Frank Iero: P.A.

We stayed at Alicia’s apartment for another three days before we headed back the mansion. We cooked and cleaned for her, and work on coaxing her out of her room more often during the day. Then at night Gerard and I would go to bed together and lie there talking about our pasts and the experiences that had made us who we were. It was sort of like therapy for us.

Ray organised a grief councillor for Alicia, and she had a session with her before we’d left. Gerard was sceptical about involving a councillor, but after he saw how her demeanour had improved with just one session he felt more comfortable about the idea and with leaving her by herself. The counselling really helped her become strong without Mikey and taught her to channel her grief into loving their baby.

It’s been a month now since Mikey’s funeral. Things are nowhere near normal again. Gerard and I can’t even return to a working relationship because he’s barely stepped into the office since we’ve been back. He spends a lot of time in his studio but nothing is ever produced for buyers or galleries anymore. That makes my job pretty unnecessary, so I just spend my time answering mail and dealing with those that Gerard is pissing off by not selling anything. The galleries are fairly easy – they just replace him with a different artist – it’s the pompous private buyers that make my job difficult. The same buyer will call up multiple times during the week, demand for a Gerard Way original, and when I tell them that Gerard is not making anything new at the moment, they’ll pull out the line ‘my money and influence made him what he is – he owes me his art’. I can’t tell them the truth, so I just make up some ridiculous lie about him being in the process of renovating his studio or something. Part of me wishes I could tell them about Mikey, just so they’ll lay off on hating Gerard.

The articles in the magazines, newspapers, and online are becoming harder to ignore. Gerard has an exorbitant amount of subscriptions to all these artsy publications and most of them are now writing rumours about him. I try to hide them so he doesn’t have to see what they’re saying about him, but he always finds them. I’ll put them in a filing cabinet or in my desk draw in the morning, and later that day I’ll find him sitting in the kitchen reading one of them. I don’t know if he bypasses the articles about him, but I’m sure he’s not oblivious to the rumours that are circulating. For me, the one that hurts the most is where they call him a selfish egotist who is too busy rolling in his millions to take a little notice of those who’ve put him on that pedestal. If only they could the Gerard that I see, the one that used his millions to give his brother the best medical care possible, the one who put his own grief on hold to dedicate himself to his widowed sister-in-law, the one that cries himself to sleep each night because his brother is gone... the one that took a chance on random guy on the train and gave him more than he could have ever imagine – a home, income, and friendship.

I head down the hallway from my bedroom toward Gerard’s like I’ve been doing every morning since we stopped staying at Alicia’s. I never go into his room – I don’t even knock – I just stand there listening for sounds of life. Truth be told, I panic that during the night the pain will be too much and he’ll attempt to take his life again. Some mornings I hear him crying, and the sound causes a stabbing sensation in my chest, but I’d rather that than the silence I’m met with on other mornings.

Today is one of the silent mornings.

I stare at the door, willing Gerard to make some kind of noise. Nothing changes in the least. The longer I stand there the more worry builds up in me. All I want is just one sound – a sob, a wail, an angry scream, a vase smashing against a wall... anything. After five minutes of silence I take a step closer to the door and press myself up against it. There is still no clear sound coming from his bedroom.

Maybe he is asleep? Maybe he’s going to the toilet? Maybe he’s lying unconscious in his bathtub...

That thought convinces me to break the house rules. I quickly open the door and head into Gerard’s bedroom. I don’t bother looking around and jog straight to his ensuite. My eyes fly to the bathtub. Thankfully, it’s empty and clean. He’s not in here at all. I let out a small sigh of relief and walk back into the bedroom.

Found him.

How the hell did I miss him in the first place? He is sitting on his bed looking directly at me. Where you’d expect to see either an angry or puzzled expression on his face he just looks numb.

“Hey,” I say softly, risking a few steps toward him.

Gerard is holding his iPhone in his hand. The screen is lit up, displaying his contacts list. This has me confused, because clearly if he had have been on the phone I would have heard him while I was standing outside his bedroom.

“It’s him, but it’s not him,” he says nonsensically.

“I don’t understand...”

His eyes focus on his screen. “When I call Mikey’s number, it goes to voicemail and I hear his voice; it’s something he would say, but I know he’s not there. All I want is to hear him say something else.”

“May I?” I ask, gesturing to his phone. He hands it to me and I call Mikey’s number.

The call goes straight to voicemail and Mikey’s voice comes meets my ear.

“I know you want me, you want Mikey Way, but I’m not here, so I’ll call you back some other day.” Beep.

I end the call and hand the phone back to Gerard. The quick rhyme made my eyes water and I blink furiously so Gerard won’t have to see me cry.

“At least it wasn’t something generic,” I say gently. “And you can always call his phone on those hard days when you really need to hear his voice.”

He nods his head slowly, rubbing his thumbs over his phone. On the surface it would look like he was happy with what I’d said, but I know him better than that; I can see his lips twitching and those extra two blinks that he ordinarily wouldn’t do. I wrap my arms around his shoulders and pull him in to me. He buries his face in my neck, and within seconds his whole body is trembling. He turns into me, taking my shirt in his fists. His phone falls to the floor, thudding loudly.

“Just let it out, Gerard, just let it out,” I murmur into his hair.

He continues to sob. My shirt becomes damp and starts to stick to my shoulder. It’s not sensation I like, but I put up with it for Gerard’s sake. I expect that he’ll cry for a long time, but less than five minutes later he sobers and pulls away from me.

“I need to check on Alicia,” he tells me as he stands.

“It’s okay for you to cry, Gerard.” He can’t always be focussed on her. “You need to grieve, too.”

He picks his phone up from the floor and wipes at his eyes. When he attempts to walk to the door I seize is wrist. Finally, he meets my eyes.

