Gray

by Pete Wentz

  22

  I think everyone should go crazy at least once in their life. I don’t think you’ve truly lived until you’ve thought about killing yourself. It’s oddly liberating. I’ve called Her and apologized for my actions. Told Her I had gone off the rails a bit, but now I’m doing fine. Really, truly fine. She told me it was okay, and that I can call Her anytime I need to talk. She talks about school and Her job. Her voice is warm and comforting, like a blanket or the gentle hiss of the radiator on a cold morning. She sounded just like my mom. I am making peace with my past. I am moving on. I don’t give a fuck anymore.

  The shareholders liked the album. They heard a potential first single. And a second one too. It’s coming out in May, I think. We’re back in Los Angeles now—at least some of us are, Martin went back to Chicago—putting the final touches on the thing, doing overdubs and the like. Glossing it up a bit. I flew back here with no problems, made it all the way across the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains without a sliver of anxiety medication, without a single tear. That chapter of my life is over. I’m tired of being afraid, and of being in control. I am officially on autopilot. I am leaving it all up to someone else. I am unchained and ready to live again.

  I call my landlord back in Chicago, tell him that I’m going to keep my place there, and I use some of the money from the record advance to pay my rent for the remainder of the year. He sounds surprised to hear my voice, says he’s glad to hear from me. I haven’t been back to the apartment in something like six months, and I may never go there again, but I like the idea of having a space in the city, a hermetically sealed chamber, untouched since I left it so long ago. Cardboard boxes are still in my bedroom. I will probably never unpack them. That’s okay.

  I find another place in LA, up in the canyon, an old house with massive windows and a weathered veranda that overlooks the city, and the Disaster moves in with me. We are all alone up there, free to do stupid things, so we smoke tons of pot and get lost in the foothills, dry-mouthed and wandering among the scrub and the sago palms, leaping from rock to rock in the arid heat. At night, we explore with flashlights, twist our ankles in unseen crags, chase off coyotes with shouts and yips. We are like feral children, wild and free, unkempt. Except with drugs. And the handgun that the Disaster bought and now keeps tucked into the top of his jeans. He only shoots bottles at the present, setting them up on boulders and blasting them into oblivion, the sound of the gun echoing around the great walls of rock. He says he’s going to bag a coyote one of these days. One time a jogger yelled at us, but for the most part we are left to our own devices. It’s not too long before we stop wearing shirts, and the California sun begins to bake our skins. Imagine, a suntan in the middle of March.

  We do a run of shows that takes us from west to east, headlining stuff now with a crew and catering and the like. Our very own bus. It’s good to see the kids’ faces again. To hear their voices sing along, not just to the old stuff but the new songs too. Our band is better than it’s ever been before, we are survivors, we have made it through the tunnel and emerged into the light. We are on the cover of a magazine. We shoot a music video, again with a crew and catering and the like. Folding chairs with our names printed on the backs. Friends are texting me from Chicago to tell me they heard our song on the radio. My dad’s clients are asking him if I could sign something for their daughters, since they’re big fans and all. It occurs to me for the first time that I may actually be famous. You can’t tell these kinds of things when you live in Los Angeles because everyone is famous out here. But in the Midwest, the Iowas and Ohios of the world, I can no longer go to the grocery store without having kids follow me, call out my name. I am signing autographs in the cereal aisle while the store manager apologizes. If we are out at a restaurant, we are asked to take photos with the waiters, to pose with the bartenders. Kids sit at tables near us, faking that they’re snapping pictures of their friends, but tilting their cameras just enough to catch us in the background. Our manager is saying we might have to hire security pretty soon. I just laugh.

  But back in LA, I’m just another guy. I can eat my dinners in peace. Only, in the weeks before our album comes out, my face starts turning up at bus stops, in the window of Tower Records, on a billboard down on Sunset. Suddenly, I am not just another guy. I am invited to parties at clubs, then after-parties in penthouses. It’s just as it was all those months ago, when the Disaster and I ran roughshod over the city, only now we are supposed to be here. We are invited guests. Well, actually, I am, but the Disaster goes everywhere with me. I am beginning to be able to get us into any event, no matter how long the line outside, no matter how stone-faced the doorman. I have become Mr. +1. You should see my name there on the list . . . right there, yeah. And here’s my friend. He gets in too. Okay? Cool? Thanks, man.

