Gray
Page 6
As far as I know, there is no manual for moments like this, when you’ve been caught smelling your girlfriend’s bedding for traces of a stranger’s semen. No caddish article has ever been published on the subject in the pages of GQ or Esquire (“I was simply admiring the scent of the Egyptian cotton”), no father has ever pulled his son aside and explained how to get out of this situation (“Just tell her, Son . . . that you were blowing your nose”). The Smithsonian archives don’t contain a single shard of Macedonian pottery depicting an instance like this. In fact, given the resources available to me, it’s entirely possible that, since the dawn of time, no man has ever been caught doing something this stupid. Which makes me a pioneer, I suppose. So, in an inspired moment, with the winds of history at my back and the gazes of my forefathers fixed upon me, I do the one thing I’m confident they would tell me not to do: I apologize.
“Yeah, I’m sorry, I—”
It was a historic miscalculation. Somewhere in the Great Beyond, Abraham Lincoln cringes. From inside his golden sarcophagus, Alexander the Great slaps his forehead. Cain mutters to Abel, “Jesus, what’s the matter with this kid?” I am an idiot for the ages.
She launches out of the bed, pulling the sheet with Her. She’s shouting, What the fuck is wrong with you?! Her face gets redder and redder. Her entire body begins to shake, and great rivers of tears flow down Her cheeks, landing on the floor in a series of epic splashes. She wraps the sheet around Her naked body and begins sobbing, asking, Why would you do that?! Don’t you trust me?! I just lie there in the bed, watching Her mouth move and Her body shake. The years drip away with each tear, the letters and I love yous are shaken loose with each convulsion, and suddenly I can’t summon the energy to do this, not now, and not ever again. We are a dying star in its last cosmic throes. We are a ship with its hull pierced, the arctic water pouring in through the gash. It’s over. Because the truth is, I didn’t trust Her. I haven’t for a while now, for about a million stupid reasons—the smoking and the moving of my shampoo, the overturned cell phone and the hurried long-distance calls, like there was somewhere she had to be or someone she had to be with—and one real reason, one that made me stop calling, and the one that had buried itself in my subconscious and had been gnawing away at my insides for months now: that she didn’t believe in me.
In the end—and this was certainly the end—it wasn’t about who she was (or wasn’t) fucking behind my back, it wasn’t about the secrets she kept from me, it wasn’t about the shampoo. It was something much deeper and more profound than all that. She had doubted my abilities and my dreams and my intentions. She looked at my life as a folly, a children’s crusade. She didn’t have faith in me to write the great rock-and-roll album of our time, to make art and save souls and, sure, maybe even get rich and famous and have hallways lined with platinum plaques. So she kept offering me alternatives—apartments and degrees and fucking Berkeley—when she knew I didn’t want any of them, and she did it because she knew I would fail. She was certain of it, but didn’t have the guts to tell me. Secretly, she probably hoped I’d crash and burn, come back to Her broken and ready to be put out to pasture. That was the breakdown. That was the disconnect. She didn’t trust in me, so why should I trust Her?
My psychiatrist would tell me that I was projecting my insecurities onto Her, that I was frightened of success, but terrified of the alternative. That, subconsciously, I had doomed myself to fail, no matter what the outcome, so I was determined to control at least one aspect of my life: Her. Even if that meant pushing Her away, even if it meant denying myself the one thing that actually made me happy. He was probably right, but at this moment I didn’t feel like listening. She was the fucking anchor that kept me tied to this town, to this life; she was dragging me down and she needed to be cut loose. So that’s exactly what I did.
I probably could’ve done it differently, could’ve explained everything to Her, or sighed that I just couldn’t do this anymore, gathered my clothes, and left. But I’ve never been one to pass up a grand gesture. So as she stands there wrapped in a bedsheet, shaking and red-faced and betrayed, sobbing, Why don’t you trust me? What did I do? I sit up in bed, grab Her phone off the table, and whip it across the room. It sails by Her head and shatters against the wall in a million triumphant little pieces, circuit boards and keys shining for an instant in the mid-morning light, then disappearing into the darkness. It was like a fireworks display.
