Christopher Gutierrez is sitting alone on a bed in a room that reeks of dirty cat litter, a lapel mike hooked to the zipper seam of his hoodie, a computer resting on his lap. He reads aloud from a script displayed on the monitor: “So bring on the heartbr–shit!” He starts the line again. “So bring on–shit!” He makes another half-dozen attempts, each ending with a string of obscenities, before a muffled voice comes through the door leading to the living room: “Don’t just read it, Chris. You gotta lecture it. Slow down.” Gutierrez takes a breath and tries again, this time with prideful flair. “So bring on the heartbreak! Bring on the failure. Bring on the scabbed knees, wrong turns, and sleepless nights, because I’m not broken yet.”
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For its first couple years Askheychris averaged 5,000 hits a day, mostly from people between the ages of 16 and 21, but its numbers have taken a dramatic uptick since March, when Gutierrez was tied to a scandal involving his former best friend, Pete Wentz, bassist and primary lyricist for the Chicago band Fall Out Boy, whose latest album, From Under the Cork Tree, has sold over two million copies. Gutierrez was suspected of leaking self-portraits of Wentz fondling his own semierect penis in front of a Morrissey poster. The two had been publicly feuding through their blogs, and while neither will go into specifics about their beef, it appears to have had something to do with Wentz inappropriately IMing Gutierrez’s ex-girlfriend. Gutierrez claims he had nothing to do with the photos: “I keep saying, if I was gonna do it, I would’ve made money off it,” he says. But he doesn’t mind the publicity. After the scandal broke, his blog peaked at nearly 20,000 hits a day. Traffic has since slowed to 15,000. “If I didn’t fully know the power of it, I wouldn’t have used my journal to respond to what a certain person from a certain band did to me,” he says. “I know it sounds crappy. I know it’s LiveJournal, and I know how people my age look upon it, but it does carry a certain weight.” For the record, though, “if he’d been in front of me, I woulda knocked his teeth out.”
Gutierrez started Askheychris a month later as a way to address everyone’s questions at once, but it evolved into a personal forum. “I’m not a writer–I’m a storyteller. That’s all this is,” he says. He did have some previous experience: in 1994 Gutierrez started a zine called deadxstop that he passed out for free at hardcore shows, and in the introduction to his book he recalls telling one of his earliest stories, about his first kiss, to a “captivated audience” of “dudes and skanks” at a party. Much of his blog consists of transcripts of IM chats with friends and details about his job as a hair-stylist at Elizabeth Arden Red Door, long-distance running, and going to shows. Some posts are honest accounts of growing up in a broken home, others of failed romance and hard-won life lessons. For good measure, there’s also one about having his pubic hair waxed at work, and another about how Gutierrez likes his blow jobs (enthusiastic, in short). It reads like a mix of Oprah’s pragmatic feel-good sermons, James Frey’s bloody-knuckles recovery-speak, and Henry Rollins’s defiant machismo: “this is my testament to not letting you win. to not letting you get the best of me. because while i dont have much, what i do have i will fight tooth and fucking nail for.”
