Gray (16 page)

I haven’t slept in a while now. My sentences are running like they just want to get away from whatever’s behind them. I’ve been writing Her e-mails with no beginning or ending, just middles, deep blue oceans of letters and words with no feeling or meaning. They don’t make any sense at all. I start calling my mom’s work voice mail at two or three in the morning, leaving fifteen-minute-long messages about how I’m doing okay. I think I am making breakthroughs and announce my brilliant theories. I try to bring her to her knees. I try to say something that will eclipse all the love she has ever given me; something so big that it will open up a new perspective for her and set her free. That’s the least that I owe her. Most of the time, I delete the messages after I listen to them once or twice. Maybe one of these times, I will leave one for real.

I lie in bed and look through the personals in
LA Weekly
to see if anyone is lonelier than me. I like the ones in the
Weekly
because they’re the craziest and most desperate, and in Los Angeles, that’s saying something. There is an art to decoding them—it’s all semantics and verbiage—though it helps if you’re screwed up and on the brink of collapse as I am: “Still Searching” means “Confused and
Lost.” “Free-Spirited” means “Crazy, or Even Possibly Psychotic.” “Thrill Seeker” means “I Like to Get High.” And “Adventuresome” means “Nymphomaniac.” The personal ads in Los Angeles are the saddest in the world. At least in cities like New York or Chicago there is hope, born primarily out of crowding—after all, you could be standing next to your soul mate on the train
right now,
or folding your unmentionables next to him or her at the Laundromat downstairs
next weekend
—but LA has nothing but great, impersonal distance, millions of lives spread across valleys and vistas, snarling lanes of traffic, sprawling, stuccoed apartment buildings. You could go an entire day without speaking to another living soul. People in LA are decaying and dying, breaking apart at the seams, scattered and hidden from view. All they’re looking for is someone to be miserable with. Odds are, they will never find that person. Geography and traffic patterns will see to it. I laugh about this every time. To myself.

Everyone around me is worried, everyone is looking at me with watery eyes and a concerned face. Speaking to me in sentences that trail off into silences. But the thing is, this all seems to be
working
. My brain has always been my enemy, and I’ve spent much of the past decade warring against it, with therapy and razor blades and bad behavior, with precision-guided prescriptions that targeted specific regions. Serotonin smart bombs and the like. I was prepared to fight this war forever, even if deep inside I knew I could never win it. There were civilian casualties (she was certainly one, many
times over). Unexploded ordnances. Violations of the Geneva Convention. It was bad. Now—thanks to my new regimen of meds—my brain and I have entered into a new era of diplomacy. There are no bullets or bombs, no carnage, just man-made medicine, warm clouds of inhibitors and blockers that act as demilitarized zones. We are at armistice. We have secured peace in our time. Now every day is warm and soft, every minute feels like the time on an airplane just before takeoff, when the cabin becomes pressurized and your body is slowly being rocked back and forth, when you are teetering on the verge of sleep, when the voices of your fellow passengers blur and become part of the background, muted, soft, and sad. You close your eyes and drift away, and when you awaken, you are someplace else entirely. A new city, a different time zone. This happens to me almost every day, though usually I find myself standing on the pier in Santa Monica, or strolling down the boardwalk in Venice. No recollection of how I got here. No worries. I don’t even have to adjust my watch.

We begin working on the record. I am barely in the studio, preferring instead to spend my days either transporting around Los Angeles or buried beneath my bedsheets, shades drawn on my windows. I don’t do anything halfway. On this particular morning, I am hiding from the sun, neither alive nor dead . . . a zombie in training, when my phone rings. It’s Martin on the other end, asking if I feel like coming down to the studio today. I tell him maybe, and he says it’s been nearly a week since I’ve done any work. This is news to me. I tell him I think
he’s mistaken, and he assures me he’s not. I hang up, take another pill, and go back to staring at the ceiling. The sunlight makes a prism above my head. The shades are fluttering in the artificial air. We have been cleared for takeoff. Then the phone rings again, and I stare at the number. It’s our manager. I have been expecting this call for a while now. Eventually, someone was bound to tell him about this. I sit up in bed and clear my throat, answer.

