Gray

by Pete Wentz

  Of course, I caught it. I saw what she was up to. We terrorists know all the tricks of the trade. The problem was, I didn’t do anything about it. I should’ve defused the bomb right then and there, should’ve cut the wires and tamped out the fuse, but I didn’t . . . maybe because I felt sorry for Her, for the way I had treated Her, for the way Her life had come off track. Or maybe I still loved Her too. Either way, I let the i love you go unchecked, and that emboldened Her. A day later, she wrote another e-mail, used i love you twice, and after that, it was too late. There was no turning back. The messages have started to come with alarming frequency now—sometimes two or three a day—and I can do nothing to stop them. For a few days, I tried ignoring Her, but that just leads to even more e-mails . . . panicked, frightened ones, sent at four in the morning, full of spelling errors and run-on sentences and lines like im sorry for being crazy. You know what I mean. I am beginning to worry about Her. She is hardly sleeping, she is never going to class, she is fixating on me and slowly coming unraveled. I am beginning to think this was a terrible idea.

  I don’t know what caused all this. Actually, that’s a lie; I do, I just don’t want to admit it. Like everything else in my life, this was all my fault. See, one night last week, in a moment of weakness after the after-party, when the moon hung low and bright over a stretch of I-95 somewhere in southeast Georgia, when I was awake on the bus and sad and really, really drunk, I may have written that I was falling in love with Her again. It was probably a mistake. I didn’t even mean it—I don’t even remember writing it—but she didn’t know that, and by the time I woke up the following afternoon, she had replied with three separate e-mails, each sent a few hours apart, and each crazier than the last. I rolled over in my bunk and went back to sleep. I am an addict. I am an idiot. My sickness is severe.

  The worst thing about Her e-mails isn’t even the i love yous. Don’t get me wrong, those are pretty bad, but what’s even worse is that when I read them, it’s almost as if I’m looking at myself. She’s started writing like me now, all lowercase and parenthetical, full of tangents and angles, half-realized thoughts thrown into go-nowhere paragraphs. She has become narcissistic and maniacal, obsessive and pathological, only she hides it all beneath a thin layer of self-effacement. I’ve been getting by on this same trick for years, and I’m beginning to realize that I can be insufferable because of it. With each e-mail I read, I wondered more and more why no one has ever bothered to tell me this. Or hauled off and belted me in the face. Anyone besides the philosopher, that is, but he had just cause. I wouldn’t want to spend a minute with me, that’s for certain.

  We’re somewhere in South Carolina now, in some awful strip club off the interstate. The kind of place where they serve breakfast and the parking lot is loaded with truckers looking for a quickie. We came here as a joke, and I’m the only one who isn’t listening. Instead, I’m on my Drone, reading another of Her endless e-mails. In front of me, a too skinny girl with bad makeup and dead eyes asks me if I want a dance. I say yes, then instantly regret it. Under the black light in a strip club, everything takes the shape of regret sooner or later.

  She puts out her cigarette (she has a pack of Camels stuffed into her thigh-highs) and goes to work. I’m trying to write Her back, but there are breasts in my light. “I’m only doing this to pay my way through school,” the dancer says to me, and I think to myself, somewhere, there is a university full of strippers paying their way through. Somewhere out there, a college takes tuition payments in dollar bills. I look in her dead eyes and lie, “You’re too pretty for this. You should model.” She smiles and I can see the stains on her teeth, all blotchy and off-white beneath the black light. I wish she’d stop. She asks me what I’m writing, and I lie again, tell her I’m writing a letter to my wife. I ask her to press SEND and she obliges.

  “You’re too young to be married,” she whispers through her hideous teeth.

  “She’s my second wife,” I say. “My first wife died in a fire. My whole house burned down, and she was in there with my kids. They’re all dead.”