She gasps and falls to the floor, sitting there for a second with a dumb look on Her face, like a baby who’s tumbled over and is looking around the room for a sympathetic eye. Then she starts picking up the pieces of the phone, putting bits of glass and wire into a little pile in Her lap. She doesn’t say a word, doesn’t even look at me, just keeps gathering up the remnants of Her phone, combing through the slivers of plastic as if somewhere in there she’ll find the reason this kid she loved so much has done something so cruel. Then, having found no answer, she starts to weep, and deep, seismic shudders seize Her body. She begins retching, making sickly, guttural noises that are broken up by panicked gasps for breath. She keeps muttering, Why?—but I don’t answer Her because I don’t know how to. I’ve broken us now. I know it. I am the feeling in Dorothy’s house right before the tornado picked it up and dropped it on the witch. I am the buzzing and humming. The dog barking. The lady screaming.
I get up out of bed, pull on my clothes, and grab the sheet off Her body, scattering the pieces of her phone everywhere. She looks up at me, almost in wonderment, Her eyes positively drunk on sorrow, and I laugh at Her vacant gaze. All we had left was fucking and fighting. And I didn’t care enough about the former to keep doing the latter. So I did this instead. She wraps Her arms around Her naked body as I lean down, grab Her face with my hands, and whisper:
“Why? Why don’t you call your boyfriend and ask why?”
I walk out of Her bedroom for the last time. I look back and see Her balled up on the floor, pulling the sheet over Her body. She looks like a victim. As I shut the door, she begins to wail, “Drop dead! Drop dead! Drop dead, you motherfucker,” and for the first time in ages, I think we’re pretty much on the same page. I don’t slow down until I’m out of Her apartment and down on the street below. Businessmen and bike messengers pass me on the sidewalk, unaware of what just transpired above their heads. Cars idle at a nearby traffic light. I look up at Her window and realize that I’ve never done something so cruel in all of my life.
• • •
A few weeks later, the guys and I go to a house party on Kedzie. The second I walk in the door, I’m greeted by a hundred angry stares . . . obviously, word of my fireworks display has gotten out. I’m not welcome here, but I enter anyway. I haven’t even shed my coat when I hear Her voice coming from the living room. She’s drunk and shouting about something intellectual—“Aleister Crowley fucking hated women,” I think it was. I walk into the room and stand by the doorway, watch as she throws Her hands wildly in the air, spilling wine everywhere as she shouts about Crowley’s “avowed anti-Semitism.” She’s seated on the arm of a sofa, Her feet resting in the lap of some barroom philosopher, who’s stroking Her back and laughing at Her brilliance. It only hurts a little when I see Her like this, but mostly I just feel sorry for Her. She’s drunk and embarrassing Herself. She looks ridiculous.
She doesn’t even notice me standing by the door, but the philosopher does, looking up from his bottled import, his eyes locking on mine. His buddies on the sofa see me too, and they puff their chests accordingly, a gang of wannabe rockabilly Dharma Bums with black-rimmed glasses and neck tattoos and cuffed jeans. I just smile and wink at them all. They look fucking ridiculous too.
A few minutes later, I’m down on Kedzie, bumming a cigarette from a girl (I smoke now too, by the way), when I get a forearm shoved into my back. My heart starts thumping and my face hurts before I can even turn around. I know what’s coming next. In Chicago, if you hit somebody in the winter, you really mean it. I whirl around, cigarette
dangling out of my mouth, and I’m greeted by my friend the philosopher. He says hello with his fists.
The first punch to my stomach turns my guts inside out. I fall onto the curb and hear my keys clink down the street. I spit up blood, steaming in the winter air, then, in a move of pure showmanship, I lick it off my hand and slap the philosopher in the face, then walk off to find my keys. He spins me around before he hits me again, I laugh ’cause my spit and blood on his face look like war paint. His rockabilly pals are down on the street now, inching closer to the fray but not willing to actually fight. Cowards.
