Categories > Celebrities > My Chemical Romance > A Misfit's Guide to the 20 Ways
15# Be Devoted
22 ReviewsShow some sincerity.
Again, thank you so much reviewers. You have absolutely no idea how big the grin on my face is when I read the comments you guys have left. I’m really pleased (and a little confused) at how well people have taken this so...yeah. I’m a shut up now.
I apologise for the ridiculous shortness of this chapter.
Be Devoted
It is four thirty-five in the afternoon.
The hotel is empty. Everyone is spending their last few days in this great country by harassing model babes and blowing credit cards on fake designer nail files.
I am hiding in the closet under piles of hotel sheets. Nirvana is in my ears. I have not moved from this spot since 10 o’clock yesterday night.
It’s actually pretty comfortable.
I’m so ugly...
But that’s okay cos so are you
If incredibly depressing.
I thought it would be pretty funny to die like this. Ironic, you know? People could stand around at my funeral as my coffin gets lowered into the ground and say “Poor Frank. If only he had come out of the closet.” I know, I know, I’m such a joker. It’d be funny, though. You gotta admit.
Sunday morning is everyday
For all I care
And I'm not scared
Light my candles, in a daze
'Cause I've found God
I guess I’m partly hoping Gerard will find me and blame himself. Because it is his fault. I finally work up the courage to say something and...what? He doesn’t want to requite me? Fine. I’m going to kill myself.
Very slowly.
In a closet.
With Nirvana.
...
This suuuuuuuuuuuuuuucks. No ones going to laugh at my closet joke because no one’s going to find me. They’ll walk into my room, look around a little bit, see that I’m not lying on the bed or hanging from the window and walk out. Then they’ll all fly away and leave me rotting in the laundry closet and when Margarita the washing lady FINALLY finds me I’ll be all corpserfied and gross and no one will even care about my joke because they’ll be busy trying not to breathe in too quickly. Or else they won’t even bother to look for me. They’ll probably be pleased I’m gone.
Footsteps outside my room. A click of a key turning in the lock. I hurriedly switch my iPod off and hold my breath as whoever they are starts walking around my room. No problem. There’s no way they’ll find me here. I’m, like, a world renowned hide-and-seek specialist. Seriously. I won a medal once.
The closet door opens, flooding my tiny space with my light. Oooh it burns! It burns! I stretch my hands out in front of me, trying to hold onto some form of safe, comfortable darkness.
“Thou shalt not have my soul!” I scream.
“I don’t freaking want it, doofus,” says Cam. “Just get the hell out of the closet.”
Heehee. It sounds even funnier when I’m alive.
“No,” I reply stubbornly, hitching the blankets up to my chin. “I’m not moving. Ever. You can’t make me.”
Cam sighs, grasps my ankles and pulls. With a cry of anguish I am sent tumbling from the closet doors, holding onto the linen as a safety blanket. “Hey, no fair!” I squeal. “You do martial arts, way of the foot and the hand and all that shizz!”
“Tai chi is hardly going to help me much in a fair fight,” Cam rolls her eyes. “Now you wanna explain what the hell is going on here?”
“I’m dying.”
“Every day we die a little more.”
“No, I mean I’m trying to kill myself,” I clarify. “And what kind of saying is that anyway? Jesus.”
“And how exactly were you planning on doing that?”
I gesture towards the closet. “Suffocation. Starvation. Nirvana.”
“And what if you finished your Nirvana playlist before your slow death finally begins to take its toll, huh? Did you think about that?”
Fuck, she’s right! I glare at the iPod as if it has somehow let me down. Foiled. Foiled by a Zen Buddhist Yoga Master.
“But my life suuuuuuuuuucks,” I wine, shoving my toesies under the blankets because it’s getting a little chilly here. “Gerard doesn’t want to be with me. How am I supposed to take on the world alone?”
“What did he say, Frank?”
“He said there was no way he was about to go out with someone who knows so little about Batman.”
“He said that he didn’t think he was ready for a serious, same-sex relationship. And, more importantly, that he doesn’t think you’re ready.”
Carrottoppedtibetenmonkwannabe say what? “What?”
“When you said you wanted to be with him forever, he said “I’m not sure that you do”. That means he’s not just doubting himself...he’s doubting your sincerity.”
