Gray

15



It’s a few weeks later. She’s started sending me love letters now. Love e-mails, perfumed and pink, coquettish. Always in lowercase. You know what I mean. The first one caught me off guard . . . it was just a normal e-mail about some dream she had, about how she was standing on this cliff, overlooking the great expanses of the West, and below Her, on another cliff, a guy in a rhinestone suit, a game-show host, was tossing elephants up to Her, and she had to try to catch them on the head of a pin while a studio audience watched intently—that was the point of the game show—and how the elephants would drop out of the sky like great, bouncy balloons, and she’d try to balance them on the pin, only she couldn’t do it, and they’d tumble down into a canyon and explode on the rocks below, in bright bursts of reds and blues, like cans of paint dropped off the roof of a building. Each time she’d let an elephant fall off the pin, the audience would boo a little louder, would hiss and inch a step closer to Her, until she was at the very edge of the cliff, looking down into the canyon, at the husks of elephants and the great, spattered rocks, and the game-show host would smile hideously, would pull a lever, and more elephants would start falling from the heavens, and the audience would lash out at Her, would tear Her clothing off and try to force Her onto the rocks, and how, just as the elephants began to rain down on Her, at the very moment Her heels were tipping back over the edge, Her roommate shook Her awake because she had been crying in Her sleep. Apparently, she had been having this dream ever since she was a child, though I’d never heard Her mention it before. Anyway, that’s what she was going on about, and I was reading along halfheartedly, my eyes skimming over the endless sea of lowercase letters and parentheses (she loved parentheses), until, at the very end, they got snagged on three words, i love you, which she had planted at the very end of the e-mail, like a strategically placed bit of C-4, packed on just out of sight, waiting to detonate.

Of course, I caught it. I saw what she was up to. We terrorists know all the tricks of the trade. The problem was, I didn’t do anything about it. I should’ve defused the bomb right then and there, should’ve cut the wires and tamped out the fuse, but I didn’t . . . maybe because I felt sorry for Her, for the way I had treated Her, for the way Her life had come off track. Or maybe I still loved Her too. Either way, I let the i love you go unchecked, and that emboldened Her. A day later, she wrote another e-mail, used i love you twice, and after that, it was too late. There was no turning back. The messages have started to come with alarming frequency now—sometimes two or three a day—and I can do nothing to stop them. For a few days, I tried ignoring Her, but that just leads to even more e-mails . . . panicked, frightened ones, sent at four in the morning, full of spelling errors and run-on sentences and lines like im sorry for being crazy. You know what I mean. I am beginning to worry about Her. She is hardly sleeping, she is never going to class, she is fixating on me and slowly coming unraveled. I am beginning to think this was a terrible idea.

I don’t know what caused all this. Actually, that’s a lie; I do, I just don’t want to admit it. Like everything else in my life, this was all my fault. See, one night last week, in a moment of weakness after the after-party, when the moon hung low and bright over a stretch of I-95 somewhere in southeast Georgia, when I was awake on the bus and sad and really, really drunk, I may have written that I was falling in love with Her again. It was probably a mistake. I didn’t even mean it—I don’t even remember writing it—but she didn’t know that, and by the time I woke up the following afternoon, she had replied with three separate e-mails, each sent a few hours apart, and each crazier than the last. I rolled over in my bunk and went back to sleep. I am an addict. I am an idiot. My sickness is severe.

The worst thing about Her e-mails isn’t even the i love yous. Don’t get me wrong, those are pretty bad, but what’s even worse is that when I read them, it’s almost as if I’m looking at myself. She’s started writing like me now, all lowercase and parenthetical, full of tangents and angles, half-realized thoughts thrown into go-nowhere paragraphs. She has become narcissistic and maniacal, obsessive and pathological, only she hides it all beneath a thin layer of self-effacement. I’ve been getting by on this same trick for years, and I’m beginning to realize that I can be insufferable because of it. With each e-mail I read, I wondered more and more why no one has ever bothered to tell me this. Or hauled off and belted me in the face. Anyone besides the philosopher, that is, but he had just cause. I wouldn’t want to spend a minute with me, that’s for certain.

We’re somewhere in South Carolina now, in some awful strip club off the interstate. The kind of place where they serve breakfast and the parking lot is loaded with truckers looking for a quickie. We came here as a joke, and I’m the only one who isn’t listening. Instead, I’m on my Drone, reading another of Her endless e-mails. In front of me, a too skinny girl with bad makeup and dead eyes asks me if I want a dance. I say yes, then instantly regret it. Under the black light in a strip club, everything takes the shape of regret sooner or later.

She puts out her cigarette (she has a pack of Camels stuffed into her thigh-highs) and goes to work. I’m trying to write Her back, but there are breasts in my light. “I’m only doing this to pay my way through school,” the dancer says to me, and I think to myself, somewhere, there is a university full of strippers paying their way through. Somewhere out there, a college takes tuition payments in dollar bills. I look in her dead eyes and lie, “You’re too pretty for this. You should model.” She smiles and I can see the stains on her teeth, all blotchy and off-white beneath the black light. I wish she’d stop. She asks me what I’m writing, and I lie again, tell her I’m writing a letter to my wife. I ask her to press SEND and she obliges.

“You’re too young to be married,” she whispers through her hideous teeth.

“She’s my second wife,” I say. “My first wife died in a fire. My whole house burned down, and she was in there with my kids. They’re all dead.”

She pauses on my lap, midgrind. You have to say something pretty f*cked-up to get a stripper to do something like that. I am on a roll now, and I don’t want to stop. I tell her that I was just e-mailing my second wife to tell her it’s over, that I want a divorce. I’ve told my wife she doesn’t understand my needs, that we grew apart long ago. I’ve told her I’m in love with another woman. As long as a guy has a sob story, he doesn’t have to throw out dollar bills. If I string together every single heartbreaking story I have, they would measure out to an entire night of free lap dances. The stripper stares at me, then continues grinding, occasionally shooting the bouncer across the room a panicked glance. I think she mouths Help to him, but I can’t be sure. She probably thinks I’m a serial killer or something. I love it. There is a special place in hell for people like me.

The dance ends and she doesn’t even ask if I’d like a second. She just gathers up her underwear and makes a beeline for the bar. As she walks away, she reaches into her stocking and pulls out another Camel. I have fantasies of my e-mail making it back to Her with faint traces of smoke and Victoria’s Secret Vanilla body spray on it. I imagine Her opening it and pausing as a few bits of glitter fall out of the subject line. That would certainly make everything easier. I laugh to myself and take another pull off my bottle of Bud. I am drunk in a strip club in South Carolina. I finish my drink and walk back to the bus.