  Eventually, we don’t even have to bother with the list. The doormen know me by first name. They know I come with company. They unlatch the velvet rope and let us inside without a moment’s hesitation. I am putting twenties in their pockets. They nod and say stuff like “Good to see you again” or “Have fun tonight.” We usually do. One night we are in a club—a minimal, throbbing place with pure white light emanating from the floor, sort of like the Korova Milk Bar only without naked women for tables—sitting in the back, when the Disaster starts elbowing me. He nods across the room, and I look in the general direction and lock eyes with the most beautiful girl in the entire world—only for a split second, of course, then I avert my stare to the floor. I glance back up again, and she is smiling at me.

  “Lookit that, man,” the Disaster whispers in my ear. “She’s lovin’ you.”

  It would appear she is. She motions for us to come over and join her table, and the Disaster and I get up and make our way across the dance floor, nodding our heads to the beat, praying not to trip or spill our drinks. Everything is happening in slow motion. She is smiling at me and biting the corner of her lip. One of her friends whispers something to her and she nods and laughs. She covers her mouth with her hand. My heart is racing, I am understandably nervous.

  “Hi,” she shouts over the music. “Have a seat.”

  Her circle of friends parts and I am suddenly sitting right next to her, my hands nearly in her lap. She leans in close to talk to me, and I can see down her dress a bit, down into the promised land. I can smell her perfume. You can tell it’s expensive. She is poured into something backless or strapless; either way, it’s missing essential parts. And when I say poured, I mean more like half a glass—but definitely of something strong. I introduce myself and the Disaster, who is across the table, in between two girls who on any other night, in any other city, would’ve been the center of attention. They are gorgeous, otherworldly. Long necks laced with diamonds. They are slightly annoyed by the Disaster’s presence, sitting upright and rigid, their eyes forward. He looks as if his head were about to explode. He has made it to the top of the mountain.

  “I know who you are,” she shouts in my ear. “I’ve seen your picture.”

  This is a key moment in all young celebrities’ lives, the instant when they stop wondering and just know that they are different from the rest; that the world will stop for them. She figured this out a long time ago. Her skin shines as if it had been buffed with diamonds. Chances are pretty good it actually was. She is not mortal. She is something greater. How do you make small talk with someone like her?

  “So . . .” is about all I can muster. “Hi . . .”

  There is a pregnant hush around the table, everyone is craning their necks to hear me speak. I clear my throat and don’t know what to say next. The pressure is mounting, my palms are sweating. She has reduced me to a panting, stuttering teenager. I am drowning.

  “Relax.” She smiles and touches my arm. “Have a drink.”

  She knows exactly what she wants, and she doesn’t have time for games. She has seen and heard it all before. She is not impressed by any of it. Yet, as the night goes on, she seems positively fascinated by m
e, laughing at the stupid jokes I eventually make, leaning into my shoulder. She’s like a cat toying with a mouse, batting me around with her paws, savoring the moments before she sinks her teeth in. The drinks flow, the music blares, the people stare, and suddenly it’s two in the morning and she is asking me what I’m doing now, and if I’d like to come back to her place. She asks this merely as a formality: she knows I’m coming back with her, that we all are, and that we will stay for exactly as long as she wants us to, do anything she asks of us, because she is who she is, and that’s the way it is. We leave the club, and photographers outside take her picture. They shout her name and ask her questions, but she doesn’t even acknowledge their presence. It is as if they don’t even exist to her, and she would walk through them if she could. Her friends form a protective barrier around her, usher her to a waiting SUV. The Disaster and I go with them, eyes wide, dumbfounded. You can see us in the background of some of the pictures. We look ridiculous.

  She climbs into the passenger seat of the SUV—the photographers bringing their cameras low just in case she’s not wearing underwear—and we pile in the back. Her friend is driving, driving right through the throngs of photographers, honking her horn almost as an afterthought. They pound on the windshield and snap away; the light from their cameras is blinding. Now I understand why celebrities are always wearing sunglasses. From the front seat, she is laughing, and she turns back and smiles at me.

