Book of my favorite Petericks

The Fight That Turned Heated

When was the last time you hit someone?

My last real physical fight was with Patrick, our singer, on the road, years ago. I strangled him against our van. I had been up forever and was totally out of my head and he said something about me being crazy or something. I have a short fuse, but it doesn't work out, 'cause I'm, like, four-foot-seven...

- Pete Wentz in Blender, March 2007

Pete hasn't slept in five days.

He's got a cocktail of pills leaking through his blood, slow poison spreading down his spine. What a funny kind of straight-edge boy to have this many drugs in his system...It sing-songs in the back of Pete's brain and he tilts his head back against the wall, bricks cold along his bones. Laughs into the night air, totally humorless.

"You okay, dude?" Someone's shimmering at the periphery of his vision - Pete can't see for shit, everything's in double these days like fucking Fight Club or something. - Andy? Joe? Not Patrick, he always knows when it's Patrick, just knows somehow - Catching the faint whiff of shitty weed, so. Joe, then. A good kid, Joe Troh. Pete thinks, Stay back. Rather not infect you with the crazy. He gets this feeling sometimes (all the time) that there's something toxic about the whole essence of him, like anyone spending too much time in the general Pete vicinity might catch it too, groupie chicks and pretty boys all wrecked wrecked wrecked by him, bands and girlfriends and fans and family and everyone, everyone he's ever known -

"Spec-fucking-tacular." Pete stretches his face into a Cheshire Cat grin, so wide it hurts. He can almost feel the skin splitting at the corners. If this were a horror movie, right about now it'd be peeling back to reveal something awful beneath. Pete's life might be simpler if it were a horror movie.

Shit, and isn't that a sweet bit of self-pity right there?

Joe eyes him uneasily, like he's going to say something, and then apparently thinks better of it. You can see everything on the faces of the stoned, it's like the power to read minds. Pete wishes he could really read other people's minds. Pete wishes he could read his own.

"Snap out of it, man," Joe says finally, "try to get some sleep or something." He turns toward the gas station. Pete watches the white parts of his Converse disappear into the darkness. "You look like hell."

The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a Hell of Heaven, a Heaven of Hell? Pete laughs again, and it sounds more like a sob in his own ears.

They've stopped to refuel in the middle of buttfuck nowhere, van parked by the pump out in front of a run-down gas station. Andy's holding them all up, trying to find something vegan in the crummy little food section. Good luck with that, Pete thinks viciously, we're in fucking beef country, idiot, and then winces at his own pettiness. Inspirational sonofabitch, he is. Wentz the wannabe rockstar, small-souled, shoddy-hearted.

He's just working himself into a nice morass of self-loathing when he catches a flash of jean jacket, redgold hair under the cheerless glow of the sodium lights. Patrick's ambling out of the gas station, sipping from a bottle of juice.

On some objective intellectual level Pete knows that this person's supposed to mean something to him, but everything's so flat and faraway and when Patrick clears his throat and says, "C'mon, Pete, let's go, everyone's already in the van" it sounds cold and distant in Pete's ears, dissociated like Patrick is never supposed to be.

He looks around and fuck, everyone else is already in the van. When the fuck did that happen? He just lost another fifteen minutes somewhere in there; sleeplessness and pills will contract and dilate your whole sense of space-time in the oddest ways. The world moves on as Pete Wentz flails, stuck like a moth on a pin, inside his own useless little brain.