Then the philosopher rears back and blasts me in the face, hits me dead center and tells me it’s for Her, asks how I like being abused. I remember thinking that, for a bookish guy, he punches pretty well, and he’s got a quick wit too. Then it all goes black. Getting punched in the face is like a hiccup in time, it all slows down from there. All of a sudden, every single tear duct in my head starts working overtime to get enough buckets out. The tears are freezing on my cheeks, and the blood starts caking on my face, mixing with the dirt of the Chicago street. I hear Converse pounding the cement in the distance; the sound is absolutely gorgeous. All I can do is crack a smile at this stupid kid—the kind of smile that says too late. Sound the cannons. The cavalry has arrived. This is why it’s a good thing to have a guy like the Animal on your side.
He plows through the philosopher, knocking him to the street with a thud. In an instant, he’s on top of him, pounding his face with his fists, calling him motherfucker and pussy and bitch. The philosopher can’t even cover up, and now he’s making gurgling noises. The Animal relents, mostly because he doesn’t want to kill the kid, and the philosopher staggers off down the street. It only takes us a split second to start chasing after him, the Animal laughing like a maniac, breathing steam into the night air. We fly around a corner and the Animal catches his prey on the front porch of a row house, pulling him off it, the skin on the philosopher’s hand tearing as he is wrenched from the safety of the doorknob he has anchored himself on.
He’s screaming like he’s being murdered. We’re panting in the cold air. The Animal holds his prey as I start laying into him. Again and again. Right hand only. I want him to feel every hit. Blood starts pouring out of his mouth—no more witty words, motherfucker—and the porch light turns on. Out steps the philosopher’s mom, a winter coat pulled over her shoulders. The Animal tells her, “Get back in the fucking house,” and I start punctuating each shot I take with a “This is for your fucking mother.” He’s defiant until the end, I gotta give him that, no white flags, just “Fuck you” between every hit. But I get into a rhythm and eventually his body goes limp. The Animal lays him down in the snow, and then, with his mom looking on from the window, I stand over his body and spit my blood into his mouth.
We book it down the street and don’t stop until we’re practically standing in Lake Michigan. Hands on our hips, lungs aching for air, the Animal and I start laughing. He lived with his fucking mother. We wash the blood off our faces and hands in a pile of dirty snow, and the Animal tells me I should probably go to the emergency room. I want to go back and find my keys, but I defer to his better judgment. He knows a mortal wound when he sees one, after all.
We walk for ages, eventually finding a hospital. We stagger in, me holding a bloody snowball to my mouth, and I tell the girl behind the desk that I’m looking to trade in some broken knuckles for 20 cc of self-esteem. She said my plan probably wouldn’t cover that. She’s funny. Because I am concussed, I decide that I’m gonna try and call Her from the pay phone in the waiting room.
I drop a quarter and a dime into the slot, and start punching in Her number. I get about halfway through before I realize that she doesn’t have a cell phone anymore because I smashed Her last one. I hang up the receiver and listen to the coins drop into the return. I don’t pick them up. I spit some blood onto the linoleum floor and walk back to the ER to have my face reattached. Fucker.
12
My life goes supersonic.
• • •
We’re selling tons of merch at each show, making real money now, but since we’re still just the openers, the club owners don’t pay much attention, which means we’re able to give them a few hundred bucks each night and simply pocket the rest. They don’t suspect a thing, mostly because this has never happened before. We eat actual dinners and stay in actual hotels and even consider getting an actual tour bus, but they run about thirty grand a month and we’re not there just yet. But we’re getting close. Like I said, it’s really happening now.
The tour stretches on, the weeks become months, the shows get bigger and bigger, until finally, on the day our album is released, we return to Chicago for a homecoming show at the Metro. It’s sold-out, absolutely packed, and backstage, in the cramped dressing room, with our parents looking on and bottles of champagne stuffed in a Styrofoam cooler, we meet with an A&R guy from the major label and sign our names on the dotted line. In an instant, our stupid little band becomes labelmates with the likes of Jay-Z and U-fucking-2. We pop the champagne and spray it around the room, the way the Bulls did during the Jordan era, and my mom even cries a little bit. It’s the single most amazing moment of my life. I mean it. It has officially happened.