Two days later, we’re in Somewhere, North Carolina. The tour is wrapping up, just a quick run up the East Coast and a left at I-80 in New Jersey is all that stands between me and Chicago. I don’t want to go back there, and not just because it means I’ll have to deal with Her. I have no place to live, either, and even though I swore I’d never go back to my parents’ house, it’s looking more and more like that’ll be the case. It’s pathetic. Midway through the tour, the Animal and I had made vague plans to get a place together, but who knows if he even remembers. I’m too embarrassed to ask him anyway.

So I’m lying awake one morning, looking out my window at some dreary North Carolina parking lot, dreading my future, when all of a sudden there’s a tremendous pounding on the door of our bus. At first, I think I’m hearing things, but the pounding just gets louder—WHUMP! WHUMP! WHUMP WHUMP WHUMP!—like some ham-fisted maniac trying to bash his way onto the bus. I don’t get up, but from my bunk I can hear our road manager swing the door open, ask someone what the f*ck he wants, then there’s about a minute of silence. I hear our road manager get off the bus, and then some shouting. Someone is asking if I’m on the bus. I’m sitting up in my bunk now, ears straining for the slightest sound, and I hear a pair of footsteps getting back on board. They walk the length of the bus, come to a stop outside my bunk, and our road manager pulls back the curtain. Standing there, next to him, soaking wet, shirtless, and wearing a long pair of cutoff jean shorts, is John Miller. The Disaster. I blink at him, he cracks a stupid smile at me.

“This came for you,” our road manager deadpans, then walks back to the front of the bus.

I get out of my bunk and just sort of stand there, in my underwear, next to John Miller. He’s carrying a black garbage bag, which, I assume, holds his worldly possessions. His lower lip bulges out from his face, a thick wad of Skoal peeking out slightly. A mesh trucker’s cap—not the Hollywood douche-bag kind, but an actual cap, made for actual truckers, purchased at an actual truck stop—sits in a peak atop his greasy head. Water drips down his forehead, leaving streak marks. He is tanned and bird-chested, skinny everywhere except his stomach, which protrudes out comically, proudly, a testament to the many tallboys he’s conquered in his time. He looks as if he just stepped off the cover of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Street Survivors album, or maybe like a slightly soaked Allman Brother. He is a damp redneck ghost, a Southern-rock relic. And he’s dripping on my bare feet.

“What are you doing here?” I ask, pulling on a pair of jeans.

“I never heard from you, so I figgered I’d just stop by,” he drawls. He seems distinctively more Confederate since I saw him last, like he’d just discovered his inner Stonewall Jackson. “Ahm hungry, you wanna go eat or som’thin’?”

I don’t know what to say, and I especially don’t want to know how he got so wet, so I just sort of nod my head. John Miller drops his garbage bag on the floor, between the rows of bunks, and clomps off to the front of the bus. I grab a T-shirt and follow him, not knowing where we’re going or how we’re getting there. We step off the bus, into the damp North Carolina morning, and trudge across the parking lot. The club where we’ll play tonight leans off in the distance, empty kegs of beer stacked in a pyramid by the back door. John Miller eyes them hungrily. He is still not wearing a shirt. I watch the muscles in his shoulders move back and forth beneath his shoulder blades, which are so sharp they could be weapons. His body (save for his beer gut) is sinewy and taut, stringy yet firm, in that weird and decidedly Southern way, the way that all goes to hell when you hit thirty. He’s never lifted a weight in his life, and someday it will catch up with him.

We walk alongside a two-lane road, our hands in our pockets, and John Miller tells me his life story. His parents run a mortuary in Jacksonville, Florida, and they want him to be more like his older brothers, who are both licensed by the state Division of Funeral, Cemetery and Consumer Services. He went to community college to get a degree in mortuary science, but dropped out because, as he put it, “morticians don’t get laid.” He has been arrested “a couple of times.” He is “a f*cking massive” Jacksonville Jaguars fan, the first I’ve ever met. And, more than anything else in the world, he claims to be one of two people in Florida who know the actual burial spot of Ronnie Van Zant.

So, after meeting me in Daytona Beach a few weeks back, he decided that I was his best bet out of Jacksonville. He went online, found out where we’d be playing, and, using the little bit of money he had saved up, bought a one-way ticket to Raleigh. He doesn’t say how he got from the airport to the front door of our tour bus, and I don’t ask. I was too busy trying to figure out how he got on an airplane if he wasn’t wearing a shirt.

A light mist is falling now, flecks of rain dancing in the gray morning air. We walk past a retention pond, surrounded by a rusty chain-link fence. The grass is knee-high, swaying like fields of thin cornstalks. The sidewalk was long ago overtaken by weeds, and bright yellow flowers poke through cracks in the concrete. No one has cared about this stretch of land for some time now. Decades maybe. Bodies are probably hiding in the grass. Or alligators. There is no one for miles. No cars, no noise, no humanity. John Miller and I are the last two people on earth.

Eventually, we make our way to a stretch of highway dotted with low-lying strip malls. Nail salons. A scary bar called the Grizzly. A pet store. It’s depressing. Cars plod by, weighed down by life. Eventually, we come across a diner, one of those sock-hop fifties-type places where everything is covered in chrome and checkered tile. We go inside and have a seat. A bubbly jukebox is in the corner, with murals of Elvis and James Dean painted on the walls. A neon GOOD EATS sign behind the register. A castrated motorcycle leaning by the bathroom. Authentic 45s dangling from the ceiling. You’ve probably been here. You know what I’m talking about.

The place is packed with churchgoers refueling after a long morning spent repenting and praising. Old women with hair as white as snow glance up from their menus, plastic-framed glasses teetering on the brinks of their noses. Ruddy-cheeked kids with syrup on their church clothes cower behind their parents. Not exactly our crowd. A plump waitress shuffles over to our booth, looks right at John Miller, and tells him that he needs to be wearing a shirt in here. She calls him “sir” in that condescending way only those who wield temporary authority can, all slowlike, with the i drawn out for emphasis: “siiiir.” Bank tellers are especially good at this. Flight attendants too.

Anyway, John Miller doesn’t have any money, so I buy him a T-shirt from the gift shop. I make sure to buy him the biggest one available, and in North Carolina, they make them plenty big. I return to the booth with a Hanes Beefy-T, XXXL. An illustration of a waitress on roller skates is on the front. John Miller doesn’t even blink while he pulls it over his head. He sits there, drinking his coffee, his actual trucker’s cap turned backward, wearing a giant tent for a shirt. None of this bothers him in the least. He is unflappable. On the wall behind his head is a metal Route 66 road sign, and a framed photo of a shiny ’57 Chevy. The caption reads AN AMERICAN CLASSIC. Exactly.

John Miller and I settle into the booth. I’m not even hungry, but I find myself looking through the menu, eyeing the All-Day Breakfast selections and the Home-Style Dinners. They have hamburgers called The Marilyn and The Big Bopper, tributes to icons who died of a mysterious drug overdose and a plane crash in Iowa, respectively. This does not make me as sad as you would think. Someday everyone will die. Not everyone will get a sandwich named after him or her.