Wait. Je suis confuzzled. “So...you’re saying if I show him how much I want him then he might change his mind?”
“If you show him how seriously you’re taking this and thinking this through then there’s no reason why he shouldn’t.”
Right. I get it. I have to show him my devotion. I can do that. I jump up, my legs surprisingly springy after spending sixteen hours stuffed in the foetal position. Cam surveys me warily. “What are you doing?”
“Going to find Gerard,” I reply.
“Don’t you think maybe you should give him a little space? Maybe shower first-?”
“-No, I don’t,” I cut across her. “I think that I need to find him and find him NOW.”
And with that I run out of the room, not even bothering to close the door behind me, leaving Cam looking confused but not altogether surprised. I pause on the landing, looking down into the lobby below. Everyone’s back from the shopping trip now, the shopping trip that I missed because I was busy waiting for the Grimm Reaper to knock on my closet door. I wonder...would I have opened it? Or would I have ignored him just to be a piss-take?
Nah, I’d probably let him in. I like the Reaper. He seems like a pretty misunderstood guy.
“Gerard!” I say, spotting him immediately. He looks up, sees me and waves. Cynthia gives me an evil look but I ignore it. She’s not my problem anymore. Her life has no purpose.
I race down the stairs to meet them, conscious of all eyes on me. I guess I smell vaguely kebab-ish. Whatevs, they can deal. “Hey,” I breathe. “How was...um...shopping?”
“Good,” Gerard shrugs. “I bought converse.”
“I bought a hat,” says Ray cheerfully. “And a jacket and a t-shirt and a key ring and a swimsuit and a-”
“-Yeah, that’s great Ray,” I interrupt. “Gerard, can I take your bags up to your room for you?”
Gerard stares at me in bewilderment. “Um...Why?”
“Feel like it.”
“Then sure,” he hands me his bags and my shoulders almost collapse under the weight. How many fucking pairs of converse did he buy, for Godsake??
“You can take my bags,” Mikey scowls.
“In your dreams, short-stuff” I laugh and hurry up the stairs before he can work out the irony in that statement.
Things continue in much a similar fashion.
I attempt to do everything for Gerard. Tidy his hotel room, sort his comic books, lock Craig the Weather Guy in a cupboard, fill drinks, refill drinks, serve drinks, make snacks, everything I can think of I do. I can feel everyone’s eyes on me, wondering whether or not I have been abducted by aliens and my soul sucked out through my ass and replaced with another life form, helpful and eager to please. I know as much because Ray won’t shut up about it.
“So Frank, what time do you remember going to sleep?” he asks me as I set a bowl of pecan nuts down in front of him.
“I told you,” I reply. “About 11ish.”
“Aha!” he exclaims gleefully. “So the ship landed at about 10.30 and waited until you were unconscious to take you in through the porta rectum.”
“I don’t know what a porta rectum is,” says Gerard dubiously. “But I really don’t think the Millennium Falcon’s got one.”
He reaches for the TV remote, presently lying about six feet away from him, realises it’s a bit of a lost cause and lets his arm drop sadly. But before he can get up I push him down and go get it myself.
“Frank, what the hell?” he exclaims indignantly.
“I’m getting it,” I reply.
“What is up with you? You’re our friend, not our servant.”
“Speak for yourself,” snorts Mikey, shovelling nuts into his face.
Gerard offers him one lasting look of distaste before turning back to me. “Is everything okay?”
“Sure, fine, okay, just peachy,” I reply, reclining back against the hotel’s sitting room couch. “No problem.”
Gerard blinks. Ray blinks. Mikey burps. “Now you’re just saying words.”
“No I’m not,” I say mildly, grabbing a magazine off the coffee table and flipping through it, humming merrily.
Ray narrows his eyes suspiciously. “Hey, I know that song...” he says.
“Yeah, whatever Ray. Cos there’s noooo where to hide, since you pushed my love aside...”
Gerard frowns at me. “Seriously, Frank?”
I nod. “Seriously. I’m out of my head, hopelessly devoted to youuuuu...”
“That’s really fucking mature.”
“Oooooooh, hopelessly devoted to youuuuu-”
“Okay. You know what? If you can’t behave like an adult then fine.”
