Gray - By Pete Wentz Page 0,51

beginning or ending, just middles, deep blue oceans of letters and words with no feeling or meaning. They don’t make any sense at all. I start calling my mom’s work voice mail at two or three in the morning, leaving fifteen-minute-long messages about how I’m doing okay. I think I am making breakthroughs and announce my brilliant theories. I try to bring her to her knees. I try to say something that will eclipse all the love she has ever given me; something so big that it will open up a new perspective for her and set her free. That’s the least that I owe her. Most of the time, I delete the messages after I listen to them once or twice. Maybe one of these times, I will leave one for real.

I lie in bed and look through the personals in LA Weekly to see if anyone is lonelier than me. I like the ones in the Weekly because they’re the craziest and most desperate, and in Los Angeles, that’s saying something. There is an art to decoding them—it’s all semantics and verbiage—though it helps if you’re screwed up and on the brink of collapse as I am: “Still Searching” means “Confused and Lost.” “Free-Spirited” means “Crazy, or Even Possibly Psychotic.” “Thrill Seeker” means “I Like to Get High.” And “Adventuresome” means “Nymphomaniac.” The personal ads in Los Angeles are the saddest in the world. At least in cities like New York or Chicago there is hope, born primarily out of crowding—after all, you could be standing next to your soul mate on the train right now, or folding your unmentionables next to him or her at the Laundromat downstairs next weekend—but LA has nothing but great, impersonal distance, millions of lives spread across valleys and vistas, snarling lanes of traffic, sprawling, stuccoed apartment buildings. You could go an entire day without speaking to another living soul. People in LA are decaying and dying, breaking apart at the seams, scattered and hidden from view. All they’re looking for is someone to be miserable with. Odds are, they will never find that person. Geography and traffic patterns will see to it. I laugh about this every time. To myself.

Everyone around me is worried, everyone is looking at me with watery eyes and a concerned face. Speaking to me in sentences that trail off into silences. But the thing is, this all seems to be working. My brain has always been my enemy, and I’ve spent much of the past decade warring against it, with therapy and razor blades and bad behavior, with precision-guided prescriptions that targeted specific regions. Serotonin smart bombs and the like. I was prepared to fight this war forever, even if deep inside I knew I could never win it. There were civilian casualties (she was certainly one, many times over). Unexploded ordnances. Violations of the Geneva Convention. It was bad. Now—thanks to my new regimen of meds—my brain and I have entered into a new era of diplomacy. There are no bullets or bombs, no carnage, just man-made medicine, warm clouds of inhibitors and blockers that act as demilitarized zones. We are at armistice. We have secured peace in our time. Now every day is warm and soft, every minute feels like the time on an airplane just before takeoff, when the cabin becomes pressurized and your body is slowly being rocked back and forth, when you are teetering on the verge of sleep, when the voices of your fellow passengers blur and become part of the background, muted, soft, and sad. You close your eyes and drift away, and when you awaken, you are someplace else entirely. A new city, a different time zone. This happens to me almost every day, though usually I find myself standing on the pier in Santa Monica, or strolling down the boardwalk in Venice. No recollection of how I got here. No worries. I don’t even have to adjust my watch.

We begin working on the record. I am barely in the studio, preferring instead to spend my days either transporting around Los Angeles or buried beneath my bedsheets, shades drawn on my windows. I don’t do anything halfway. On this particular morning, I am hiding from the sun, neither alive nor dead . . . a zombie in training, when my phone rings. It’s Martin on the other end, asking if I feel like coming down to the studio today. I tell him maybe, and he says it’s been