  “Sometimes they’ll stick their feet under the tires on purpose,” she says. “So they can sue you. That’s why Cookie is honking the horn. You have to prove there was no malicious intent. Look at them, they’re so . . . ridiculous.”

  She says ridiculous the way normal people say rat or cancer, with pure disdain. We pull away from the madness and head up into the Hills. At a red light, a couple in the car next to us look up and do a double take. They start waving and she smiles, says, “Whateverrr,” under her breath. We pull away and the couple have a nice story to tell everyone at their next dinner party. We climb higher into the night, and she is skipping through tracks on the CD player now and rolling down the window, sticking her head out into the night and shouting to no one in particular, “Fuck!” Everyone in the car laughs and nods. They know exactly what she’s talking about. The Disaster and I exchange glances from the backseat. She lights a cigarette and talks to the car about the house of Balenciaga or something, laughs loudly at some joke Cookie makes, calls her a “cunt.” We bend around curves, the headlights illuminating the road ahead. We pull up to a gate that opens slowly, then we are inside. The lights in the house turn on automatically. No one is amazed by this except for the Disaster and me. Everyone piles out of the car and goes inside. More drinks.

  She sits on the floor in the middle of the room, legs crossed, smoking a cigarette and talking about Damien Hirst’s diamond-encrusted skull. She makes wild gestures with her arms; her voice is low and scratchy around the edges. It sounds as if it hurts her to speak, but she only stops when the mirror gets passed her way, then she ducks her head down and makes a few lines disappear. Her hair is long and straight and covers her entire face when she’s snorting. When she’s done, she knocks her head back and brushes the hair out of her eyes, laughs, and screams, “Oh, my Goddd.” Her friends all laugh. Now she’s at the stereo—what the rich refer to as “the entertainment center”—fumbling through some CDs, knocking stacks of them onto the tiled floor. She’s shouting for Cookie to come help her find the Stooges album . . . “Cookie! Cooooookie, you cunt, where’s the Stooges?” she cackles. “Cookieeee! Stoooges!” She is out of her mind. “Coo-kie!” she cries, then, silence, some more rummaging, more shit falling onto the ground, followed by “Found it!” She walks away as Raw Power cranks from the speakers at unfathomable volume, pulls open the massive glass doors to her balcony, and dances out into the darkness as Iggy wails about being a streetwalking cheetah with a heart full of napalm. She is shouting and thrusting her middle fingers toward the heavens. Judging from the looks in the room, this occurs fairly regularly. Her neighbors must hate her.

  I excuse myself from the room, and nobody so much as looks at me, not even the Disaster, who is sunk deep in an armchair, watching the show in disbelief. I wander down the hallways, upstairs to another massive sitting room, lined with leather-bound books, unopened, bought for decorative purposes, with a fireplace filled with candles, spatters of wax on the floor. “Gimme Danger” is blasting downstairs, nearly drowning out her voice but not quite, and I can hear her laughing about something and squealing with delight. I go into an adjoining room, this one filled with religious artifacts—a hanging cast-iron cross, a book covered in golden Sanskrit—as if her interior decorator were trying to cover all the bases. The flat-screen TV on the far wall has probably never been turned on; the remote and the manual sit on a glass coffee table, still wrapped in plastic. I go into the bathroom for no other reason than I can—I mean, how often do you get to see a bathroom like this?—only it’s clear this isn’t her bathroom, just one reserved for her many guests. You can tell no one’s been in here for a while; the medicine cabinet is empty, the sink is clean. This whole wing of the house is like a natural-history museum. I look at myself in the mirror and just smile. . . . What am I doing here? How is this happening?

