Gray

Chapter 20

Big things are happening. We are finishing the record. We are mastering and mixing and multi- tracking, seated behind great boards, nodding our heads to the beat, using words such as tone and pitch and low end as if we were industry pros. The guys at the studio humor our requests. It's sort of funny.

 We are due to leave Los Angeles in a few weeks, scheduled to fly to New York to play the record for the folks at the label, to have meetings and do press and assuage stockholders. A tour is being planned. It is all very professional. The idea of boarding an airplane and traveling across the United States terrifies me. All those mountains and lakes and cities, all those places in which to crash. I'm not sure where I picked up this fear of flying, but it's real and not going away. I'm not sure how I'll manage, but I'm trying to take things one day at a time. The shrink told me that. I'm meeting with him regularly now, and while I won't bore you with the details, he seems like a genuinely good guy. He tells me amazing stories about the guys in Mötley Crüe going on drug binges and buying automatic weapons and barricading themselves in hotel rooms. He has seen it all. He is trying to get me to meditate with him, and we take drives down to secluded beaches, sit on mats, and watch the pelicans swoop up and down the coastline. And, yes, he does, in fact, have a dangly earring. 

I haven't paged the Soap Opera Doctor in a few weeks. That doesn't necessarily mean that I'm cutting out all the pills, but, rather, that I'm refusing to refill my prescriptions. I say good-bye to the tandospirones that you can only get in China, and the buspirones and the eptapirones that made my head whirl. I watch as the Zolofts and Ativans and Klonopins slowly dwindle away, and when they finally disappear, all I'm left with is some Tylenol PMs. Enough of them will do in a pinch. Everyone is a little less worried about me. The Death Watch is officially over. No one is afraid to wake me up in the mornings anymore. 

This is all happening when she decides to leave me. We had a fight after I told Her that things were going well with the band, that I was excited again and that I hadn't thought about quitting in a few weeks. I told Her that I was considering staying in Los Angeles and thought she should move out here to be with me. After all, I joked, it's closer to Berkeley than the North Side of Chicago. She didn't laugh. This was apparently the final straw. The next day, she is on the phone to me, saying she knew this day was coming, and that she couldn't sit by and watch me kill my- self. She said we had been stuck in place and she owed it to Herself to move on. I didn't neces- sarily disagree with Her. I can tell she has found someone else, probably some boring dude in one of Her study groups or something. Someone who wants to wear sweaters and drink expen- sive coffee and live around the corner from the food co-op. Someone who is into Freud and the unconscious self. Someone who is not me. 

She only cries a little bit as she's telling me this, and only retches once, the phone clinking against Her teeth, Her tears echoing off the bathroom tile. It is a fairly low-key affair. She doesn't even wait for me to object, probably because she knows I won't. We are both too tired for grand gestures, both too weary to go on fighting. A year ago, I would've hopped on a plane and showed up at Her place with dynamite strapped to my chest and a list of demands in my hand. I would've begged for us to go back to the way we were—or else. Fuck hostage negotiating; I would've been romance's last terrorist. Love's last chance. Now, I can't even be bothered to whip up some fake tears. No one needs to die for this. We've grown up and grown apart. We haven't slept in the same bed in months now, not since I went back to Chicago, and she hasn't made any attempts to come out to LA, even now that Her mother is stable again (as I knew she would be). Love has long since left the building. It's not coming back. As we're saying good-bye, I wish Her good luck with the new guy, and just as she asks, "What does that mean?"—I hang up on Her. She doesn't call back. I don't blame Her. 

That night, I don't stay up waiting for the phone to vibrate, as I've done after every single fight we've ever had. I don't call any of my friends in Chicago and tell them to keep an eye on Her, just in case she does anything stupid. I don't stare at myself in the mirror and think about cutting my wrists, about expressing my love for Her with some childish final act. I just accept what has hap- pened as part of life; an inevitable step on the path to wherever; "rungs on a ladder," as my dad always said. She's gone. Good-bye. And all of that would be great if any of it were true. What I actually do is sit on the edge of my bed and stare at my alarm clock and realize that this is never going to work out, that she will never be with me as long as I am with the band, and that I can never have everything because life is unfair and God has it in for me. I will always be alone and unloved, no matter how many kids buy our albums or shout my name. I start to feel like I'm going to vomit, but I stop myself because it would've got all over the carpet and we probably wouldn't get our deposit back. I pull my knees to my chin, rock back and forth in an attempt to settle my stomach, and as I'm curled up, I realize that I'm nothing more than a frightened child, a scared little boy with tough-guy tattoos and a hollow snarl, and that no matter how much I like to think of myself as a die-hard romantic, I'd never have the guts to actually die for love. Sure, I'd flirted with the notion, had got some illicit thrills out of the Soap Opera Doc and his prescription pad, but I'd never dreamed of going all the way. And that made me a phony, a liar. A coward. So right then and there, I decide to make a life change: I am going to die. I am practical about it. My shrink would be proud. I gather up every last pill in my possession—a fistful of blues and or- anges and pale yellows—and swallow them all, lock myself in the bathroom, and break the mir- ror with my fist. I cut my knuckles up pretty good and blood trickles down my arm in bright red ribbons. It's full of oxygen and oozing and steaming hot. I begin to worry that all the pills I've been taking aren't letting the blood clot, so I freak out even more. My head is churning and there's a whole lot of blood now, so I crawl into the shower and start crying. White flashbulbs are going off in my eyes, and when I rub them, I get blood on my face. I turn on the water and sit there, getting soaked, watching the blood wash away from my knuckles, staining my clothes. Martin knocks on the door, asking me what's wrong. When I don't answer him, his voice gets louder, and he says my name, telling me to let him in, but I just put my head in my hands and feel the water run down the back of my shirt. I don't know how much time goes by—five min- utes? An hour?—but then security comes and takes the door off its hinges, and a big, burly guy in a blue suit turns off the water and puts a towel around me while Martin and the rest of the guys stand in the living room. I sit on the corner of my bed, watching water pool around my sneakers while an EMT wraps my hand in gauze and shines one of those pocket flashlights in my eyes. He asks me what I've taken and I tell him I don't know, and his partner knocks around the pill bottles by my computer. I laugh because while my body is shivering, my head is so, so hot, and I ask the EMT if steam is coming out of my ears. He doesn't laugh and just goes "Uh- huhhhh" and calls me "sir" and asks me again what I've taken. The other guy is in the back- ground holding up empty orange bottles, asking me if I took all of these, sir, did I take all of these, and I smile and lie and say, "Noooo." Both EMTs go back out into the hallway and talk to the guys, then come back into my bedroom and tell me I'm borderline and they think I should go down to the ER and have my stomach pumped, but since I'm borderline, they're leaving the deci- sion up to me, and I tell them I'm fine and they respectfully disagree, tell me I should go with them, but I refuse again. They tell me that whatever I do, don't fall asleep, and as they're packing up their stuff, they tell the guys the same thing—whatever you do, don't let him fall asleep. They leave and the guys take turns watching me sit in a chair. Occasionally I go into the bathroom and throw up, and pink puddles are on the floor, my blood mixed in with the water, and one of the guys stands in the doorway and watches as I stick my head in the toilet. By noon, I feel better, and everyone decides it's probably okay for me to go to sleep, so I crawl into bed and sleep with my right arm elevated, since I'm still worried about the blood not clotting. When I wake up, I look at my damp clothes balled up in the corner and decide that I had probably overreacted. It was nice of the EMTs to come out though.