“What are you doing?” he asks, though it’s clear from his tone that he’s not interested in hearing the answer.

“Hey, hey, man,” I mutter, my voice still buried beneath the covers. “I, uh . . .”

“What the fuck are you doing?”

“I’m just in, uh . . . I’m in bed. I don’t know why.”

“I know why you are. You do too,” he says, losing a bit of steam now. “Look, I—I’m not going to tell you how I know about the pills. It’s not important how I know, it’s not important who told me . . .”

He doesn’t have to tell me. I know Martin called him. Martin panics easily. He is a good friend.

“ . . . that’s not the issue here. The issue is the pills. And, uh, and getting you some help. I’m not judging you, I’m not asking why you’re taking so many, that’s not the issue either. The issue is, uh . . .”

The issue doesn’t matter. He is going to want me to see another shrink. Some industry vet, someone who’s been through the wars, seen the best and brightest burn out and fade away. Someone with a dangly earring, I bet.

“ . . . the issue is the band. And what your little, uh, little episode is doing to it. And, of course, getting you healthy.”

“Of course,” I say, though I’m not sure why.

“So, I want you to go talk to someone. He’s a good guy. He helps people like you get through, uh, through situations like this. He comes recommended, of course.”

“Of course.”

“So I’ve e-mailed him and he’s going to be in touch. I want you to go see him.” New York traffic rattles in the background. Our manager is talking to me on the street. “Look, the band is one thing, but, uh, it’s not the only thing, you know? Like I said, I’m not judging you, but I am, uh, you know . . .”

I do know. I just want him to say it.

“ . . . I’m worried about you. I want you to be okay.” He shifts tone to make it clear that he’s wrapping up this call. “So . . . go see him. For me. Would you do that?”

I tell him I will. He hangs up feeling satisfied with himself, thinking he has swooped in and saved the day. I imagine him taking a confident swig from his coffee. He is a good friend. I have a lot of them, even if I don’t realize it. Despite overwhelming desires to the contrary, I get out of bed, pull on a hoodie, and head down to the studio, for the first time in a week. I leave most of the pills under my pillow, though I’m not sure why I’m even hiding them anymore. A couple of girls in the Oakwood hot tub whisper as I pass. They probably assumed I had died up in my room. It is bright and sunny and eighty-five degrees,
but I am freezing. My hands are sweaty, my face is ashen. I begin life as a functioning addict not because I want to, but because I have to. I owe it to the guys, to our manager, to Her. We’ve come too far—from the KoC halls in Arlington Heights to the end of the continental United States—to give up now. I’m not about to call it a revelation, but it’s close. Most times, revelations come when you least expect them.

When I enter the studio—a big, plush place with platinum records lining the halls and cocaine buried in the fibers of the carpets—the receptionist doesn’t recognize me, and I have to be buzzed in by an engineer. No one says a word to me, trying hard to maintain that well-crafted vibe of
professionalism,
but they clearly didn’t expect to see me back here. This record is being made in
spite
of me.

My hands shake a bit when I pick up my guitar. It feels impossibly heavy around my neck, like a weight I can’t bear to hold. After a few minutes, the heft goes away. My guitar feels like a weapon again. Suddenly the pills and the sorrow and the flight towers don’t seem to matter all that much. I don’t know why. Martin whispers that he’s sorry. I tell him not to be. I play along to a track, fumbling the beat a few times before getting it right. Behind the glass, our producer looks at me with tender, worried eyes. I will not let him down. I will not let anyone in this room down. Not today, at least.

That night, with my pills staring at me from under my pillow, I write Her my first clearheaded e-mail in a long while. I apologize for making Her worry, I tell Her I’m
feeling better, though I don’t even try to explain why. I haven’t quite figured it out myself. I include a passage extolling the virtues of love and sanity, compare Her to a lighthouse in a churning sea. My beacon. I am sure it will leave Her breathless. The next morning she replies with
You have a spot in my heart that could never be replaced
.

