Gray

by Pete Wentz

  All of this happens just before we are to leave for New York. Timing has never been my strong suit. We have a meeting to determine whether I’m okay to fly, and I lie on the couch and tell the guys I’m ready to go. They say I don’t have to, that they can handle it, and that I should stay here and relax, but I won’t listen. My hand is healing—the cuts are just tiny pink crosses on my knuckles now—and my head is actually feeling pretty clear, and I figure it’s time to meet the shareholders. They’re the ones who paid for this ridiculous trip, after all. I probably owe them an apology.

  • • •

  I believe I am fine until the night before we leave, when I find myself staring at my bags and googling stuff like world’s safest airlines. We are not flying on any of them. I can feel panic starting to creep in, like ice water in my toes, so I take a couple of Tylenol PMs (the shrink said they were okay) and try to sleep. All night my bags sit by the door in an ominous black heap. At one point I swear I saw them move. Then it’s morning and we’re loaded into an SUV and sent on our way, and I pull my hood over my eyes and try to relax, try not to think about plummeting into the Rocky Mountains, but it’s not working. I’m trying my best not to let the guys know, but I start shaking as we’re going through security, and I can’t take my boots off on my own. Martin helps, unknots my laces and places my boots on the conveyor belt. He tells me it’s going to be all right. I don’t understand why this is happening to me. I am embarrassed to be seen like this by my friends. I never wanted to be the anchor, I never wanted to pull us down. It seems that’s all I’m doing these days.

  As we sit on the runway, I can feel my pulse quickening. I’m having a hard time catching my breath, and tears are in my eyes. I wipe them away with my sleeve and try to focus hard on the in-flight magazine in my lap. I play with the tray table. I pray to God, even though I can’t remember the last time He helped me out. I try to get my life in order, just in case this plane doesn’t make it to New York. It’s funny how fears hide inside other fears. The fear of airplanes hiding inside the fear of heights hiding inside the fear of highways hiding inside the fear of cars hiding inside the fear of elevators hiding inside the fear of leaving my room hiding inside the fear of living. Fear tries to own me. In the past, I had paid it rent by downing twenty milligrams of Valium and a Xanax and sleeping through flights, but now all I’ve got on me are some of the PMs, and they’re not going to do the trick. A tranquilizer couldn’t slow my heart right now.

  I try to calm myself by thinking logically. I have read about calculated fears and irrational fears. The fear of flying is irrational. The odds of a fatal plane crash are something like nine in twenty-one million. It’s like gambling, only you want the house to keep winning. Only nine in twenty-one million flights crash, but every single person who got on any one of those nine planes was thinking about a statistic just like that. Somewhere out there, someone pulls the lever on a slot machine and wins $30,000 on the first try. Somewhere out there, someone gets on a plane for the first time in his or her life and it crashes into the Atlantic Ocean.

  Fear owns me because I let it. Because I obsess over it, name it, raise it, and nurture it to become perfect. It is one of the few things in my life that I can control. “It’s just on this side of crazy,” they say, but I’m not sure what side they’re yelling that from. “You’re losing it,” they say, but I know I am, so technically speaking, I’m pretty sure I’m “giving it away,” not “losing it.” I decide before we take off that I need to hear Her voice, not because I miss Her but because I feel the need to get my life in order just in case the plane goes down. I call Her up and the phone just rings and rings, so I hang up and call again. This time she answers, but she’s not in the mood to nurture my fears, to massage my neurosis, or to agree that God won’t let this plane go down because there are kids on it. I don’t really blame Her.

  “You’re losing it,” she sighs.

  “Whose side are you on?” I whine.

  “There aren’t sides. This isn’t high school.”

  “There is me, and then there’s everyone else,” I shout into the phone. “Now pick!”

