Gray (17 page)

The Oakwood management, apparently concerned over the previous night’s events, have called the record label and demanded I move out. They also put an official-looking letter on my front door—typed and on letterhead and everything—that mentions such stuff like property damage and “inherited risk.” I think they’re overreacting, and I go tell the property manager that if he really wants to clean up this place, he should start with
the hot tubs, but he won’t be swayed and I am shipped off to a hotel. The guys help me move, and our manager flies out to room with me. I can tell they are all annoyed with me, but they’re masking it with serious talk and “general concern.” Apparently, my little incident has morphed into “a cry for help,” so now there’s talk of my taking a little break from everything, since I’m clearly cracking up. I tell our manager that I’m fine, and I was just trying to get the blood off my hands, but he doesn’t say anything, just nods. I am suddenly seeing the shrink with the dangly earring daily. He’s gone serious on me now too. No more stories about Mötley Crèe and their AK-47s. He says I could’ve died from all the pills I took and that he can’t believe the EMTs didn’t take me to the psych ward for a seventy-two-hour hold. He tells me this is “very real” and that everyone just wants me to “get healthy.” I shoot back that if people are really worried about my health, they should get me a gym membership. He actually laughs a little bit when I say it. He’s okay in my book. People watch my every move, ask me how I’m feeling. I am under twenty-four-hour supervision. Jen-with-Two-
N
’s is hugging me every time she sees me. Things are getting ridiculous.

All of this happens just before we are to leave for New York. Timing has never been my strong suit. We have a meeting to determine whether I’m okay to fly, and I lie on the couch and tell the guys I’m ready to go. They say I don’t have to, that they can handle it, and that I should stay here and relax, but I won’t listen. My hand is healing—the cuts are just tiny pink crosses on my knuckles now—and my head is actually feeling pretty clear, and I
figure it’s time to meet the shareholders. They’re the ones who paid for this ridiculous trip, after all. I probably owe them an apology.

•   •   •

I believe I am fine until the night before we leave, when I find myself staring at my bags and googling stuff like
world’s safest airlines
. We are not flying on any of them. I can feel panic starting to creep in, like ice water in my toes, so I take a couple of Tylenol PMs (the shrink said they were okay) and try to sleep. All night my bags sit by the door in an ominous black heap. At one point I swear I saw them move. Then it’s morning and we’re loaded into an SUV and sent on our way, and I pull my hood over my eyes and try to relax, try not to think about plummeting into the Rocky Mountains, but it’s not working. I’m trying my best not to let the guys know, but I start shaking as we’re going through security, and I can’t take my boots off on my own. Martin helps, unknots my laces and places my boots on the conveyor belt. He tells me it’s going to be all right. I don’t understand why this is happening to me. I am embarrassed to be seen like this by my friends. I never wanted to be the anchor, I never wanted to pull us down. It seems that’s all I’m doing these days.

As we sit on the runway, I can feel my pulse quickening. I’m having a hard time catching my breath, and tears are in my eyes. I wipe them away with my sleeve and try to focus hard on the in-flight magazine in my lap. I play with the tray table. I pray to God, even though I can’t remember the last time He helped me out. I try to get
my life in order, just in case this plane doesn’t make it to New York. It’s funny how fears hide inside other fears. The fear of airplanes hiding inside the fear of heights hiding inside the fear of highways hiding inside the fear of cars hiding inside the fear of elevators hiding inside the fear of leaving my room hiding inside the fear of living. Fear tries to own me. In the past, I had paid it rent by downing twenty milligrams of Valium and a Xanax and sleeping through flights, but now all I’ve got on me are some of the PMs, and they’re not going to do the trick. A tranquilizer couldn’t slow my heart right now.

I try to calm myself by thinking logically. I have read about calculated fears and irrational fears. The fear of flying is irrational. The odds of a fatal plane crash are something like nine in twenty-one million. It’s like gambling, only you want the house to keep winning. Only nine in twenty-one million flights crash, but every single person who got on any one of those nine planes was thinking about a statistic just like that. Somewhere out there, someone pulls the lever on a slot machine and wins $30,000 on the first try. Somewhere out there, someone gets on a plane for the first time in his or her life and it crashes into the Atlantic Ocean.

