed to hate every aspect of who I was. One of the many reasons I turned to punk music in the first place: first, as an act of rebellion, and second, as a form of community.
So, I stretch my arms above my head, shake my body, and smile. “Oh, I saw that band too,” I say to my friend, and his eyes light up. We touch the lips of our cans together. Another friend wanders over wearing face paint, and a few of us clump together for a photograph on an instant camera. When it develops in the dim light of the hotel bar, our faces are serious, throwing up peace signs and middle fingers, trying to look tough. We laugh, and something shakes loose inside of me.
This last night is a celebration of all that has come before: the Great Canadian Beer Purge. Most people have been in town since Wednesday or Thursday and have collected cases of beer and handles of vodka like they’re playing cards, unable to take them home as they board planes bound for the West Coast, Canada, England, Japan. We gather in the lobby of a hotel, carrying cases of beer, boxes of pizza, bags of candy, memories of the short time we’ve spent together.
Maybe the weekend will never end, and the bands will keep on playing, the hotel beds and floors will always be open, and the feelings of loneliness will still be there, bubbling below the surface when the sun comes up. This is one weekend of many, not the first and not the last. As long as we keep meeting this way, the weekend will never end.
#
10
If you cram enough people into a moderately-sized SUV, you can do anything. There are three rows of seats if you count the front and there’s six of us, enough room for everyone to have their own cube of personal space to be invaded. It’s early when we leave town: the sun is high in the sky but far from setting, and the trees on our block still have most of their leaves, and the kids are just starting to plan out their Halloween costumes for the weekend. A. and L. at the front, me and M. in the middle, N. and O. in the back. There’s space in the trunk, too, on top of backpacks and blankets, for one person to stretch out and take a nap in the sun filtered through the dirty glass pane of the back window.
The back window of the Forerunner has yet to be shattered in a tragic incident involving a tree branch, but the car’s still seen a lot of action since ‘04, and haven’t we all, the six of us all coming of age around that time. David Kay says to Congress, “Let me begin by saying, we were almost all wrong,” and the original premise for the Iraq War—that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, the premise the American public was sold on—was formally debunked. NATO expands to include a handful of countries from Eastern Europe. George Bush wins re-election, defeating John Kerry by three million votes. The imperial machine of war did a number on all our teenage brains, so it’s no surprise that we’re driving cross-country to a punk music festival, excitedly talking about all the bands we’re going to see, political or not. It’s the year of the Arab Spring, of the Guantanamo Bay file leaks, of occupations in Zucotti Park in Manhattan to protest wealth inequality, and I’m riding a high like I never have before: it’s war all the time, but the people have power, too. We listen to songs about revolution, songs about anarchy, and songs about falling in love despite everything.
The album As The Roots Undo released in 2004, and Circle Takes The Square is playing at 12:30 a.m. on Friday, the last set of the first night, the set I’m most excited for at my first Fest. Bomb The Music Industry! formed in 2004, and they’re playing at 12:50 a.m. on Saturday night. Hot Water Music released The New What Next in 2004, their last album before breaking up, and announced they’re releasing a new album in 2012; they’re playing at 11:25 p.m. on Friday night. I’ll get punched in the face while trying to keep a crowd surfer aloft during one set (an accident), I’ll almost lose my fanny pack while crowd surfing during another (purposeful; I will feel someone’s fingers undoing the clasp at my waist and smack them away with a free hand), stand at the back and nod my head when my temples begin to throb (a perpetual ache after losing my earplugs on the first night).
We can start fights over the pungent smell of jerky (half the car is vegan), who gets access to which window (behind the driver is safest but the seat’s pushed back furthest), who gets to pick the music (the navigator, riding shotgun, feet up on the dashboard, rotating through albums of all the bands playing the festival). We can point out signs for small towns and use them as insults: M.’s a Walnut (Indiana), D. grew up in a Horse Cave (Kentucky), A. smells like Bucksnort (Tennessee), L.’s got a Box Ankle (Georgia).