I look up from the menu and see that John Miller is staring at me, with a rabid, faraway look in his eyes. A Southern look, honed by peering off into great distances, searching for clues on the horizon. We don’t have that look in Chicago. He asks what I was laughing about, and I tell him the joke I just made to myself about the hamburgers. He doesn’t get it. Why would he? He is a maniac, he is just embarking on an adventure; he has no time to think about death. The waitress shuffles back to take our orders. John Miller is having some ghastly thing with eggs and bacon and french fries. I tell the waitress I want the repression burger, fifties style. She doesn’t laugh, doesn’t even bat an eyelash; instead, she sighs and tells me it’s too early to order anything off the dinner menu. It was a pretty dumb joke. I order an omelet instead.

“So whudyou guys do for fun?” John Miller asks me, eyes wide now.

“I don’t know, man. To be honest, we don’t have a lot of fun,” I say. “Basically we just drive from one place to the next. We play shows. . . . I don’t know. It’s not fun, man. Not after a while.”

He chuckles. “You awghta come down to Jacksonville with me sometime. If you think this ain’t fun, you ain’t seen nothin’. Man, all we got down there is the f*ckin’ water.”

I smile. Suddenly, I care about John Miller more than anyone else on the planet. He is a believer. He sees the good in everything. He is unscathed by life, not because he hasn’t lived, but because he hasn’t slowed down long enough to notice that he’s bleeding. He is free, like the hoboes of Kerouac. If he wanted to, John Miller could disappear right now, could pick up his garbage bag, toss it over his shoulder, and vanish into thin air. No one would ever come looking for him, and he wouldn’t expect them to. John Miller is unencumbered, he carries no baggage, has no phobias or neuroses. He asks no big questions, does not worry about what tomorrow may bring, because he lives only in the now. He is unlike anyone I have ever known before. I want him to teach me everything, how to embalm a body or hop a train, how to go through life free of burden and fear, how to be truly, maddeningly, dazzlingly happy. I want more than anything for him to like me. So I tell him the story of the actress I slept with in Las Vegas, about how she climbed in my bunk and told me to cum inside her, about how I haven’t called her since and probably never will again. He laughs and pounds the table with his fists and shouts stuff like “No shit!” and “God-damn!” at the top of his lungs, making the old, churchgoing crows stare at us over their plastic-framed glasses. I tell him about my other conquests too . . . the pretty tattoo artist in Phoenix, the girl with the studded tongue in St. Louis, the Chilean girl in Milwaukee who said her dad was Tom Araya from Slayer . . . and now John Miller is practically rolling on the floor, guffawing and repeatedly spitting out “Je-zus Christ!” with such fervor that the manager has to come over and remind us that this is a family restaurant. We ignore him and just keep right on shouting, cursing, being terrible. Offending churchly old women and meek, stammering managers. I feel alive for the first time in months.

But then, as our waitress tosses our food in front of us with a huff, I find that there’s no second act. I’ve confessed all of my sins to John Miller, every dirty deed I’ve done since we hit the road, and now as he stares at me expectantly, over a steaming plate of eggs and bacon and fries, I find I’ve got nothing left to tell him. There’s a deflating moment of silence. My omelet quivers slightly on my fork. John Miller wipes the tears from his eyes and exhales deeply.

“Shiiiit” is all he says.

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

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

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

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

I shrug.

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

I nod.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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





16



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

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

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

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

In that instant, a desperation had come over me; a panic. I didn’t know what to do but I knew I had to do it now, so I sat up in my bed, ran my fingers through my hair, and decided to do something irrational. And now I am hopping around in the dark, pulling my jeans on, trying not to make a sound or break my neck. John Miller is snoring biblically at this point, as if he’s got locusts in his throat, and as I slip out of the bedroom, he sputters and snorts, comes close to surfacing, but doesn’t wake up. If he did, I would’ve smothered him with a pillow. Such is my mania.

Before I know it, I am sitting in my brother’s car, trying to figure out how to make the garage door open without waking them up. Did you know that with enough force you can make even a mechanical garage door open? Neither did I, until I found myself squatting and sweating, working my fingers under the lip of the thing, then gritting my teeth and lifting. I grunt and swear under my breath, nearly kill myself, and have to rest the door on my shoulder. But, eventually, I get it up, push it over my head, and it didn’t make a sound as it swung open. I step out into the driveway, pale blue in the moonlight, and look up at my parents’ bedroom window to make sure they’re still sleeping. I’m not really sure why I’m doing any of this . . . I am twenty-five years old, I can come and go as I please. But something about tonight lends itself to secrecy. I start the car as quietly as I can, wincing as the engine wakes from its sleep. It hasn’t moved since my brother went away to college, and it takes a few seconds to shake the cobwebs. Then I drive out and onto the street, slowly, no headlights on, and I’m off. At the very least, I know now I can break into my parents’ garage if the situation warrants it.

The streets of the North Shore are deserted, dead. The neat brick houses are sleeping, their shutters closed tight. Even the lampposts have dozed off. I drive around for a bit, past Avoca Park, where I used to play Youth Soccer, down to the Baha’i temple, its dome illuminated for no one in particular. I don’t know where I’m going, so I just keep driving, my bones buzzing and my head fuzzy, that kind of feeling you only get when you’re awake while the rest of the world is asleep. An uninterrupted stream of classic rock is on the radio, the DJs playing long songs like “Layla” so they can go for smoke breaks. I am driving with the windows down, and the night feels damp on my face. I’m the only one breathing it in right now, the only one alive. I glance down at the clock on the dashboard. Jesus, it’s three thirty in the morning. It’s Monday now. Off in the distance, I see a truck stopping at each house, tossing newspapers out of the passenger door. I throw the car in park and turn the radio down, listen to hear the thump of the Monday edition landing on each driveway. It’s a sound most people don’t ever get to hear, but if you’ve heard it once—if you’ve been wandering the streets while the businessmen sleep—then you never forget it.

I decide to drive into the city. Maybe I will call Her and wake Her up. I reach into my pocket and realize I’ve left my cell phone sitting next to my bed. Oh, well. It will have to be a surprise then. I don’t know what time she wakes up for class, or even if she has class, but I’m pretty sure it’s not going to be for a few hours now. I’ve got time to kill and nowhere to kill it. I steer the car back toward Sheridan, take it over the harbor, pass the Baha’i again, its dome still lit. I follow the road as it twists through the campus of Northwestern, all sandstone monuments to higher learning, through Centennial Park, with Lake Michigan in the distance, inky black and refracting the moon into a million shards that dance on its choppy waves. There are lights even farther off, ships maybe, blinking red and white. I wonder if she’s awake right now? I wonder if I should try to call Her from a pay phone?

