Gray (2 page)

T
he
bus crawls into Dallas, but it doesn’t matter. All the skylines look the same now. It’s raining again, because the rain clouds follow me wherever I go. As usual, I don’t have an umbrella. Life. I am not prepared for any of this.

Yawn. Squint. Dark glasses. I hate the way the sky looks at me, as if it knows everything I’ve been up to. I sit up in my bunk, in my underwear and sunglasses, listen to the motor hum and the miles whistle away beneath my feet.

I imagine the bottom of the bus falling away, me hitting the ground running, burning north up 35, cutting east on 44 at Oklahoma City, rocketing across great distances, jumping onto 55 in St. Louis, just a blur now, a bottle rocket headed north, past Springfield, Peoria, Lexington, Chenoa, Pontiac; then Chicago looming large on the horizon, me headed right for the heart of it, now supersonic, Kedzie Ave, Ashland Ave, Chinatown flashing by, digging my heels into the asphalt, making sparks fly,
skidding to a stop on Lake Shore Drive, standing there in my underwear and sunglasses, my heels cooling in the morning light. Maybe a scarf wrapped around my neck for warmth. Oh, what would they say about me then?

I laugh about this to myself. I am fucking crazy.

Anywhere, Texas. Everywhere, USA. I feel the same regardless. I am homesick all the time. I didn’t sign up for this. It used to be simpler—you know far—far, but never
too far
from home, from Her. Now, everything is bigger. Stranger. We have money, but we don’t ever need it. We don’t pay covers. We don’t stand in lines. We sleep through the days. I mostly think of vampires, which isn’t quite the same, but they are the closest I can come. They gotta know something about the way we don’t go to sleep until the sun comes up. Or maybe something about the marks I’ve got on my neck.

“What the fuck are you
doing
?” asks the Disaster, who is inexplicably awake (or, more accurately, hasn’t yet gone to sleep). He’s staring at me as if I were covered in blood or something, and I don’t understand why, until I remember that I’m sitting in my underwear, legs dangling out from my bunk, with a pair of $300 sunglasses on my face.

“I couldn’t sleep,” I say, which is a pretty good explanation for all of my peculiarities. “What the fuck are
you
doing?”

“I
didn’t
sleep,” the Disaster enthuses (our lives have become so predictable). “I partied the whole way here. Everyone else is passed out. Let’s go eat.”

We call him the Disaster for all the reasons you’d expect. He’s always looking for something to ruin. He is a
man of few words . . . a man of action. He has no feelings of remorse, no regrets. He is everything I am not. He’s pretty much my hero.

In the rare instances when the Disaster sleeps, he does it less than three feet away from me on the tour bus. He’s always beating off, and he doesn’t make any attempts to hide it, mostly because he doesn’t care enough to. Right now, he’s standing between the rows of bunks, swaying a bit as the bus pumps its brakes (or because he’s kind of wasted). He’s got on boxer shorts and a shirt that says
COWGIRLS RIDE BETTER BAREBACK
. I know he put it on just because we’re in Dallas. Those are the kinds of things he thinks about. It’s enough to make me laugh because I know later on tonight, after the show, he’ll
still
be wearing it, and he’ll use it as a pickup line.

The bus pulls in behind some arena named after an airline. It’s ten in the morning, but already, kids are milling about, some playing it cool, barely looking up from their phones, some losing their minds. There’s never an in-between with them (our lives have become so predictable), it’s full throttle or nothing at all. I watch them through the tinted window of the bus, feeling guilty. Sometimes I feel like the fucking pied piper, only I’m leading them down a vermin hole. I never meant to be like this.

The Disaster looks at them too, only he’s a talent scout. He spies a couple of prospects (“Tremendous upside potential” is how he puts it), spits, and heads to the bathroom. When he returns, he’s got his skinny jeans tucked into a pair of cowboy boots. They’re made of rattlesnakes. Of course they are. He looks at me
for approval, and I crack a smile. I pull on jeans and a hoodie—my uniform—and we make our way to the front of the bus. Out into the spotlight. Showtime.

