Gray (9 page)

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.

•   •   •

It’s way past noon when I finally crawl out of bed. I’m so hungover, I can’t even see straight. My folks have decided to have mercy on me—they’ve left a pot of coffee on the burner and gone out for the afternoon. A year ago, they would’ve given me such shit for rolling in at 6:00 a.m., but now, things are different.

I sit in the kitchen while the rest of the world carries on without me. Somewhere someone is mowing a lawn. Somewhere someone is beeping a horn. My parents’ dogs are going nuts about something in the backyard, but I’m too sick to get up and see what it is. I drink my coffee and move my eyes around the room . . . the bowl of fruit my mom is constantly refilling, mostly because the apples keep going bad. The wallpaper that my dad hated hanging, golden fleurs-de-lis entwined with fingers of ivy. The big, stainless-steel fridge, with a picture of my brother playing soccer and an old promo photo of my band (me with long hair too). I’ve been in this room a million times over the years, but it’s never seemed as
still and sad as it does in this moment. It’s like sitting in the kitchen of someone who’s just died. The cabinets are filled with cans they’ll never open, the freezer stuffed with meat they’ll never thaw. The air is heavy and you don’t want to disturb anything because, you know,
that’s the way they left it
. Maybe it’s just because I’m hungover though.

I reach across the table and pull a stack of mail toward me. There are offers for credit cards, a newsletter from the Wilmette Public Library, and a letter from the Columbia Registrar’s Office, addressed to me. I don’t even open it, just rip it in half and toss it toward the garbage can. I miss by a mile, and the two halves of the envelope flutter harmlessly to the floor. I’ll get them in a minute. I finish my coffee and put the mug in the sink, run some water for no particular reason. The dogs are chasing each other around the backyard, stopping, staring each other down, then bolting off again. I watch them through the kitchen window and smile. I can hear kids playing next door, making up simple games with infinitely complex rules (“You can’t touch the grass because it’s
lava,
”), and I can remember me and my brother doing the same thing. It seems like that was fifty years ago for some reason.

I stand there for a while, the water running, the kids burning up in the imaginary lava, and I start to think about Her. I wonder if she knows the girl I was with last night. I wonder if she’ll even care? And I wonder if she thought about
me
the first time she had sex with the philosopher? Probably not. Then, out of nowhere, an
overwhelming sadness comes over me, makes me shiver, and I decide to never come back to this house again. I decide I’m going to move far away from here, I’m going to hide and never come back. I turn off the tap, then throw up in the sink. It’s still red. Probably from the blood.

T
he
cities start to blur together. The shows do the same. The days are indefinable, and time is only marked by events: In May, we get a full-time publicist from the label. In June, we get a manager. In July, we say good-bye to the van and get a tour bus (which we’re sharing with another band to cut costs . . . our manager wasted no time in proving his worth). The shower on the bus is like an old phone booth. The bunks are like coffins. None of this matters to me in the slightest. We’ve been out on the road for months now, living out of duffel bags, washing ourselves with tiny bars of soap pilfered from hotel supply rooms, sleeping when the sun comes up, and none of that matters to me, either. Every day is a new adventure, every city a new opportunity.

After a show in Las Vegas (I think it was Las Vegas) I meet an actress who used to be on a show I watched as a kid, and we hit it off. She is drinking whatever lowers her standards and laughing at all my jokes and touching my knee with her hand. She’s got downtown legs that are too
tall for every single pair of pants she owns. People would pay to have problems like that. She looks at my eyes, darkened around the edges, and I can tell it gets her going because she thinks I can relate to her troubles. She doesn’t know I’ve always been this way; that I’m just a rainy day kid and have been from the start. Or, she doesn’t care.

She asks to see our bus. I take her on, and before I know it, she’s sliding into my bunk. The light is so bright that it hurts my eyes, but I don’t want to turn it off because I need proof that this is actually happening. I don’t know what to do with my hands, so I leave them at my sides, soaking with sweat. Kissing. Hand at the button on the front of my pants. This girl is out of my league—I know it, but she knows it too. She knows where this is going even when I don’t have an idea. She climbs on top of me, her face inches away from mine, and closes her eyes. For whatever reason, I can’t stop thinking about that show she was on, how she was just a kid like me back then, and how everything in her life transpired to bring her to this moment, to this bunk on this bus in the desert, with a loser kid like me inside her. It sort of makes me sad. Then she says something like “Cum in me” or “Cum on me,” barely whispered over the noise of her panting, and I don’t catch it. But I realize there is a pretty big difference between the two options.

I nod my head. I begin to realize that “hot” girls come with crazier flaws than the rest of us—the hotter they are, the crazier the flaws. Our knees touch. We shiver in the heat. Our skins stick together like leather in the summer. If only my friends could see me now. She pulls her
dress back on and puts her number into my phone. We both know it’s a meaningless gesture. Then she steps off the bus, back into her life. I fall asleep with a smile on my face. I am living the dream.

•   •   •

Months, miles, who’s counting anymore? Only the events stand out. One night, I am inexplicably getting drunk at a motel in Daytona Beach (I think it was Daytona Beach), some morbid, Mid-Century Modern place called the Thunderbird Motel. I only remember the name because I still have the postcard I stole from the lobby. The parking lot faced the highway, the balconies faced out to the Atlantic. Landlocked tears versus limitless possibilities. I remember thinking that was
way
symbolic. I was pretty drunk at the time.

Girls were there, poor, wide-eyed things from tiny, hopeless towns, and they just stared at us, stood there biting their lips because they didn’t know what to say or how to say it. You could tell their minds were blown. Maybe that was just the pot though. The Animal and I did our best to chat them up, but after a while, we just gave up. It wasn’t worth the effort. So mostly we all just stood out there on the balcony, watched the moon ripple on the Atlantic, listened to the traffic on the other side of the building. No one was talking. The party was kind of dead.

Then, from inside the room, came a hideous crash. A scream. We ran back inside to see a kid—long hair, jean shorts, no shirt—lying flat on his back, blood pouring from his head. He was covered in white powder,
and crushed ceiling tiles were scattered around him. We thought he was dead. But then he sat up, stared at us, and smiled. There were several gaps where some teeth should’ve been. Without saying a word, he got to his feet, walked into the kitchen, and came back with two tallboys of Natural Light. He drank one and offered the other to me. Dumbfounded, I took it from him.

“Hey, yer that guy, right?” he said, wobbling slightly.

I nodded.

“Oh, man, you fucking suck.”

Everyone in the room was mortified. They were looking at the hole in the ceiling, the tiles on the floor, at everything except this bleeding maniac standing in the middle of the room. Nobody knew who he was, nobody knew where he came from. He was the first real person I’d met in almost a year. He had balls instead of brains, and you need people like that in your life because they keep you honest. I liked him immediately.

“Why are you bleeding?” I asked him.

“I tried to jump through the fuckin’ ceiling but I missed.”