Sheridan presses on, past Kedzie, which isn’t the Kedzie where the philosopher and I brawled, but close enough, cuts around the cemetery, so big and full of ghosts right now, dives through the campus of Loyola, red bricks and Jesuit priests, and finally tosses me into the mouth of Lake Shore, that great road hugging the banks of the lake, the site of many an existential episode. Cars are on the opposite side of the road now, and their headlights make me jump. For a while there, I had sort of forgotten about the possibilities of other people because my pulse was hopping and I was thinking of Her and reveling in the solitude of the night. I wonder where these other people are going, and who’s waiting for them when they get there? Maybe no one. I think of John Miller and his garbage bag full of clothes and heart full of crisis. I think of his dead son. I press on and Lake Shore unwinds in front of me, the great lights and buildings of Chicago appearing through the passenger window of the car.

I turn off at Roscoe, cross over Broadway, and suddenly I am parking the car on Clark. Up ahead, the lights of the diner shine forlornly onto the empty streets. I’m drawn to them like a moth. It seems like I always end up here, in this diner, in this booth, and it’s always night. I haven’t been back downtown since the night of our record-release party, when I got drunk and went home with that girl who shouted all those Oh, Gods and wrote Bastard on my hand. I wonder if anyone ever told Her about that. I wonder if she cared. The diner is practically vacant right now, at what I’m guessing is around 5:00 or 6:00 a.m. (I don’t own a watch). A few loners seated at the counter. A cute lesbian couple cuddled together by the window. A cook with tattoos on his forearms. A waitress who looks like a purple-haired librarian. Me. The lights make it feel yellow in here, the way all-night diners always feel when they’re empty and the morning skies are still dark. Or maybe that’s just me; my eyes never adjust to the light.

I order a coffee from the librarian. Ask her what time it is. She tells me it’s four forty-five. F*ck. We used to kill hours here, splitting coffees, cracking jokes. We had no place to go, and we were in no hurry to get there. Things are different now. I’m older and impatient. It’s because of the road, of the lost hours spent wandering the streets of strange cities after sound check, or slumped in a chair backstage, killing time before the show, listening to the kids shout on the other side of the wall. There are only two constants on the road: waiting around, and the knowledge that you’ll be doing it again tomorrow, only in a different city. It kills you eventually. Now, I hate waiting for anything. But at this moment, I’ve got no other choice.

I drink my coffee slowly. Stare at the lesbians in the window. Occasionally, they notice, and I avert my eyes, pretend I’m studying the menu intently. My brain is still trying to convince me that I don’t love Her, replaying a million conversations about Freud and the unconscious self, conversations I entertained only out of politeness but never made an attempt to comprehend. My brain shows me highlights of our greatest hits, the fights, the tears, the doubts. It unspools footage from the future, of our place in Berkeley, of the two bookish kids we will raise, of the co-op market on the corner. I am fat and unhappy, prone to gazing out the window, thinking about what could have been. I have glasses and am wearing a sweater. Have gone soft. It is boho-intellectual-postmodern-think-globally-act-locally-organic-produce-petition-signing-expensive-coffee-drinking hell. I shudder a bit. Call the librarian over and order breakfast.

Someone once told me that digging up the past has two sides: The pro is that you remember things you had forgotten about. Unfortunately, the con is the exact same thing. That may scare some people away, might force them to always be moving forward, never looking back, not for a second. But not me. I’m a believer. In my heart, I know that nothing is ever finished. I can’t close the door on anything. Right now, I need to follow my heart; I need to have a little faith. So, against my brain’s advice, I wolf down some eggs, slurp up my coffee, and leave the diner with a newfound sense of purpose. A mission. I walk Clark with a full head of steam, burning seconds with each step. But then I realize that it’s still too early to accomplish much of anything, so I go back to my brother’s car, fall asleep in the backseat. I awake to somber, light purple skies and the sound of early rising commuters. For a second, I think about what my parents will think when they discover John Miller and one empty twin-size in my bedroom. Then I think about John Miller, and what he’ll do when my parents find him there. But only for a second. Then I’m off to Her place.

I cut through Cabrini, hoping to avoid the early morning traffic. I’m not actually sure why . . . it’s barely 6:00 a.m., and I’m in no hurry to get to Her apartment. The city is beautiful now, the Near North Side still slumbering in its affluence, the coffee shops and charcuteries still shuttered tight. I’m watching Chicago awaken. A ghost with no real place to go. But I’m getting antsy, so enough of the ethereal shit. I drive to Her building, slanted and slightly crumbling, the kind of decay rich people pay good money for. I park the car and sit for a few minutes, studying Her window for any sign of life. The same curtains are starting to glow in the early morning sun. I’m suddenly nervous, my throat dry. I study myself in the rearview mirror, just a collection of lines around my mouth and dark circles beneath my eyes. I look like I slept in the backseat of a Toyota.

In a dreamlike daze, I drift across the street, take up position outside Her door. I don’t want to buzz up to Her place, for reasons I probably don’t want to admit to myself. Catching Her in the act and all of that. Delivery drivers unload boxes from their trucks, businessmen hustle to the El train. No one notices me. Her door swings open, but it’s just another guy in a suit and power tie. He eyes me suspiciously as he goes on his way, arrogantly slinging a backpack over his single-breasted jacket. Prick. Nothing happens for a long while, and I shift my weight from one foot to the other, my hands jabbed deep in my pockets. What am I doing here? Maybe this is a terrible mistake. Maybe I am going crazy again. Another motion at the door, but it’s just an old lady, stern and buttoned-up in her sadness. She looks like a principal or something.

An hour goes by, I think. People leave the building. None of them are Her. I stand there, sweating in my early morning mania. By now, everyone is awake at my parents’ house. They know that I’m missing, have probably called my cell, have heard it ringing upstairs in the bedroom. They are probably worried about me. I am thinking that maybe I should find a pay phone, should let them know that I’m alive and only slightly insane. But then, the door of the building swings open, and I turn and she walks right into me. Textbooks fall to the street. In slow motion Her eyes look up, meet mine. Her face goes blank. The smile exploded across those wonderful lips. She buries Herself in my chest, wraps Her arms around my shoulders. She’s shaking like a child, so small in my arms. It’s everything I could’ve imagined it would be. Actually, that’s a lie. It’s even more.

“You came for me” is all she says. It’s all she has to.

There are no apologies. No explanations. None are necessary, not now, probably not ever. The tears well up in Her big eyes. Somewhere deep inside me, something comes alive again. We go up to Her apartment, kissing on the stairwell. We go into Her bedroom. I go inside Her and stay there all day. The world spins along outside, the sun rises and sets, the streets go dark, the lights come on. The future is happening, but it can wait until tomorrow. Neither of us knows what will come next, or where we go from here, or even what anyone will say about us, but none of it matters. We’ve got each other right now.

Later that night, as she’s taking a shower, I call my parents from Her phone. It was largely anticlimactic. They weren’t even mad that I took my brother’s car. Turns out John Miller had told them where I was going that morning, over breakfast and coffee in the kitchen. I never told him my plans, but he probably knew them even before I did.