Of course, it’s never that simple, so we have to wait for our road manager to guide us from the bus to a waiting car. It’s something like ninety feet, so, naturally, there’s no way we could do it alone. This is a voyage fraught with peril, after all. The convoy is assembled in the front lounge of the bus—someone has poured a beer on the Xbox, I note—and we head out, swinging the bus door open with a shudder. The girls start screaming, jumping up and down as if something were inside them that their bodies just can’t contain. They call my name over and over (the world is on a first-name basis with me).

We pile into a black SUV, the Disaster rolling down the window to wave good-bye to his pair of prospects. This hasn’t gotten old to him yet, and it probably never will. The SUV pulls away from the arena, making its way through the maze of empty streets, exploring the canyon of skyscrapers. Downtowns are always amazing on weekend mornings, nothing but shadows and lonely newspaper bins, coffee shops with the chairs turned upside down on the tables. Ghostly. You can imagine it’s after some meteor strike, after the humans have died out. You can imagine grass growing between the cracks of the sidewalks, vines swallowing skyscrapers. Or, at least I can.

Now we’re in the “artistic” area of Dallas—you can tell by the vegan restaurants—and the SUV parks outside one of them, some place with bright graffiti on the awning, and we go inside. No one even raises an eyebrow at us.
They’re all too cool to care who we are. It . . . it’s kind of refreshing, actually.

We sit at a table near the window, and the Disaster leans back in his chair, folds his hands behind his head, and props those rattlesnake boots up on the table, knocking his knife and fork to the floor with a clatter. He lets out a huge groan and wonders aloud if it’s too early to have a beer, which draws more than a few disapproving stares from the room. It’s all MacBooks and expensive jeans, beards and disheveled hair in here. Trust-fund babies and graphic designers and aspiring novelists. This only emboldens the Disaster, and now he’s letting out thunderous belches and scratching himself. It’s devolution at work. Man back into monkey. I look out the window, wishing I were anyplace but here. I stare down at the menu, but I’m not even hungry.

Our waitress comes by, and suddenly there’s no place else I’d rather be. Jesus, she’s beautiful . . . black hair and big eyes, hips that peek out of her jeans. She’s got a tiny piercing in her cheek too, just to let you know she likes a bit of pain as well. I bet she hates her father and reads Camus. Naturally, she’s the kind of girl who doesn’t give a shit about me at all, which only makes me want her more. I take off my sunglasses when I order. It’s the polite thing to do.

She disappears with our order, and I know I didn’t exactly win her over with my charms. It’s over. The Disaster is talking loudly to the road manager about something—the
Stunt Rock
DVD, I think, which has become a favorite of his on this tour—and I do my best not to listen, my
eyes drifting from table to table. These places are always the same no matter where you go. Same terrible artwork on the walls (it’s always for sale), same soy milk, same tofu scrambles with stupid names. Like the people who eat here, these places like to think they’re unique. They’re not. There’s a place exactly like this back home in Chicago, down on Clark Street, where we used to sit in one particular booth and order coffees (because we had no money) and sit there all night (because we had no place to be), much to the delight of the waitstaff. We were such little shits back then.

“And there’s a fucking
wizard
in it, onstage, and he’s blowing shit up the whole time,” the Disaster is shouting. “You guys should
do
that.”

I think he said it to me, but I’m not paying attention anymore. I’m thinking about Chicago. And getting back on my medication. But mostly I’m thinking of Her. I’ve been trying not to . . . it’s because we’re in this restaurant. We used to waste the night away in that place on Clark Street, just Her and I and two cups of coffee, still wrapped in our sweaters, the cold still tingling in our legs. We’d sit on the same side of the booth and hold hands under the table, watch the flurries of snow whip around on the street. Eventually, she’d have to go home and I’d walk Her outside, hold Her tight to keep Her warm. The buttons on one side of Her coat never snapped on the other side. They were for fashion, not function, she would tell me. Then she would kiss me and say something like “You’re beautiful for a boy” and make me laugh, and I’d watch Her get into Her car and
drive up Clark, take a right on Newport, and disappear. And I’d go back inside and finish both our cups of coffee, just because.

