10
I don’t tell Her I’ve left. I’m not sure why. My phone vibrates every half hour or so, Her name flashing on the screen, but I let it go straight to voice mail. I listen to Her messages in the bathroom of the studio, away from the other guys, the tap running while I swallow my pills. As Her voice spills into my ear (“Hey . . . it’s me . . . where are you?”), I stare at myself in the mirror and realize that I am nothing more than a smile with a heartbeat attached to it . . . skeletal, muscular, and circulatory systems, all color coded. Major veins and arteries. Major organs, easily removed. I am a living version of the Visible Man. You can see directly into me. I place an Ativan on my tongue, gulp it down with water from the tap. Watch now as it makes its way to my stomach. Follow it into my bloodstream. See it attach itself to the receptors in my brain. I’m here for your education.
After the first dozen messages, the Heys get more panicked, and the I love yous become less frequent. She’s worried about me, she says, and for whatever reason I don’t seem to mind. I’m teaching Her a lesson . . . don’t believe in me, and this is what you get. But then the Ativan rolls in over me like a warm fog, and my eyelids start to get heavy, and I start to feel bad for Her, so I decide it’s time to return Her calls. She answers, and Her voice is filled with genuine relief (“Oh, thank God!”), but that quickly fades when I tell Her where I am. She asks me why I didn’t call, and maybe it’s the Ativan, but I tell Her the truth: I say I’m not really sure why.
I hear Her light up a cigarette on the other end of the phone, breathe out smoke with a gust. There’s silence for a minute, then she asks when I’m coming home, and I say I don’t know. A few weeks maybe. She asks me what I’m going to do about my medication, or my psychiatrist, and I tell Her I haven’t thought about either of them. And that I don’t care. She asks what’s wrong with me, why am I acting like this, and I say I’m not sure. Then she says she has to go to class, and there’s another minute of silence. I tell Her I’m sorry, but she just says, “Yeah,” and hangs up. There’s no I love you, just dead silence. I turn the tap off and walk back into the studio. I leave my phone sitting on the edge of the sink.
Here’s how the next few weeks go: We start working on the album. We learn that while Nirvana recorded a bunch of songs for Nevermind in the studio we’re in, just one actually ended up on the album (“Polly,” in case you were wondering). We are bummed out by this. We take breaks from recording and walk down to Lake Monona, which is still frozen solid. We step out onto the surface, like little kids, and try to slide all the way to downtown. We attempt ice fishing, with little success.
We learn that Madison is a great town, especially if you like aging hippies and date-rapist/frat-guy types. The Animal tries to fight a group of the latter down on State Street. He punches one of them in the eye and it makes a sound like a water balloon bursting. There’s blood on the icy sidewalk. He says the power of Dave Grohl compelled him to do it. We disappear into the night before the cops can show up.
We sleep on some chick’s floor in the University of Wisconsin dorms. We have no money, so we survive on Fritos and Mountain Dew. But none of that matters. The album is humming along—for the first time, I’m getting my lyrics in the songs—and the music sounds big and shiny . . . like the way a real album should sound. We are becoming a real band. It doesn’t matter that the temperature is in the single digits during the day, or that we are surrounded by burned-out professors and drunken bullies. In fact, that makes everything even better. We’re a band of brothers . . . and we’re out here alone, behind enemy lines. We know no one and don’t need to apologize for our actions. We are fighting, we are laughing, we are alive again. Or at least I am.
Because the songs I’m writing now aren’t love songs. They’re hate songs. And they’re all about Her. I want to punish Her for not believing in me or my band, I want Her to know that she hurt me. So I write songs—fantasies, I suppose—that put Her in the worst situations imaginable. I reveal high school shames and pull skeletons out of the closet. I spill secrets she told me in confidence. My pen is a weapon, and I use it to humiliate Her, to extract a measure of revenge. I don’t use Her name at all, but when she hears these songs, she’ll know exactly who they’re about. It’s awful, writing such terrible things about the person you love, but I’ll take a pen and paper over a psychiatrist’s chair any day of the week. This is my therapy. This has been building in me for a while.
