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call it dumb call it luck call it whatever you call it
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For whatever reason, the one decent truck stop in all of Great Plains reminds Pete of home. He doesn’t know what it is -- maybe the Chicago-bright flashing signs? He sidesteps a wide oil puddle that managed to spill in the exact shape of Lake Michigan, and eyes the long expanse of overhanging roof looming in front of him. Its gotta be the cheesy interior of the attached restaurant, or something. It kinda reminds him of his aunt’s place.
It’s 3:23 a.m., and he’s been awake for days. It seems like it at least, but maybe he’s just been dead for years, and these last couple of months have been his grand homecoming to the gigantic mindfuck that is humanity. Yeah, maybe it’s something like that.
“Dude, dude.” Heavy footsteps hurrying over the dry pavement behind him (dry because this is Montana, Pete thinks to himself, not the Pacific Northwest -- so, no rain, kinda like Prince said -- or, no, Prince said purple rain, so who the hell was it who…) “Pete, wait up, hey.”
Patrick’s caught up beside him, then, but still pulling his vest on. And his shoelace is either undone or was never done up in the first place, but Pete thinks that’s pretty appropriate.
“No rain,” Pete mentions, looking over at Patrick, who is now fixing the collar of his shirt as they cross the gas pumps. “Why the hell can’t I remember who the hell sung that?”
Patrick raises one eyebrow. “Blind Melon, dude. Were you not alive in 1993?”
“I woulda remembered eventually,” Pete grins, pushing the hood of his sweatshirt back a bit to scratch behind his ear. Patrick gives him this condescending look that says he doesn’t believe it for a second. “Come on, dude, I haven’t slept in days. Give me a break.”
Patrick stops at the curb surrounding the gas station to bend down and tie his shoelace up, so Pete waits beside the garbage can and picks at his nails. When Patrick’s double knotted, fixed the cuffs of his pants, and brushed the dust off of his knees, Pete knows there isn’t much left to do, other than pull at the front of his shirt.
Patrick tugs at the front of his shirt, making sure it’s not too clingy.
“You’re very predictable to me,” Pete says, just for clarification purposes, as Patrick re-re-adjusts his collar and heads for the door. Pete makes a grab for it first, and glances over his shoulder as he tugs it open, back at the bus to see if they’ve been followed by any stragglers. Anyone who’s everyone in there is either still asleep, or already in the store.
And, as usual, Pete is somewhere in-between.
“I am so wanting some Chocodiles right now,” Patrick muses, ducking under Pete’s arm, and managing to catch the corner of his glasses on the sleeve of Pete’s hoodie.
Laughing, and temporarily broken out of whatever box Patrick could see he’d managed to trap himself into, Pete lets go of the door. The little bell overhead dings as Patrick steps inside, among the newspaper shelves and overwhelmingly tall Gatorade displays.
Pete immediately notices the top half of Joe’s head over a row of chips and cans of Pringles, which makes him laugh under his breath. Something about a half assed fro bobbing up and down and watching his best friend check out inappropriate magazines pseudo-incognito does that to a guy. He elbows Patrick a little to get him to look too, and gets a corner-smile in return.
The past middle-aged guy manning the front counter looks like he’s completely miserable to be there, and just from the pattern of his dress shirt, Pete would go so far as to guess that he’s a fan of the Beach Boys. Baby-boomer lost in the rush, he thinks.
Still smirking a little, egotistical to anyone who’d look and not know, he tucks his hands into the front pocket of his sweatshirt, and follows Patrick, who’s already wandered down the closest aisle. He’s also humming the bars to and I start to complain that there’s no rain. Pete smiles.
As usual, most of his shopping experience consists of following Patrick down each aisle, picking up whatever catches his eye on the way.
In the middle of the boxed soup and hot cereals section, he bumps into Joe, a magazine folded under one arm and an army of provisions in the other. He’s trying to decide on what flavor of Lean and Chunky soup he wants, so Pete does the courteous bromosh thing and points out carrot & rice. It’s a pretty kicking combination.
By the time they get to the counter, it seems like the entire bus convoy bumbling around outside has been refueled, and now everyone is just playing a waiting game with the three lost boys still in the store.
Patrick dumps all of his collected paraphernalia on the counter, and doesn’t gripe when Pete adds his in there, too.
“So what would you say is the better release,” Pete asks the clerk, still dutifully hovering over the cash register, and now ringing their items through. “Pet Sounds, or Endless Summer?”