  She pauses on my lap, midgrind. You have to say something pretty fucked-up to get a stripper to do something like that. I am on a roll now, and I don’t want to stop. I tell her that I was just e-mailing my second wife to tell her it’s over, that I want a divorce. I’ve told my wife she doesn’t understand my needs, that we grew apart long ago. I’ve told her I’m in love with another woman. As long as a guy has a sob story, he doesn’t have to throw out dollar bills. If I string together every single heartbreaking story I have, they would measure out to an entire night of free lap dances. The stripper stares at me, then continues grinding, occasionally shooting the bouncer across the room a panicked glance. I think she mouths Help to him, but I can’t be sure. She probably thinks I’m a serial killer or something. I love it. There is a special place in hell for people like me.

  The dance ends and she doesn’t even ask if I’d like a second. She just gathers up her underwear and makes a beeline for the bar. As she walks away, she reaches into her stocking and pulls out another Camel. I have fantasies of my e-mail making it back to Her with faint traces of smoke and Victoria’s Secret Vanilla body spray on it. I imagine Her opening it and pausing as a few bits of glitter fall out of the subject line. That would certainly make everything easier. I laugh to myself and take another pull off my bottle of Bud. I am drunk in a strip club in South Carolina. I finish my drink and walk back to the bus.

  Two days later, we’re in Somewhere, North Carolina. The tour is wrapping up, just a quick run up the East Coast and a left at I-80 in New Jersey is all that stands between me and Chicago. I don’t want to go back there, and not just because it means I’ll have to deal with Her. I have no place to live, either, and even though I swore I’d never go back to my parents’ house, it’s looking more and more like that’ll be the case. It’s pathetic. Midway through the tour, the Animal and I had made vague plans to get a place together, but who knows if he even remembers. I’m too embarrassed to ask him anyway.

  So I’m lying awake one morning, looking out my window at some dreary North Carolina parking lot, dreading my future, when all of a sudden there’s a tremendous pounding on the door of our bus. At first, I think I’m hearing things, but the pounding just gets louder—WHUMP! WHUMP! WHUMP WHUMP WHUMP!—like some ham-fisted maniac trying to bash his way onto the bus. I don’t get up, but from my bunk I can hear our road manager swing the door open, ask someone what the fuck he wants, then there’s about a minute of silence. I hear our road manager get off the bus, and then some shouting. Someone is asking if I’m on the bus. I’m sitting up in my bunk now, ears straining for the slightest sound, and I hear a pair of footsteps getting back on board. They walk the length of the bus, come to a stop outside my bunk, and our road manager pulls back the curtain. Standing there, next to him, soaking wet, shirtless, and wearing a long pair of cutoff jean shorts, is John Miller. The Disaster. I blink at him, he cracks a stupid smile at me.

  “This came for you,” our road manager deadpans, then walks back to the front of the bus.

  I get out of my bunk and just sort of stand there, in my underwear, next to John Miller. He’s carrying a black garbage bag, which, I assume, holds his worldly possessions. His lower lip bulges out from his face, a thick wad of Skoal peeking out slightly. A mesh trucker’s cap—not the Hollywood douche-bag kind, but an actual cap, made for actual truckers, purchased at an actual truck stop—sits in a peak atop his greasy head. Water drips down his forehead, leaving streak marks. He is tanned and bird-chested, skinny everywhere except his stomach, which protrudes out comically, proudly, a testament to the many tallboys he’s conquered in his time. He looks as if he just stepped off the cover of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Street Survivors album, or maybe like a slightly soaked Allman Brother. He is a damp redneck ghost, a Southern-rock relic. And he’s dripping on my bare feet.

  “What are you doing here?” I ask, pulling on a pair of jeans.

  “I never heard from
you, so I figgered I’d just stop by,” he drawls. He seems distinctively more Confederate since I saw him last, like he’d just discovered his inner Stonewall Jackson. “Ahm hungry, you wanna go eat or som’thin’?”