17



O happy, blustery Chicago days, the sky getting heavier, the leaves changing colors. O endless fall nights, the wind getting colder, the stars brighter. Everything is beautiful when you are mindlessly in love, when you ignore your fears and doubts and focus hard on the here and now. We are inseparable again, she and I, making the scene at the bars, walking the campus of Columbia arm in arm. There are doubters, those who shoot us disapproving glances from across tabletops and crowded rooms, but they all seem insignificant and far away. Her friends aren’t talking to Her anymore. The guys in the band just sort of nod in that knowing, weary way. None of them matter to us. I haven’t had a rational thought for weeks now, haven’t felt the need to worry. She does something to me, something no one else on the planet can do. She makes me normal, she makes me free.

We never even forgave one another for the past. It didn’t seem important. We just picked up right where we left off, before it all went bad and I lost my mind. I haven’t thought about the band in a long time, haven’t felt the promise of the open road course through my veins. Everything goes into Her. We talk about getting married, we think up names for our children (I want to call my son Martin, she prefers Oliver). We are perfect and in love and we are making everyone around us sick. At night, when I lie next to Her in bed, sometimes I worry that I am delusional, that perhaps I am rushing things. My heart may be in the driver’s seat at the moment, but my brain is still shouting directions from the back. Why? How? Really? But then she’ll stir, will turn into me to protect Her from whatever bad dream she’s having, and the doubting stops. I am a believer. I want to believe.

John Miller and I find an apartment in Bucktown, a slightly dingy place above a bar on Wabansia. When we had originally cooked up the idea of moving in together, we had envisioned our place as a sort of clubhouse/ rendezvous point, a launching pad for our great adventures; we had plans for wild nights spent carousing and conquering, for weekday mornings spent sprawled out on the couch, for gluttony and sloth and adultery and all sorts of lesser, decidedly venial sins. Instead, she is basically over every single night, cooking us dinners, watching movies, playing three-person power hours. John Miller doesn’t mind. He loves anyone who will make him a hot meal, and he especially loves someone who can handle their liquor. She can do both. They develop a rather amazing bond, like an overprotective brother and his kid sister, or one of those YouTube clips where a bear raises a kitten or something. One night, when we are all good and drunk, when nothing seems impossible and everything is unspeakably right, she is dancing in the middle of the living room to some old record, and he leans over and tells me, “I kin see why you love Her.” He is my best friend. She is my girl. Our lives are simple and insular and beautiful. I don’t even worry about how John Miller is going to pay his share of the rent. It doesn’t seem all that important right now.

Of course, it can’t last forever. Our manager is leaving me messages on my phone, “checking in” on me, ending each one with the promise (threat?) of “Talk to you soon.” I never return his calls, hoping he’ll just give up and go away. Instead, he starts calling more frequently, his voice getting increasingly nervous with each message he leaves. When we do finally speak, the conversation starts with broad, friendly generalities—How are you? and What have you been up to?—as if we’re just beginning a fight and he’s feeling me out. It switches gears when he asks how the other guys are (“I don’t know,” I tell him) or if I’ve been working on any new songs (“Not really,” I sigh). He’s getting frustrated now, telling me “the people at the label” are wondering if we’re thinking of getting back into the studio anytime soon. His voice now has a corporate passive-aggressiveness. When I tell him no, he’s silent.

After a few seconds he says, “Listen, I’m not going to try and force you guys to do something you don’t want to do. But I want you to be aware of—to be cognizant of—the, uh, the—I don’t want to say pressure—but the, uh, suggestions I’m getting from the label now. They want another record. They, uh, well, they believe the time is right, want to, uh, ‘strike while the iron is hot’ is what they’re saying, and, uh . . .”

I stop listening. I already know how this conversation is going to end. I can try to fight it, but there’s no point. They have the leverage, they have our signatures. My happiness is not in the best interest of their stockholders. We are commodities now, we are the down payment on some CEO’s waterfront property. We are making another album.



• • •



Against my objections, it is decided. Even though I don’t have a single thing written, we leave for LA in a week. We’ll just write the songs out there, the label seems to think (and our manager insists). What could possibly go wrong? I haven’t even thought about Ativan in a long time, but now, images of those little pills dance through my head. My brain will always get the best of my heart. Life sees to it.

The next week is morose. The skies over Chicago open up, as if someone up there is crying nickel-size tears. It rains for four days straight, and eventually even the sewers get sick of it, because they start spitting the water back out. Those who are more carefree have taken to the flooded streets and formed an armada. Her and I just stay in bed. There’s no point to doing much of anything. The city is permanently cast in a suspicious green light that’s not quite haunted, but definitely considering it.

The day of my departure draws closer, and now she and I are in my bedroom at the apartment, filling my suitcase with clothes for my journey to the West. I never even got the chance to unpack my stuff from when I moved out of my parents’ house, so I just move clothes from one container to another. Life is just a series of containers, and ultimately, you end up in one. I am tossing old socks and T-shirts into the case, and she is removing them, folding them into neat little packages, putting them back in the case in perfect stacks. I stop for a second and watch Her work, and it makes me smile. She is just like my mother, I think to myself.

I don’t want any of this to end; I don’t want to leave Her again because I am afraid of what will happen when I do. We are eternally being pulled apart. Eventually, it becomes impossible to put things back together again. We have to trust and believe in one another, have to have faith. But she promises me that she is okay with my going to Los Angeles, understands that this is just part of life. She swears she’s not worried about us. She is being brave. She has Her brave face on now—chin jutted out, lips pursed, eyes serious—as she’s folding my underwear. She notices me watching Her and smiles.

“What are you looking at?” she asks.

What am I looking at? My future wife? The mother of my children? The person I was put on this earth to find? Yes. But saying any of that seems silly when she’s folding my underwear.

“Nothing, just watching you,” I say, then, after a long pause, add, “Sometimes I wish I could be invisible so I could watch you do stuff like this all day long. Observing you in your natural habitat, like on a nature show.”

“You’re going to need a longer lens, then.” She laughs. She is being brave again.

“Hey . . . you know I don’t want to do this, right? You know I don’t want to leave you, and I wish you could come out there with me—”

“I’ll fly out.” Her eyes are looking down at a shirt she is folding. “I’ll be out as soon as finals are over. Only a couple of weeks.”

“I know, but . . . I don’t want to be apart from you. And I know it isn’t fair. So I want to promise you something. I promise that this is it for me. After we make this record, I’m done. And I’m not just saying that for you, it’s for me too. I love you and I want to be with you forever, and I don’t want anything to get in the way. So this is the last time I’ll leave you. Do you understand?”