• • •
One night, we’re bored and decide to drive back to Chicago on a whim. Our producer doesn’t think that’s a particularly good idea, especially since it is around 2:00 a.m. and the dead of February in Wisconsin, but we keep pestering him, tell him we need to get a particular guitar, this one with great tone and so on and so on, and eventually he relents. We pile into his Mustang (an ironic one) because we had for some reason decided that our van wouldn’t make it all the way down to Chicago. This was probably not exactly true, but, hey, we were rolling. We shoot our way down dark country roads, snow piled up high on either side of us, light posts whizzing by the headlights. We open the windows and feel the roar of the icy, black Wisconsin air; it stings our cheeks and makes our eyes water. The Mustang is slaloming down the roads now, slipping from side to side, the wheels frantically searching for traction. We latch onto the interstate in some place called Janesville, and the snow is starting to fall now, and everything is dark and quiet, except for when we overtake the occasional eighteen-wheeler, and we roar past its tires and you can hear the wet road passing beneath them with a hiss. It’s slightly scary, to be honest: just one turn of the wheel . . . just one errant ice patch . . .
We limp into Chicago at around five, the sun not even a fully formed thought on the horizon, the city streets muffled by the snow. Our producer keeps the Mustang running as we trudge up to our practice space, our feet crunching beneath us, and grab the guitar (or any guitar). We all stand around in the room for a few extra minutes, partially because we’re frozen from the cold—not to mention a little dazed from the trip down—but also because we want to make it seem like this trip was actually worth it. To further that cause, we decide that we should probably get something to eat, so we make the producer drive us over to the place down on Clark Street, where we pack ourselves into a corner booth, order coffees, and plow through tofu scrambles. The light outside is turning soft and purple; the occasional apartment window glows gauzy and incandescent. The city is coming to life.
Across the room is the booth where we shot the cover to our first album. It’s empty now, but a year ago, we were packed in tight, Her on the other side of the table, looking at everyone but really only at me. We were just kids then. We’re basically still kids now. Only I feel older somehow, more hollowed out. I didn’t even call Her and tell Her we were coming back into town for the night. She’s probably waking up right now, actually, thinking about some exam she’s got today, or maybe kicking some stranger out of Her bed. I don’t know why that thought entered my head, but it did.
We head back to Madison just as the sun is turning the skyline red, and no one is the wiser. The Mustang slides onto the interstate, the tires spinning through the melting ice. The sun rises red over our shoulders. It is quiet now, just the wind brushing by the windows and the hum of the engine. Everyone is tired, staring out at the rapidly widening horizons, the cities and smokestacks and scrap heaps giving way to barren, windswept fields, bales of hay wrapped in tarps, distant farmhouses, roofs frosted with snow. The sunlight is warm against our faces, our eyelids are heavy but happy. Good songs are on the radio. We sing along and pound the roof of the car with our fists. It’s like a movie scene. Right now, she’s probably walking out of Her apartment, sitting in Her car while the engine runs, blowing on Her hands. Unaware that I was in our city tonight, or that I made our producer drive by Her apartment as we left town. I’m pretty sure the other guys noticed.
When we arrive back in Madison, we sleep until late afternoon on the dorm-room floor, waking up when we hear the chick return from her classes. We walk down to the studio and get a crash course in business when we find out that our label has talked a major into giving us an advance to make our album. That gave the major the rights to first refusal, which was something none of us understood until later, when I called my dad and he told me that it meant that our album might actually come out on the major. That freaked us out until we realized we could probably use some of the advance to eat a little better, so almost immediately we start going out for proper meals. We ring up a bill fitting of major-label artists-in-waiting.
A week later, the recording is done and we pack up to head home. For the first time in forever, I’m not anxious to return. Her and I haven’t been speaking all that much, and when we do, there’s nothing to say. I don’t know what will happen when I show up on Her doorstep tomorrow morning. I’m not sure who will answer the door. I sift through the pocket of my coat to find my Ativan. I fill my hands with water from the tap in the bathroom and swallow the pill. I feel the benzos enter my bloodstream, like tiny psychoactive snow flurries. I turn off the tap and shut off the bathroom light. This time, I take my phone with me, but I’m not really sure why.