And with that he gets up and storms right out of the room. I just watch him, mouth hanging open like a moron. Ray wears a similar expression. Mikey burps.
“Now what the hell was that all about?” asks Ray.
I shrug feeling a dull pit where my stomach used to be.
“It was probably something to do with Frank acting like a total dick,” says Mikey conversationally in between mouthfuls of nuts. “And assuming that he could win Gerard through material means, thus assuming him to be both shallow, superficial and consumerist. Or it could have something to do that you knowingly took the piss out of his incompetence by singing a cheesy song from a 70s musical. One of the two, anyway.”
“I wasn’t taking the piss,” I mumble.
Mikey surveys me with a scarily Mikey-ish look over his wire-rimmed glasses. “Yes you were Frank,” he replies.
Okay, fine. Maybe I was slightly rubbing in the fact that I would do just about anything for a guy who can’t actually make his mind up on whether he likes cock or vaj. And maybe I intended it to sting a little. But that doesn’t mean he should go sulk about it! This is all his fault! I almost killed myself!
Mikey and Ray watch me anxiously. Suddenly I feel like I’m carrying the world on my shoulders, that my back is aching from the strain of it all, that there is nothing I would like more than to put down my burden and crash on a couch somewhere. I stare at my palms because it’s easier than looking at critical faces.
“What do you think I should do?” I ask them aloud.
They offer no words of comfort. No words at all. But then they wouldn’t. Because they’re my hands.
“You should give him some space,” Mikey offers. “In time he’ll come around.”
Give him some space. Right. If that’s what he wants. I haul myself to my feet and grab my jacket, hanging in the cloakroom by reception. Something strange has happened to my mind. Everything’s become a little less clear, objects are blurred at the edges and suddenly I feel tired, really tired. I stumble awkwardly for the door, throwing a last comment over my shoulder.
“Tell Cam where I’ve gone, yeah?” I say to no one in particular.
“Where have you gone?” says someone, Ray or Mikey.
I shrug. “Away.”
And with that I open the door and walk in that very direction.
Ooh little bit of drama!
Ladies (and Gentlemen?), we have now entered that point in the story where everything starts to go downhill then there’s a huge climax and hopefully a resolution, whether it is a good one or a bad one. Basically we are approaching the ending soon but not too soon. Five or six chapters should do it.
I apologise for the ridiculous shortness of this chapter.
Be Devoted
It is four thirty-five in the afternoon.
The hotel is empty. Everyone is spending their last few days in this great country by harassing model babes and blowing credit cards on fake designer nail files.
I am hiding in the closet under piles of hotel sheets. Nirvana is in my ears. I have not moved from this spot since 10 o’clock yesterday night.
It’s actually pretty comfortable.
I’m so ugly...
But that’s okay cos so are you
If incredibly depressing.
I thought it would be pretty funny to die like this. Ironic, you know? People could stand around at my funeral as my coffin gets lowered into the ground and say “Poor Frank. If only he had come out of the closet.” I know, I know, I’m such a joker. It’d be funny, though. You gotta admit.
Sunday morning is everyday
For all I care
And I'm not scared
Light my candles, in a daze
'Cause I've found God
I guess I’m partly hoping Gerard will find me and blame himself. Because it is his fault. I finally work up the courage to say something and...what? He doesn’t want to requite me? Fine. I’m going to kill myself.
Very slowly.
In a closet.
With Nirvana.
...
This suuuuuuuuuuuuuuucks. No ones going to laugh at my closet joke because no one’s going to find me. They’ll walk into my room, look around a little bit, see that I’m not lying on the bed or hanging from the window and walk out. Then they’ll all fly away and leave me rotting in the laundry closet and when Margarita the washing lady FINALLY finds me I’ll be all corpserfied and gross and no one will even care about my joke because they’ll be busy trying not to breathe in too quickly. Or else they won’t even bother to look for me. They’ll probably be pleased I’m gone.
Footsteps outside my room. A click of a key turning in the lock. I hurriedly switch my iPod off and hold my breath as whoever they are starts walking around my room. No problem. There’s no way they’ll find me here. I’m, like, a world renowned hide-and-seek specialist. Seriously. I won a medal once.