  Sometimes when I am leaving, arguing with someone takes the place of saying a formal good-bye. Everyone on the plane is staring at me now. Kids have turned all the way around in their seats to look at the crazy man screaming into his cell phone. Their parents grab them and spin them forward again, as if I might infect them or something. The flight attendants are giving me concerned glances. I don’t let any of that stop me. My life has veered off course. Has crashed into the mountain. I have become one of those people you see on daytime TV, the ones who shout obscenities at their exes and throw chairs around the studio. The ones who have Maury Povich do paternity tests for them. I am at the bottom. But still, I can go lower. I call Her a bitch and tell Her she has ruined me. I don’t mention my incident from the other night, or the EMTs, but she gets the drift. The silence on the other end of the phone tells me she is searching for something to say to me. Something punishing. Something unforgivable.

  “I hope your plane crashes,” she spits.

  Somewhere deep down, so do I, but I’m not lucky enough to be struck by lightning or to win the lottery. I’m not nine-in-twenty-one-million lucky. I hang up on Her just as the flight attendant tells me to turn off my phone, and after a perfunctory safety demonstration (as if any of it is going to help), we are roaring down the runway, picking up speed, rattling and straining and leaving the earth behind us. I am suddenly not afraid of dying anymore. I think it’d be a relief. And besides, no one would miss me if I were gone. I’ve burned all the bridges, collapsed all the walls.

  Every time the plane bumps, I think of Her.

  21

  It’s later. New York City on a February morning, in a winter that just won’t quit. A hotel near Times Square, a wind that tears through the city streets, a cold that grips you and won’t let go. Businessmen in trench coats, collars turned up, hustling to work. Neon signs just waking up. Or just going to sleep. Steam billowing up from somewhere down below, rank and heavy, the way you see in old movies. Coffee from a cart, in a paper cup, sugar congealed on the bottom. Me in a dream, taking it all in, skin blue, smoke pouring from my lips, hands dug in my pockets. My coat is somewhere in Chicago. My apartment, long vacant, probably burned to the ground. My life just as empty, and quite possibly as charred, the smoldering remnants put out on the street. Alone. Low. Months since I’ve shared a bed with another warm body, since I’ve put my hand on soft skin. An ad on a bus for laundry detergent, a smiling woman in a white robe, an angel here to rescue me. She disappears around a corner in a cloud of exhaust. Typical.

  • • •

  The guys are meeting the shareholders without me. They are playing them the record they made in spite of me. It’s probably better that way. I am barely in the equation; I am a remainder at best. Maybe a decimal point. I have nothing to do, no place to be, and I can’t bear to sit in my hotel room any longer, so I’m just wandering around the city, up and down the streets, with no coat on. It’s almost as if I were on vacation, except I don’t want to be here. I walk down to the water, stare at the old aircraft carrier rusting by the pier. It’s called Intrepid. It is a floating metaphor. They’ve turned it into a museum, and tourists stop and take pictures. You can buy souvenirs up on the flight deck. New Jersey squats in the background, tiny rows of condominiums crowding the shoreline. The smokestacks of a factory. The darkness on the edge of town. Somewhere out there, Bruce Springsteen is waking up and having breakfast with his wife. Thinking of the Boss in his bathrobe makes me sad. The wind whips off the water, so I turn and walk off in the direction of nothing in particular. Eat breakfast at a diner even though I’m not hungry. Take a cab ride up and down the avenues, even though I’ve got nowhere to go. The driver looks at me in the rearview with his wild African eyes. I tell him anywhere is fine, and he dumps me on some corner on Eleventh Avenue, down by the Lincoln Tunnel. The air is thick with the smell of gasoline and the
sound of mufflers. Huge buses hiss and downshift, full of passengers escaping the island. I can see the rear of the Intrepid off in the distance . . . I drove around for twenty minutes and only traveled ten blocks.