11
Expect the unexpected. We jump right back into bed, we don’t skip a beat. We make loud love while the sun rises on Chicago; we wake up Her roommate with the noise. When we’re done, she falls asleep with Her body wrapped around me, and I listen to Her breathing, rhythmic and shallow. I feel Her body go still around mine. I let my eyes drift around the room: our clothes, tangled on the floor like the skins of ghosts; Her books, stacked on the desk—Cognitive Psychiatry, Blackwater by Kerstin Ekman (“one of Sweden’s most prominent novelists”), The Collected Works of Oscar Wilde, bound in bright blue—proof of a life that continues on without me; an open pack of Marlboros, an overflowing ashtray, evidence of Her growing imperfections. The radiator hums away in the corner, and the midmorning light spills in around the curtain, casting the walls in a dull, white hue. Tibetan prayer flags hang from the light on the ceiling, fluttering slightly in the heat. It’s like a photograph of a crime scene . . . What went on here? Who where these people?
Her cell phone lies on the table beside the bed, face-down, green light flashing. It’s beckoning me to investigate, to pick it up and flip through the text messages and discover that she’s been unfaithful, but I don’t, not because I’m particularly trusting, but because I don’t want to risk waking Her up. Instead, I bring the covers up to my nose slowly, smell them for evidence of transgressions—someone else’s sweat in the fabric, some DNA left on the threads (I’m guessing it smells like bleach)—but all I can get off them is the scent of Her body. And cigarettes. It occurs to me that I might be going crazy.
“Why are you smelling my sheets?” I hear Her ask from behind my head.
As far as I know, there is no manual for moments like this, when you’ve been caught smelling your girlfriend’s bedding for traces of a stranger’s semen. No caddish article has ever been published on the subject in the pages of GQ or Esquire (“I was simply admiring the scent of the Egyptian cotton”), no father has ever pulled his son aside and explained how to get out of this situation (“Just tell her, Son . . . that you were blowing your nose”). The Smithsonian archives don’t contain a single shard of Macedonian pottery depicting an instance like this. In fact, given the resources available to me, it’s entirely possible that, since the dawn of time, no man has ever been caught doing something this stupid. Which makes me a pioneer, I suppose. So, in an inspired moment, with the winds of history at my back and the gazes of my forefathers fixed upon me, I do the one thing I’m confident they would tell me not to do: I apologize.
“Yeah, I’m sorry, I—”
It was a historic miscalculation. Somewhere in the Great Beyond, Abraham Lincoln cringes. From inside his golden sarcophagus, Alexander the Great slaps his forehead. Cain mutters to Abel, “Jesus, what’s the matter with this kid?” I am an idiot for the ages.
She launches out of the bed, pulling the sheet with Her. She’s shouting, What the f*ck is wrong with you?! Her face gets redder and redder. Her entire body begins to shake, and great rivers of tears flow down Her cheeks, landing on the floor in a series of epic splashes. She wraps the sheet around Her naked body and begins sobbing, asking, Why would you do that?! Don’t you trust me?! I just lie there in the bed, watching Her mouth move and Her body shake. The years drip away with each tear, the letters and I love yous are shaken loose with each convulsion, and suddenly I can’t summon the energy to do this, not now, and not ever again. We are a dying star in its last cosmic throes. We are a ship with its hull pierced, the arctic water pouring in through the gash. It’s over. Because the truth is, I didn’t trust Her. I haven’t for a while now, for about a million stupid reasons—the smoking and the moving of my shampoo, the overturned cell phone and the hurried long-distance calls, like there was somewhere she had to be or someone she had to be with—and one real reason, one that made me stop calling, and the one that had buried itself in my subconscious and had been gnawing away at my insides for months now: that she didn’t believe in me.
In the end—and this was certainly the end—it wasn’t about who she was (or wasn’t) f*cking behind my back, it wasn’t about the secrets she kept from me, it wasn’t about the shampoo. It was something much deeper and more profound than all that. She had doubted my abilities and my dreams and my intentions. She looked at my life as a folly, a children’s crusade. She didn’t have faith in me to write the great rock-and-roll album of our time, to make art and save souls and, sure, maybe even get rich and famous and have hallways lined with platinum plaques. So she kept offering me alternatives—apartments and degrees and f*cking Berkeley—when she knew I didn’t want any of them, and she did it because she knew I would fail. She was certain of it, but didn’t have the guts to tell me. Secretly, she probably hoped I’d crash and burn, come back to Her broken and ready to be put out to pasture. That was the breakdown. That was the disconnect. She didn’t trust in me, so why should I trust Her?
