Gray (12 page)

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.

“Shiiiit” is all he says.

We eat our meals quietly, much to the relief of the skinny manager, who still watches us suspiciously from the cash register. The tiny jukebox on our table makes me think about the first night I met Her . . . that time in Chicago so many years ago, back when we were young and unafraid, sort of like John Miller. How we kissed on the street, held hands beneath the table. How I traced the small of Her back with my fingers. And, oh, how much distance we’ve covered since then, how much we’ve changed, two arrows shot in opposite directions. She’s still writing me love letters and I am unmoved by them. They’re just words. I realize I do not love Her. I wish I hadn’t told Her I did.

I drop a quarter in the jukebox, summon the ghosts of ducktailed rockabilly cats and tousled-haired teen idols,
sweet-voiced doo-wop singers and yelping young Negroes with wild pompadours. They were the kings of their era, the Imperials and the Belmonts, the Diamonds and the Del-Vikings. They were the savages of the decade, pounding the piano, and thumping the upright bass. Pulling pints of whiskey from their back pockets. Groping girls. Having wild times. None of that mattered in the end; they’re all dead now. Time always wins. Suddenly, I can’t bear to look at their names. One time, when I was a kid, my dad took me and my brother to a diner like this, with the same jukeboxes on the tables, and he let us each play a song. He gave us quarters and helped us scroll through the selections. My brother chose Buckner and Garcia’s “Pac-Man Fever.” I don’t know why I remember that.

This place has a sadness, an indefinable, intangible dread. John Miller doesn’t notice. He’s too busy shoveling food into his mouth. Watching him eat is disgusting, just a blur of elbows and french fries. Belching. He never comes up for air. I stare at him with a mixture of admiration and disdain. I get the feeling most people look at him this way. He doesn’t notice that either.

“Whas the matter?” he asks, his mouth full of yolk and potatoes. “You not hungry?”

I shrug.

“I gonna tell you something, man, based on my observations, and I hope you don’t git too mad or take it th’ wrawng way.” He reaches in his back pocket for his can of Skoal. “You promise me you won’t take it th’ wrawng way now, right?”

I nod.

“See, th’ thing with you is, man, you jess seem so sad. Like, sadder than prolly anyone I ever met. An’ from what I heard, you ain’t got nothing to be sad about. Now I may not have th’ whole pitchure, and I may not know you all that well, but based on what I’ve observed, on watchin’ you look around th’ place, not eatin’, lissenin’ to you talk about all those pretty girls you been with . . . you jess seem
sad,
man. It’s in yer eyes. Shit, but if I’m wrawng, jess tell me. Don’t git upset.”

He is not wrawng. I begin to worry that he can see right through me, that he can tell I’m a gigantic phony, perhaps the phoniest person alive. So I tell him the story of Her, the whole story, from when we met to that time I left Her crying on the bedroom floor, picking up pieces of Her shattered cell phone. That time when I was so unbelievably cruel. I tell him how she used to make me feel, how I opened myself up to Her and how she let me down more than anyone else has ever let another human being down. I tell him about the brawl with the philosopher and the trip to the emergency room. And finally, I tell him about the love letters she’s been sending me, and how
they
make me feel . . . like I’m snared, being pulled back down again. The waitress comes and clears our plates away, and I keep talking. She returns to refill our coffees, and I’m still talking. I talk and talk, until there’s nothing left to say, until I’m trailing off, ending sentences with “and you know . . .” and eyes into the distance. When I’m finished, John Miller is the only person alive who knows the
entire
story of Her and me. I’ve told it to no one else. I’m not sure why.

We sit there for a heavy minute, John Miller preparing his Skoal. He holds the can between his thumb and middle finger, flicks his wrist, thumps the can with his pointer finger, packing the tobacco in one fluid, blurry motion. He tilts the can toward me, nods his head, but I say no. Then he takes a massive wad and crams it into his bottom lip. It bulges just like his stomach. We sit there for another heavy minute, and I’m wondering if he was even listening to me. He spits into his coffee cup, leans
waaaay
back in the booth, eyes me with that country-mile stare, and finally, regally, speaks.

“Lissen, man. I’m gonna say it again. I may not know you all that well, but I understand whatcher goin’ through,” he drawls. “I been through it, my brothers’ been through it, everybody’s been through it. We all got a crisis, an’ somehow, there’s always a girl involved in the creation. There was this girl back in Jacksonville that I loved. Shit, I was gonna marry her. We didn’t have a care in the world, not one. An’ then one day, she finds out she’s pregnant. We’re gonna have a baby, an’ I jess lose it. I don’t know what happened. I wasn’t ready. I was terrified. So I left.”

He gets quiet, spits in his coffee cup. Someone plays a song on the jukebox in the corner. I wish they hadn’t.

“I left her an’ then she didn’t have the baby. She loss it, you know? Pretty early on, but long enough, y’know? The doctors said there was nothin’ she coulda done different. But I knew she loss that baby because of me. Because I left. She knew it too. We broke up an’ I haven’t talked to her since. This was jess about a year ago now, an’ since
then I dropped out of school an’ got arrested a coupla times, because I was so mad at myself. I still am. I think about that baby all the time, and how it’s dead on account of me. Woulda been a boy. . . .

