Gray - By Pete Wentz Page 0,34
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 fuck 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