Gray - By Pete Wentz Page 0,53

in spite of me.

My hands shake a bit when I pick up my guitar. It feels impossibly heavy around my neck, like a weight I can’t bear to hold. After a few minutes, the heft goes away. My guitar feels like a weapon again. Suddenly the pills and the sorrow and the flight towers don’t seem to matter all that much. I don’t know why. Martin whispers that he’s sorry. I tell him not to be. I play along to a track, fumbling the beat a few times before getting it right. Behind the glass, our producer looks at me with tender, worried eyes. I will not let him down. I will not let anyone in this room down. Not today, at least.

That night, with my pills staring at me from under my pillow, I write Her my first clearheaded e-mail in a long while. I apologize for making Her worry, I tell Her I’m feeling better, though I don’t even try to explain why. I haven’t quite figured it out myself. I include a passage extolling the virtues of love and sanity, compare Her to a lighthouse in a churning sea. My beacon. I am sure it will leave Her breathless. The next morning she replies with You have a spot in my heart that could never be replaced.

It makes me laugh just a little. It’s funny the way people only say shit like that right before they replace you.

20

Big things are happening. We are finishing the record. We are mastering and mixing and multitracking, seated behind great boards, nodding our heads to the beat, using words such as tone and pitch and low end as if we were industry pros. The guys at the studio humor our requests. It’s sort of funny.

We are due to leave Los Angeles in a few weeks, scheduled to fly to New York to play the record for the folks at the label, to have meetings and do press and assuage stockholders. A tour is being planned. It is all very professional. The idea of boarding an airplane and traveling across the United States terrifies me. All those mountains and lakes and cities, all those places in which to crash. I’m not sure where I picked up this fear of flying, but it’s real and not going away. I’m not sure how I’ll manage, but I’m trying to take things one day at a time. The shrink told me that. I’m meeting with him regularly now, and while I won’t bore you with the details, he seems like a genuinely good guy. He tells me amazing stories about the guys in Mötley Crüe going on drug binges and buying automatic weapons and barricading themselves in hotel rooms. He has seen it all. He is trying to get me to meditate with him, and we take drives down to secluded beaches, sit on mats, and watch the pelicans swoop up and down the coastline. And, yes, he does, in fact, have a dangly earring.

I haven’t paged the Soap Opera Doctor in a few weeks. That doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m cutting out all the pills, but, rather, that I’m refusing to refill my prescriptions. I say good-bye to the tandospirones that you can only get in China, and the buspirones and the eptapirones that made my head whirl. I watch as the Zolofts and Ativans and Klonopins slowly dwindle away, and when they finally disappear, all I’m left with is some Tylenol PMs. Enough of them will do in a pinch. Everyone is a little less worried about me. The Death Watch is officially over. No one is afraid to wake me up in the mornings anymore.

This is all happening when she decides to leave me. We had a fight after I told Her that things were going well with the band, that I was excited again and that I hadn’t thought about quitting in a few weeks. I told Her that I was considering staying in Los Angeles and thought she should move out here to be with me. After all, I joked, it’s closer to Berkeley than the North Side of Chicago. She didn’t laugh. This was apparently the final straw. The next day, she is on the phone to me, saying she knew this day was coming, and that she couldn’t sit by and watch me kill myself. She said we had been stuck in place and she owed it to Herself to move on. I didn’t necessarily disagree with Her.