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The hiatus – that they were refusing to name – was turning out … not awful. Granted, Patrick couldn’t say he’d had a break since the band, well, took a break. Almost immediately, he’d started putting things together for a solo album. He had no idea yet if it would see the light of day, if he was actually confident enough to go at that alone, but he was having fun with it nonetheless.
Editing arrangements, re-familiarizing himself with the instruments he didn’t get to play with as often as he’d like – as often as he should - to keep up with his skill level. All of it was keeping him plenty busy. Everything seemed to flow, though. If he found himself sometimes wanting to look over his shoulder for someone to agree with him – or disagree and spark a whole event – no one needed to know.
Everyone probably knew. The worst part – best, maybe – was that he was realizing he wasn’t usually looking for input, just a sounding board. Some of the conversations with Joe – the upsetting ones Patrick hadn’t been ready for – were starting to make more sense.
But it was still fun. Patrick was having a ball. Sometimes it was lonely, but he was building his own sound. He knew people would hate it – hadn’t they heard enough of that following Folie à Deux? Some would complain that he just wasn’t … Fall Out Boy, but for the first time in his entire adult life, Patrick didn’t have to be. So, hopefully, others would listen and connect. And it would all be without labels, managers, anyone telling him he needed to maintain a certain sound and image.
He could pull an entire rejuvenation. Change his look. Change his whole entire life. No one said it was going to be easy, but it was so incredibly … freeing.
That is, until he started on the lyrics.
When Patrick tried to put words to the music, there was an inexplicable disconnect. Even things that looked great on paper or sounded fantastic in his head didn’t seem to hold up. That’s when Patrick realized exactly what his problem was, what was missing.
He tried to hold it off, wait it out. They were taking a break. Sure, there had been a few texts, but they were all keeping contact to a minimum. More than just a break from the music and the band, this was a break from each other.
Patrick made it two weeks.
Playing and perfecting the arrangements were nice distractions, but there always came the party when he couldn’t do anything else without the vocals. But the vocals just wouldn’t work. Patrick had done production, guest vocals, bossed around guest vocalists. This should be the easy part. Something had to be done, and Patrick wanted to hate himself for it.
To keep some semblance of distance, Patrick sent an email. He didn’t grovel or ask for input, didn’t want to lock Pete into that when Pete was always under the gun and spending some much needed time on getting old – and less aged – issues in check. Instead, Patrick took a page out of Pete’s book, a wave of nostalgia for the way they communicated and shared thoughts so long ago. He kept it simple.
Working is different alone. Followed by a single verse.
Pete – being Pete and living in a time zone that effectively put him in Patrick’s past – responded about eight hours later when Patrick was finally trying to sleep around 3 A.M. The response was less in-depth and dramatic than Patrick could have expected years ago.
New therapist sucks. with a slightly revised verse underneath.
The words were all the same, but a tiny line shift made all the difference. It was equal parts annoying and amazing how that happened.
Patrick tried to put a limitation on his blatant solicitation. Words were sliding almost easily into lyrics that recorded easily as vocals against Patrick’s pre-recorded backing tracks. At least for some songs. The ones that didn’t work kept getting pushed back until Patrick was driving himself half-insane.
But every email he sent received a reply, tiny reworkings that weren’t Pete trying to change anything, just Pete helping Patrick twist what was already there.
Then something strange happened.
Patrick sent a verse for what he was tentatively calling “Allie” and received … prose. Pages upon pages of prose. But it wasn’t a stream of consciousness ramble that usually marked Pete’s decent – ascent? – into mania.
No, this was a novel. A written, more coherent than a journal, novel to a story Patrick knew all too well. And he had absolutely no idea what to do with it.
So he did what he’d always done. He read what Pete wrote. Gave the words his full attention - the way Pete obviously was with Patrick’s - and only offered vague suggestions that didn’t change anything. They went back and forth this way for a while, tagging each other with emails full of their words and offering small suggestions that didn’t change much – even when Patrick wanted to grin and reminisce about all the lyrics he was seeing Pete pepper throughout this … thing he was working on.