There’s some kind of spark in -- Pete glances down at his nametag quickly, Hank, and that’s pretty appropriate for a truck stop attendant’s name, Pete thinks -- there’s some kind of spark in Hank’s eyes, like all of a sudden, he remembers.
“Pet Sounds,” He answers without thinking, like how Pete would say yeah forever or if you know what I mean whispered suggestively under his breath. Hank reaches across the counter to ring Patrick’s box of Chocodiles through. “It doesn’t get better than that.”
Grinning wide, Pete nods, even if he has no idea what Hank’s talking about, really, cause he’s never been that big a fan. But, he grins and nods, then reaches across the counter to grab Patrick’s grocery bag.
Patrick’s smirking with half his mouth, which Pete has learned is the equivalent to his own all-my-teeth-showing smile, as he hands over a twenty dollar bill.
“It’s just, you won’t ever get anything more fine than that,” Hank is still smiling and using his pointer fingers to pull the few coins in Patrick’s change out of the cash register till. “That album is all…” He leans away from the register, and reminisces into the space between the lotto tickets and cigarettes. “…summer nights and damp mornings… you know what I mean?”
Pete laughs out loud, surprised, and glances sideways at Patrick.
“I think I do,” He admits, pushing away from the counter with his elbow, fluidity in every step. Hank smiles down at him from his little cashier podium, and somehow Pete can see the remnants of the kid on the beach left in him, little shards stuck in his chest, in his dead eyes that maybe might one day have some life left in them.
Hank raises his eyebrows, gray and bushy and Pete sees him as the conductor on a train, maybe, or a banker. “Musicians these days, it won’t ever be the same as it was back then -- I don’t think they get it,” He tells Pete. “Maybe I’m just old, now, but…” He shrugs and glances out the wide-pane windows, at the line of buses and equipment vehicles crowding his gas pumps. Then he looks back at Pete. “You some kind of touring band, or something like that?…”
“Something,” Pete smiles, already turning away from the counter. “You have a good night, Hank.”
A nod of the head and one last smile, Hank reaches forward for Joe’s assortment of truck stop oddities, and somehow, Pete sees that summer shrink just a little bit.
“That was weird,” Patrick comments, once they’re back outside and the mild air is washing over Pete’s face. He glances over his shoulder, and watches Joe through the window, awkwardly trying to maneuver a bank card out of his wallet.
Pete shrugs and moves one arm, making this noise when the plastic bag bumps into his leg that reminds him of walking to elementary school in the snow. Reminds him of his pant legs in that fucking one piece snowsuit that he fell over in one time and couldn’t get back up, and how when he’d walk, the fabric would rub together and make this noise, shhh, shhh, shhh. Like it had a secret or something.
“What’d you buy, anyway?” Pete asks, trying to look into the bag through the holes in the handles looped over the palm of his hand. “I wasn’t even paying attention.”
They hear Joe come out of the store behind them, the sharp ring of the bell, and then the following noise of his flip-flops flapping over the pavement.
“The usual,” Patrick shrugs, pushing his glasses up by the nose. “Found that flavored popcorn shit you gorged on in Illinois and haven’t been able to find since.”
Pete’s eyebrows jump up into his hairline. “Oh dude, no way. Did you get me some? What flavor? Why didn’t I see it?”
“Grape.” Patrick looks vaguely seasick at the idea of grape flavored popcorn, but points to the bag Pete’s trying to rifle through anyway. “And you didn’t see it because you were mostly preoccupied with Joe’s dirty magazines, The Beach Boy, and walking behind me so you could watch my ass.”
Pete glances up, says guilty as charged without talking, and makes some kind of noise that amounts to “aha” when his fingers hit the hard tin packaging.
“You know what.” He looks up with his eyebrows still raised, and over at Patrick’s face. One of Patrick’s eyebrows raise, too. “Give me one of these.”
Reaching forward and grabbing Patrick’s hand, Pete maneuvers himself around until he’s walking backwards-in-front-of Patrick, and twists his thumb up, down, sideways, moves his wrist -- it’s only a half second before Patrick catches on. Secret handshake, circa argyle sweaters and awkward fitting shorts.
“You guys are so weird,” Joe comments, looking them over as he passes by with one arm digging through his own plastic bag. It’s in up to his elbow, it looks vaguely provocative.
