Gray - By Pete Wentz Page 0,3

he’s got his skinny jeans tucked into a pair of cowboy boots. They’re made of rattlesnakes. Of course they are. He looks at me for approval, and I crack a smile. I pull on jeans and a hoodie—my uniform—and we make our way to the front of the bus. Out into the spotlight. Showtime.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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