“Of course I do. But don’t go making promises like that. I don’t want you to,” she says, trailing off slightly. “This is a chance for you, for the band, to fulfill your dreams. To go to LA and make a record in a big studio, to have someone else pay for it. This is what you’ve been working for. And I don’t want you to give it up because I know someday you’ll regret it. So don’t make any promises.”

“You know I’d give it up for you. You know I would. In a second.”

“I know.”

In that instant, the room feels massive, like we’re standing on opposite sides of a canyon, and suddenly I can feel the anxiety creeping up my legs, wrapping its tentacles around my bones. But then she walks across the void, Her little feet tiptoeing around the boxes, Her hips sashaying side to side, a sly smile on Her face. She pulls me toward her, tells me, “You’re sweet, you know that?” I crack a smile. Life will not tear us apart this time. Our hearts will see to it. We make love on the bed, with an audience of cardboard boxes watching intently. It is kind of sexy.





18



We’re inmates at the Oakwood apartment complex, which our label rep lovingly refers to as “the Cokewoods.” The sign on the gate is emblazoned with the three most gorgeous words, FULL RESORT AMENITIES, written in a looping, regal script. But that makes the place sound much nicer than it is. Oakwood is where movie studios and record labels house “talent” whenever they’re in Los Angeles working on a project. I believe the correct term for the place is “temporary furnished and serviced apartments,” or at least it says so in the brochure. But basically, it’s where child almost-stars and has-beens-in-the-making do tons of cocaine (hence the nickname) and then f*ck each other in the hot tubs. It’s a twenty-four-hour nightmare, fueled by those little white lines, full of silicone-injected blondes and men with bizarrely white teeth. And kids, C-list actors from Disney shows, most not a day over fifteen, wandering around with sadness in their eyes and white powder around their nostrils. Terrible house music is always playing by the pool. It’s brutal.

We spend every minute indoors, hiding from the zombies that prowl the place, and though we should probably be working on songs, we basically amuse ourselves by calling our rep—a nice girl named Jen-with-Two-N’s (that’s how she introduced herself when she picked us up at LAX, so we refer to her only as such)—and begging her to come and save us. She picks us up in an SUV, and we drive around Los Angeles, up to the top of Mulholland Drive, which probably looks a lot like the movie I never saw. The garages here are twice the size of most people’s houses. We get out of the car and marvel at the view, but Jen-with-Two-N’s says we can’t stay up here for long because homeless people hide in the bushes and wait for you. Imagine it: the richest homeless people in the world.

Up there at the top, you can see the smog hovering above the valley, as if it’s trapped in there and can’t get out. In the distance, the skyscrapers of downtown Los Angeles are barely visible through the yellowish haze. The suburban sprawl fans out in all directions, split-level houses clinging to the cliffs, block after block of apartment buildings, huddled together for safety. When I think about the California suburbs, it brings to mind the Mansons, not the Cleavers. Los Angeles is like hell only with more pretty people. You would think all the plastic would melt out here in the desert heat.

We tell Jen-with-Two-N’s that we want to see the water, so she begrudgingly takes us down to Santa Monica (a trip that, thanks to the traffic, takes roughly twenty-two hours), where we walk out to the end of the pier and watch the old men cast their reels into the Pacific. They stand there in silence, listening to ball games on the radio, buckets full of minnows between their feet, until one of them gets a tug on his rod, then in a sudden burst of excitement, in a whirlwind of yanking and frantic reeling and cursing in Spanish, the rod bending and threatening to break in two, the old men shout instructions, and everyone holds his breath until eventually the old man is victorious, and he pulls a huge fish out of the ocean, shiny and electric and wriggling, and a great cheer goes up along the pier, and the old man accepts congratulations from his fellow fishermen, and maybe takes a drink or two, and tourists snap photos of the wide-eyed, silvery fish while the pelicans watch with hungry eyes. Everyone wants a piece of the action.

We roll up our jeans and walk on the beach, while women in Lycra sports bras jog by, pushing their babies in three-wheeled sports strollers. Men do yoga in the sand. We look ridiculously out of place, with our pegged jeans and pale skin in the early evening sun, but nobody even looks in our direction. Everyone is lost in their own little world, which is kind of the way things are out here. Los Angeles is a great place to disappear because people don’t notice anyone but themselves. Jen-with-Two-N’s is standing up on the boardwalk, furiously typing away on her BlackBerry. You can tell she’s getting a little annoyed with us, probably because she has to go back to her boss with daily status updates, has to say stuff like “Today they all went to Santa Monica and watched old men fish.” Ledgers are shifted, and the stockholders are getting restless. I expect a phone call from our manager any day now.

The songs are coming along, albeit slowly. Martin and I are sharing a “temporary furnished apartment” at Oakwood, and we stay up late writing lyrics and melodies, while Sodom and Gomorrah rage on outside our windows. He and I have got close again since we’ve been here, mostly because we’re the two sorest thumbs of the lot. Neither of us wants to be here, trapped inside our earnestly appointed little cell, and both of us are missing someone back home in Chicago, so we’re penning joyous little numbers about that. He has always been a sweet, good-natured guy, with kind eyes and an infectious smile. He is bringing out the best in me, which is why I don’t mind writing with him. But there is also a more selfish reason: I see in him a way out because I believe he could carry this band forward when I leave. And I’m most definitely leaving, as soon as this record is done. He doesn’t know that yet—none of the guys do—but I figure now is probably not the best time to tell him.

When I’m not writing, I’m talking to Her. So far everything is okay, our lives remaining in sync despite the distance between us. John Miller helps out, as he’s sort of become Her unofficial guardian in my absence. He is a constant in both of our lives these days. It also helps that Her and I have developed a routine, one born out of my insomnia. I am always awake at 5:00 a.m., which is 7:00 a.m. back home in Chicago, so we do a video chat, me wide-eyed and sleep-deprived, spouting all kinds of nonsense, Her laughing tiredly and getting ready for school. Eventually, I fall asleep (usually around 6:00 a.m.), when she is in class. By the time I’m awake again, she’s back home, and we spend the next few hours sending texts to one another. Then, at around 11:00 p.m., she gets ready for bed, and we do another video chat. She brings the computer to bed with Her, and I talk to Her until she falls asleep. Some nights, she forgets to sign off, so I sit in Los Angeles and watch Her sleep in Chicago, grainy and barely visible in the dark, Her breathing mixing with the sounds of the city, in that bedroom I know so well. Eventually, our connection times out and she freezes on my computer screen, no more breathing or movement, so I swallow a few Ativans and go back to doing whatever distracts me from my loneliness . . . usually this means staring out the window at the action in the hot tubs, or maybe walking down to the vending machines for no particular reason, except that my brain is sort of humming and fuzzy and warm and it’s telling me I need to get some of that California air, to breathe it in and let it cool my system. So I stand outside in my hoodie, drinking a can of soda, my eyes swooshing around in a haze, over to the glimmering taillights on the Hollywood Freeway, across the night to the fences of Universal City, or down to the pitiful Los Angeles River. Behind me are the Hollywood Hills, all pocked and mysterious in the moonlight, and beyond that, the Forest Lawn cemetery, the final resting place of silver-screen stars. Famous ghosts in there. One night I got all freaked out because I thought I heard a coyote over in the bushes, and Jen-with-Two-N’s had told me that tons of them were up here, and that they kill people’s pets at night. I’m thinking of switching meds, for the record. Ativan isn’t doing it for me anymore. Or it’s doing it too well. I’m not sure. Anyway, eventually 5:00 a.m. rolls around again and we do another video chat, I watch Her leave for school, and the process starts all over again. I’d say we spend roughly half the day talking to each other, yet we say absolutely nothing of substance. I am strangely okay with this. We are both nervous. We both see the writing on the wall. We are both choosing to ignore it.