Laughing, Pete unhooks his fingers and lets go, then reaches up to pull off his hood.
.
Somewhere in-between Billings and Livingston, the sun sets and then rises again, leaving Pete to the back couch and his grape flavored popcorn. Oh, and a burned copy of Better Off Dead.
He doesn’t know a better way to spend a night.
“Your phone is beeping or ringing or something,” Patrick says, coming through the narrow hallway-to-lounge doorway with Pete’s enthusiastic Sidekick in his hand.
Pete reaches out for the bane of his existence, and then pats the spot on the couch beside him for Patrick.
“John Cusack marathon. Me, you, and the next eight hours,” Pete explains, glancing between Patrick and where he’s logging into the messages on his phone. Patrick can’t help but grimace a bit at the idea of eight hours with Mr. Wonderful -- John, that is -- even though he doesn’t try to dart.
Nothing important, or immediate. Pete tosses the phone to his side.
“What about Xanadu instead,” Patrick suggests, going for the DVD drawer. “Gene Kelly.”
When Patrick sits himself down on the edge of the coffee table just to rummage through the drawer, Pete jabs him in the lower back with his toes. “Patrick Stump. That is the most homoerotic thing you’ve ever said to me.”
“It’s such a fucked up movie, come on!” Patrick hedges, managing to find the case wedged in-between someone’s scraggly notebook and a VHS rental for some Blockbuster in Toronto. He spins around on the table top, fully ignoring the socked feet still trying to push him off. “I bought you that purple shit all stuck in your teeth, come on.”
A dramatic sigh, but Pete relents without that much bitching.
Then he goes for another handful of grape flavored happiness.
.
if that ain’t love then I don’t know what love is.
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Patrick’s wandering around one of the halls at the back of the venue, contentedly mixing up the lyrics to all of his favorite seventies rhythm rock when the Polytone version of Golddigger is suddenly in a to the death competition with his voice. He hates it when he forgets to put his phone on vibrate, or even better, silent.
He also doesn’t bother looking at the caller ID, he knows who it is.
“What’s up,” He greets, heading to lean against the wall, pivoting until he’s shouldering it, and his cell phone is bending between the white painted cement blocks, and the side of his hat.
It’s Pete, of course. Because only a sardonic son of a bitch like that would secretly reset Patrick’s customized ringtone to Kanye.
“I’m lost,” He explains, even though he sounds pretty cheerful about whatever situation he’s managed to land himself in. Patrick only saw him last twenty minutes ago, it couldn’t be that bad. “But I could hear you singing, so I figure I’m getting closer.”
Snorting, Patrick rolls his shoulders against the wall until he’s resting against it with his back, and pushes his hat up a bit to scratch at his forehead.
“So I’m your trail of breadcrumbs, or something?”
Pete laughs, genuinely unguarded in that kinda dumb HA-HA-HA thing he does, where he sounds like he’s a Saturday morning cartoon character or prime time laugh track or something.
“Are you calling me a Goldilocks?” He asks. Patrick goes to say something, but looks up instead, when he hears a distinct echo following Pete’s words. He can see a shadow approaching down the hall. “This place is like a ghost town or something, where the hell is everybody?”
Patrick bends away from the wall, until he’s upright again and can see the height of the shadow growing, bending against the wall.
“Lunch. Or dinner. Or drunk,” He answers, half shrugging. Pete’s shoulder comes around the corner first, and then his head and shoes and that foolish look of recognition on his face.
At the other end of the hallway, and phone line, Pete says, “Hey. There you are.”
Patrick flips his phone closed, and holds it up with two fingers in some kind of weird offering to the God closing in at the end of the hall.
“Golddigger. Really?” He asks, when Pete’s close enough so he doesn’t have to shout.
Grinning wide and shameless, Pete sticks his hands in his pockets and shrugs. “It’s appropriate.”
“Cause Jamie Foxx left your ass for a white girl?” Patrick baffles, shuffling backwards, back towards his leaning wall. He shuffles until the backs of his shoes hit the wall, and then the back of his head and the curve of his shoulders.
Unacquainted with the concept of personal space, Pete steps in close, leaning half on the wall but mostly against Patrick’s arm. He looks half asleep, or half out of it, or half baked or half something. Two quarters of something that Patrick can’t figure out yet, anyway.
“You sleep last night?” Patrick asks, knowing the answer full well, knowing he was the one spread across the couch, on top of and beside and under and next to Pete all last night.