We can make a seventeen-hour drive a twenty-four hour drive with little time management, stopping at gas stations and rest stops to pee, only one stop per person, every fifty miles. At one stop, there’s a bottle of Aquafina half-full of piss in the grass at the edge of the pavement, fifty feet from the restrooms, five feet from the nearest trash can. We can stop at Waffle House and order hashbrowns smothered, covered, diced, capped and/or topped, or we can get them all-the-way, lingering in the booths over cups of lukewarm coffee. L. eats cotton candy on the pavement outside of a gas station with a Dairy Queen, M. folds his bandana and wraps it around his head, A. drives and drives and drives. The car shakes but it holds firm. When we finally pull into Gainesville, there’s a massive line outside the Holiday Inn, stretching from the conference room on the second floor, out through a side door, down the stairs and into the parking lot, where it wraps around the building once before hitting the sidewalk. We fall in, drinking warm beers, eating hot pizza, stretching our legs.
The weekend starts. The weekend progresses. The weekend ends.
We can head home after the festival. When the car inevitably breaks down in a Wal-Mart parking lot on the way home, we will meet a shady couple in the store, and they will invite us all to their house to see their puppies, and not to murder us; they will seem like nice people, and that will ring true, but at 3 a.m. in a parking lot in Florida, they will seem suspicious. We will joke when N. and O. go with them (they will get a ride to the airport in the morning, and make it home before we do), M. will find a ride with another set of friends (absent for the breakdown of the vehicle, already on his way home), and the three who remain will nap in the car until the auto shop opens, and we can get whatever’s wrong under the hood fixed. Then we can do it all in reverse: we will use the restroom when we stop at gas stations for snacks, we will spin the CDs we bought at the festival repeatedly, we will open the windows on the highway and feel the air rush past us and turn cold as we head north. Fall will fade into winter, and 2011 will be as distant as any other year.
#
20
We are in the middle of a great tumult, bodies moving in all directions but always facing toward the stage where the band is dancing and noodling and tossing themselves around with a foolhardy abandon that the crowd mimics. We go around in circles, slamming into each other, throwing back our heads and screaming the words of songs we’ll know forever, until our throats feel hot and raw. We are great waves of nonsense, community mad with ecstasy, and we are smiling and laughing and hugging each other, picking up anyone who falls, a dozen arms and hands flailing until everyone is back on their feet again—the waves have crashed and they have rolled and we are all in a tumble. We know that we have always been alive, that we will live forever if we keep moving and the music keeps playing, as long as we are still singing.
The lights from the stage are bright, even at a distance, and the heads of the people in the crowd look like cresting waves, green and red and orange foam bubbling with each note. Beneath the waves, life is roiling, and life is turning, and life is blooming, growing, thriving. The sky above is dark, and the turf of the park stretches half a city block, from street entrance to stage, and every inch of it is occupied by someone. The air is balmy, and damp, and it smells of fruit, and sweat, and cigarettes, and beer. There are people in shirtsleeves and shorts, and people in faded jeans and denim jackets, and people in assembled messes of Halloween décor, outfits and costumes thrown together in haste. A chorus rings out and the people are jumping high into the air and coming back down with a collective thump that jolts the body from the soles of the feet and up through the ribcage, where blood pumps heavy and warm. Everyone is yelling, everyone is singing, everyone is dancing, everyone is blooming, growing, thriving. I turn my head around slowly and watch the smiles dance across faces, half in shadow and half in neon. This is all there is, and this is all there ever will be. We keep singing until the lights go out.
#
12
When you’re on tour, it’s hard to think of anything other than the road and the promise of a warm place to sleep. It becomes a rhythm of its own: wake in the morning, sometimes early and sometimes late, load the van with drums and guitars, stare out the windows for hours at all the cities you’ve never seen and will probably never see. But in passing all those places, another thought intrudes: you imagine what life would be like if you had grown up somewhere in between. What if you had a job at a convenience store, a lifelong fling with the girl who sits behind you in history class—we make fun of the teacher’s take on a buzzcut, more like the wall of the haunted hedge maze on the outskirts of town—, staying put forever because it’s comfortable and safe, and what would you even run away from?
