Afraid of the Dark

For years now, I've carried a lighter with me in my backpocket at all times. I'm not a smoker and I'm not a pyromaniac. I'm just afraid of the dark.

I've slept with at least one nightlight on every single night since I was eight years old. At first, I had a bunch of nightlights--at least ten or fifteen--all plugged into a long extension outlet in a row, lighting up my room with tiny glowing orbs in pale shades of yellow and pink and white. As I got older, the nightlights burnt out, and I stopped replacing them until I could eventually get by with only one or two. But I've never been able to get rid of all the lights entirely.

I was never afraid of the dark until Dad left, and soon after that I became passionately obsessed with astronomy--stars in particular. Mom saw her opening and bought me a set of glow-in-the-dark stars to glue to the ceiling of my room. We spent a whole afternoon in there together, arranging the little plastic stars into the dreamy constellations of distant galaxies.

Some nights, if Mom wasn't working third shift, she'd come home and fix dinner and then the two of us would lay on a blanket in the grass in the backyard and just watch the night sky, and I would fall asleep tracing shapes into the sprawling spray of endless stars above me. The stars went on forever. That was what I liked about them.

There was no second-guessing about the stars. They had been burning for centuries, and they would keep on burning, always--never faltering, never dying out. Or, at least, that was what we learned in the first grade. I was in love with the stars from then on.

My favorite star of all was Polaris, the North Star. All the others were seasonal. Sometimes they shined in one corner of the sky, sometimes in another. They would disappear entirely for months, though of course you could always count on their eventual return.

Polaris never left. It never moved. It stayed right there in that one spot in the sky, always, no matter what. You never had to wonder if the North Star would be there when the horizon turned dark and night came again; you never had to search for it in unexpected places. It was steady and unwavering, faithful and true. You could count on Polaris.

It would even guide you home if you ever lost your way in the dark.

But just in case I'm ever stuck somewhere without a clear view of the sky, I always have the lighter in my backpocket. I had the lighter with me that first day in mid-December, and in the lonely darkness of Business Class seating, I dug it out of my pocket to stroke the smooth plastic lovingly.

I had been worried that the airport security would confiscate the lighter from me at some point, but they never did. It was five o'clock in the morning and everyone else on the O'Hare to New York flight with me was fast asleep in their seats, some with blankets thrown over themselves or iPod earburds shoved in their ears. The interior of the plane was almost completely dark, save for the scarce light emitted by the in-flight movie (which no one was watching) and the various lit-up buttons everywhere, and I was beginning to feel the old familiar fear creep up on me again.

Glancing around to make sure there were no flight attendants near, I flicked at the trigger of the lighter until a small golden flame wavered into being. Entranced by its inviting glow, I watched the flame dance and sway unsteadily for a while. I didn't particularly like fire, but it chased away the darkness, and that was enough to make it a friend of mine.

As I stared down at the tiny light cupped between my hands, I remembered the stars on my ceiling and my many nightlights and smiled a little to myself. All of that seemed so long ago, so far away from me now. I had been just a little girl back then, innocent and blithely naive, stumbling through everyday life without the slightest clue of what was in store for me later on down the road.

Of course, even then, at twenty-four, I was still more naive than I knew. In my mind, I was some big-time, hot shot journalist; I had no idea that in just a few hours I would meet the man who would make me question the very core of my existence, igniting the breakdown of the few things I thought I knew for sure.

But at the time, I knew nothing. I just stared down that flame in the disquieting darkness, blissfully unaware of my fate as my thoughts strayed and I wondered if I could see Polaris from such great heights. I craned my neck and stared out the foggy airplane windows at the waking world below, but there was no North Star to be found--only the pale tendrils of newborn dawn on the horizon, emerging gradually from the last remains of the dark night. The beginning.

-----

When the plane finally touched down, it was six in the morning in New York City and the sun was already rising. Wide awake with the sense of adventure that always comes with a new project, I walked by the hoards of irritable travelers with a smile on my face. I frequented airports enough to know all the major ones by heart, so it only took me a few minutes to find my way to baggage claim.