Pete rolls his eyes and sucks something off of his front teeth. He’s always bitching his teeth are too big or his jaw is too small or something, but Patrick thinks they’re pretty alright.
Instead of answering (it’s “no”), Pete shrugs and says, “I get a real bed tonight, one that isn’t going to cover five hundred miles in the time it takes me to get comfortable enough to maybe consider dozing off, so who knows. Maybe I’ll get lucky.”
“Yeah,” Patrick manages. He’s sick of sleeping inside coffins-in-motion too.
Pete watches him in this intensely-Pete kind of way, where his eyes are too -- something -- and his hips are just at -- some kind of -- angle. Patrick isn’t the wordsmith, he doesn’t know where to start in describing something that was created by -- someone -- like Pete.
“What are you thinking,” Patrick murmurs, feeling like he’s got pin point fingers, and just by talking he’s already started to poke holes in this twoboyshaped bubble that Pete has vigilantly created just for them.
Pete’s eyes flash, maybe it’s just thanks to the terrible overhead lighting Patrick’s been dealing with since the bathroom sink, but they do, and Patrick notices so that only means one thing --
“I’m thinking about grape popcorn,” He says, careful. Patrick should have rehearsed for a scene like this. “And the skin on the backs of your knees.”
Oh, somebody inside of Patrick’s head says, almost overwhelmed. If he wasn’t used to Pete-verse flooding the very back hallways of venues forever, now, maybe he would be that, overwhelmed.
But he’s Patrick, and if he wasn’t, Pete wouldn’t have said it.
“Yeah,” Patrick hushes, kind of stupidly, but Pete’s used to Patrick not knowing where to start or what to say, used to the interpretation that comes up somewhere between yeah and connects it to insomnia has nothing on hotel rooms and the palms of my hands. So he pulls the sleeve of Pete’s hoodie until he’s leaning close enough to kiss.
And then he does.
.
They’re stumbling down the red-white-then-blue interior of the hotel hallway, weighed down with backpacks and all the other luggage they carry around on tour, on roadways and behind alleyways.
“We’re out of here by six tomorrow,” Bob is telling them, Patrick doesn’t even know how he gets himself into these semi-coherent stages. Usually he isn’t. “You got from now, ‘til then.”
He and Pete veer off (roommates, bunkmates, buddies, sleepover pals, then-Pete used to snicker, when they’d first started pairing off into hotel rooms) to the first door they encounter. And luckily enough, Patrick’s got the matching keycard.
“New lyrics,” Pete sighs, leaning against the doorframe as Patrick tries the keycard, and then tries it again. Second red light. Damnit, he hates these stupid things. Shifting the majority of his bus-to-hotel-back-to-bus crap from one arm to the other, he tries it again. Pete half yawns, then shakes his head. “Never mind. I forgot them.”
Patrick’s eyes are so bleary and his brain is so dead that he almost doesn’t care.
(Almost.)
“You’ll remember,” He murmurs, voice rough. Not from lack of sleep, not from thirst, but maybe something else. Maybe he’s homesick, except this is his home. The keycard finally takes, and they listen as the door unlocks from the inside, and the little light flashes green.
Tossing the keycard on the table and himself on the closest bed, Patrick closes his eyes without much thought, and lays in the strip of light flooding in from the hallway until Pete closes the door. And then he just lays in complete darkness.
Pete dumps all of his stuff on the other bed, and falls down on the mattress next to Patrick, letting the box spring creak and leaving the hotel patrons wandering the hallways to imagine.
“I wonder if Hank has a family,” Pete says into the dark, in that moment where Patrick has already begun to drift off, fully clothed and heavily armed.
Preoccupied mostly with the drowning feeling in his mind, Patrick puts the effort into shifting his legs and a hand, but doesn’t open his eyes. “Who’s Hank.”
“The guy at the truck stop. Beach Boy Hank. You know.”
Patrick feels the blankets pull when Pete turns his head to the side to look at him. He wants Patrick to say something.
“Probably,” Patrick whispers out of habit and into the bed covers. “That’s why he works such a shitty job when he should be retired. To support his wife and kids.”
The covers pull again. Pete has gone back to looking at the ceiling.
“I wonder if he loves them enough,” Pete muses, crossing his hands over his stomach. Patrick feels the movement but doesn’t like where the conversation is heading.
