Afraid of the Dark

Another adorable banner by my wifey, Shelli. <3

The image of the neat, rectangular east windows swam feverishly before my eyes, the feeble glow of sunlight behind their drawn curtains fading in and out, matching the pulsating rhythm of my pounding headache. Cringing away from the light, I rolled over in bed to face the wall--but the alarm clock on the bedside table caught my eye, and once I knew it was already eight in the morning, I couldn't allow myself to so much as entertain the idea of sleeping in longer.

I sat up in bed and looked around at my surroundings: sparse, white, expensive furnishings, an adjoining living room area and kitchenette...

Oh, right. The hotel room.

Rubbing the dazed spots out of my eyes as I staggered out of bed too quickly, I crossed the ten feet between my bed and the bathroom. The bright overhead lights were castrating after the curtain-dimmed light of the bedroom, and for a moment, I could only grip the edge of the sink and wince as I waited for my eyes to adjust.

They did eventually, and I leaned in closer to the huge mirror over the sink, inspecting the damage. At first, I hadn't remembered why I felt so horrible, but now, looking back at my reflection, I realized that I was clearly hungover. All at once, my mind's eye was swamped with the details of the night before: the wine, the laughing, the talking, the smiling, the crying, the hurt and regret and the fear and the shock.

All of these memories I had put away for the night as I slept, but now--today--they had to be taken out and examined again, dusted off and analyzed objectively. I knew I should have been pleased with the night's events, because I had dedicated my entire profession to seeking out and documenting the truth, and Wentz had been more honest with me than anyone else I had ever known: I could see the truth there in his eyes, steely and confident in their complete surrender. I should have been happy to have the truth, but somehow, the more I thought about, the more I wasn't sure I really wanted it so much after all.

And I couldn't stop thinking about it. While getting dressed, I caught myself pacing aimlessly around the room a few times, lost in the image of Wentz crying in my mind--fuzzy and swaying because of the wine, but still sharp, still tender, still pitiful and searing...

He just looked so lost.

I found a bottle of Tylenol in the bottom of my suitcase, where I always kept it. The hangover wasn't so bad (I had only started really drinking after Wentz had confessed that dark thing, to deal with the way the look on his face made me feel, and it was just wine, anyway), so I only took two pills with a glass of water. The water was cold and familiar and it calmed me down.

As I dumped the rest of the water into the bathroom sink, I looked up at my reflection and saw something there that took me off guard--a timid vulnerability that I hadn't seen in myself in years. The weakness in my face and the constant memory of Wentz crying to me in that big cave of a room scared me, and the empty glass shook in my hand. I filled it up again and drank some more water, just to have something to do, and I felt its chill sliding all the way down my throat when I swallowed.

I could never describe the way Wentz made me feel that night, when he told me Ashlee wasn't what he wanted. He had been crying, and I cried a little too, in some innermost part of me that no one--not even myself--was aware of, but the tears eroded away a little of my conviction and when I looked at myself in the mirror the next morning, I could see the fissures of my splitting faith there in the lines of my face. I have tried time and time again to explain the feeling I got when he looked at me with all that secret burning pain in his eyes, but I never could get it right; the closest I ever got was to say that it just felt like crumbling, or melting, or both.

Our relationship was so odd. We had both been on the verge of a breakdown all our lives, and though we knew that, we didn't know how to stop falling apart. When we met, each of us immediately recognized the other's failings, and from then on, we were always trying to hold each other together--we were always crumbling, melting, breaking down in each other's arms.

The morning after I first saw the holes riddled through him, I was scared. I was scared because I saw in him the same flickering light that had always been in me, the hope that, with enough praying and planning and trying, trying, trying, one day all your dreams will come true--the light that had failed him, that was maybe doomed to fail me. I was scared because I knew that he recognized himself in me, too--knew all my flaws and failings by heart already, could probably trace the exact location of my Achille's heel in time. I was scared because all I wanted to do was fix him, smooth out his frown lines and hold him together with the soft palms of my hands, patch up the holes just so he'd stop crying.

And I was scared because I didn't know how to stop that wanting.

-----

When I had first received my assignment to do a story on Fall Out Boy, I had vowed not to follow in every other journalist's footsteps--to interview all four of the band members equally, without asking the other three roundabout questions primarily related to Wentz and nothing else. In my first interview with Patrick Stump later on that morning, I broke that vow. I couldn't help it; every single thought that flashed through my mind was set against a distracting backdrop of thoughts about Wentz, the night before, the look on his face, the things he had said, the way he had smiled, cried...

So I gave in and asked Stump some generic question about Wentz, just like every other journalist who had ever interviewed Stump probably had. So much for originality and principles. Oh well. There's both good and bad in the world, and there's a place for giving up, too.

"Well... The thing about Pete is that he always has a plan or twelve up his sleeve," said Stump, chuckling uncomfortably. He shrugged. "Sometimes he can't follow through with them, but, I mean... At least he has a plan."