She never flies out to see me because Her mother conveniently gets sick just as finals are over. Her mother looks like a skeleton. She is always sighing and moaning about something, always struggling against someone. She is always the victim. She and I don’t like each other that much. When she goes back into the hospital, that means no visit to Los Angeles, which only further puts a strain on things. Now whenever we talk, she’s usually standing in the hallway of some Chicago hospital and I’m peering out my window at the suntanned silicone of LA. She is reading me pamphlets about Copaxone and Avonex, I am listening with an Ativan on my lips. There are long periods of silence. We are living in alternate universes. I suspect Her mother did this on purpose. She always hated me.

So, with nothing to do and no one to look after, John Miller decides to head West. I have the record label pay for his flight. First class. F*ck them. He lands at LAX and steps out into the smog and sunshine and feels a shudder run up his knotty Southern spine. His quest for adventure has taken him to the end of the continent, to the end of the world. He has reached his spiritual home, his Mecca. Here he will officially become the Disaster. He shows up at Oakwood with a canvas pack slung over his shoulder (a definite improvement over a Hefty bag), tells me he’s arranged to have “the gays from downstairs” watch the apartment while he’s gone. His return flight is booked for two weeks from now, but he’ll change that. His eyes are manic, filled with fire and heritage and a million bad intentions.

“Now,” he drawls, “why don’t you show me whut this town is all about?”

We spend the next week haunting the hipster bars in Silver Lake, the velvet-rope Hollywood spots with one-word names, the terrible Red Bull–and-vodka joints on Sunset. We pass out in the achingly minimal lobbies of hotels, DJs playing down-tempo-chill-out bullshit behind black-lacquered booths. We waste away poolside at the Roosevelt, we get invited to a bungalow party at the Chateau Marmont, where we watch the cast of some primetime make bad decisions. The Disaster swears some sitcom actress made a pass at him, but I didn’t see it. There are pills and powders and pot so strong it makes your head ring, black eyeliner and smeared lipstick. Half-smoked cigarettes slowly expiring in ashtrays. Blurry photographs of kissy-faced model/actresses. Bottles and black light. Endless nights and afterthought days. We have kidnapped Jen-with-Two-N’s, mostly because we need a designated driver, and she is eternally hammering away on her BlackBerry, though after a few days, her hope of rescue begins to diminish, and one night she gets so drunk I have to drive back to the Oakwoods. She and the Disaster made out in the hot tub while the living dead cheered them on. Everything is falling apart.

I still don’t belong here—I’m an outsider, a peripheral character—but some nights I feel I can see my future playing out in front of me, in the dark corners and the bathroom stalls, the sparkling cleavage of sad starlets, the orchids in the hotel lobbies that make everything smell like a funeral parlor. I stand at the valet line in the dusty, early morning light of Los Angeles, when Sunset Boulevard is bathed in a somber, shimmering red, like a well-trod trail of rubies leading to heaven, and I think to myself that one night I’ll follow that path off into the ether. The Great Ghost of Death is everywhere out here, in the Marilyn impersonators on the street corners, the stoic murals of James Dean, the stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. It reverberates off the hills, vibrates down into the valley, colors the yellow air that we breathe. It’s why the young and famous party with reckless, feckless abandon: they’re either trying to forget about dying or resigned that their death is inevitable. When I am drunk and spun out on Ativans, I fear that I too am destined to die in this town, out in these hills, with the ghosts of singing cowboys and Marlboro men and about a million rock-star corpses guiding me into the light, my body left to the coroners and the coyotes. Everything is coming undone.

I am thinking this as I sit in the bungalow at the Chateau, the party whirling around me, the Disaster crashing over furniture, careening down the hallway, terrifying everyone in his path. I am thinking about death—Belushi overdosed in one of these bungalows, someone had just told me—when she calls, and I answer with a roar because I can barely hear myself over the din of Young Hollywood’s demise.

Her voice is faint and distant on the other end because she’s whispering in the hospital hallway. “Hi, hello? It’s my mom, she—”

People are shouting, I can’t make out a word she’s saying. I tell Her to hold on as I climb over the arm of the sofa, snake my way down the hallway, force my way through a crowd of beautiful people at the door. I hear Her ask, “Where are you?” All I can say is “Hold on . . . sorry . . .” Finally I am outside by the pool, and I plug my ear with my finger and pour honey into the receiver, cooing, “Sorry, honey . . . sorry about that. How are you?”

I am beyond drunk. I do not realize how bad this could be.

“Where are you right now?” is all she says.

“Oh, I’m at a party . . . at the Chateau Marmont.” I’m still trying to pull off the babe-in-the-woods routine. “The place where all the celebrities stay. John and I got invited to a party here, and it’s—”

“You’re at a party?” she shoots back, probably scaring some orderlies.

“Yeah . . . I . . . is that okay?” I tremble, the blood slowly draining from me. Assorted fabulous folk, previously lounging poolside, sunglasses on in the middle of the night, now turn their attention to me, the ratty outsider slowly drowning in the deep end. I hadn’t noticed that I was still shouting. The gallery laughs condescendingly.

“What? I don’t care. Listen. My mom . . . it’s not good.” Her voice is flat like an out-of-tune piano, lifeless like a corpse on a slab. “The doctors say she hasn’t been responding to the medicine . . . the new medicine, the Copaxone . . .”

Silence. I am missing my cues.

“The Cofazone?” I shout again, earning more stares from the people around the pool. I am out of my mind.

“No, COH-PA-ZONE. It’s not working, and she’s starting to shake more and more now. So they say that, maybe they’ve run out of options. They say there’s not much else we can do now . . .”

Her voice cracks at the end of the sentence, trails off down the haunted hallway. I figure I am supposed to be compassionate now, even though I’m not certain it would be a bad thing if we were out of options, even though Her mother’s been out of options at least five times in the past and has inexplicably survived, even though I am a terrible person. So I say I’m sorry because that’s what people say in situations like this. I decide to whisper the words so maybe they’ll carry a bit more meaning, but she says nothing back. Maybe whispering was a bad choice due to the shitty cell-phone service out here. I clear my throat and repeat the apology more audibly. She says she heard me and then asks if I could come back to Chicago for the weekend, because she needs me there, because she is confident Her mom is going to die any second now. I tell Her I’ll see what I can do.

