Afraid of the Dark

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By noon, the photoshoot was well under way. In the center of the room, the four members of Fall Out Boy were huddled together beneath a cluster of blinding white lights and intimidating cameras, struggling to get the perfect cover shot and mostly failing.

Dutifully ignoring the pushy director's instructions, Wentz cycled through every single overused, overexaggerated facial expression he had memorized by now, as if he was reading them off of a teleprompter: his signature "grr" face, goofy smile, obnoxiously-fake surprise, emo pout, etc, etc, etc... Miraculously, Trohman rivaled Wentz for the award of Cheesiest Pose and ended up aggravating the director nearly as much as Wentz.

Stump and Hurley just sulked around in the background with mild variations of the same sheepish expression on their faces, as if they were embarrassed by the other half of their band. The director shouted at them, too; he was red in the face and had probably been developing some sort of anneurysm ever since Fall Out Boy walked onto set.

I watched all of this with amusement from my seat in a nearby folding chair, scribbling in my notebook occasionally, though there wasn't much to comment on. If Fall Out Boy were mediocre musicians, they were downright terrible models.

Wentz knew this, of course, and he was getting bored. I didn't learn the recognize the expression until later on, but looking back on that day, he wore it then: the barely-detectable tightening of his eyes, the half-malicious set of his jaw as he decided to toy with someone for his own amusement.

His manipulative face.

Locking eyes with the photographer, he pushed up his shirt a little and turned sideways, one hip jutting out so that the waistband of his too-tight jeans strained against the faded tattoo on his abdomen.

The photographer paused in his constant stream of click-click-click to give Wentz an are-you-serious? look.

"What do you think? Does this turn you on?" Wentz grinned, his eyes laughing but unrelenting in their demand for a reply nonetheless.

Baffled, the photographer could only stare at Wentz in return. Wentz's three bandmates glanced around at him restlessly, but looked more annoyed than confused. Apparently, this sort of behavior was typical of him.

"Okay, then," said Wentz when the photographer still didn't reply, "how about this?" He pulled down his jeans as far as he could without anything popping out: a good two inches of his blindingly white underwear bunched up over the top hem of his jeans and a wide expanse of smooth skin was exposed as his fingers trailed ever upwards, bringing his shirt with them.

The photographer blinked once, heaved a sigh, and bent forward to snap the picture. And the subsequent flash of the camera wasn't anywhere near as blinding as Wentz's triumphant smile.

-----

After the photoshoot was over, the four of them changed into "normal clothes," washing the mousse out of their hair and the make-up off of their faces. A chauffered car picked up the five of us--the band with me in tow--from the warehouse and drove us back to our hotel (the magazine had booked a hotel room for me in the same hotel the band was staying in, probably on purpose.) Eliciting a collective sigh of relief from his three bandmates, Wentz offered to do the first interview with me.

Player one, round one.

"You're a brave, brave man," I said as I followed him down the hall to his hotel room.

"Nah. Don't pay any attention to those dudes," said Wentz, referring to his bandmates, I assumed. "They're just scared you'll rip them to shreds in your article."

"And you're not?"

"What?" He raised his eyebrows at me, almost in a challenge. "Scared you'll rip me to shreds?"

Ever since we'd first met, I had been comparing him to the stories I'd heard of him in the past, to the person he made himself out to be in his blogs and on stage, to the words he had written. And up until that moment, none of those Pete Wentzs had meshed, but just then, he seemed to be all of those people all at once--tired and resigned and witty and charming and cynical and morbid, and strangely poetic in a way that's constantly taking the whole world off guard.

The look on his face suddenly caustic, he stopped dead in his tracks and turned to face me; he was closer than I thought, and I took a step back as he stared me down. The words that spilled out of his mouth next flowed so smoothly that they sounded almost rehearsed, as if he had stayed up nights making sure they all fit together just right.

"Half the world knows all of my ex-girlfriends' life stories, my attemped suicide four years ago is some kind of sick running joke on the internet, millions of copies of my wedding pictures were printed up and sold in People magazine, and when you type my name into Google, hundreds of pictures of my penis pop up."

He looked almost angry in an indignant sort of way, and for a moment, I could only gape at him in fear and surprise. And then he did the last thing I expected: he cracked a smile.

"So, no, I'm not scared of you."

Satisfied, he smirked to himself as he turned to his right and, facing the door there, slid his room key into the designated slot on the door handle. I hadn't even realized we were at his hotel room already.

Without looking, he yanked the key back out again at the exact moment that the green light started flashing, as if he had unlocked enough hotel room doors to open them by memory now. "So," he said lightly, "you like New York?"

The way he flipped back and forth between grim and casual subjects without seeming to think anything of it was still new to me on that first day, and at first, I wasn't sure how to react. I bit my lip and decided to just go along with the subject change."Yeah. I like it a lot, actually. It's one of my favorite big cities. What about you?"

Shrugging, Wentz pushed the solid hardwood door open and waited for me to enter first before stepping inside behind me. What a gentleman. "I like it," he said, "but Chicago's still my favorite."

"I like New York better."

He grinned and walked past me into the living room area of his massive suite. "Well, Chicago's not your hometown," he said cheekily.

"That's true," I admitted.

"Of course it is. Every word I say is true."

His gaze was confident--steady and unwavering, with no trace of humor--and I couldn't tell if he was being serious or not. "Unless you're lying to me now," I said.

