Choke.

It was three hours after dinner, three hours after we had checked in, three hours after he and I were in the dingy motel office breathing cigar smoke, Frankie with his big big sunglasses hiding the big big bloodshot eyes that meant he’d spent the past two nights crying against the sticky vinyl upholstery of my car. Frankie with his bruises, bruises anywhere he could manage to hurt himself, bruises that looked like abstract watercolor paintings, Saffron and Indigo and Royal Purple pigments exploding underneath his vellum skin. Frankie with his skinny jeans and my leather jacket and his hair gelled fake 80s punk, trying hard to look like someone else – a game we had started and pretty soon realized wasn’t a game anymore.

“Names?”

He was leaning forward against the edge of the messy desk, staring down the manager with the cocky self-assurance he could always fake so well, body bent so that both hipbones jutted visibly out from his small skeleton. The cigarette in the corner of his mouth jerked slightly as he answered, lowering his voice to a hoarse, seductive drawl. “Frankie.”

I opened my mouth to interject my name, but he wasn’t done.

“And this-” He gestured to me. “This here is Nancy.”

Frank and Nancy?

“Sinatra.”

Frank and Nancy Sinatra.

The pen stopped moving.

With a loud sigh that made the skin of his disgusting cheeks wobble, the motel owner sat up in his chair, crossing both arms over his sweat-stained white shirt, and shot a thick, rosaceous scowl up in Frank’s direction. “Funny, you fuggin’ wise-guy. Real funny. You want a fuggin’ room or not?”

“Yes, sir,” Frankie mumbled sheepishly, straight-faced. “Sorry. Charge it to Harry. He’ll pay for everything, won’t you?”

I just looked at him.

“Sorry, he’s a mute. Cleft palate thing. I’ll give you his credit card.” Frank’s eyes sparkled with a light that looked more like the edge of a razorblade than anything, and he smiled, slowly, slowly… “It’s hard to read, but it says Harry Houdini.”

-

Three hours after all of that, three hours after I finally wheedled a room out of the pissed-off manager, Frankie was sitting cross-legged on the dirty motel carpet, slamming his right wrist against the metal arm of the single chair in the room, over and over and over, up and then down, up and then down. Thud. Thud. Thud.

He wasn’t doing it hard, not yet. Just mimicking his heartbeat.

Lub dub. Lub dub. Lub dub. Bill Nye the fucking Science Guy. Frankie with his pretty little bruises, the ones people used to think his daddy gave him, because no one could understand this generation of fucked-up kids who would hurt themselves for pity and for attention, the ones burning their skin with erasers, hacking the veins out of their wrists, sniffing aerosol cans and twisting lit cigarettes into their skin.

See Frankie naked, and you’d realize that while the bruises were the only thing visible at first, there was absolutely nothing he hadn’t tried. And oh… Marlboros leave scars like a bitch.

Thud. Thud. Thud.

Frankie with one bruised wrist still hitting the chair, with those decaying celadon eyes fastened on the shitty television like he actually cared that it was snowing in Buffalo. Again.

A cold front is moving in across New York City, kids.

“That weather guy is fucking HOT,” he said.

I was too busy to acknowledge him, slowly sliding the night-table drawer back and forth on its squeaky track, open and closed. Open. And. Closed. The dusty Gideon Bible glinting gold-on-green up at me every time I let a little light shine in.

“I’d fuck him like HELL.”

Open. “Frankie…”And. Closed. “Seriously, Christ.”

When the weather in New York finally got boring, he got to his feet and announced that he was on his downstairs to check the outdoor payphones for change, coming back into the room ten minutes later empty-handed, with lackluster eyes and a wrinkled nose that kind of made me want to fuck him right then and there. “Ew, fucking hell…”

To me, the motel room had smelled like shoe polish and disinfectant from the start, but he insisted he tasted blood in the air.

“Click, click, boom,” he giggled wildly, “Richard Corey put a bullet through his head.”

In my mind, the wallpaper suddenly ran fire-truck scarlet.

“Shit, Frank.”

“KABLAM. Brains all over the walls.” His sick smile was so chemical-wide that it looked like his face had ripped itself in half.

Maybe all this is just a cry for help.

And I was bitter, and I was tired, and it had been a long day, and the strong scent of shellac in the room was making my head spin, but of course still I had no excuse for the words that crawled out of my throat.

To this day, I make myself sick.