“Please, Frank – this is how I grieve. Just let me do this at my own pace.”

His eyes bore into me, asking me desperately for more than just to let him call Alicia. He is asking me to let him go so he can do what he needs to, and I don’t just mean letting go of his wrist.
I let go, my hand falling back to my lap. He walks away from, not looking back at all. The sound of his bedroom door closing echoes loudly in the eerily silent room.



I haven’t seen Gerard since he broke down his bedroom this morning. After shedding a few tears myself, I left his bedroom and went down to the office to continue answering fan mail. What was once praise had turned to hate mail and complaints. I only wrote replies for about an hour, just enough to kill time until Ellie arrived. We talked for a while about Gerard, like usual, and then I offered to help her with cooking Gerard’s meals for the day.

Cooking with Ellie was fun, but quite honestly I was of very little help to her. I think she liked having the company with her, though. Things between her and Bernard had become tense over the past month. He was a bit frustrated with how much time he was spending with Gerard and Alicia – she just wanted to comfort them while they dealt with Mikey’s death – and Ellie was angry with him for not wanting to discuss anything to do with his passing. You could see that they dealt with grief in very different ways, but they shouldn’t be letting it affect their marriage. The more they fought, the more time she spent with other people, and the less of a chance he had to talk about his feelings, then they’d fight about it all over again. It was like a never ending cycle. All I could do was tell her to go home and talk with him. Eventually, she listened.

I was left alone again, so I went back to the office to resume some form of work. My hours were flexible now that Gerard couldn’t be bothered to watch over me, or order me about. I responded to some phone calls that were clogging up the answering machine, then got back to answering fan mail. Before I knew it it was seven o’clock. I had been in the office for six hours straight.

“Jeeze, Frank,” I muttered to myself, “you didn’t work this hard when Gerard wanted you to.”

Ellie came to mind again. I wonder how she got on with Bernard? Hopefully they spoke about what has been upsetting them. It’s been a while since she left; they should have spoken about it by now and be settling down on the couch together. I’ll ring her, just to be sure. But first, I’m getting the hell out of this chair.

I stand up, stretch my muscles, then head out of the office. There’s probably some bad cartoons on TV I could watch on mute while I talk to Ellie; I’ll use the phone in the living room. As I approach the living room I hear voices...

Gerard’s and Alicia’s.

I’m about to walk in and say hello to Alicia, but the conversation they’re having stops me in my tracks.

“...I can’t do this alone, Gerard,” Alicia says, sounding panicky.

“Sweetie, you know I’ll help you when the baby arrives. You’ll have me and Ellie, and Frank will probably want to help, too. He’s good like that,” Gerard replies in a gentle, comforting tone.

I have to admit, I feel very flattered that he spoke so kindly of me. He is right; I want to help out when Alicia has the baby, if I can. She’s due in about a week.

“What if something happens to me?” Alicia replies, her voice rising in fear. “Mikey died – I could, too. Our baby will have no parents!”

He hushes her. “Relax, sweetie. Nothing is going to happen. From what I’ve heard, childbirth is the most natural, routine thing in the world for a woman. You’ll be fine.”

“I meant if I get sick! But now there’s that, too – something could go wrong! Oh, God! Oh, God!” She is in hysterics now, breathing heavily, and I can hear Gerard trying to calm her down. “Promise me you’ll take the baby if something happens.”

“Alicia, you’re being–”

“Promise me!” she all but screams it. “You’ll be all they have left – promise me!”

“I promise,” he replies sincerely, “but it won’t come to that, okay?”

They go quiet. I poke my head around the doorframe so I can see what’s happening. Gerard is holding Alicia in his arms as she breathes heavily. She’s so scared; I never realised just how much Mikey’s death had affected her mentally. Hopefully Gerard can convince her that she’s getting all worked up for nothing.

I step away from the living room and walk quietly through the house to the kitchen. The last thing I want is for them to know I overhead such a personal conversation. In the kitchen, I take the plate of food Ellie left for me and heat it up in the microwave. It only takes two minutes, so I’ll wait until after I eat before I ring Ellie.

When I’ve finished eating and put my plate in the dishwasher I pick up the phone and dial Ellie’s number. It rings eight times until the answer machine kicks in. It’s not like Ellie to not pick up the phone. Perhaps things went well between her and Bernard and they’ve made up, gone to dinner or something nice.

There’s nothing else for me to really do, so I head for my bedroom. My eyes flick to the living room as I walk past; Alicia is gone, home I presume, and Gerard has disappeared again. I continue up the stairs and proceed to my door, stopping to look down the hallway to the studio door. Something tells me he’ll be in there drawing anything that will take his mind off things. I’m not going to go to him, though, as much as I want to. He wants me to let him go, and that’s what I’m going to do.



I’m ripped from my sleep by someone shaking me violently. My eyes snap open as my hands ball into fists; I’m ready to punch whatever is trying to attack me.

Gerard is glaring down at me, calling my name. My muscles relax upon seeing that it is him and not some serial rapist.

“Get up, Frank – we’ve got to go to the hospital!”

“Hospital?” I ask groggily.

“Alicia’s gone into labour. Come on!” he demands agitatedly.

"Now? Are you serious? Now?!" I exclaim.

"I'm not exactly fucking happy about the situation either!" he shouts back.

I’m suddenly wide awake. I spring from the bed and start stripping immediately, not caring that Gerard is in the room. He goes to my closest as I’m ridding myself of clothing and then comes back, throwing jeans and t-shirt at me as he heads for the door.

“I’ll start the car,” he tells me hurriedly as he fumbles in his pocket for his keys. It’s now I notice that he’s wearing the same clothes he was yesterday. “Get dressed and meet me down on the driveway ASAP.”