There’s a word for a kind of nostalgia for a life you’ve never lived. “The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows” calls it “anemoia,” from the Greek words for “wind” and “mind.”2 You will eventually watch a sepia-tinted YouTube video on the definition, hearkening back to times in history memorialized in photographs.3 You will think that even that definition isn’t enough: you’re not thinking about the past, really, you’re thinking about alternative futures, different paths you could’ve taken. Your longing isn’t a longing for the pages of a Jane Austen novel, but for the lines of a Tom Petty song that hasn’t been written yet, and it seems perfect that you’re heading to Gainesville; maybe you’ll find another word for what you’re feeling there, if you stand for long enough in Northeast Park—it’ll be another five years before they rename it Tom Petty Park, marked with a sign bearing the great artist’s likeness, declaring when exactly it’s okay to linger beneath gray-green trees.
The wheels turn, the van slows to a stop on a strange street, and you unload the gear onto the sidewalk. The band plays and you watch from a table at the side, occasionally snapping a photo, playing the part of salesman to kids in band tees and skinny jeans. When they leave, you wonder what kind of lives they’re living: where do they work, who do they flirt with, what places do they find to be comfortable and safe, and what, if anything, could drive them to run away from all of it.
After a week on the road, you start to long for home. The van is six people squatting in two bench seats and the captain’s chairs up front, sprawling out amongst the many pieces of a drum kit, guitar cases adorned with stickers, amps in varying shapes and sizes, plastic bins filled with shirts and stickers and records and a tiny metal box for cash, and duffel bags and backpacks filled with clothes, books, toiletries for the days to come. You pay the rent by slinging merch, snapping photos, playing navigator while riding shotgun. The places you visit become visions of home, images slanted through mirrors of waking life, carbon-copy reproductions and botched watercolor replicas of the things you know, all those images of lives you’ve never lived but could if you were the protagonist of a different song.
The van chugs along the roads, rest stops and gas stations as safe havens, each house or venue that you unload at marking that your quest is progressing, slowly, steadily, onward till the end. There are things to do when you’re on tour: count how many shirts are left in the merch tub and organize them by size after every gig; take pictures of the graffiti in venue bathrooms and imagine the hands behind the markers and spray cans; play Magic: the Gathering on a plastic tub in the van while watching highway signs fly by; hunch over a musty paperback, trying to make it through one more chapter without feeling carsick. Each day counts down toward the next, until the festival looms on the horizon, and you can take a few days off resting in the shade of a live oak tree.
There are couches in apartments in Milwaukee that have seen more bodies than the van’s seen miles. There’s a pizza place in Normal where the promoter hands you a bottle of whiskey and a box of pizza as payment, and it’s enough to get through the night. There’s a sign above a doorframe in St. Louis that says, “We Appreciate,” and you do, you appreciate it all. There are people in Decatur smoking outside and they’ll offer you a cigarette if you ask, and you do, because you’ve been good: you haven’t had a cigarette all week. In Panama City, you stand in the parking lot with your friends, and think about the view from the Hathaway Bridge, and why they call the strip of land to the south Shell Island, even though it’s clearly a peninsula: you should know, you’re from Michigan. You make it to Gainesville on Halloween, and there’s a parade of Hare Krishnas in their robes clapping tambourines and dancing in the street outside the Taco Bell, mixing with Halloween revelers in matched pairs of nonsense, the couples-costume jokes lost in the massive throng of bodies crammed together, and sexy versions of presidents and southern wranglers, and giant, fuzzy costumes that must somehow operate on an electrical grid, powering dozens of fans within to keep the occupants from baking in the Florida heat. You imagine masses of cords sticking to their skin, running up to solar panels, or wireless generators, sci-fi apparatuses necessary for survival.