“Are you ever going to just do it?” I snapped sarcastically, a breath of laughter roughening my voice. “Just finally fucking kill yourself instead of talking about it all the time?”

Sure, I thought I was fucking hilarious, but once the question was hanging in the air, there was no way to explain that it was ‘just a joke.’

Just a joke.

There’s no way to tell, but your stupid stupid words could kill the thing you love most.

His eyes went as big as saucers, big and green without the sunglasses to hide the mess, brilliant whites stained by that familiar cerise spiderweb of inflamed capillaries. The scary scary horror encapsulated somewhere between his pupils and his irises and the way his long lashes were quivering made me nauseous, and I realized, too late, what I’d done.

Unimaginable guilt.

Suffocating.

Everywhere.

Ripping my chest open, compressing my sternum and manubrium back into my spine with a dull, throbbing ache that was almost comforting as it pounded like the rhythm of a bass line behind the other pain, the sharp, splitting agony that was tearing rapidly through my torso; a mess of skin-rending, blood-spurting, heart-wrenching force.

I opened my mouth, but closed it again before I puked up my ribcage.

Oh no no.

He was gone before I even tried to take back what I’d said, and as I turned away and heard the door slam shut, I could feel the shredding, all-encompassing guilt burrowing deep into my core, twining itself around my insides like a blood-soaked parasite. The broken scone lamps, leaning off of the peeling wallpaper like jagged teeth, glared nauseatingly at me from the soiled walls: you’ve finally snapped him.

I waited… Fuck, I wanted to wait longer, but then my nerves snapped in half and I barely even thought to grab a jacket on my way outside.

The cold hit me like a fucking wall, but all I could think of was getting Frankie to stay with me. To stay safe.

I followed far enough behind him that he wouldn’t hear my footsteps, and he never ever once looked back.

Frankie with his animal eyes, his bruises, my jacket, the bones arranged so seductively underneath his skin…

He walked and walked and I wondered if he was just going to keep going until one of us dropped dead, but then all of a sudden he was stopping, unzipping the jacket, and his chest was heaving fitfully like he must have been crying and I looked around and realized that fucking Frank Sinatra was going to jump off a bridge.

Maybe it’s just a cry for help.

Paralyzed with shock, horrified that he would go this far to prove me right, as I struggled to open my mouth and fucking say something, all of the warning signs came streaming back in a sensory cascade.

A thousand times, he had practically told me that this was what we were running toward, but like every stupid friend, every selfish jackass piece of shit human being who ignores the danger, who avoids the intervention for fear of a serious conversation, who would sacrifice their friends’ lives to avoid a single awkward moment, I had pretended not to hear. Not to understand.

And now he was going to jump.

Melodramatic? Unbelievable?

Don’t blame me when your friends are dead.

People do crazy fucking things when they can’t take it any longer.

Did the water, that thin layer of colorless frost coating its surface, look inviting? Like finally touching heaven, blinding white baptism, purity reclaimed in a surge of cold wet black ink, salvation, the icy eyes of God ready to receive him?

I could have said something. Could have done something. Stopped him right in the nick of time.

Instead, I watched him climb the safety railing.

Sway.

Whisper something I couldn’t hear.

And.

Jump.

He was so fucking naked in that moment, arching body suspended between fall and flight, takeoff and impact – stripped bare like I had never seen him, past clothes, flesh, raw red muscle and straining cartilage, tendons and ligaments, bleached bone and marrow and pulsing blood… Just his rag-and-bone soul exposed against the dirty grey sky, tortured and filthy and smashed beyond repair, and I felt my iron heart finally explode under my ribs, in a spurt of hot, gushing chemical red.

He hit the water hands first, cerulean-inked wrists followed by the rest of his fragile body as they pierced the ice, twisting limbs and flying bones all crumpling into the churning blue-grey river until the whole blur of cold, pale skin that was Frankie disappeared beneath the surface.

Fuck.

No.

I ran blindly for the water, feet slipping on the steep, snow-covered incline that led down the riverbank. My heart was thudding in my chest like a time bomb, threatening to shatter my skeleton into a thousand useless chips of bleach-white bone, to crush me from the inside out, and as I skidded down the muddy, slushy, snowy hill, I could already feel the empty empty hole in my heart, manic little Frankie, torn violently out of my life.

There was no time to think.