The closet door opens, flooding my tiny space with my light. Oooh it burns! It burns! I stretch my hands out in front of me, trying to hold onto some form of safe, comfortable darkness.
“Thou shalt not have my soul!” I scream.
“I don’t freaking want it, doofus,” says Cam. “Just get the hell out of the closet.”
Heehee. It sounds even funnier when I’m alive.
“No,” I reply stubbornly, hitching the blankets up to my chin. “I’m not moving. Ever. You can’t make me.”
Cam sighs, grasps my ankles and pulls. With a cry of anguish I am sent tumbling from the closet doors, holding onto the linen as a safety blanket. “Hey, no fair!” I squeal. “You do martial arts, way of the foot and the hand and all that shizz!”
“Tai chi is hardly going to help me much in a fair fight,” Cam rolls her eyes. “Now you wanna explain what the hell is going on here?”
“I’m dying.”
“Every day we die a little more.”
“No, I mean I’m trying to kill myself,” I clarify. “And what kind of saying is that anyway? Jesus.”
“And how exactly were you planning on doing that?”
I gesture towards the closet. “Suffocation. Starvation. Nirvana.”
“And what if you finished your Nirvana playlist before your slow death finally begins to take its toll, huh? Did you think about that?”
Fuck, she’s right! I glare at the iPod as if it has somehow let me down. Foiled. Foiled by a Zen Buddhist Yoga Master.
“But my life suuuuuuuuuucks,” I wine, shoving my toesies under the blankets because it’s getting a little chilly here. “Gerard doesn’t want to be with me. How am I supposed to take on the world alone?”
“What did he say, Frank?”
“He said there was no way he was about to go out with someone who knows so little about Batman.”
“He said that he didn’t think he was ready for a serious, same-sex relationship. And, more importantly, that he doesn’t think you’re ready.”
Carrottoppedtibetenmonkwannabe say what? “What?”
“When you said you wanted to be with him forever, he said “I’m not sure that you do”. That means he’s not just doubting himself...he’s doubting your sincerity.”
Wait. Je suis confuzzled. “So...you’re saying if I show him how much I want him then he might change his mind?”
“If you show him how seriously you’re taking this and thinking this through then there’s no reason why he shouldn’t.”
Right. I get it. I have to show him my devotion. I can do that. I jump up, my legs surprisingly springy after spending sixteen hours stuffed in the foetal position. Cam surveys me warily. “What are you doing?”
“Going to find Gerard,” I reply.
“Don’t you think maybe you should give him a little space? Maybe shower first-?”
“-No, I don’t,” I cut across her. “I think that I need to find him and find him NOW.”
And with that I run out of the room, not even bothering to close the door behind me, leaving Cam looking confused but not altogether surprised. I pause on the landing, looking down into the lobby below. Everyone’s back from the shopping trip now, the shopping trip that I missed because I was busy waiting for the Grimm Reaper to knock on my closet door. I wonder...would I have opened it? Or would I have ignored him just to be a piss-take?
Nah, I’d probably let him in. I like the Reaper. He seems like a pretty misunderstood guy.
“Gerard!” I say, spotting him immediately. He looks up, sees me and waves. Cynthia gives me an evil look but I ignore it. She’s not my problem anymore. Her life has no purpose.
I race down the stairs to meet them, conscious of all eyes on me. I guess I smell vaguely kebab-ish. Whatevs, they can deal. “Hey,” I breathe. “How was...um...shopping?”
“Good,” Gerard shrugs. “I bought converse.”
“I bought a hat,” says Ray cheerfully. “And a jacket and a t-shirt and a key ring and a swimsuit and a-”
“-Yeah, that’s great Ray,” I interrupt. “Gerard, can I take your bags up to your room for you?”
Gerard stares at me in bewilderment. “Um...Why?”
“Feel like it.”
“Then sure,” he hands me his bags and my shoulders almost collapse under the weight. How many fucking pairs of converse did he buy, for Godsake??
“You can take my bags,” Mikey scowls.
“In your dreams, short-stuff” I laugh and hurry up the stairs before he can work out the irony in that statement.
Things continue in much a similar fashion.