I circled around the wide loop of the conveyor belt until I found a gap in the crowd of people waiting to retrieve their luggage. Dropping my huge carry-on bag and briefcase to the floor at my feet, I folded my arms across my chest and craned my neck to scan the moving rows of luggage for the rest of my bags.

I thought I saw my suitcase, but just as I caught a glimpse of the damn thing, some big ogre of a college kid with a goatee leaned forward to grab his guitar case off of the conveyor belt, blocking my view. Who sends a guitar through baggage claim, where it will most likely be mangled and manhandled, instead of taking it on the plane as a carry-on item, anyway? Idiot.

Then again, I once attempted to bring a guitar on a plane with me, and the security personnel were convinced that I was smuggling cocaine or handguns or something else dangerous and/or illegal inside of it. They made me take it out of the case so they could look inside of it. I told them there was nothing in there, and they couldn't see anything either, but they insisted on taking the strings off to check. The result: I had to run to avoid missing my flight, my favorite guitar string-less and banging against my shins the whole way to the airport terminal.

If I've learned anything since I've been working for the magazine, it's that flying is going to be a pain in the ass no matter what you do or don't do. It's probably the worst part of my job--besides, you know, having to laugh at John Mayer's stupid jokes in order to write the article that will pay next month's bills. That part kind of sucks, too.

As the college kid collected the last of his bags from the conveyor belt, he leaned back just in time for me to see my suitcase moving towards me, nestled in alongside a gigantic duffel bag and a child-sized suitcase with Hannah Montana's face emblazoned across the front of it. Shoving Miley Cyrus' bucked teeth out of the way, I hoisted my suitcase off of the conveyor belt and set it on its wheels. With my briefcase in one hand and my rolling suitcase in the other, my carry-on bag slung over my shoulder, I dragged myself and my luggage past all the tourists and businessmen and out into the soft light of early morning in the city.

All this airport business was so familiar to me by now that it had become routine, so as I stepped out onto the sidewalk and let go of my suitcase long enough to hail a cab, I was just going through the motions. While my body was busy loading my bags into the backseat of the first cab that stopped, my mind was elsewhere. Absentmindedly, I read the address of the hotel the magazine had booked for me off of a scrap of paper I had tucked away in my pocket, and the driver nodded once in understanding before merging into the heavy flow of traffic.

I stared out the window as LaGuardia Airport gradually disappeared behind us, Queens fading away along with it as we headed towards Manhattan. The blurred shapes of people, buildings, and other cars moved past us in one long stream of sound and motion. New York City rose up around us, alive and thriving in all its sprawling glory.

But I wasn't thinking about the city, even as I watched it speed by through the dirty cab window. I was thinking about all the people I had met and interviewed and written about--Madonna and the Silversun Pickups, Vampire Weekend and Shia LeBeouf, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and, yes, John Mayer--and all the things they had said, or hadn't said. Sometimes the words we don't say are the loudest of all.

And I was thinking about Fall Out Boy. I was thinking about meeting them, interviewing them, writing about them...about the things they might say. Or might not say.

I really had no idea what to expect from them at all. I was never a Fall Out Boy fan and whenever I happened to buy an issue of People magazine (which wasn't often; needless to say, my boss discouraged patronizing even the least threatening of our competitors), I didn't bother reading the captions under the pictures of Pete Wentz and Ashlee Simpson(-Wentz) hanging all over each other at the glitzy Hollywood party of the week. When Wentz gushed about his wife and son on Entertainment Tonight or shamelessly promoted his own clothing line on TRL, I changed the channel.

I heard things, of course. All my friends made their opinions on Fall Out Boy quite clear ("Jesus Christ, no wonder music sucks these days"), as did my colleagues. I can't think of a single one of my fellow writers at the magazine who so much as approved of Fall Out Boy; on the contrary, most of them seemed to take great joy in flaming the band whenever they got the chance to, no matter how irrelevant to the rest of the article Fall Out Boy happened to be.