  It’s only around 10:00 a.m.; the meeting probably hasn’t yet begun. I picture the guys sitting in some expansive lobby, being asked if they would like anything to drink. The Animal will say yes, because he always says yes. Martin will say no because he is polite. I laugh to myself and dig my hands even deeper in my pockets, start to walk back across the city, through the dingy parts of Ninth Avenue, with its old butcher shops and even older Italian restaurants, smoke-filled bars already open for business, bums hunched over in doorways, like another world, another time. Past the Port Authority Terminal, dank and smelling of urine, terrified kids from Indiana clutching their suitcases and looking up, always up, at the towering skyscrapers, some guy in a leather jacket trying to steal one of their wallets, everyone smoking. Beneath the shadow of the New York Times Building, white and regal and ramping up toward heaven. Back through Times Square, the tourists now posing for pictures with cops on horseback, the Ferris wheel in the Toys “R” Us lit up and slowly turning, laden with children. I’m nearly hit by a cab as I’m crossing Broadway, the driver throwing his hands in the air, me pounding the hood with my palms for added effect. Down to Bryant Park, old black men playing chess even in the cold, the grass slightly frosted even as the sun begins to poke through the February sky. Around to the front of the New York Public Library, those famous steps dotted with people, those famous stone lions sentinel and stoic, proud and vigilant. Even the pigeons won’t go near them. Then over to Grand Central Terminal, cavernous and bustling, people pulling suitcases in every direction, children crying, voices and heels echoing around the space, off the marble floor, up to the constellations on the ceiling. The four-sided clock in the center of the room. The massive display board above the ticket booths, listing destinations (Katonah, New Canaan, Mount Kisco). Train tracks at the end of mysterious, gilded corridors, a temple full of secret passageways, and I follow one of them down below, see the trains snort and kick and whinny on the tracks, yearning to break free and go, and for a minute I think of getting on one—any one, it doesn’t matter which—and heading north, but instead I just watch them fill with businessmen and women and babies, then shudder and depart, reminding me that there are other places in this world I could be, other places that are not here.

  I look down at my watch and realize I’ve only killed about ninety minutes, and that the meeting is probably still going on, and that I cannot think of anywhere else to go, or anything else to do, and it sounds stupid, but in that instant it becomes clear to me that I am not in control of my own life, that none of us are, that the very notion of control is ridiculous. A man in a suit boards a train bound for White Plains, makes sure he catches the 7:05 so he will be sufficiently early for his appointment, and as the train departs from Grand Central, he is sitting in his seat reading his newspaper, feeling self-assured and calm, and everything is fine until that train hits a snag on the tracks—a broken joint in the rails, a loose bolt, who knows?—and derails, and he is thrown from his seat and killed instantly, dies with the same, smug look on his face. It was beyond his control. Something like this happens every day. Every minute. A train crashes. An airplane plummets to earth. John Miller’s baby son dies. A land mine, an earthquake, a calamity. Life is merely a numbers game, a series of odds, and eventually we all lose. To think otherwise is foolish. But if we didn’t, why would anyone ever bother getting out of bed in the morning?

  Yet, I have spent the first twenty-five years of my life believing the exact opposite . . . that I was in control of my destiny, that fate is a myth, that there is no great book in the sky with my expiration date already written in it. I have fought and gouged and grabbed for control, have pushed everyone and everything aside to possess it. When I thought I had it, I vowed to never let it go, gritted my teeth and held on tightly, snapped at anyone who came close. That’s how I lost Her. How I became an afterthought. There is no such thing as control. It’s a red herring, a MacGuffin. It keeps us going, gives us false hope. Life is cruel and unfair and nothing more than a series of cosmic coincidences. We are powerless to stop it.

  Right then and there, on the dirty subterranean platform, as the 11:37 off-peak departs for New Haven, I lose my mind. The water main bursts behind my eyes, and hot, salty tears come pouring down my cheeks, some of them flowing into my mouth, others landing on the filthy platform with a loud splat! Tears like I’ve never cried before. My pulse is pounding in my ears, it’s so loud that it drowns out everything else. My legs go out from underneath me, and I am suddenly aware that I am sitting on the concrete, my knees pulled tight to my chest. People are staring at me, a woman nearly trips over me, and then a police officer grabs my shoulder, shakes me, and asks if I’m all right. It sounds as if he were talking underwater. I nod and wipe the tears from my eyes, tell him that my girlfriend was on that train, that she left and is never coming back. I am probably shouting right now. The officer clearly can’t be bothered to arrest me—probably doesn’t want to do the paperwork or something—so he pulls me to my feet and tells me to go cry somewhere else. I wipe my nose on my bare arm, leaving a long, glistening trail of mucus on my tattoos.