My psychiatrist would tell me that I was projecting my insecurities onto Her, that I was frightened of success, but terrified of the alternative. That, subconsciously, I had doomed myself to fail, no matter what the outcome, so I was determined to control at least one aspect of my life: Her. Even if that meant pushing Her away, even if it meant denying myself the one thing that actually made me happy. He was probably right, but at this moment I didn’t feel like listening. She was the f*cking anchor that kept me tied to this town, to this life; she was dragging me down and she needed to be cut loose. So that’s exactly what I did.
I probably could’ve done it differently, could’ve explained everything to Her, or sighed that I just couldn’t do this anymore, gathered my clothes, and left. But I’ve never been one to pass up a grand gesture. So as she stands there wrapped in a bedsheet, shaking and red-faced and betrayed, sobbing, Why don’t you trust me? What did I do? I sit up in bed, grab Her phone off the table, and whip it across the room. It sails by Her head and shatters against the wall in a million triumphant little pieces, circuit boards and keys shining for an instant in the mid-morning light, then disappearing into the darkness. It was like a fireworks display.
She gasps and falls to the floor, sitting there for a second with a dumb look on Her face, like a baby who’s tumbled over and is looking around the room for a sympathetic eye. Then she starts picking up the pieces of the phone, putting bits of glass and wire into a little pile in Her lap. She doesn’t say a word, doesn’t even look at me, just keeps gathering up the remnants of Her phone, combing through the slivers of plastic as if somewhere in there she’ll find the reason this kid she loved so much has done something so cruel. Then, having found no answer, she starts to weep, and deep, seismic shudders seize Her body. She begins retching, making sickly, guttural noises that are broken up by panicked gasps for breath. She keeps muttering, Why?—but I don’t answer Her because I don’t know how to. I’ve broken us now. I know it. I am the feeling in Dorothy’s house right before the tornado picked it up and dropped it on the witch. I am the buzzing and humming. The dog barking. The lady screaming.
I get up out of bed, pull on my clothes, and grab the sheet off Her body, scattering the pieces of her phone everywhere. She looks up at me, almost in wonderment, Her eyes positively drunk on sorrow, and I laugh at Her vacant gaze. All we had left was f*cking and fighting. And I didn’t care enough about the former to keep doing the latter. So I did this instead. She wraps Her arms around Her naked body as I lean down, grab Her face with my hands, and whisper:
“Why? Why don’t you call your boyfriend and ask why?”
I walk out of Her bedroom for the last time. I look back and see Her balled up on the floor, pulling the sheet over Her body. She looks like a victim. As I shut the door, she begins to wail, “Drop dead! Drop dead! Drop dead, you motherf*cker,” and for the first time in ages, I think we’re pretty much on the same page. I don’t slow down until I’m out of Her apartment and down on the street below. Businessmen and bike messengers pass me on the sidewalk, unaware of what just transpired above their heads. Cars idle at a nearby traffic light. I look up at Her window and realize that I’ve never done something so cruel in all of my life.
• • •
A few weeks later, the guys and I go to a house party on Kedzie. The second I walk in the door, I’m greeted by a hundred angry stares . . . obviously, word of my fireworks display has gotten out. I’m not welcome here, but I enter anyway. I haven’t even shed my coat when I hear Her voice coming from the living room. She’s drunk and shouting about something intellectual—“Aleister Crowley f*cking hated women,” I think it was. I walk into the room and stand by the doorway, watch as she throws Her hands wildly in the air, spilling wine everywhere as she shouts about Crowley’s “avowed anti-Semitism.” She’s seated on the arm of a sofa, Her feet resting in the lap of some barroom philosopher, who’s stroking Her back and laughing at Her brilliance. It only hurts a little when I see Her like this, but mostly I just feel sorry for Her. She’s drunk and embarrassing Herself. She looks ridiculous.
She doesn’t even notice me standing by the door, but the philosopher does, looking up from his bottled import, his eyes locking on mine. His buddies on the sofa see me too, and they puff their chests accordingly, a gang of wannabe rockabilly Dharma Bums with black-rimmed glasses and neck tattoos and cuffed jeans. I just smile and wink at them all. They look f*cking ridiculous too.
A few minutes later, I’m down on Kedzie, bumming a cigarette from a girl (I smoke now too, by the way), when I get a forearm shoved into my back. My heart starts thumping and my face hurts before I can even turn around. I know what’s coming next. In Chicago, if you hit somebody in the winter, you really mean it. I whirl around, cigarette dangling out of my mouth, and I’m greeted by my friend the philosopher. He says hello with his fists.