Fear owns me because I let it. Because I obsess over it, name it, raise it, and nurture it to become perfect. It is one of the few things in my life that I can control. “It’s just on this side of crazy,” they say, but I’m not sure what side they’re yelling that from. “You’re losing it,” they say, but I know I am, so technically speaking, I’m pretty sure I’m “giving it away,” not “losing it.” I decide before we take
off that I need to hear Her voice, not because I miss Her but because I feel the need to get my life in order just in case the plane goes down. I call Her up and the phone just rings and rings, so I hang up and call again. This time she answers, but she’s not in the mood to nurture my fears, to massage my neurosis, or to agree that God won’t let this plane go down because there are kids on it. I don’t really blame Her.

“You’re losing it,” she sighs.

“Whose side are you on?” I whine.

“There aren’t sides. This isn’t high school.”

“There is me, and then there’s everyone else,” I shout into the phone. “Now pick!”

Sometimes when I am leaving, arguing with someone takes the place of saying a formal good-bye. Everyone on the plane is staring at me now. Kids have turned all the way around in their seats to look at the crazy man screaming into his cell phone. Their parents grab them and spin them forward again, as if I might infect them or something. The flight attendants are giving me concerned glances. I don’t let any of that stop me. My life has veered off course. Has crashed into the mountain. I have become one of those people you see on daytime TV, the ones who shout obscenities at their exes and throw chairs around the studio. The ones who have Maury Povich do paternity tests for them. I am at the bottom. But still, I can go lower. I call Her a bitch and tell Her she has ruined me. I don’t mention my incident from the other night, or the EMTs, but she gets the drift. The silence on the other end of the phone tells me she is searching for
something to say to me. Something punishing. Something unforgivable.

“I hope your plane crashes,” she spits.

Somewhere deep down, so do I, but I’m not lucky enough to be struck by lightning or to win the lottery. I’m not nine-in-twenty-one-million lucky. I hang up on Her just as the flight attendant tells me to turn off my phone, and after a perfunctory safety demonstration (as if any of it is going to help), we are roaring down the runway, picking up speed, rattling and straining and leaving the earth behind us. I am suddenly not afraid of dying anymore. I think it’d be a relief. And besides, no one would miss me if I were gone. I’ve burned all the bridges, collapsed all the walls.

Every time the plane bumps, I think of Her.

I
t’s
later. New York City on a February morning, in a winter that just won’t quit. A hotel near Times Square, a wind that tears through the city streets, a cold that grips you and won’t let go. Businessmen in trench coats, collars turned up, hustling to work. Neon signs just waking up. Or just going to sleep. Steam billowing up from somewhere down below, rank and heavy, the way you see in old movies. Coffee from a cart, in a paper cup, sugar congealed on the bottom. Me in a dream, taking it all in, skin blue, smoke pouring from my lips, hands dug in my pockets. My coat is somewhere in Chicago. My apartment, long vacant, probably burned to the ground. My life just as empty, and quite possibly as charred, the smoldering remnants put out on the street. Alone. Low. Months since I’ve shared a bed with another warm body, since I’ve put my hand on soft skin. An ad on a bus for laundry detergent, a smiling woman in a white robe, an angel here to rescue me. She disappears around a corner in a cloud of exhaust. Typical.

•   •   •

The guys are meeting the shareholders without me. They are playing them the record they made in spite of me. It’s probably better that way. I am barely in the equation; I am a remainder at best. Maybe a decimal point. I have nothing to do, no place to be, and I can’t bear to sit in my hotel room any longer, so I’m just wandering around the city, up and down the streets, with no coat on. It’s almost as if I were on vacation, except I don’t want to be here. I walk down to the water, stare at the old aircraft carrier rusting by the pier. It’s called
Intrepid
. It is a floating metaphor. They’ve turned it into a museum, and tourists stop and take pictures. You can buy souvenirs up on the flight deck. New Jersey squats in the background, tiny rows of condominiums crowding the shoreline. The smokestacks of a factory. The darkness on the edge of town. Somewhere out there, Bruce Springsteen is waking up and having breakfast with his wife. Thinking of the Boss in his bathrobe makes me sad. The wind whips off the water, so I turn and walk off in the direction of nothing in particular. Eat breakfast at a diner even though I’m not hungry. Take a cab ride up and down the avenues, even though I’ve got nowhere to go. The driver looks at me in the rearview with his wild African eyes. I tell him anywhere is fine, and he dumps me on some corner on Eleventh Avenue, down by the Lincoln Tunnel. The air is thick with the smell of gasoline and the sound of mufflers. Huge buses hiss and downshift, full of passengers escaping the island. I can see the rear of the
Intrepid
off in the distance . . . I drove around for twenty minutes and only traveled ten blocks.