More silence. The heavy, awful kind. The worst kind.

“Okay. Well, I’m going to go back in with her,” she says, completely deflated, betrayed by the man she loves when she needed him the most. “Call me in the morning, okay?”

“I will. I love you.”

“I love you too.”

Then she hangs up. Everything is broken now. Everything is falling into the Pacific Ocean. I stand by the side of the pool for a minute, thinking about the ghost of John Belushi. The empty lounge chairs. The candles flitting in the breeze, lilting back and forth on the breath of the Great Ghost. Everyone has gone back to ignoring me now, returning their attention to hastening their inevitable demise. I am nothing to them once again. I am a ghost. One more Ativan goes down my throat. I go back to the bungalow, back to the clamor and the clatter and the cocaine. Back to the business of death. Girls are locking hips and lips. Guys are shouting and snorting. That prime-time actress is balanced on the arm of an Eames chair. She looks like an angel.





19



I fly back to Chicago for a week. Have a minor panic attack on the ride to LAX. Take three Ativans to settle myself down. This is becoming a daily occurrence. When I land at O’Hare, no one is there to greet me. I take a cab to my apartment, realize I don’t have my keys, make the driver take me to my parents’ house. My mom asks me if everything is okay. I tell her I don’t know and go to sleep in my old bed. I wake up a day later, my cell phone on the floor, the message light blinking violently. I go to Her apartment. Her bed isn’t made. Nothing is sadder than an unmade bed. We go see Her mother in the hospital. We hug awkwardly, and I can feel her shoulders twitching as I hold her. Spend the next few days wandering the hallways, poking my head into mysterious, darkened rooms, eating french fries in the cafeteria. I smoke cigarettes with Her outside the emergency room. We don’t talk about much. At night, I hold Her while she sleeps. We don’t have sex. Her mother doesn’t die. All in all, it was a bad trip.

As I am waiting for my return flight, I am suddenly and inexplicably overcome with terror. I shouldn’t be leaving. I should stay here where I am safe. The floor goes out from underneath me. My pupils become black holes. I am shaking and sweating, my stomach is tumbling. Tears are streaming down my face. I fumble for my phone, call Her to come save me. She tells me to calm down, that she will call me when she’s done talking to the doctors. My flight will be gone by then, and so will I. She tells me to take my medication and says she has to go. Silence on the other end. I was calling for a little compassion. I got none. I am aware of the irony of the situation.

I swallow a handful of Ativans—who’s counting anymore?—and crash out on the plane. I arrive back in Los Angeles, call the Disaster to see if anyone died while I was gone. He asks me if I’m all right. I tell him I don’t know and hang up. I call Her to say I made it to LA. Voice mail. When I get back to the Oakwoods, I close my blinds and crawl into bed. I pull the sheets over my head and try to imagine what it would be like to be dead. The air-conditioning kicks on. Outside, silicone and meat are stewing in the hot tub. I fall asleep flat on my back, my arms at my side, like a cadaver. I wake up a day later, when Martin starts pounding on my door. He comes into my room and sits in the corner, asking me if I feel okay, if I need a doctor. He doesn’t say it, but I can tell he’s worried that I’ve gone off the deep end. I don’t blame him. I’m worried too. I can’t even begin to explain what’s happening to me.

I am informed that some doctors in Los Angeles can get you anything you need, no questions asked. They will even come to your “temporary furnished and serviced apartments” if necessary. They are quick with the diagnosis and even quicker with the prescription pad. I figure now is as good a time as any for a consultation. The Disaster knows a guy who knows a guy, so I have him summon a doctor to my bedroom. A slick-talking guy, with a wide tie and a white smile. Tan. Pager on his belt. He looks like he just stepped off the set of a soap opera. Maybe he did. It doesn’t matter all that much. He listens to me talk for a while, then whips out the pad and gives me a script for Zoloft. The little, blue miracle workers. He doesn’t even ask if I’m taking any other medications, probably because he knows the answer already. Or he doesn’t care. If only Chicago had doctors like him. As he’s leaving, he gives me his pager number, tells me to call if I need anything. I am now officially taking meds for anxiety and depression. I am now officially under his care.



• • •



A week or so later—who’s counting anymore?—I am wandering the aisles of a bookstore in a haze, and during a momentary break in the clouds, I find myself staring at The Pill Book, “the illustrated guide to the most-prescribed drugs in the United States,” according to a blurb on the cover. I have always liked illustrations, so I buy it. Thousands of pills are listed inside, of every shape and size, potency, ability. They have fantastically foreign-sounding names, such as Abacavir and Norvasc and Zaroxolyn, that clog the tongue and bunch the lips. Betatrex and Cerebyx, Lorazepam and Mevacor, Questran and Rynatan. My old friend Ativan. My new nemesis Copaxone. Anoquan. Decadron. Guaifenex. Norethin. Roxicet. Warfarin. Names that recall distant galaxies hovering on the rim of space. Placid resort towns in Arizona. Snow-dotted villages in New England. Sterile stops on the sterling-silver superhighway of tomorrow. Misty, quartz-powered home worlds of superheroes. Letters seemingly chosen at random to make words—new words, a new language, a new world. Alphabet soup. Flurries. Each of them is a unique, little snowflake. Each of them is beautiful.

I hide the book under my mattress, like it was an old copy of Playboy and my parents were in the next room. I lock the door to my bedroom and read it at night. My pulse quickens with each page I turn. My eyeballs flutter in the dim light of my Oakwoods apartment. I hope my mom doesn’t walk in on me. Snorted, swallowed, or shot into my stomach, every pill represents a new opportunity, a new neuron-frying, serotonin-searing adventure for me to embark on. There are dosage guides and lists of possible side effects. Food interactions. Generic equivalents for the penny-pinchers. Overdose warnings too, but I usually ignore them. It’s a step-by-step guide to self-medicating, sort of like The Anarchist Cookbook for manic depressives. I am no longer aware of how many different pills I am taking, but I find myself paging the Soap Opera Doctor at least once a day. He doesn’t seem to mind. He’s seen hundreds of guys just like me, nobodies from the middle of nowhere who show up in his town and promptly fall apart. I’m just following the script, having my first meltdown. Call me a cliché. I probably won’t even notice. My eyelids are always heavy. Things are easier this way. No talking, no feeling, no pain. Just a handful of prescriptions and the occasional suspicious look from the pharmacist. Days blur into nights. Dull, warm sunsets become hazy, fuzzy sunrises. Los Angeles begins to disappear into a pharmaceutical haze. And I go with it. Sometimes, I even admit that I’m sort of enjoying all this. This is what I am supposed to be doing, after all.

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 f*ck 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.