  Now I am sitting in the second-floor waiting room, which is also sort of a food court, not to mention a good place for homeless men to masturbate. My head is in my hands, my ears are ringing. I’m not crying anymore, but that’s mostly because I’m utterly, completely drained. There’s nothing left inside of me. I am so alone, and so scared—terrified, for the first time in my life—because I’ve glanced behind the curtain, I’ve seen that no one is at the wheel. Not God, not anybody. There is no one left to believe in, nowhere left to go. We are all adrift, we are all lost, with nothing to put us back on course . . . because there is no course, there is only emptiness and space, numbers and ratios. That is a terrible way to look at life, but maybe it’s also the most realistic. The most scientific. Albert Einstein did not believe in God. Neither did Carl Sagan. But they believed in numbers. Numbers are all that matter. God probably does not exist, and if he does, he’s nothing more than an angry, old white man who spends his days shooting dice with the archangels, rolling sevens and elevens and making airplanes fall out of the sky, taking babies up to heaven for no reason in particular. He would not be the beatific, cloud-inhabiting superbeing we learned about in CCD classes. You would not like God if you met him.

  Then again, maybe I am wrong. Maybe God is not a superstition. So I sit there and pray for Him to reveal Himself . . . for Him to show me a sign that He is really up there, that all of this misery is worth it in the end. These are the moments when He is supposed to reveal Himself, after all, when His followers are at their lowest. I pray to Him, beg for an answer. I wish this were easier. I want God in the form of a teen magazine “Is He right for you?” test, where I can turn the magazine upside down and look at all the answers to get the outcome I want, so I can cheat my way to peace of mind. I want it glossy. I want it easy. I’ve always believed in God. I’m just not so sure He believes in me.

  It’s like when Her and I used to fight late at night and then for the next six hours I’d watch my cell phone and wait for Her to call. That’s what my belief in God has always been like. It is the most desperate, obsessive relationship I’ve ever had in my life. I want to stalk Him, to sit out on the street in front of where He lives and just know that He exists. I have been more unfaithful in this relationship than I have been to any of my exes. And it hasn’t paid off at all; or maybe it has because I’m not dead. Yet. I open my eyes and look around the waiting room, searching for a ray of light or a dove or something. A woman is eating a chicken sandwich. A janitor is mopping the floor. A homeless man has his hand down the front of his pants. Then, to my left, there is a child . . . a cherub-faced boy, in overalls, blond hair hanging down over his forehead, his eyes bright blue. A holy infant, so
tender and mild, like the ones we used to sing about in church. He is looking at me with curiosity. I stare back at him, not knowing what to do. It occurs to me that I am looking directly into the face of God. I am peering deep into His azure eyes. There is a splendid silence. I lift my hand to Him, as if He were a spring and I am a parched man who has crawled through the desert. I reach for Him, an oasis, an illusion, a glorious thing. Then He starts freaking the fuck out, bawling, and His mother puts down the chicken sandwich and grabs Him by the waist. She lifts His tiny face to hers and coos, “What’s the matter? What’s wrong?” She wipes the tears from His tiny face. He wasn’t God. He was just a little kid. God doesn’t exist.

  I wait for them to leave the waiting room, then I wobble to my feet and do the same, head back up into the massive windows and marbled arches of the main terminal. The light is shining down in the most theological way, and I understand that, once upon a time, someone built this entire building as an edifice to God’s glory. I wonder if he or she knew what I know. Probably not. If they did, you can bet they never would’ve stacked two marble blocks together. I walk out onto the street, take a cab back to my hotel, shaken and broken, yet, on some level, alive, or maybe reborn, eyes wide, confident in the knowledge that I will probably never have a more depressing day in my entire life. And if I do, well, then I hope God or whoever strikes me down. I hope the universe pulls my number. Either way, the result will be the same.