Gray - By Pete Wentz Page 0,35

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 fucking 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