He looked amused in a snide way (the way people look at you when they know something you don't) as he said, "I'm not lying."

"How do I know that?"

"You don't." His smile faded as the look on his face turned grave, and he regarded me with vague consternation. "You just have to believe me, I guess."

Though I didn't know it yet at the time, almost everything Wentz says has a profound double meaning of some sort. His knack for subtle plays on words, put to use in his tongue-in-cheek song lyrics, is what propelled him to the top of the music industry in the first place, but it takes some getting used to when he uses it in person. That first day, before I knew him very well, I just felt bewildered throughout most of our conversation.

But as quickly as his mood had shifted, his usual off-handed attitude resurfaced. All smiles again, he left me standing there in the doorway, confused, as he flitted off to the far end of the suite, where I could no longer see him.

"Do you want something to drink?" called his disembodied voice, competing with the sounds of clanking bottles and rustling plastic wrappers as he rummaged around in what I guessed was a mini-fridge of some sort.

"Um...sure. Thanks."

"Okay, well..." Wentz darted back into my line of vision with a drink in each hand. "All I've got is Red Bull and this weird orange sugary shit--"

"Red Bull would be great," I said with a strained smile.

"Okay," he laughed. "Good call."

While I waited for him to put the drinks into some glasses, I ventured into the sunken-in living room area and sat down on one of the sofas, glancing around at my surroundings. Big and white and full of stylish, expensive-looking designer furniture, the suite was easily half the size of my apartment back home, and was probably worth at least five times as much.

In the back corner of the miniature living room was a kitchenette, complete with a mini-fridge, a microwave, a sink, and a full set of counters and cabinets, where Wentz was currently fumbling with our drinks. A small, square table with four chairs pushed neatly into place stood nearby. Huge floor-to-ceiling windows looked out over the city twenty-seven stories below, with wispy white curtains framing each bird's-eye view. Tall, solid curtains anchored in the ceiling, their ends pooling on the marble floor, separated the living room from what I assumed to be the bedroom area.

Contradicting the tidy furnishings of the suite, piles of dirty laundry, empty plastic cups, and scatterings of random items like deoderant and cheese crackers cluttered the whole room. It looked like several homeless teenage boys had been camping out here for weeks on end.

"So, how long have you guys been in town?" I asked Wentz as he handed me a crystal glass full of Red Bull.

"Uh...I don't know, a few hours, I guess. We just flew in around lunchtime."

I felt my eyes go wide. He had only been in town a few hours, and his hotel room was already in this shape?

Oblivious, he collapsed onto the sofa adjacent to mine, kicking his shoes off and propping his feet up on the coffee table. The movement knocked a stack of papers off the end of the table and they scattered to the floor. He made no move to pick them up.

So I guess that explained the mess.

"When did you get here?" he asked, probably out of politeness. He was very good at this small-talk stuff--maybe the best I'd ever seen, at least among my past interview subjects.

"At about six o'clock this morning," I replied, making a face.

"Oh, man, that sucks," said Wentz fervently. "I hate evening flights. They scare the shit out of me."

"Really?" Pete Wentz was afraid of something? Curious, I squinted at him over the brim of my glass.

"Oh, yeah." His voice took on the forceful quality of an oath as he explained, "I'm fucking terrified of flying in the first place, and it's even worse when it's dark out and you can't see anything...and you can't be sure..."

Suddenly at a loss for words, his gaze grew vacant as he trailed off. A few beats of silence passed, and then he pinned me with the pained, pleading sort of look that would become commonplace between us eventually.

"You know what I mean?" he said.

I realized I was staring openmouthed and looked away. "Yeah," I muttered. "I know what you mean."

I turned away, busying myself with getting out my notes and my tape recorder to block out the words stuck in my head, to distract myself from the prickling memory of fear in my veins. When I finally glanced up at Wentz again, he looked almost as troubled as I felt.

Wincing, he blinked fiercely--once, twice, three times--as if to dispel whatever image was floating before his eyes. For a moment, I wondered what he saw there.

And then, out of nowhere, he said, "Sorry about the crystal, by the way." He gave me a cheesy grin as he indicated the glass in my hand with a slight jerk of his head. "That was all I could find."

I still felt sort of spooked by what he had said earlier, but I forced myself to laugh a little, hoping he didn't catch the hollow ring to the sound. "No problem."

"These hotels..." He shook his head, his gaze drifting towards an abstract painting on the wall; it was one of those simplistic pieces that could have been painted by a four-year-old and most likely sold for tens of thousands of dollars at auction, a wide stretch of vacant white and soft baby blue on canvas, interrupted only by a small red square in one corner. He blinked again, forcefully, and looked away. "I don't even know anymore, man. It's crazy."

Preparing to jot down direct quotes, I flipped to a blank sheet of paper in my notepad and frowned at him in thought. "What do you mean?" I asked.

He shrugged, smiling without humor. "All I'm saying is...you know how sometimes, when you first wake up, you look around and you don't know where you are or how you got there?"

I nodded, urging him with my eyes to go on.

"Well..." Wentz paused long enough to run a hand through his hair self-consciously, chuckling nervously under his breath. If I hadn't known better, I would have thought he was embarrassed. "It's just that...sometimes my whole life feels like that. You know?"

I knew.