It’s only around 10:00 a.m.; the meeting probably hasn’t yet begun. I picture the guys sitting in some expansive lobby, being asked if they would like anything to drink. The Animal will say yes, because he always says yes. Martin will say no because he is polite. I laugh to myself and dig my hands even deeper in my pockets, start to walk back across the city, through the dingy parts of Ninth Avenue, with its old butcher shops and even older Italian restaurants, smoke-filled bars already open for business, bums hunched over in doorways, like another world, another time. Past the Port Authority Terminal, dank and smelling of urine, terrified kids from Indiana clutching their suitcases and looking up, always up, at the towering skyscrapers, some guy in a leather jacket trying to steal one of their wallets, everyone smoking. Beneath the shadow of the New York Times Building, white and regal and ramping up toward heaven. Back through Times Square, the tourists now posing for pictures with cops on horseback, the Ferris wheel in the Toys “R” Us lit up and slowly turning, laden with children. I’m nearly hit by a cab as I’m crossing Broadway, the driver throwing his hands in the air, me pounding the hood with my palms for added effect. Down to Bryant Park, old black men playing chess even in the cold, the grass slightly frosted even as the sun begins to poke through the February sky. Around to the front of the New York Public Library, those famous steps dotted with people, those famous stone lions sentinel and stoic, proud and vigilant. Even the pigeons won’t go near them. Then over to Grand Central Terminal, cavernous and bustling, people pulling
suitcases in every direction, children crying, voices and heels echoing around the space, off the marble floor, up to the constellations on the ceiling. The four-sided clock in the center of the room. The massive display board above the ticket booths, listing destinations (Katonah, New Canaan, Mount Kisco). Train tracks at the end of mysterious, gilded corridors, a temple full of secret passageways, and I follow one of them down below, see the trains snort and kick and whinny on the tracks, yearning to break free and
go,
and for a minute I think of getting on one—any one, it doesn’t matter which—and heading north, but instead I just watch them fill with businessmen and women and babies, then shudder and depart, reminding me that there are other places in this world I could be, other places that are not here.

I look down at my watch and realize I’ve only killed about ninety minutes, and that the meeting is probably still going on, and that I cannot think of anywhere else to go, or anything else to do, and it sounds stupid, but in that instant it becomes clear to me that I am not in control of my own life, that none of us are, that the very
notion
of control is ridiculous. A man in a suit boards a train bound for White Plains, makes sure he catches the 7:05 so he will be sufficiently early for his appointment, and as the train departs from Grand Central, he is sitting in his seat reading his newspaper, feeling self-assured and calm, and everything is fine until that train hits a snag on the tracks—a broken joint in the rails, a loose bolt, who knows?—and derails, and he is thrown from his seat and killed instantly, dies with the same, smug look
on his face. It was beyond his control. Something like this happens every day. Every minute. A train crashes. An airplane plummets to earth. John Miller’s baby son dies. A land mine, an earthquake, a calamity. Life is merely a numbers game, a series of odds, and eventually we all lose. To think otherwise is foolish. But if we didn’t, why would anyone ever bother getting out of bed in the morning?

Yet, I have spent the first twenty-five years of my life believing the exact opposite . . . that I was in control of my destiny, that fate is a myth, that there is no great book in the sky with my expiration date already written in it. I have fought and gouged and grabbed for control, have pushed everyone and everything aside to possess it. When I thought I had it, I vowed to never let it go, gritted my teeth and held on tightly, snapped at anyone who came close. That’s how I lost Her. How I became an afterthought. There is no such thing as control. It’s a red herring, a MacGuffin. It keeps us going, gives us false hope. Life is cruel and unfair and nothing more than a series of cosmic coincidences. We are powerless to stop it.