When they finally stopped, Patrick had an LP's worth of songs to send Pete, and Pete had tacked fin onto the bottom of the last page.
They were … finished. Respectively. And Patrick didn’t know what to do with himself. Now that they were both essentially finished with their projects, Patrick didn’t know what the rules would be and how he and Pete could still interact in this context of a break.
Patrick just really missed his friend.
In the end, he shouldn’t have been so worried. As always, Pete did his thing and bridged the divide.
“Have I told you lately that you’re a little magic?” Pete asked in lieu of a greeting when he called two days later.
Laughing, Patrick sagged in relief, breaking his gaze away from the tracks mocking him from his laptop screen. “I’m pretty sure you text me that yesterday morning at 6, actually, when you found that weird shirt we made when we had that random show that time.”
It was so vague that no one should understand, but Pete laughed, loud and braying and everything that made Pete fun. “Probably. But this time I mean those tracks you sent. Your solo shit is killer, man. Seriously.”
Patrick tried and failed not to blush; at least this wasn’t a Skype or FaceTime call. Pete and Patrick had a lot of years of humoring each other under their belts, but that never involved the important things. Everything professional meant honesty – brutal and unwavering – and a disregard for hurt feelings and pride.
The setup had been working for them since about 40 minutes after the started working together.
“Thanks. You helped a lot. I wouldn’t – “ Patrick hadn’t been this much of a mess about words in quite some time, especially with Pete. But this felt different since it was Patrick’s solo work as opposed to an actual joint effort.
“You’re selling yourself short again.” Pete snorted. “You know how much I hate that.”
This was a conversation they’d had off-and-on for years. Patrick had been coming into his own for over a decade, but self-confidence was always going to be something he second-guessed. Even when he faked it well.
“Yeah, I do,” Patrick chuckled softly. They lapsed into silence for a moment, Pete rustling around with … something Patrick didn’t even want to identify … was the only sound breaking the monotony. If Pete wasn’t trying to end the call or talking a mile a minute, he wanted something. Judging from Pete’s opening line, they were having sharing/caring hour – which was just fine with Patrick.
“So that … novel you sent me?” Patrick wasn’t sure where to go from there. “That was a lot of … was it autobiographical?” Granted, all the identified characters were obvious but renamed. Which Patrick found interesting.
If Pete was writing this for himself, why bother with that? The guy made terribly un-subtle blogging an artform before it was all the rage.
“Remember that time I had that therapist that wanted to do trauma therapy, and I called it bullshit?” The connection between therapy and this novel wasn’t readily apparent, but Patrick was well-versed in Pete’s tangents. They’d follow the road map and get back to the point … eventually.
Patrick sighed, unamused memories of that night coming back. He’d read the information brochure on the method with Pete and thought it might help. Pete, however, had been less … enthusiastic and had changed to a psychiatrist more willing to medicate and move on not long afterward.
“The new one wanted to try it so why the fuck not, right?” Pete sighed from somewhere deep in his chest. If Patrick wasn’t so used to it - so well trained in all Pete’s cues - he’d have missed it. “So I had to write it all. She called it a trauma narrative. It’s everything that happened. And then share it.”
“So you shared it with me?”
The silence stretched on for a long time, so long that Patrick started counting the minutes. When Pete finally spoke he sounded … shy. “I thought. Who better than my best friend? You’d been there for most of it anyway. I … wanted to make sure that if someone was getting it in my own words, they would know it all already or at least more than anyone else.”
“Pete,” Patrick breathed the name and was already closing computer programs to bring up his email and read through the whole ordeal again. He’d been an avid reader the first time around, but he wanted to make sure this – Pete’s literal root issues – got the appropriate level of attention.
“I tried to do it with songs. But I just handed her a mix of the albums, and she was disappointed I was trying to cop out of the whole thing.” Even though Pete laughed, Patrick could hear the embarrassment in his voice.