  I don’t know what to say, and I especially don’t want to know how he got so wet, so I just sort of nod my head. John Miller drops his garbage bag on the floor, between the rows of bunks, and clomps off to the front of the bus. I grab a T-shirt and follow him, not knowing where we’re going or how we’re getting there. We step off the bus, into the damp North Carolina morning, and trudge across the parking lot. The club where we’ll play tonight leans off in the distance, empty kegs of beer stacked in a pyramid by the back door. John Miller eyes them hungrily. He is still not wearing a shirt. I watch the muscles in his shoulders move back and forth beneath his shoulder blades, which are so sharp they could be weapons. His body (save for his beer gut) is sinewy and taut, stringy yet firm, in that weird and decidedly Southern way, the way that all goes to hell when you hit thirty. He’s never lifted a weight in his life, and someday it will catch up with him.

  We walk alongside a two-lane road, our hands in our pockets, and John Miller tells me his life story. His parents run a mortuary in Jacksonville, Florida, and they want him to be more like his older brothers, who are both licensed by the state Division of Funeral, Cemetery and Consumer Services. He went to community college to get a degree in mortuary science, but dropped out because, as he put it, “morticians don’t get laid.” He has been arrested “a couple of times.” He is “a fucking massive” Jacksonville Jaguars fan, the first I’ve ever met. And, more than anything else in the world, he claims to be one of two people in Florida who know the actual burial spot of Ronnie Van Zant.

  So, after meeting me in Daytona Beach a few weeks back, he decided that I was his best bet out of Jacksonville. He went online, found out where we’d be playing, and, using the little bit of money he had saved up, bought a one-way ticket to Raleigh. He doesn’t say how he got from the airport to the front door of our tour bus, and I don’t ask. I was too busy trying to figure out how he got on an airplane if he wasn’t wearing a shirt.

  A light mist is falling now, flecks of rain dancing in the gray morning air. We walk past a retention pond, surrounded by a rusty chain-link fence. The grass is knee-high, swaying like fields of thin cornstalks. The sidewalk was long ago overtaken by weeds, and bright yellow flowers poke through cracks in the concrete. No one has cared about this stretch of land for some time now. Decades maybe. Bodies are probably hiding in the grass. Or alligators. There is no one for miles. No cars, no noise, no humanity. John Miller and I are the last two people on earth.

  Eventually, we make our way to a stretch of highway dotted with low-lying strip malls. Nail salons. A scary bar called the Grizzly. A pet store. It’s depressing. Cars plod by, weighed down by life. Eventually, we come across a diner, one of those sock-hop fifties-type places where everything is covered in chrome and checkered tile. We go inside and have a seat. A bubbly jukebox is in the corner, with murals of Elvis and James Dean painted on the walls. A neon GOOD EATS sign behind the register. A castrated motorcycle leaning by the bathroom. Authentic 45s dangling from the ceiling. You’ve probably been here. You know what I’m talking about.

  The place is packed with churchgoers refueling after a long morning spent repenting and praising. Old women with hair as white as snow glance up from their menus, plastic-framed glasses teetering on the brinks of their noses. Ruddy-cheeked kids with syrup on their church clothes cower behind their parents. Not exactly our crowd. A plump waitress shuffles over to our booth, looks right at John Miller, and tells him that he needs to be wearing a shirt in here. She calls him “sir” in that condescending way only those who wield temporary authority can, all slowlike, with the i drawn out for emphasis: “siiiir.” Bank tellers are especially good at this. Flight attendants too.

  Anyway, John Miller doesn’t have any money, so I buy him a T-shirt from the gift shop. I make sure to buy him the biggest one available, and in North Carolina, they make them plenty big. I return to the booth with a Hanes Beefy-T, XXXL. An illustration of a waitress on roller skates is on the front. John Miller doesn’t even blink while he pulls it over his head. He sits there, drinking his coffee, his actual trucker’s cap turned backward, wearing a giant tent for a shirt. None of this bothers him in the least. He is unflappable. On the wall behind his head is a metal Route 66 road sign, and a framed photo of a shiny ’57 Chevy. The caption reads AN AMERICAN CLASSIC. Exactly.