“So I been runnin’ ever since. I can’t run from me though. An’ that’s my crisis. I know I got to deal with it, I jess don’t know if I ever will.” He smiles slightly. “What you got is a crisis of confidence. With that girl, with yourself. An’ you gotta deal with it. Now, I jess met you and I don’t know how you do it, but you gotta. Or else it’ll eat you up an’ you’ll end up like me, with nothin’ and no place to go.”

John Miller spits again into his coffee cup. The manager thinks about saying something from behind the register, but he decides differently. The ghost of Fats Domino wafts along in the air like a sad, black balloon. There’s nothing left to say. We pay our check and walk back into the drizzly North Carolina rain. John Miller doesn’t talk much on the walk back, and I get the feeling that he’s never told anyone else about his crisis. By the time we get to the bus, our clothes are soaked. John Miller hasn’t had a dry minute since he got here. That night, after we’re done with our last song, I tell the audience that I love them. I don’t know why I did it. From the side of the stage, in a rumpled white T-shirt with a roller-skating waitress on the front, John Miller, Southern Sage, is smiling. Chicago looms large on the horizon, just weeks away now. For the first time in forever, its jagged, gray skyline doesn’t seem all that ominous.

J
ohn
Miller is my new roommate. Right now, he and I are sharing twin beds in my old bedroom, but we’re moving out soon. When I showed up at my parents’ house with him in tow, my mom’s jaw about hit the floor. He had managed to make himself look extrapathetic by not showering for a week, so his hair stuck out in all directions from underneath his trucker’s cap. I told my mom that he had no other place to go, that taking him in was an act of charity. It was an easy sell; my mom loves charity. She emptied his garbage bag into the washing machine, made him some food, sat back, and watched the elbows fly. Nobody eats like John Miller. It’s like being in shop class or something. Debris everywhere. You should be required to wear safety glasses whenever he’s at the table.

My mom loved him immediately, leaned against the refrigerator with arms crossed, listened to his stories about Jacksonville and his two older brothers with glee. She watched him saw through meals and thought he was just the greatest—a real character from the Deep South,
right here in her tastefully wallpapered kitchen. John Miller was laying it on thick too, complimenting her cooking with an antebellum grace (“This here cake is better than my grandmama’s”) and offering to work on the hydrangeas out back (“There was a time when me and my two brothers had ourselves a lan’scapin’ business”). He seemed to get more Southern as the situation demanded it, and right now he was talking like some combination of Foghorn Leghorn and Roscoe P. Coltrane. I half expected him to pull a coonhound out of his pocket. It was amazing to watch him work. There was an art to it. His eyes were constantly darting around the room, sizing everything—and everyone—up, sussing out their weaknesses, plying them with praise. John Miller was a natural-born con man, a used-car salesman, a lawyer’s lawyer. Naturally, my dad didn’t like him, but I could not care less; in a few days, we’d be set up in our own place, and then the real fun would begin.

In the midst of all this, I wasn’t even thinking of Her, and I didn’t until later that night, when John Miller was buzz-sawing through sleep (he did everything abrasively). I lay there in my old bed, thinking of the times she had laid next to me, the summer nights when my parents went away to their place in New Buffalo, on the shore of Lake Michigan, and she and I would sleep wrapped around each other, the window open, the cool air kissing our shoulders. I had long ago decided that I didn’t love Her anymore, but on certain nights, when I lay awake while everyone else slept, eyes wide-open in the dark, I knew that was a lie, or at least I was pretty sure it was.
Maybe I
did
love Her, more than I’d ever loved anyone or anything else in my life. Perhaps I had spent the past six months trying to convince myself otherwise, blaming Her for things that were not Her fault, getting drunk and screwing around with women who weren’t Her and never could be. John Miller, wise son of the St. John’s, he knew this the minute I started rattling off my sexual conquests in that North Carolina diner, could see right through my bravado, my act. He knew I was lying, that all of it was a show and that deep down I ached for Her, even if he didn’t know who
Her
was just yet. Which is why he took pity on me, laid that sob story on me . . . he wanted me to know that it was
okay
to be in love with Her, that it was probably inevitable, and that, if I ever wanted to fix my—as he put it—“crisis of confidence” and be happy and not live out of a garbage bag, well, then there was probably no better place to start than with Her. Either that or he was trying to con me. I haven’t decided.

But now, as I lie here in the night watching the moonlight pour in through my bedroom window, my mind wandering back to those sweet summer nights when our feet would touch at the bottom of my twin-size bed, I am at least willing to consider that I loved Her. Perhaps even admit it. Almost by accident, I think of Her face, slender and pale, and those big, beautiful eyes that, on nights like this, caught moonbeams and held them quivering and soft on her lashes, and I know that it’s all over for me. I can hear my pulse quicken against my pillow, can physically
feel
my heart roll over in my chest. Our brains may lie to us, but our hearts never do. . . . I could deny it to
myself all I wanted, but I loved Her. I needed Her. And she needed to know that I did. In that instant, I could tell where this night was heading; we insomniacs know when sleep’s not in the cards.