It makes me laugh just a little. It’s funny the way people only say shit like that right before they replace you.

B
ig
things are happening. We are finishing the record. We are mastering and mixing and multitracking, seated behind great boards, nodding our heads to the beat, using words such as
tone
and
pitch
and
low end
as if we were industry pros. The guys at the studio humor our requests. It’s sort of funny.

We are due to leave Los Angeles in a few weeks, scheduled to fly to New York to play the record for the folks at the label, to have meetings and do press and assuage stockholders. A tour is being planned. It is all very professional. The idea of boarding an airplane and traveling across the United States terrifies me. All those mountains and lakes and cities, all those places in which to crash. I’m not sure where I picked up this fear of flying, but it’s real and not going away. I’m not sure how I’ll manage, but I’m trying to take things one day at a time. The shrink told me that. I’m meeting with him regularly now, and while I won’t bore you with the details, he seems like a genuinely good guy. He tells me amazing stories about the guys in
Mötley Crüe going on drug binges and buying automatic weapons and barricading themselves in hotel rooms. He has seen it all. He is trying to get me to meditate with him, and we take drives down to secluded beaches, sit on mats, and watch the pelicans swoop up and down the coastline. And, yes, he does, in fact, have a dangly earring.

I haven’t paged the Soap Opera Doctor in a few weeks. That doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m cutting out all the pills, but, rather, that I’m refusing to refill my prescriptions. I say good-bye to the tandospirones that you can only get in China, and the buspirones and the eptapirones that made my head whirl. I watch as the Zolofts and Ativans and Klonopins slowly dwindle away, and when they finally disappear, all I’m left with is some Tylenol PMs. Enough of them will do in a pinch. Everyone is a little less worried about me. The Death Watch is officially over. No one is afraid to wake me up in the mornings anymore.

This is all happening when she decides to leave me. We had a fight after I told Her that things were going well with the band, that I was excited again and that I hadn’t thought about quitting in a few weeks. I told Her that I was considering staying in Los Angeles and thought she should move out here to be with me. After all, I joked, it’s closer to Berkeley than the North Side of Chicago. She didn’t laugh. This was apparently the final straw. The next day, she is on the phone to me, saying she knew this day was coming, and that she couldn’t sit by and watch me kill myself. She said we had been stuck in place and she owed it to Herself to move on. I didn’t necessarily disagree with
Her. I can tell she has found someone else, probably some boring dude in one of Her study groups or something. Someone who wants to wear sweaters and drink expensive coffee and live around the corner from the food co-op. Someone who is into Freud and the unconscious self. Someone who is not me.

She only cries a little bit as she’s telling me this, and only retches once, the phone clinking against Her teeth, Her tears echoing off the bathroom tile. It is a fairly low-key affair. She doesn’t even wait for me to object, probably because she knows I won’t. We are both too tired for grand gestures, both too weary to go on fighting. A year ago, I would’ve hopped on a plane and showed up at Her place with dynamite strapped to my chest and a list of demands in my hand. I would’ve begged for us to go back to the way we were—
or else
. Fuck hostage negotiating; I would’ve been romance’s last terrorist. Love’s last chance. Now, I can’t even be bothered to whip up some fake tears. No one needs to die for this. We’ve grown up and grown apart. We haven’t slept in the same bed in months now, not since I went back to Chicago, and she hasn’t made any attempts to come out to LA, even now that Her mother is stable again (as I knew she would be). Love has long since left the building. It’s not coming back. As we’re saying good-bye, I wish Her good luck with the new guy, and just as she asks, “What does that mean?”—I hang up on Her. She doesn’t call back. I don’t blame Her.