None of that really affected my opinion of Wentz or the band, though. My friends and co-workers were biased and narrow-minded, and all those incriminating quotes in throwaway gossip magazines are just red herrings, at best. You can't tell what a person is really like based on the watered-down interviews that Access Hollywood chops up and spoon-feeds to the public in conveniently concise soundbites. All of that shit is just the entertainment industry selling you a product, even if that product is scandal or hate. It's not real; it's just business.

In magazines and on TV, you only see what the suits in the staffroom want you to see, never the truth--because who wants the truth, anyway? I had been in the business long enough to know that well myself.

I had been hired less than two years after graduating from college--a miraculous feat, considering that the magazine that hired me was quite possibly the world's biggest, most prestigous music biweekly. I was one of the youngest writers at the magazine, but I had gotten the hang of the job quickly: recieve your assignment, research and listen to songs by the band, fly out to meet them somewhere, ask them questions and try to coax them into providing witty and/or interesting responses (it was always best if their answers were somewhat obscene in one way or another, as our audience consisted mainly of college-aged guys), put it all together into a logical and enlightening piece that people will actual pay to read, rinse and repeat. And then, of course, there were the three unspoken rules every writer knew to follow.

First of all, the reader is always right. If the reader (i.e., a 19-year-old pothead with a fake I.D. and extensive porn collection) doesn't like the band, you don't like the band.

Secondly, as a sort of condition that applies to the first rule, the fan is also always right. Even if the band's hardcore fans (i.e., 12-year-olds in cheap eyeliner and chipped black nail polish) don't normally read your magazine, they will read your article on their favorite band, so you shouldn't bash the band too much unless you're prepared to recieve boatloads of backlash from angry fangirls.

So what happens when you're assigned to write a full-length article on Fall Out Boy--a band the readers hate but the fans love--and you have to find a way to make everyone happy? You see the problem. Basically, as a yellow checkered taxi cab spirited me away to a hotel room in Manhattan, I was faced with an impossible task.

As the writer, you don't have to take on this task. You can choose to insult Fall Out Boy throughout the entire piece and make the college dudes happy, or you can suck up to Fall Out Boy in worshipful detail and make the preteen girls squeal. Many of my fellow writers would have picked one or the other (usually the first option, out of shared distate for Fall Out Boy and loyalty to their regular readers), but I didn't.

I decided to beat my own path and avoid offending or pleasing either demographic. This choice was partly rooted in ethics--because, frankly, it's just wrong to purposely skew someone's reputation in order to sell more magazines--but, morals aside, I had discovered that contradicting preconcieved notions kept people interested, and that in itself boosted sales.

So that was the basis for the third rule--an optional, but helpful, suggestion: take a band people know, or think they know, and cast them in an entirely new light.

I could have written Wentz and his band the way the rest of the world saw them: as annoying but harmless sell-outs, or as the ridiculously talented (and omfg, so cute!) messiahs of angsty teens everywhere. I could have portrayed Fall Out Boy as a mainstream crap machine, or as a group of insightfully clever, down-to-earth, regular-old-kids from Chicago. I could have made Wentz look like a famewhoring douchebag or a musical genius.

But I didn't, because the band wasn't what everyone else saw in the glossy posters that plastered so many preteens' walls, and Wentz wasn't any of those things to me. He was charming and odd and funny and kind and awkward and special and straightforward and manipulative and too smart and too honest. But I didn't know it at first.

All I knew was what other people had said about him, and none of that held weight with me. I had seen enough celebrities turn out to be completely different from the reputation that precedes them to have learned not to judge people before you've had a chance to meet them.

The thing is, sometimes a guy who's supposed to be a douchebag and a sell-out and a manwhore turns out to be the sweetest, kindest, most genuine guy ever. Sometimes he turns out to be boring and normal. Sometimes he turns out to be a douchebag and a sell-out and a manwhore anyway. And sometimes he turns out to be your soulmate.

You just never know.