“Half of it is lyrics anyway,” Patrick said, at a loss for one of the first times with Pete in years.
“They still fit. I’d already written my story and made you sing them on stage. I still don’t get why I had to do this now.”
“It’s part of the – “
“Process,” Pete cut in. “I know. That’s what everyone says. So that’s what I’m doing.”
Humming, Patrick wheeled his chair around and pressed his toes against the wall, balancing his laptop against his knees and hoping his chair didn’t tip. “You changed the end.” While Pete had maybe had nightmares – not maybe, Patrick had been woken up more than once on tour buses and in shared hotel rooms over the years to know that the grand finale hadn’t happened anywhere but Pete’s – sometimes extremely fucked up – subconscious.
“Makes for better reading.” Without missing a beat, Pete launched into an explanation. “If I’m writing this, I want to do something with it. I’ve been talking to a few people. I have one of the MTV news guys practically fucking begging to help turn it … “
“Coherent?” Patrick was scrolling to find the original email, where everything started. There was no denying that the whole work read like a ramble. As someone who had copious experience with trying to make sense of Pete’s stream of consciousness nonsense in lyric form, he’d known how to navigate and decipher Pete’s words. The average person had a little more trouble, probably.
Pete laughed, long and loud. “Yep. Piece it together until people can make sense of it. I do everything else, why not break into books?”
Conversation catching up with him, Patrick startled himself into huffing laughter. “Wait. Pete. I think when your therapist said write and share your trauma narrative she didn’t actually mean write a novel and find a publisher.”
“Whatever, I do what I want.” The smile was bright in his voice. He sobered some after a moment, the way he always did when he didn’t want something to be serious but it was. “Everything I do is public. Yeah, the world needs a little less … me. You guys need a little less of my shadow hanging over you, but this is … It’s real, Patrick. It’s not media attention and tabloids or my mistakes turning into scandals on accident. This is me telling it the way my head sees it and letting people get it. And after listening to people that the lyrics hit … “
“You think they might need to hear it from you to feel like their lives are real too.”
Fucking Pete.
If he thought his problems – diagnosed or experiential – might actually help someone that felt like he had for so long – did so often, still – then it was worth it to him. Even when Pete thought he was just some fucked up kid who had accidentally grown up and landed a ton of responsibilities, he was one of the most respectable people Patrick knew.
“Might help somewhere. Those kids in the Midwest that don’t get the connections, right?” Pete’s voice had gone soft and sincere.
“Right,” Patrick agreed. “You usually are.”
“And you’re getting too good at lying to me. That shit sounded honest.”
“Because it was.” Shaking his head, Patrick shuffled around to re-balance the laptop and start searching for flights. Pete sometimes needed to see a face he knew never judged him, and Patrick sometimes just needed to make sure his friendships held up, even when they’d essentially cut everything down and off. “If I was to look up a flight right now – “
“You know my card number.” Pete didn’t let Patrick finish. “Could maybe use some time seeing those Midwest kids again.”
Patrick knew how to play off Pete’s mood changes, especially when Patrick was the one causing it or shifting it in the first place. “You just want them to fangirl out at you. L.A. is less impressed by everything.”
“So’s New York. But Chicago never lets me down.”
“One of the few things,” Patrick started searching, looking for the fewest layovers between Pete and himself.
“You don’t, either.” Sometimes when Pete said it, he was playing and turning their whole entire lives into a joke. Times like this, he was being ridiculously earnest.
The pang in his chest was more than the nostalgia from earlier. It was the loneliness of going too long without your family around.
“You just miss the attention.” Patrick wanted to keep it light and let this conversation fade into something lighter than actual conversations with any of Patrick’s best friends had been in ages.
“I just miss you.”
Patrick smiled at his screen, finally accepting that this break was actually a break. Maybe he finally got the reason everyone had lost their shit when they announced they were doing their own things for a while.
A lot of things seemed like goodbye that weren’t. But goodbyes were never really forever, at least not when Pete Wentz was involved.