He opens his eyes slow, battling the overwhelming feeling to just sleep, and looks over at the silver-lined profile of Pete’s face. He’s still watching the ceiling, not really blinking. Not much or even enough, anyways.
“I don’t know,” He answers, not knowing what else to say.
Pete lays there, absorbed in the ceiling tiles and maybe further than that, until Patrick just doesn’t remember anymore. He falls asleep in exactly three minutes, after a one hundred and twenty second grace period where he waited for Pete to say something else.
.
They’re all bleary-eyed but willing the next morning, sitting in a line on the concrete curb that surrounds the loading area of the hotel parking lot. Pete’s got both hands knotted in his hair and he’s yawning wide, the kind of yawn that makes Patrick’s jaw crack by association.
Joe and Andy are involved in what has come to be known as a distinctly Joe-and-Andy-only mumble and shrug conversation, angled towards each other in their own little daybreak symposium. Pete yawns again, not bothering to cover his mouth. His tongue is still stained a faint purple, lavender maybe.
Patrick never understood insomnia before he met Pete, the wide-awake but yawning revelation that could go on for days and days and days. Patrick is more of a forty winks and then go kind of guy, but can appreciate the gray colored nights and pink haze mornings that he sees Pete shamble through so often.
“Fuck,” Pete’s grumbling. Patrick glances over, one hand sleep-propping his head up so he can comfortably watch Pete fight with his hoodie pockets, and finally manage to produce his phone. Patrick yawns with his mouth closed and a hand covering that, and blinks the tired-tears from his eyes. “It’s -- what time is it -- whatever time it is, and this thing is already going off.”
Shuffling his feet against the pavement, Patrick looks out to where they’re pulling the tour bus around, ready to load, and says, “It’s 5:23 in the morning, and you like that thing going off.”
“Not today,” He snaps, and -- oh -- Patrick realizes it’s going to be one of those days.
‘Those days’ consisting of somber one liners and the heartsick lyrics that Patrick has become accustomed to over the years, ‘those days’ where Pete designs a whole new bubble just for himself, where he can be selfish and despondent and believe that nobody cares. Patrick fucking hates days like that.
“Just,” Patrick starts, and wants make the effort to be helpful, wants to say something like ‘try and sleep on the bus’ or ‘maybe the doctor was right with the pills…’ but he doesn’t, not right out loud at least.
Pete looks over at him, with these angled eyes that make Patrick feels rattled inside, rattled in the worst of ways. Folding his knees up against his chest to protect himself from the Depressive Force That Is Pete Wentz, he rests his chin on the back of his hands, and thinks about finishing up with maybe, don’t be like that. Just don’t be like that.
But, instead of bothering with the words he knows he doesn’t carry, Patrick just untangles one hand from where he kept it hidden between his knees, and reaches over, wrapping his fingers around Pete’s wrist instead. He’s still got a pulse, which means he’s still human, Patrick muses. And you know, he tries to understand, sometimes, thinks of how everything is just another round for Pete: me versus the drugs versus my words versus what matters most (you).
And when Patrick’s fingers close around, it’s like this significantly sized chunk of ground drops out from under Pete at just that second, a plateau that Patrick didn’t even realize he was balanced on. He closes his eyes, and they’re stained with days-old makeup, but instead of that, Patrick notices the alleviation in Pete’s face, an expression that looks like it opened the floodgates for a poorly shot drug trial infomercial.
Pete folds himself in half (flexible, some ridiculous part of Patrick’s mind thinks, but we knew that) and drops his head until his mouth is pressed flat against the curve of Patrick’s hand, the skin in-between his thumb and forefinger moving against the dry skin of Pete’s lips.
Patrick doesn’t know what else to do, so he just bows his head, and kisses the back of Pete’s skull, and his hair smells like the stale shampoo from two hotels ago, but that’s something familiar, and it’s maybe that familiar feeling that makes Patrick’s fingers tighten around Pete’s wrist.
“You guys,” Joe says, sounding a little exasperated from somewhere above them as he wipes the sidewalk remnants off of his ass with one hand, and holds a cup of lukewarm coffee in the other. “Piggyback each other to the bus or something, I don’t care, but let’s get going because I’m hungry.”
Laughing against the top of Pete’s head because it’s all he can do, Patrick closes his eyes, and curls his fingers up against Pete’s face when he feels teeth against his palm.
.
and I’m afraid I might give in.