Now I am here in Dallas, eating something made out of tofu. I don’t even remember what I ordered. The Disaster is hitting on our waitress, talking to her like an old plantation owner (“Why, hell-ooooo there, darlin’ ”) even though we’re in Texas. All the South is the same to him since he’s, in theory,
Southern
himself. Our road manager is laughing so hard he’s nearly crying. The Disaster can have her—the waitress, that is—I don’t even care anymore. I never really did. She just reminded me of someone else. You can probably guess who.

We’ve been broken up for so long now, but I still feel as if I were cheating on Her all the time. My whole life is an affair. I owe it all to Her. Her. She made me, she put me here. We fought about that. We fought about a lot of things, but I still miss Her. She is Chicago to me, the humid summers and the lake-effect winters. When I’m homesick, it’s for Her.

We pay our bill and leave, but not before the Disaster lets the waitress know that we’re playing tonight at the arena named after the airline and if she wants to come and check out the show, she should just give him a call. He doesn’t tell her that he’s just a guitar tech. It doesn’t matter, either. She’s not going to call. The SUV makes its way back into the heart of Dallas, the skyscrapers growing larger by the second, until they swallow us whole. There is something intensely foreign about Texas, like secession is imminent. Or death. Both are definite possibilities.

I miss home again. I miss Her. It’s impossible for me not to. Chicago won’t let me go. I realize that I left my sunglasses back at the restaurant, but I don’t care enough to go back and get them. Maybe she’ll find them—the waitress—and think I left them for her or something. I decide that would be okay. In the front seat of the SUV, the Disaster is shouting about wizards again.

N
ow
I’m back on the bus, alone. The light on my laptop pulses white on black, like Morse code, sending distress signals into the dark. This ship is obviously sinking. I’m thinking about that waitress, about how I should’ve tried harder. I’m thinking about getting back on my medication. But mostly, I’m thinking about the last time I saw Her. It didn’t go well.

Her lips curl when she’s talking about the
Q
. Her middle name begins with
Q,
but she’s not like that, you know? She’s regular. She’s normal just like me. But Her lips still curl in the most exquisite way. You should see it in person. I’m not doing it justice. I call Her up because I want to hear Her lips cup the air around the receiver. I want Her to put the receiver to Her chest, so I can hear Her blood. I want to tell Her to build me a model of San Francisco, because I have a great idea for a disaster. I was drunk if you couldn’t have guessed. She must be on Her computer because the phone just keeps ringing. She can’t be bothered to pick it up. Right now I want to shoot those
fucking Harvard kids who started Facebook in their dorm room.

I call Her up again, to tell Her to build a mini-version of San Jose for me to devastate. This time she answers and tells me she is on the phone long-distance with Her aunt. “I’ll call you back,” she promises. I want to kill every member of Her extended family.

I call Her up again because I want to go over the blueprints for a miniature Atlanta because I crave catastrophe. I want to tell Her I am the new William Tecumseh Sherman. She would get the reference, I think. Like I said, I was pretty drunk. It goes right to voice mail. Right now I hate Her voice because it reminds me of how much I think about Her. The faker. And I can’t stop thinking about Her. I miss Her lips curling around those
Q
’s. I miss Her body. After a while, when one bounces back and forth between different hearts, nothing gets old. You never really have to mean anything to anyone. My intimacy problems are with the world.

Finally, a call. I pick Her up at Her apartment, even though I probably shouldn’t be driving. Her eyes are blackened around the edges so much that she looks like a raccoon. They look permanently bruised. She’s always the consummate victim. Her hair looks like rows of shark teeth, just jagged dye jobs on top of one another, running away from Her natural color. No one wants to be what they are. We drive around the city so she can alternate between smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee. We talk about the kids we hate just so we have something to talk about.

We’re sitting on the edge of my bed now, in my apartment. Every single inch on Her body is filled with millions of nerves. Somewhere inside Her brain neurons have fired to synapses and put them on alert. When my hands brush Hers, it feels electric. Every movement has a meaning, either yes or no. It’s getting later and later.