The first punch to my stomach turns my guts inside out. I fall onto the curb and hear my keys clink down the street. I spit up blood, steaming in the winter air, then, in a move of pure showmanship, I lick it off my hand and slap the philosopher in the face, then walk off to find my keys. He spins me around before he hits me again, I laugh ’cause my spit and blood on his face look like war paint. His rockabilly pals are down on the street now, inching closer to the fray but not willing to actually fight. Cowards.
Then the philosopher rears back and blasts me in the face, hits me dead center and tells me it’s for Her, asks how I like being abused. I remember thinking that, for a bookish guy, he punches pretty well, and he’s got a quick wit too. Then it all goes black. Getting punched in the face is like a hiccup in time, it all slows down from there. All of a sudden, every single tear duct in my head starts working overtime to get enough buckets out. The tears are freezing on my cheeks, and the blood starts caking on my face, mixing with the dirt of the Chicago street. I hear Converse pounding the cement in the distance; the sound is absolutely gorgeous. All I can do is crack a smile at this stupid kid—the kind of smile that says too late. Sound the cannons. The cavalry has arrived. This is why it’s a good thing to have a guy like the Animal on your side.
He plows through the philosopher, knocking him to the street with a thud. In an instant, he’s on top of him, pounding his face with his fists, calling him motherf*cker and p-ssy and bitch. The philosopher can’t even cover up, and now he’s making gurgling noises. The Animal relents, mostly because he doesn’t want to kill the kid, and the philosopher staggers off down the street. It only takes us a split second to start chasing after him, the Animal laughing like a maniac, breathing steam into the night air. We fly around a corner and the Animal catches his prey on the front porch of a row house, pulling him off it, the skin on the philosopher’s hand tearing as he is wrenched from the safety of the doorknob he has anchored himself on.
He’s screaming like he’s being murdered. We’re panting in the cold air. The Animal holds his prey as I start laying into him. Again and again. Right hand only. I want him to feel every hit. Blood starts pouring out of his mouth—no more witty words, motherf*cker—and the porch light turns on. Out steps the philosopher’s mom, a winter coat pulled over her shoulders. The Animal tells her, “Get back in the f*cking house,” and I start punctuating each shot I take with a “This is for your f*cking mother.” He’s defiant until the end, I gotta give him that, no white flags, just “F*ck you” between every hit. But I get into a rhythm and eventually his body goes limp. The Animal lays him down in the snow, and then, with his mom looking on from the window, I stand over his body and spit my blood into his mouth.
We book it down the street and don’t stop until we’re practically standing in Lake Michigan. Hands on our hips, lungs aching for air, the Animal and I start laughing. He lived with his f*cking mother. We wash the blood off our faces and hands in a pile of dirty snow, and the Animal tells me I should probably go to the emergency room. I want to go back and find my keys, but I defer to his better judgment. He knows a mortal wound when he sees one, after all.
We walk for ages, eventually finding a hospital. We stagger in, me holding a bloody snowball to my mouth, and I tell the girl behind the desk that I’m looking to trade in some broken knuckles for 20 cc of self-esteem. She said my plan probably wouldn’t cover that. She’s funny. Because I am concussed, I decide that I’m gonna try and call Her from the pay phone in the waiting room.
I drop a quarter and a dime into the slot, and start punching in Her number. I get about halfway through before I realize that she doesn’t have a cell phone anymore because I smashed Her last one. I hang up the receiver and listen to the coins drop into the return. I don’t pick them up. I spit some blood onto the linoleum floor and walk back to the ER to have my face reattached. F*cker.
12
My life goes supersonic.
• • •
We’re selling tons of merch at each show, making real money now, but since we’re still just the openers, the club owners don’t pay much attention, which means we’re able to give them a few hundred bucks each night and simply pocket the rest. They don’t suspect a thing, mostly because this has never happened before. We eat actual dinners and stay in actual hotels and even consider getting an actual tour bus, but they run about thirty grand a month and we’re not there just yet. But we’re getting close. Like I said, it’s really happening now.
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-f*cking-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 motherf*cker 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 f*cking 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.
13
The 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 f*cking 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 f*ckin’ ceiling but I missed.”
It made sense. I liked him even more.