But the halfway point, the five days between five days down and five days back up, feels less like a respite and more like a punishment. You don’t work except for the day of the show, so you have three days off the schedule and there are three of you along for the ride, three people to split the duties of one person, but you crave the work more than anything, feel an itching in your fingertips that moves you toward a purpose, toward proving your worth. On the day of the show, a Sunday, you can sit behind a table in a crowded venue, feeling the walls sweat inches behind your head, and think: if Hell had a locker room, this would be a great spot for it. They play laser tag in here when the festival isn’t happening, and you imagine the fog machine’s been pulling double duty for as long as you’ve been alive. You unpack the bins onto the table, records along the edge, t-shirts folded to the left, stickers and miscellanea at the end. The band, your friends, play their set like they’ve done every day before and will do every day after, and it feels tighter every time, each set practice for the next. You pack the bins back up and load everything into the van: the amps stacked precisely to maximize space, the guitars in their cases sitting safely, the drums broken down into their individual parts, stacked to the ceiling.
You eat dinner in the street outside the Taco Bell, in a booth at the diner, under a tent where they sell pizza by the slice out of the back of a van. You sleep in a hotel bed that smells nothing like someone else’s couch, but use a shower that has less water pressure than a suburban squat. You stretch your knees and walk everywhere, making up for all the times you sat in the van with your feet on the kick drum or slept with your socked feet pressed against the glass of the side windows.
The way back takes less time. You laugh at newspaper clippings on a fridge in Madison. You sit on the steps of a venue in Nashville and watch your friend eat a whole garlic clove to fight against the onset of a cold, the Fest Flu as they call it. You fart around the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library in Indianapolis: you were born to fart around. You sleep on a couch in Columbus and on a wooden floor in Cleveland, the chill grasp of Midwestern fall reaching into your bones and holding tight. Your last night is in Kalamazoo, a homecoming, and you sleep in your friends’ living room, dreaming of your bed some fifty miles north, waiting for you.
The next morning, you drive home alone, just you and the radio. The sky is cloudy and it has not yet begun to snow, but don’t worry: the cool air feels refreshing after the oppressive heat of July, and the stunning heat of Florida. You’ll make it home and lie in your bed with your coat still on, staring up at the ceiling, feeling like you’re in a third home, one that didn’t exist until you stepped across the threshold, and you’ll wonder what changed. You’ll keep wondering until you leave again, and you’ll see the world as a series of second homes, of comfortable places to lie down and rest. You’ll wonder what other lives you could live, and why you’d even want to choose something else.
#
20
The lawn is covered in straw and a child is dragging clumps into a large pile. When he has amassed enough, he walks fifteen feet away, then sprints and jumps into the pile, his body arcing into a half-flip. He lands on his back and sinks halfway down, only the blond hair on the top of his head visible, the same color as the straw. A man, presumably his father, stands nearby with his arms crossed, grinning, his gaze moving from the needle in the haystack that was once his son and the stage, where a band is tuning their guitars, strings vibrating but quiet against the afternoon’s hum: casual conversations, the boy rolling out of the hay, brushing straw from his clothes, the ding of a register as someone orders yet another PBR at the tent nearby. The boy runs toward the tent that is blocked off for the bands, high-fives a woman who’s bent over toward him, already waiting for his hand, his mother or a bystander encouraging the triumph of a child’s sense of adventure. Mingling in groups and standing aloof across the lawn, we are all at some sort of play, waiting for the band to strum their first chord and instruct us on what steps to take next.
#
15
“Zombies ate our hotel room.”
The text makes no sense until I open the door to the motel lobby and see E. standing at the counter. Behind the counter, a man holds up his hands, his face framed like a statue that’s stood for decades; his cheeks are sullen, eyes dark, exasperation in every wrinkle. He argues with two zombies, their shirts stained with dirt and blood. They’re arguing with the man behind the counter, and E.’s standing off to the side, watching them. One of the zombies turns his head toward me and I can see the light of life in his eyes. His costume is convincing. I look past him, catch E.’s eyes, and she follows me outside.
We head out into dry heat and new darkness, the shift from day to night stark, like leaving a movie theater at dusk. Maybe we had been watching the zombies and the motel clerk argue for hours. We drive around Reno, passing signs for the zombie convention in town, laughing at our luck until we pass the fifth No Vacancy sign. The road to Gainesville is long, and it’s important to take breaks, to pace yourself: eat when you’re hungry, sleep when you’re tired, see the sights when they appear in front of you. If Jesus came back, even he’d be walking slowly back to his car, his shoulders slumped; or, maybe, he’d have booked well in advance: it is a festival of zombies, after all.
