Gray - By Pete Wentz Page 0,20

left. I’m not sure why. My phone vibrates every half hour or so, Her name flashing on the screen, but I let it go straight to voice mail. I listen to Her messages in the bathroom of the studio, away from the other guys, the tap running while I swallow my pills. As Her voice spills into my ear (“Hey . . . it’s me . . . where are you?”), I stare at myself in the mirror and realize that I am nothing more than a smile with a heartbeat attached to it . . . skeletal, muscular, and circulatory systems, all color coded. Major veins and arteries. Major organs, easily removed. I am a living version of the Visible Man. You can see directly into me. I place an Ativan on my tongue, gulp it down with water from the tap. Watch now as it makes its way to my stomach. Follow it into my bloodstream. See it attach itself to the receptors in my brain. I’m here for your education.

After the first dozen messages, the Heys get more panicked, and the I love yous become less frequent. She’s worried about me, she says, and for whatever reason I don’t seem to mind. I’m teaching Her a lesson . . . don’t believe in me, and this is what you get. But then the Ativan rolls in over me like a warm fog, and my eyelids start to get heavy, and I start to feel bad for Her, so I decide it’s time to return Her calls. She answers, and Her voice is filled with genuine relief (“Oh, thank God!”), but that quickly fades when I tell Her where I am. She asks me why I didn’t call, and maybe it’s the Ativan, but I tell Her the truth: I say I’m not really sure why.

I hear Her light up a cigarette on the other end of the phone, breathe out smoke with a gust. There’s silence for a minute, then she asks when I’m coming home, and I say I don’t know. A few weeks maybe. She asks me what I’m going to do about my medication, or my psychiatrist, and I tell Her I haven’t thought about either of them. And that I don’t care. She asks what’s wrong with me, why am I acting like this, and I say I’m not sure. Then she says she has to go to class, and there’s another minute of silence. I tell Her I’m sorry, but she just says, “Yeah,” and hangs up. There’s no I love you, just dead silence. I turn the tap off and walk back into the studio. I leave my phone sitting on the edge of the sink.

Here’s how the next few weeks go: We start working on the album. We learn that while Nirvana recorded a bunch of songs for Nevermind in the studio we’re in, just one actually ended up on the album (“Polly,” in case you were wondering). We are bummed out by this. We take breaks from recording and walk down to Lake Monona, which is still frozen solid. We step out onto the surface, like little kids, and try to slide all the way to downtown. We attempt ice fishing, with little success.

We learn that Madison is a great town, especially if you like aging hippies and date-rapist/frat-guy types. The Animal tries to fight a group of the latter down on State Street. He punches one of them in the eye and it makes a sound like a water balloon bursting. There’s blood on the icy sidewalk. He says the power of Dave Grohl compelled him to do it. We disappear into the night before the cops can show up.

We sleep on some chick’s floor in the University of Wisconsin dorms. We have no money, so we survive on Fritos and Mountain Dew. But none of that matters. The album is humming along—for the first time, I’m getting my lyrics in the songs—and the music sounds big and shiny . . . like the way a real album should sound. We are becoming a real band. It doesn’t matter that the temperature is in the single digits during the day, or that we are surrounded by burned-out professors and drunken bullies. In fact, that makes everything even better. We’re a band of brothers . . . and we’re out here alone, behind enemy lines. We know no one and don’t need to apologize for our actions. We are