• • •
The sun is coming up now over the Atlantic, big and red, setting the sky on fire. We’re standing on the balcony, the Animal and me, drinking tallboys. The crazy kid is out there with us too, still shirtless, the blood dried in midtrickle down his face. Pretty much everyone else had passed out, the girls curled up in chairs, eyes closed tight, mouths small and taut, peaceful, innocent, beautiful, the way all girls look when they’re asleep. It was kind of magical, the air effervescent with ocean mist, the morning sky glowing like embers. Beneath us, the waves rush the beach, then quickly retreat with a soft hiss . . . God’s white noise, the kind psychiatrists pay good money to fill their waiting rooms with. My old life seems so far away now. I’m stoned and happy. My eyelids are getting heavy. I’m not long for the world. Then, without being prompted, the kid starts talking.
“I wuz pretty much born in an abortion clinic,” he says, waking the Animal and me from our trances. “I wuz born in Tampa in May of ’82. They razed the hospital, and by January ’83 it was an abortion clinic.”
He’s just staring out at the Atlantic, his face expressionless, and I can’t help but laugh. Lines like that are showstoppers, and I definitely heard the record skip in my brain. Finally, I’m compelled to ask this crazy kid what his name is, and he tells me it’s John. John Miller. It’s sort of a letdown. He deserved a better name than that, something like Talon or Falcon or Buck, something befitting a wild-haired feral child, the kind that crawls out of the jungle once every fifty years. The kind of name suitable for a big-game tracker, or a roughneck on an oil derrick, or a drunken, dusty gunslinger. Instead, he got stuck with John Miller. It makes him sound like a chiropractor. His parents really f*cked him over.
“Well, John Miller,” I said, eyelids drooping like some cartoony drunk’s, “your name f*cking sucks.”
“Yeah, I know it,” John Miller winced, finishing his umpteenth tallboy of the night (or morning). “My parents really f*cked me over.”
Great minds. Kismet. All that bullshit. I love this kid.
“I think we should hang out more,” I told him, leaning on the railing of the balcony for support. “You should give me your e-mail address, and the next time we’re in here we should hang.”
“Yeah, definitely, I love doin’ dumb shit,” John Miller said, then staggered inside to get a pen or throw up or something. The Animal and I stare out at the quickly brightening beach. We should be going soon.
“That kid is great.” I laugh.
“Eh, he’s okay,” the Animal snorts. He’s a man of few words.
We go back to staring at the Atlantic. There’s really nothing else to say. The sun clears the horizon, making the surface of the ocean shimmer like a tray of diamonds, and from the other side of the motel comes the sound of the first trucks of the day, downshifting on their way out of town. We should’ve been back on the bus by now. People are probably starting to worry.
Then there’s another crash behind us, and we whirl around to see John Miller standing there, holding a sheet of paper in his hand. On it, he’s scrawled his e-mail address: [email protected]. It’s strangely perfect.
“Nobody ever calls me John,” he said, handing the sheet to me.
“Yeah, I can kind of see why.” I laugh.
And then, the Animal and I are in the lobby of the motel, calling our tour manager from a courtesy telephone. He asks where we are and says he’ll send a cab to get us. He hangs up in a huff. I think we woke him up. We sit out on the curb and watch the trucks rumble by, off to who knows where, back who knows when. You can feel the heat rising from the ground already. Finally, the cab comes to get us, one of those old bangers with the velvety interior that always smells like cigarettes, the kind they have in every city that’s not New York, and we have the driver take us back to whatever the arena was called. I roll down my window, lean my head back on the velvet, and close my eyes. The last thing I see is the cabdriver checking me out in the rearview. He looks like the kind of guy they’d cast to play a Vietnam vet in some movie.
It’s not important. Like I said, after a while, you don’t remember the days, just the events. I’ll remember this day because there were two of them. The first was meeting the Disaster. The second happened when I got back to the bus, climbed into my bunk (the good-luck one), and checked my e-mail before I passed out. Only one new message was in my in-box. Sent at 3:47 a.m. From Her. I stare at it as the bus engine purrs to life, as we slip out of (I think) Daytona Beach. I can feel my heart pounding, and I’m pretty sure I know why. I should probably just delete it, go on with my life, but I don’t. The computer takes forever opening it, as if God or Steve Jobs were asking me, “You sure you really wanna do this?” But then, there they are: Her words, filling my screen, and there’s no turning back. I make it as far as the first line before I feel my heart burst in my chest.
I miss you.