I ripped off my jacket and plunged as fast as I could into the choppy waves, suddenly engulfed by breathtaking, bone-jarring cold as the freezing water clawed the breath painfully out of my chest, instantly sucking all feeling from my bare fingers and seeping through my skin until the lining of every vein ached. My eyes stung as I forced them open, desperate searching for any sign of Frankie in the dark water.

Find. Him.

Finally, lungs almost bursting with pressure, I saw a shadowy blur and wet cloth brushed my numb fingertips and I knew.

Bubbles of oxygen rushed out of my nose and mouth, aching ribs one step closer to cracking, as I fought to drag his cadaverous body up towards the surface. There was light glimmering teasingly above me; I could see the warped reverse reflection of the grey sky above, but my muscles were burning napalm-hot with lactic acid and his weight was pulling me down down down into the freezing, silt-clouded darkness below.

My heart pounded harder and harder as I struggled, feverishly pumping blood like it thought one more weak trickle of red could redeem me, but I knew that time was running out.

Click, click, boom.

Desperate, I found his mouth, just one black hole in a blur of pallid, slippery skin, pushing my lips to his as tightly as I could. Even underwater, he tasted like sugar, liquor candy hearts and blood, Frankie Frankie Frankie Frankie, watercolor paints and the overpowering, sea-salt salinity of too many tears. Fingers tangled tightly in his wet hair, I closed my eyes tightly and forced every last ounce of stale oxygen from my constricting lungs into his.

If not us, can I just save you?

I was straining, muscles screaming in vicious protest, trying and trying and trying to get his limp body above water, but I knew somewhere in the back of my mind that even if I could roll him onto shore, no one would find him in time.

I had to save myself too.

Pushpushpushpush, splintering, crushing pressure folding my bones as an aneurysm built deep in the numb brain tissue, my vision bleeding, heart blossoming blinding red, and then finally, pure white light flooded my eyes, oxygen exploding into compressed lungs as my head broke the surface. Gravel cut my frozen hands, dirt and snow lodging beneath my fingernails as I crawled painfully up onto the bank of the river, pulling Frankie after me with all the strength I had left.

Staggering, I dragged his limp body – heavy in waterlogged clothes – across the snow until the concrete wall of the bridge sheltered us from the bitter wind, every part of me trembling harder than I’d thought was possible in the cold evening air. My wet skin felt shrink-wrapped to my bones, and I could feel my breath catch painfully in my sore chest as I dropped to the ground beside Frankie, lungs scarred raw from icy water and air.

He looked like a drowned fucking kitten, soaking wet and too unconscious to shiver, his nose and lips stained a surreal cherry-red with blood from the force at which he’d hit the water. His dark hair was clinging to his face, and as I buried my face in his neck, searching desperately for any sign of life or a pulse, his damp skin felt like the rigor-mortis shroud of a congealed corpse.

There was the faintest trickle of blood throbbing inside his jugular, and I could feel my stomach turn over with relief, churning its acidic contents into a painful mess.

Frankie with his bruises and his scars invisible beneath the soaking clothes, Frankie smirking at the motel owner, Frankie with those fucking eyes, night eyes, the kind that always draw you right in between tangled sheets, Frankie suspended in the winter air, bridging the gap between life and death…

Lub dub. Lub dub. Lub dub.

Minutes or hours or years later, he woke up choking on the blood in the back of his throat, lakewater and diluted crimson splashing onto the snow as he rolled sideways, retching painfully against the frozen ground.

Cherry, puke and cold water.

I watched him spill his icy guts, feeling the wetness creep slowly up the thighs of my jeans from where my knees were planted in the slush. My heart contacted spasmodically as he crumpled and broke, crumpled and broke all over again, and finally, he rolled over onto his back, exhausted and starting to quiver just slightly, perfect candy mouth opening in a ragged gasp.

“G-gerard?”

My hands were shaking, and I couldn’t touch him. “Wh-what the hell were you thinking?” I breathed unsteadily, sudden anger crashing down over me like the suffocating collapse of an avalanche. “What the fucking hell were you thinking?! What kind of fuckass suicide attempt was that, you stupid cunt?!”

He started to laugh, still coughing up fluid from bruised lungs, his wind-chapped lips splitting into a bloody smile. “Harry H-Houdini s-saves f-fucktard boyf-friend f-from d-drowning.” Big olive-oil eyes stared up into mine, ripping my breath away and leaving my heart suddenly threatening to snap like an ice-coated branch under the weight of all that fear and guilt.