• • •
There’s an actual after-party too, at an actual bar with an actual open tab. I am told by our A&R guy that this is our record-release party. Everyone in Chicago shows up to drink the free booze. Everyone except Her. She was probably studying or hanging out with the philosopher and his mom or something. It doesn’t matter, really. I’m too buzzed to be sad about Her, too flushed with the present to think about the past. I tell myself this with every shot our A&R guy buys for me, and eventually, I actually believe it. Or I just get too drunk to care.
When they tell you not to drink alcohol or operate heavy machinery while taking Ativan, they’re not kidding. I’m amazingly drunk at this point, stumbling around the bar, bumping into people, spilling drinks all over myself. I’m laughing like a lunatic, shouting in people’s ears, yelling at the DJ to play some good music. I can’t imagine what I would’ve done if they let me drive a forklift. People are staring at me sideways, whispering shit about me in dark corners, but I don’t care. This is my party. Or my band’s. Whatever.
At some point, I go into the bathroom and lock the door, stare at myself in the mirror, then proceed to puke all over the sink. It’s red from all the liquor I’ve been drinking, or from blood. I remember how in The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield used to pretend he had been shot in the gut, used to clutch his stomach and grunt, “They got me . . . they got me good,” so I do the same thing, stumbling around the bathroom, backing into the wall, sliding down, collapsing into an imaginary pool of my own blood. I’m a funny motherfucker when I’m drunk, I think to myself. Then I black out.
The next thing I remember, I’m in the backseat of a cab, headed somewhere with some scene chick I’ve never met before. I actually come to as we’re making out, my tongue halfway down her throat, my hand halfway up her skirt. We paw and slobber for a few blocks, and every once in a while I catch the cabdriver watching us in the rearview mirror. Part of me wants to ask him for help, but I don’t. Instead I just move my hand between her legs. We pull up outside her apartment, in a part of town I don’t recognize. We grope each other as we head up her stairs, and then we’re inside her place.
“I just want you to know that I never do things like this,” she admits, but only people who always do things like this say lines like that. We are clumsy as we make our moves. As this stranger fumbles with my belt, I suddenly realize that this officially means it’s over between Her and me. It’s funny the things that cross my mind in moments like this. Depressing too. So I block it out and get to work. I pull at her buckle; it’s turned around to the side of her pants. Ten scene points. I grab her hair, which is jet-black and covers her face in just the right way. Twenty-five scene points. She’s about to get the boy you couldn�
��t catch in between the sheets. One hundred scene points.
We grunt and sweat all over each other, her hair hanging like a black cloud over my head as I lie under her. She moans and wails as if she’s just found religion, rolls her eyes back in her head, runs her nails down my back. It’s all a big show. The thought crosses my mind that there’s not much difference between fucking and a fistfight. At least not right now. It ends with her shouting, “Oh, God,” over and over. Her poor roommates. We lie there drenched in sweat, white sheets clinging to our bodies. I’m starting to sober up now, and all I want to do is escape. So I make up a lie, say I have to get back to the van by 6:00 a.m. because we’re heading out of town. I don’t know if she believes me or not, and I don’t care.
Her alarm goes off at 5:30 a.m., but we are both still awake. She walks me down to the street as I desperately scan the horizon for a cab. The air is heavy and damp with the impending promise of spring, and if I weren’t standing out here with a complete stranger, wearing a shirt still covered in booze and what appears to be dried vomit, I’m sure I’d be enjoying this right now. Finally, I spot a cab and frantically wave it down (“Save me!”). As it pulls to the curb, she pulls my hand toward her, writes Bastard on it, then scribbles her number below that. I look at it for a second, then, not knowing what to do or say next, jump in the cab and tell the driver to go. We take a right, then another right, and another, and I doze off. I wake up as the cab comes to a stop in front of my parents’ house. I’m not sure how he knew to stop here. I walk up the stairs and into my room, drop my clothes in a pile by the door, and am asleep by 6:00 a.m. I sweat out the booze, and by the time I wake up, her number has worn off my hand. But the Bastard is still there. I look at it and laugh, even though I’m probably not supposed to. The truth will do that to you.