He scratched at the pale, smooth skin where his trademark sideburns used to be--a nervous habit. Sitting there in the stiff hotel chair with a tape recorder in my hand, I was the one making him nervous. He sat directly across from me with his Fruit Loops getting soggy in their styrofoam bowl on the table between us, but he couldn't quite bring himself to look me in the eye very often; mostly he just stared vacantly out the window at the hazy Manhattan skyline.

"His big plan right now is this free concert he wants to put on here in New York, in a park or something--probably Washington Square," Stump went on. "You know, as a sort of fan appreciation thing..."

I was confused enough to break one of the major rules of journalism: I interrupted the person I was interviewing. "Can that work? I mean...if it's free and it's just out in the open, won't people trample each other and block traffic and shit?"

"Uh, yeah..." he mumbled with a dreary, slightly constipated look on his face. "That's definitely a major concern. We've got people looking into it."

"Hm." I bit my lip thoughtfully.

"I mean, it might not work," he said hurriedly. "That's kind of what I'm trying to say. Pete makes all these plans, and he means well, but...sometimes they just don't work."

"He's very ambitious."

"Oh yeah. Very. There's nothing wrong with that, though," said Stump. He concentrated on collecting a spoonful of cereal and then dropped the spoon back into the bowl disinterestedly, without ever taking a bite. "It's probably the only reason Fall Out Boy has gotten as far as we have."

I decided to be blunt. "A lot of people like to call Pete a sell-out."

"A lot of people like to call Pete a lot of things. That doesn't make any of it true. He's not a sell-out. He doesn't do it for the money."

"For the fame?"

Stump frowned and shook his head. "No. I don't think so. Not in the way you mean it." Falling silent, he squeezed his eyes shut and massaged his temples for a moment. "...It's hard to explain," he said finally. "I don't think he cares what...you know, Perez Hilton--or whatever his name is--what he thinks about him. But he wants to leave his mark on the world. You know?"

I nodded, mostly to keep him talking.

"He just has all these ideas, and he wants to try all of them. He wants to do everything. And why shouldn't he?" Stump chuckled darkly under his breath. "People can call him a sell-out all they want to, but if they ever got the chance to start their own clothing line or guest star on C.S.I., they'd do it too."

He had a point there.

I brought up another one: "Okay, but sometimes his...ideas affect Fall Out Boy, too, not just him personally. Has he taken the band in a different direction than you or the other guys wanted to go?"

Stump exhaled heavily as he considered the question. "Well, I'm sure he has a time or two. But we all have. We all have disagreements about the band. We compromise. Sometimes Pete gets his way, sometimes he doesn't."

"...But he usually does," I guessed.

He just shrugged, a guilty smile settling into place across his lips. "Yeah, usually. But he's the frontman. He's kind of like the executive branch of our band government. Congress doesn't override the President's veto very often."

I laughed at his brainy political analogy and asked another question. "Well, as the lead singer of the band, do you resent Pete for taking over the role of the frontman?"

"No," said Stump. "I mean, you know, when Fall Out Boy appeared on One Tree Hill, Pete was the one everybody made fun of--not the rest of us. The President's usually the one who gets assassinated. I'm fine with being a Congressman. Besides," he added with a grimace, "I'm not very good at the whole frontman thing."

"Yeah, you don't seem like you're digging this interview very much." I laughed a little to let him know I didn't mean to mock him or put him down for it. He seemed like the delicate, easily-ruffled type, and I didn't want him to get his panties in a bunch over something I said.

But if Stump was nothing else, he was painfully self-aware, and my pointing out his awkwardness didn't seem to bother him very much. "Well, I handle it a lot better now than I used to," he said matter-of-factly.

I hoped the blatant disbelief didn't show on my face, because I was certainly having a hard time picturing an even more uncomfortable version of him. Just in the short time I had known him, he was prone to rambling, taking long, unneccessary pauses in between phrases, stammering, blushing, sweating profusely, and just seeming strained, shy, and evasive in general. How was this better?

"I used to hate all reporters automatically," he explained. "But I can deal with them now. Sort of."

"What changed?" I asked, biting my tongue against saying more. I had a feeling that correcting him on the fact that I was a journalist, not a reporter, probably wouldn't go over with him as well as it had with Wentz.

"I don't know," mumbled Stump. His eyes darted away from my gaze to rest on his own feet instead--there it was again, the chronic awkwardness. "I guess I just kind of realized that they're...you know, a neccessary evil."

"Gee, thanks. You flatter me so."

"Oh--" His cheeks reddened with embarrassment as he realized what he had said. "No, I didn't mean it like that--"

"It's okay," I laughed, "I'm used to it. I get 'evil' a lot. It's just part of my job."

Stump laughed, too, and something in the way he looked at me then let me know that his cold attitude towards me was beginning to defrost. "Yeah... I guess I know how you feel," he said after a moment. "It's weird how people you've never even met before can hate you, isn't it?"