“I didn’t mean it,” I whimpered, afraid that I was going to say the wrong thing all over again. “I fucking didn’t…”

His face contorted momentarily, but when the flicker passed, there was forgiveness scrawled across his porcelain cheeks. “I’m j-just s-stupid, G-ger…”

I shook my head weakly, trying not to cry, afraid the tears would freeze on my cheeks like indelible evidence of the crushing pain.

Frankie mumbled something incoherent, delirium starting to set in, and turpentine panic ignited between my synapses. He looked like a wet, frightened sparrow, curled frozen and shivering in the crimson-spattered snow, his skin stripped smooth and white as bone by the searing wind. Every breath was full of water, and I could see the iridescence of his muddy eyes fading as something gluey – like silk fibers and cobwebs – slowly collected in their cold aqueous film.

“Frankie…”

“You’ve g-gotta keep me warm,” he gasped, fragile chest heaving like a heart-attack. “K-keep me awake or I’ll d-die.”

How bad do you want me, Ger?

“Anything, Frankie,” I breathed, trachea clenching tight like a fist. “Anything, anything.”

“H-hurry.”

I crawled on top of him, the bone of my kneecaps bruising his soft thighs, and fireworks exploded bloody red across the sky or behind my irises as I crushed our cold mouths together, searching for all the hot breath left in my chest and trying to keep his strawberry lips from turning aquamarine blue in the bitter air.

He whimpered, moaned, pushed his wet tongue into my mouth until all I could taste was his saliva, overpowering and hemoglobin-sweet. Popsicle fingers were leaving streaks of icy water on my cheeks as he tried to pull me even closer, hearts beating, chests heaving, both of us trying desperately to regain missing body heat.

And I was trying to save his life.

Unbuckling his belt, unzipping his sodden pants, trying to save his fucking life.

“G-God, Ger-” The breath hitched in his throat as I pulled the jeans down his thighs, exposing pale white skin marked with familiar bruises, and those awful, incandescent scars that had haunted me the first time I’d seen him undress. Even drunk, I’d been able to tell that Frank Iero was something else, alright.

Frankie teasingly licking his lips with his pants on the floor and all the scintillating secrets hidden beneath his clothes exposed, Frankie watching my drunken stare widen with every vicious scar I saw, Frankie with nothing in his scary scary neon eyes, nothing to betray if he was frightened, so naked under the motel lights and stripped bare for all my alcohol-blurred judgment.

“Whatthefuck did you do?”

Frankie with his dangerous smile, Frankie with his skin glowing golden, Frankie with that little pretty-boy body, rolling over slowly on the sheets and putting on a show. “You coming to bed or not?”

I didn’t ask again, and by the next morning, I was already in too deep to run when I realized the truth.

Things hadn’t really changed that much.

-

“G-ger?” His voice was what jerked me back to the winter cold.

“I- I’m here.”

“W-were you th-thinking ab-bout me?” he whispered coquettishly, his weak breath hot on my face and leaving faint ghost clouds of moisture shimmering in the air.

Something about the way the water was gluing his dark eyelashes together, pale winter light casting their spiky shadows on his damp cheeks, which were just barely starting to flush with what I hoped was warmth, the way his knees were bent up and his saturated shirt was clinging to his body…

He looked so fucking beautiful.

I nodded, and his emerald eyes flashed shameless seduction, bloody tongue flickering out between his lips and smearing syrupy grenadine-red between our mouths as I lowered my head to kiss him again, realizing all over again that I loved this broken doll boy with all my stupid stupid crumpled tin heart.

His hands were on my hips, my wrists, my face, and I could taste the road salt from the highway on his wet fingers, caustic against the lining of my mouth like a chemical burn.

God, and I wanted him so bad.

Every watery breath he took made it sound like his cold lungs were fucking liquefying, hypotonic cells splattering against the inside walls of his chest in a thousand shades of salty red, but he never hesitated, never said stop, and I knew that if I truly wanted to save him, I’d have to get him through the shredding, freezing pain. His face was bone-blanched-white and his fingers looked like bare phalanges and his knees were bent submissively, and even as I forced myself inside him, making his eyes swivel just slightly back in his skull, he never once said ‘Fuck me.’

The rhythm of hot blood coursing through our swollen veins was pounding metrically in my head; the white ground grey sky highway noise was all a flickering motion blur as we both bent and succumbed to the rhythm, the sensations, my hands sliding slickly on his wet wet skin and his lips coated with cold and blood and hips and ribs and the slushy, melting snow, our erratic breathing staining the air and our desperate bodies fighting, forcing it, for passion and warmth.