  John Miller and I settle into the booth. I’m not even hungry, but I find myself looking through the menu, eyeing the All-Day Breakfast selections and the Home-Style Dinners. They have hamburgers called The Marilyn and The Big Bopper, tributes to icons who died of a mysterious drug overdose and a plane crash in Iowa, respectively. This does not make me as sad as you would think. Someday everyone will die. Not everyone will get a sandwich named after him or her.

  I look up from the menu and see that John Miller is staring at me, with a rabid, faraway look in his eyes. A Southern look, honed by peering off into great distances, searching for clues on the horizon. We don’t have that look in Chicago. He asks what I was laughing about, and I tell him the joke I just made to myself about the hamburgers. He doesn’t get it. Why would he? He is a maniac, he is just embarking on an adventure; he has no time to think about death. The waitress shuffles back to take our orders. John Miller is having some ghastly thing with eggs and bacon and french fries. I tell the waitress I want the repression burger, fifties style. She doesn’t laugh, doesn’t even bat an eyelash; instead, she sighs and tells me it’s too early to order anything off the dinner menu. It was a pretty dumb joke. I order an omelet instead.

  “So whudyou guys do for fun?” John Miller asks me, eyes wide now.

  “I don’t know, man. To be honest, we don’t have a lot of fun,” I say. “Basically we just drive from one place to the next. We play shows. . . . I don’t know. It’s not fun, man. Not after a while.”

  He chuckles. “You awghta come down to Jacksonville with me sometime. If you think this ain’t fun, you ain’t seen nothin’. Man, all we got down there is the fuckin’ water.”

  I smile. Suddenly, I care about John Miller more than anyone else on the planet. He is a believer. He sees the good in everything. He is unscathed by life, not because he hasn’t lived, but because he hasn’t slowed down long enough to notice that he’s bleeding. He is free, like the hoboes of Kerouac. If he wanted to, John Miller could disappear right now, could pick up his garbage bag, toss it over his shoulder, and vanish into thin air. No one would ever come looking for him, and he wouldn’t expect them to. John Miller is unencumbered, he carries no baggage, has no phobias or neuroses. He asks no big questions, does not worry about what tomorrow may bring, because he lives only in the now. He is unlike anyone I have ever known before. I want him to teach me everything, how to embalm a body or hop a train, how to go through life free of burden and fear, how to be truly, maddeningly, dazzlingly happy. I want more than anything for him to like me. So I tell him the story of the actress I slept with in Las Vegas, about how she climbed in my bunk and told me to cum inside her, about how I haven’t called her since and probably never will again. He laughs and pounds the table with his fists and shouts stuff like “No shit!” and “God-damn!” at the top of his lungs, making the old, churchgoing crows stare at us over their plastic-framed glasses. I tell him about my other conquests too . . . the pretty tattoo artist in Phoenix, the girl with the studded tongue in St. Louis, the Chilean girl in Milwaukee who said her dad was Tom Araya from Slayer . . . and now John Miller is practically rolling on the floor, guffawing and repeatedly spitting out “Je-zus Christ!” with such fervor that the manager has to come over and remind us that this is a family restaurant. We ignore him and just keep right on shouting, cursing, being terrible. Offending churchly old women and meek, stammering managers. I feel alive for the first time in months.

  But then, as our
waitress tosses our food in front of us with a huff, I find that there’s no second act. I’ve confessed all of my sins to John Miller, every dirty deed I’ve done since we hit the road, and now as he stares at me expectantly, over a steaming plate of eggs and bacon and fries, I find I’ve got nothing left to tell him. There’s a deflating moment of silence. My omelet quivers slightly on my fork. John Miller wipes the tears from his eyes and exhales deeply.