14
I’m drunk and I probably shouldn’t be writing this. But I really miss you tonight. I know I’m not supposed to—everyone tells me that—but I have for a while now, and it’s not going away. I tried calling you the other night, from a pay phone so you wouldn’t recognize the number, but the call didn’t go through. Maybe Ma Bell doesn’t want us to be together. Maybe God doesn’t either. But I do. My life has come off track without you. I hardly know myself anymore. I need you.
I’m sorry about the past. I know I should’ve supported you; I was just scared of losing you. I didn’t want to share you with everyone else. I was being selfish and I know that’s what drove us apart. I forgive you for what you did. I would’ve probably done the same thing. I don’t even care about it, to be honest. I just know that I need you back in my life, in any way possible, because it’s getting harder and harder to get out of bed in the morning. It’s scaring me.
Please write back.
I lie in my bunk, just reading the last line over and over. It’s brutal. Beautiful. The saddest sentence I’ve ever seen. Three little words; so much weight, so much desperation alive within them. They’re either the beginning, or the end, or both. Probably both. Rain pelts the window of the bus. Big, angry drops. Drops with a purpose. I watch the flat expanses of Florida blow by in a blur, nothing but swamps and palm trees and alligators. Things get less exotic the farther north you head: gated neighborhoods that back up to the interstate. Shopping malls on the horizon. Billboards for Jesus. The sky is low and pregnant and gray. The rain makes it even more depressing. I am stalling now.
I go back to that last line. Please write back. It paralyzes me. I close my eyes tightly, pull my blanket over my head, like a frightened kid trying to wish away the monster under his bed. I figure it’s worth a shot. Sometimes I am willing to believe in anything if it means ignoring the reality of a situation. I open my eyes. Please write back. F*ck. I wish I had just deleted Her message. None of this would be happening if I did. I’d probably be asleep right now, dreaming of that fiery sunrise and that shimmering Atlantic. Instead I’m lying here, disarmed. Impotent. My head feels like I can’t sit or lean on anything on the inside because it’s all been freshly painted. Grays and pinks. And open some windows ’cause the air just isn’t circulating the way it should. I realize I am stalling again. F*ck off.
She’s always been succinct, but this line is Her masterwork. Please write back. It’s funny because, according to my shrink, this is exactly what I’ve always wanted, what I’ve moaned and wailed and bled for my entire life: complete and total control. The past, the present, the future, it’s all mine. I can erase history. I can eliminate what might be. I can either write Her back, or not. It’s that simple. Only it doesn’t feel that way. It feels profound, frighteningly, cripplingly so. This is a fork in the road. A Choose Your Own Adventure book. A catastrophe waiting just around the corner. For the first time, it’s all up to me. I realize in this instant that perhaps control isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. There’s a reason I’ve never been able to grab the reins: I’m not strong enough to do it.
So now, not only am I paralyzed, but I’m furious at myself. I am useless. Weak. A boy in over his head, hiding behind tattoos and one-night stands. Trying hard to make sure nobody notices that he’s drowning. The rain really gets angry now, hammering the roof of the bus like machine-gun fire. Heavy bullets from heaven. Heavy thoughts in my head. Do I really miss Her? Did I ever love Her? Can I hurt Her again? I’ve been staring at Her e-mail for more than an hour, and my computer is running on fumes. Just a tiny red sliver remains in the battery icon. I wish humans came with the same kind of indicator . . . it would make things much easier. You would know how to deal with every person on the planet, and I’d always be in the red. Please write back. The computer is dying. The rain is pushing the bus off the road. There’s a twister coming. Make a decision. It’s only a goddamn f*cking e-mail. It’s only my goddamn f*cking life.
Good morning, I write to Her. It’s a new day.
I press SEND, launch my reply out into the ether. I cannot control what happens next. If it finds Her, it was meant to be. Cosmic chance, divine fate, karma chameleon. Whatever you want to call it. After a few moments, my heart stops pounding and a strange calm fills my body. I am such a smug bastard that I think I’ve learned some sort of deep lesson from all this. I get out of my bunk and walk to the front lounge of the bus, feeling good about myself. A placid, Buddha-like smile slides across my face. I am enlightenment. I am Zen. I am not only the vase, I’m the space around the vase, and the space within the vase. You know, all that really deep stuff. I sit in the lounge and watch the towering storm clouds shower the flatlands and strip malls of Florida. Everyone else is asleep. I probably shouldn’t be feeling good about myself. It was only a goddamn f*cking e-mail.