I attempt to do everything for Gerard. Tidy his hotel room, sort his comic books, lock Craig the Weather Guy in a cupboard, fill drinks, refill drinks, serve drinks, make snacks, everything I can think of I do. I can feel everyone’s eyes on me, wondering whether or not I have been abducted by aliens and my soul sucked out through my ass and replaced with another life form, helpful and eager to please. I know as much because Ray won’t shut up about it.
“So Frank, what time do you remember going to sleep?” he asks me as I set a bowl of pecan nuts down in front of him.
“I told you,” I reply. “About 11ish.”
“Aha!” he exclaims gleefully. “So the ship landed at about 10.30 and waited until you were unconscious to take you in through the porta rectum.”
“I don’t know what a porta rectum is,” says Gerard dubiously. “But I really don’t think the Millennium Falcon’s got one.”
He reaches for the TV remote, presently lying about six feet away from him, realises it’s a bit of a lost cause and lets his arm drop sadly. But before he can get up I push him down and go get it myself.
“Frank, what the hell?” he exclaims indignantly.
“I’m getting it,” I reply.
“What is up with you? You’re our friend, not our servant.”
“Speak for yourself,” snorts Mikey, shovelling nuts into his face.
Gerard offers him one lasting look of distaste before turning back to me. “Is everything okay?”
“Sure, fine, okay, just peachy,” I reply, reclining back against the hotel’s sitting room couch. “No problem.”
Gerard blinks. Ray blinks. Mikey burps. “Now you’re just saying words.”
“No I’m not,” I say mildly, grabbing a magazine off the coffee table and flipping through it, humming merrily.
Ray narrows his eyes suspiciously. “Hey, I know that song...” he says.
“Yeah, whatever Ray. Cos there’s noooo where to hide, since you pushed my love aside...”
Gerard frowns at me. “Seriously, Frank?”
I nod. “Seriously. I’m out of my head, hopelessly devoted to youuuuu...”
“That’s really fucking mature.”
“Oooooooh, hopelessly devoted to youuuuu-”
“Okay. You know what? If you can’t behave like an adult then fine.”
And with that he gets up and storms right out of the room. I just watch him, mouth hanging open like a moron. Ray wears a similar expression. Mikey burps.
“Now what the hell was that all about?” asks Ray.
I shrug feeling a dull pit where my stomach used to be.
“It was probably something to do with Frank acting like a total dick,” says Mikey conversationally in between mouthfuls of nuts. “And assuming that he could win Gerard through material means, thus assuming him to be both shallow, superficial and consumerist. Or it could have something to do that you knowingly took the piss out of his incompetence by singing a cheesy song from a 70s musical. One of the two, anyway.”
“I wasn’t taking the piss,” I mumble.
Mikey surveys me with a scarily Mikey-ish look over his wire-rimmed glasses. “Yes you were Frank,” he replies.
Okay, fine. Maybe I was slightly rubbing in the fact that I would do just about anything for a guy who can’t actually make his mind up on whether he likes cock or vaj. And maybe I intended it to sting a little. But that doesn’t mean he should go sulk about it! This is all his fault! I almost killed myself!
Mikey and Ray watch me anxiously. Suddenly I feel like I’m carrying the world on my shoulders, that my back is aching from the strain of it all, that there is nothing I would like more than to put down my burden and crash on a couch somewhere. I stare at my palms because it’s easier than looking at critical faces.
“What do you think I should do?” I ask them aloud.
They offer no words of comfort. No words at all. But then they wouldn’t. Because they’re my hands.
“You should give him some space,” Mikey offers. “In time he’ll come around.”
Give him some space. Right. If that’s what he wants. I haul myself to my feet and grab my jacket, hanging in the cloakroom by reception. Something strange has happened to my mind. Everything’s become a little less clear, objects are blurred at the edges and suddenly I feel tired, really tired. I stumble awkwardly for the door, throwing a last comment over my shoulder.
“Tell Cam where I’ve gone, yeah?” I say to no one in particular.
“Where have you gone?” says someone, Ray or Mikey.
I shrug. “Away.”
And with that I open the door and walk in that very direction.
Ooh little bit of drama!
Ladies (and Gentlemen?), we have now entered that point in the story where everything starts to go downhill then there’s a huge climax and hopefully a resolution, whether it is a good one or a bad one. Basically we are approaching the ending soon but not too soon. Five or six chapters should do it.
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