Gray - By Pete Wentz Page 0,41
Northwestern, all sandstone monuments to higher learning, through Centennial Park, with Lake Michigan in the distance, inky black and refracting the moon into a million shards that dance on its choppy waves. There are lights even farther off, ships maybe, blinking red and white. I wonder if she’s awake right now? I wonder if I should try to call Her from a pay phone?
Sheridan presses on, past Kedzie, which isn’t the Kedzie where the philosopher and I brawled, but close enough, cuts around the cemetery, so big and full of ghosts right now, dives through the campus of Loyola, red bricks and Jesuit priests, and finally tosses me into the mouth of Lake Shore, that great road hugging the banks of the lake, the site of many an existential episode. Cars are on the opposite side of the road now, and their headlights make me jump. For a while there, I had sort of forgotten about the possibilities of other people because my pulse was hopping and I was thinking of Her and reveling in the solitude of the night. I wonder where these other people are going, and who’s waiting for them when they get there? Maybe no one. I think of John Miller and his garbage bag full of clothes and heart full of crisis. I think of his dead son. I press on and Lake Shore unwinds in front of me, the great lights and buildings of Chicago appearing through the passenger window of the car.
I turn off at Roscoe, cross over Broadway, and suddenly I am parking the car on Clark. Up ahead, the lights of the diner shine forlornly onto the empty streets. I’m drawn to them like a moth. It seems like I always end up here, in this diner, in this booth, and it’s always night. I haven’t been back downtown since the night of our record-release party, when I got drunk and went home with that girl who shouted all those Oh, Gods and wrote Bastard on my hand. I wonder if anyone ever told Her about that. I wonder if she cared. The diner is practically vacant right now, at what I’m guessing is around 5:00 or 6:00 a.m. (I don’t own a watch). A few loners seated at the counter. A cute lesbian couple cuddled together by the window. A cook with tattoos on his forearms. A waitress who looks like a purple-haired librarian. Me. The lights make it feel yellow in here, the way all-night diners always feel when they’re empty and the morning skies are still dark. Or maybe that’s just me; my eyes never adjust to the light.
I order a coffee from the librarian. Ask her what time it is. She tells me it’s four forty-five. Fuck. We used to kill hours here, splitting coffees, cracking jokes. We had no place to go, and we were in no hurry to get there. Things are different now. I’m older and impatient. It’s because of the road, of the lost hours spent wandering the streets of strange cities after sound check, or slumped in a chair backstage, killing time before the show, listening to the kids shout on the other side of the wall. There are only two constants on the road: waiting around, and the knowledge that you’ll be doing it again tomorrow, only in a different city. It kills you eventually. Now, I hate waiting for anything. But at this moment, I’ve got no other choice.
I drink my coffee slowly. Stare at the lesbians in the window. Occasionally, they notice, and I avert my eyes, pretend I’m studying the menu intently. My brain is still trying to convince me that I don’t love Her, replaying a million conversations about Freud and the unconscious self, conversations I entertained only out of politeness but never made an attempt to comprehend. My brain shows me highlights of our greatest hits, the fights, the tears, the doubts. It unspools footage from the future, of our place in Berkeley, of the two bookish kids we will raise, of the co-op market on the corner. I am fat and unhappy, prone to gazing out the window, thinking about what could have been. I have glasses and am wearing a sweater. Have gone soft. It is boho-intellectual-postmodern-think-globally-act-locally-organic-produce-petition-signing-expensive-coffee-drinking hell. I shudder a bit. Call the librarian over and order breakfast.
Someone once told me that digging up the past has two sides: The pro is that you remember things you had forgotten about. Unfortunately, the con