  When I head back downstairs, side two of Raw Power is already under way, only it’s blasting to an empty room. Everyone has gone off to their respective corner of the house, to do whatever it is you do when you live in the guest wing of a celebrity’s mansion (more cocaine?). The Disaster is gone too, which makes me chuckle a bit to myself. This kid from Florida, this wonderful son of the New South, is probably passed out in bed with a swan-necked model folded around him, a mirror on the bedside table, a mirror on the ceiling, smiling and snoring and dreaming big American dreams, the kind that aren’t possible anywhere else but Hollywood. Tomorrow he will be bloated and red-eyed and hoarse, but he will still tell me all about his adventures, will spare no detail, will begin most sentences with “An’ got-damn,” will end them with a weary chuckle. He is perhaps the most predictable person I’ve ever met, the most dependable. You can set your watch to him.

  “What are you laughing at,” she purrs from the balcony, just as “I Need Somebody” is trailing off.

  I smile and shrug. She beckons for me to come outside. I don’t have any choice in the matter. The air is crisp, slightly cool. The lights of Los Angeles twinkle in the distance. She is leaning against the railing of her balcony, her amber hair flowing out into the canyon. She is looking right into me, biting the corner of her lip again. She is getting ready to sink her teeth into me.

  “I think it’s so cute how you little punk boys act like you hate girls,” she jokes, lighting another cigarette. “It’s like we’re your enemies or something.”

  I tell her to replace girls with everyone and she’d be onto something. The whole night has been leading up to this moment, when we would be alone in the dark, her friends gone off into their own little worlds. It has been perfectly planned, a well-organized, businesslike seduction. You get the feeling she has done this before. She knows what she wants. She draws closer to me, her eyes looking up into mine, and she puts her hands on my chest, inching her lips closer, and then we kiss, and she bites my lip and pulls back, asks me, “Where are you sleeping tonight?”

  It’s a mere formality. She already knows the answer.

  23

  The sun is coming up but we’re still awake. She lies next to me, in all her glory; the morning light is soft and blue and makes her skin glow. I want to trace the freckles on her shoulders into constellations. I want to map every square inch of her. She smokes a cigarette and looks up at the ceiling, casually stroking my leg, sighing. I kiss the top of her head to keep up the illusion. She keeps excusing herself to the bathroom and I know how it goes.

  I fall asleep and have the most insane dreams. She shakes me awake a few hours later, her face hovering above mine. She tells me she’s been watching me, says it wa
s adorable. The ashtray by the chair backs up her story. I don’t think she’s slept—I don’t know, she could have—and she’s still as wired and lean as she was last night. She tells me we’re going to a hotel, and I don’t understand why, but I agree. I have to. I take a shower and put on the same clothes I wore the previous night. We barrel back down the hill in her SUV, and at least three cars are trailing us, photographers who accelerate around blind curves and try to overtake us, try to box us in. They dutifully fall back into line with the approach of oncoming traffic, then attempt to zoom ahead again when the road is clear. She is laughing and calling them “fuckers.” It is the most pointless car chase I have ever been a part of.

  We walk to the coffee shop in the hotel lobby, making our way through a wall of even more photographers, all of who seemed to know we’d be lunching here. She is careful not to grab my hand as we navigate past the lenses. Inside, we take a seat that’s near enough to the window—a happy accident—and everyone in the place notices. They’re all either blatantly staring at us or trying hard to make it look as if they were not. Either way it makes my skin crawl. I hide my eyes in the shoulder of her jacket. We sit next to each other—not across from each other—at a booth. Outside, the photographers trample the shrubbery to take our picture. She pretends not to notice. I can’t do the same.

  “Should we, you know, move?” I ask.

  “It’s fine,” she says flatly, like I’ve let her down. Then she strokes my hair with her hand, laughs at nothing in particular. It is a great photo op.

  I struggle to stay awake, but we’re both so fucking out of it. She’s high on whatever comes out of that little bag and goes up her nose in the bathroom. I’m just along for the ride. I am aware of exactly what we are, and exactly what this is. Business, pure and simple. A way to make the tabloids. “Who Is Her New Man?” the headlines will scream. If only they knew I’m just her man for the day, someone preselected to give her the edge her career needs. Her “rocker boyfriend,” as the tabloids will put it. The waitress comes by and I order a ginger ale. I pull my hood over my head and kiss her neck to keep up the act. The hotel manager lowers the screens on the windows now, as a courtesy to her. It’s feeding time at the zoo.