Finally, “Sh-shit,” Frankie managed, and I could see all of the six-hundred-something muscles in the human body rapidly contracting one after another, epinephrine, serotonin, endorphins all shooting through his cerebral cortex and throwing him over the edge. His jade-green eyes went as wide as sundials, pinwheels, morgue drains, big big big and bright and intensely beautiful, and a series of convulsions gripped his freezing torso, locking his voice prisoner in his throat. “U- Unh…”

Time slowed down so that I could watch his face change from numb lust to shock to ecstasy, quivering lips exhaling an ephemeral wisp of hot water vapor. Frost-stiffened fingers slid down my back as he arched his spine against the snowy ground and pushed his perfect pelvic bones up out of alignment, and that was when I lost control.

Something like a hot spark, a crackling blue-white bolt of electricity, ignited deep inside me, the instant pleasure metastasizing so fast that I couldn’t tell where it had its roots, and my mind went blank as cold kaleidoscope swirls exploded inside the rings of my irises. I thought I saw a strawberry smile flicker across Frankie’s mouth before I squeezed both eyelids shut, face contorting, muscles straining, something unintelligible coming out of my lips while my neurons were screaming, and then I felt the cool rush of memory and sensory input coming back, leaving me shuddering in the wake of my mescaline dreams. “Oh- F-fuck, Frankie…”

Choking on the aftermath of ecstasy, he let out a hoarse breath and slowly reached one shaking hand up towards my face. “H-hey…”

“Hey, baby.”

With two freezing fingertips ghosting over my cheekbones, he opened his mouth, faltered, and closed it again, eyeballs collapsing suddenly into a flood of salty tears. “I f-fucking tried to k-kill m-myself,” he whimpered, almost like he didn’t believe it, and I cracked, pulling him into a desperate, splintering embrace as the sobs gripped his cold body.

“I’m here I’m here I’m here; oh baby, baby, I’m here…”

My murmured words only made him cling tighter, whimpering wretchedly, and every time he inhaled, it sounded like shredding costal cartilage. “I d-don’t want you t-to haveta t-take this anym-more,” he gasped guiltily. “M-me f-falling apart-”

“No, Frankie,” I breathed, almost hysterical with love and fear and horror and hope and pain. “I love you. I fucking love you. I’ll pick up the pieces every single time.”

“I l-love you too, G-ger, but I’ve b-been s-so f-fucking sad…” Bedroom eyes squeezed shut, face buried in my shoulder, he just curled into a damp, freezing bundle of pumping blood and limbs and ice and kept crying, the tears starting to come slower and slower as I held him, gently kissing his neck.

“Everything’s gonna be alright, Frankie. Someday, everything is gonna be alright.”

It would. It fucking would; I wasn’t lying, couldn’t lie to him anymore. I loved him, and that meant seeing every fracture line, holding him through every breakdown, keeping him as safe as I could from himself and the whole fucking world. Nobody was going to rip my little manic Frankie apart anymore.

Frankie with his bruises and his scars and his eyes and the dangerous apathy he only used to hide the pain, the way all those emotions were twisting his ribcage monstrously inside-out. Frankie learning to shake and scream and crumple inside without crying, without letting the telltale blush of sickened blood vessels corrode his eye sockets, without ever admitting how fucking much it hurt.

Hide the emotions; choke it all down, baby. Never let them see how much you care, because they won’t understand.

But I cared.

I understood.

And if I ever didn’t, I’d keep fucking fighting; I wouldn’t stop until I hacked past the scar tissue lies and exposed the heart in all of its bloody autonomy, until I could taste the ocean and cut my fingers on the jagged insides of the thing we call love.

Finally, when his tears were starting to dry, I mumbled “Frank Sinatra?,” and I could feel his sticky-toothed smile against my skin.

Frankie Frankie Frankie with his bruises, bruises anywhere he could manage to hurt himself, bruises that looked like abstract watercolor paintings, Saffron and Indigo and Royal Purple pigments exploding underneath his vellum skin, Frankie with his skinny jeans and my leather jacket and his hair gelled fake 80s punk, trying hard to look like someone else, Frankie curled in my arms in the vicious winter cold, where the combined body heat we’d generated was the only thing keeping our cold hearts beating…

Lub dub. Lub dub. Lub dub.

And love was the only thing keeping us from ripping them right out of our own chests.