That night, I don’t stay up waiting for the phone to vibrate, as I’ve done after every single fight we’ve ever had. I don’t call any of my friends in Chicago and tell them to
keep an eye on Her, just in case she does anything stupid. I don’t stare at myself in the mirror and think about cutting my wrists, about expressing my love for Her with some childish final act. I just accept what has happened as part of life; an inevitable step on the path to wherever; “rungs on a ladder,” as my dad always said. She’s gone. Good-bye. And all of that would be great if any of it were true. What I
actually
do is sit on the edge of my bed and stare at my alarm clock and realize that this is never going to work out, that she will never be with me as long as I am with the band, and that I can never have everything because life is unfair and God has it in for me. I will always be alone and unloved, no matter how many kids buy our albums or shout my name. I start to feel like I’m going to vomit, but I stop myself because it would’ve got all over the carpet and we probably wouldn’t get our deposit back. I pull my knees to my chin, rock back and forth in an attempt to settle my stomach, and as I’m curled up, I realize that I’m nothing more than a frightened child, a scared little boy with tough-guy tattoos and a hollow snarl, and that no matter how much I like to think of myself as a die-hard romantic, I’d never have the guts to actually
die
for love. Sure, I’d flirted with the notion, had got some illicit thrills out of the Soap Opera Doc and his prescription pad, but I’d never dreamed of going all the way. And that made me a phony, a liar. A coward. So right then and there, I decide to make a life change: I am going to die. I am practical about it. My shrink would be proud. I gather up every last pill in my possession—a fistful of blues and oranges and pale yellows—and swallow them all, lock myself in
the bathroom, and break the mirror with my fist. I cut my knuckles up pretty good and blood trickles down my arm in bright red ribbons. It’s full of oxygen and oozing and steaming hot. I begin to worry that all the pills I’ve been taking aren’t letting the blood clot, so I freak out even more. My head is churning and there’s a whole lot of blood now, so I crawl into the shower and start crying. White flashbulbs are going off in my eyes, and when I rub them, I get blood on my face. I turn on the water and sit there, getting soaked, watching the blood wash away from my knuckles, staining my clothes. Martin knocks on the door, asking me what’s wrong. When I don’t answer him, his voice gets louder, and he says my name, telling me to let him in, but I just put my head in my hands and feel the water run down the back of my shirt. I don’t know how much time goes by—five minutes? An hour?—but then security comes and takes the door off its hinges, and a big, burly guy in a blue suit turns off the water and puts a towel around me while Martin and the rest of the guys stand in the living room. I sit on the corner of my bed, watching water pool around my sneakers while an EMT wraps my hand in gauze and shines one of those pocket flashlights in my eyes. He asks me what I’ve taken and I tell him I don’t know, and his partner knocks around the pill bottles by my computer. I laugh because while my body is shivering, my head is so,
so
hot, and I ask the EMT if steam is coming out of my ears. He doesn’t laugh and just goes “Uh-huhhhh” and calls me “sir” and asks me again what I’ve taken. The other guy is in the background holding up empty orange bottles, asking
me if I took
all
of these, sir, did I take
all
of these, and I smile and lie and say, “Noooo.” Both EMTs go back out into the hallway and talk to the guys, then come back into my bedroom and tell me I’m borderline and they think I should go down to the ER and have my stomach pumped, but since I’m borderline, they’re leaving the decision up to me, and I tell them I’m fine and they respectfully disagree, tell me I should go with them, but I refuse again. They tell me that whatever I do, don’t fall asleep, and as they’re packing up their stuff, they tell the guys the same thing—whatever you do, don’t let him fall asleep. They leave and the guys take turns watching me sit in a chair. Occasionally I go into the bathroom and throw up, and pink puddles are on the floor, my blood mixed in with the water, and one of the guys stands in the doorway and watches as I stick my head in the toilet. By noon, I feel better, and everyone decides it’s probably okay for me to go to sleep, so I crawl into bed and sleep with my right arm elevated, since I’m still worried about the blood not clotting. When I wake up, I look at my damp clothes balled up in the corner and decide that I had probably overreacted. It was nice of the EMTs to come out though.