It’s a regular thing in Reno, every year close to Halloween: the world’s largest zombie crawl. We’re quiet as we watch it play out in front of us, our drive through the city hindered by waves of groaning zombies staggering through the streets from casino lobby to casino lobby, seeking brains but settling for slots and shots. We find the last rundown motel almost by mistake, stopping in front of a group lumbering past, plastic cups in hand, right outside a squat building whose neon NO is unlit. We drop our bags in our room and check the bathroom and bedsheets for bugs, noses inches from the mattress. There are two beds: a queen and a twin, each with their own television, and I move my bags to the smaller one because she spent the day behind the wheel and deserves the better one.
We venture into the night, rub shoulders with zombie David Bowie and zombie Marilyn Monroe in a bar with a bad zombie cover band, talking excitedly about how our trip only started this morning and we’ve already found adventure, a story to tell our friends, a story to reminisce about in five years. When the lights come up and the last call sounds, we’re drunk with excitement, and the wind carries a chill with it. The zombie horde disperses but their hunger has spread, and we find ourselves back in the motel room, both in the big bed, wrapped up in each other because the desert gets cold this time of the year. The lights of the casino are ablaze through the curtains, and somewhere far beyond the walls the dawn of the dead rises.
The next morning, we load up the car and keep driving. The streets are filled with trash and the casino lobby down the block looks full, but there are no zombies wandering, and we leave the city behind, back to the long stretch of desert. We stop at a truck stop, stock up on Gatorade and snacks, keep driving until we see the salt flats of Bonneville. The water levels are low as the dry season fades, just a few months past Speed Week, when the tourists come out in droves to watch cars zip across the hard-packed salt crust. Someone set a record this year, 406.7 miles per hour across the 10-mile racetrack, a blue blur against the brown and gray backdrop of distant mountains.
I snap a photo of her with my disposable camera when she’s not looking—just her at the center of the frame, her shadow stretching beyond the edge of the viewfinder. The whole scene sticks in my mind in shades of gray: the footpath below our feet, the gloss of the shallow water, cloud spreading across the sun, teasing rain. We linger, and the clock does too.
I close my eyes and imagine her sunning herself on a rock, sprawled out like the anoles we’ll see when we make it to Florida. I imagine myself wading into the water, slowly lowering myself to my knees in prayer. I drink, my body facing west toward the sun and where we came from. Somewhere behind me, Salt Lake City glimmers, and Gainesville lurks further beyond. We take our time, because it’s important to pace yourself. Summer in October is only days away.
#
20
The elevator squeaks as the brakes release between floors, the doors sliding open to reveal yet another person in a black T-shirt and a beer in their hand. The numbers tick down, and for every person that gets off at 3F, another two get on, down until the doors open at 1F and the crowd spills out into the hotel lobby, so tightly packed that if you jumped, you’d hang in the air, suspended between the shoulders of the people next to you. The glare of the sun makes a portal of the lobby’s sliding doors, and each person disappears into shadow as they cross the threshold back into the world. The hotel exists as a haven, a place of quiet respite from the wet heat of the day, to rest and recharge before heading back out into the thick of it. On every floor, there are people drinking, and people bathing, and people napping, and people watching Brendan Fraser catapult off a cliff in The Mummy, and people talking loudly about their plans for the day. We are simple people living simple lives, our routines the same every year, not out of a lack of imagination but out of rigorous practice, a necessary regimen to manage the trials of the weekend. The last person walks across the hotel lobby, sneakers squeaking on the white tile, and the valet at their podium looks up only to make sure they’ve vanished before looking back down at the book in their lap. They won’t stop reading until the book is done.
Radtke, Kristen. Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness. First edition, Pantheon Books, 2021.
Koenig, John. The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. Simon & Schuster, 2021.
Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. (2014, December 21). “Anemoia: Nostalgia For A Time You’ve Never Known.” YouTube.
matty weaver is someone who writes sometimes. he/they like/s worms and ghosts, and live/s in michigan. his/their essays have appeared in publications that no longer exist, but if you look hard enough, you too can see their ghosts.
