Wentz has just arrived from Los Angeles, and he's tired. But then, he's always sleep-deprived, he says, despite popping Ambien like Tropical Skittles. He's got a lot going on these days. In addition to overseeing Clandestine Industries, he's keeping tabs on his record label, Decaydance, which he runs like a sort of promotional puppy pile, in which the bands­—including Panic at the Disco, Gym Class Heroes, and the Academy Is ...—share a management team, tour together, and turn up as guests on each other's tracks and videos.

He's also prepping for a second season of FNMTV, the weekly music-video show he hosts, and getting set to unveil the latest outpost of his bar, Angels & Kings, the would-be Planet Hollywood for the emo crowd. Though the first A&K, which opened in New York in 2007, was billed as a gritty clubhouse for Wentz and his friends (a Chicago branch opened this summer), this location­—just off the pool deck in the brand-new luxury ME Barcelona hotel­—is an uncharacteristically upscale affair.

Meanwhile, on December 16, Fall Out Boy­—the less celebrated members of which are guitarist Joe Trohman, drummer Andy Hurley, and singer-composer Patrick Stump­—will release Folie à Deux, a collection of attention-deficit genre mash-ups, featuring cameos by Lil Wayne, Debbie Harry, and Elvis Costello.

And then there's the ultimate brand extension, the one guaranteed to propel Wentz into a whole new sphere of exposure: Bronx Mowgli Wentz, the son he and his wife, Ashlee Simpson, welcomed into the world on November 20. When Wentz found out Simpson was pregnant, he was in Chile with Fall Out Boy, preparing to play a show in nearby Antarctica. "I was like, 'Oh my God, this might be the worst possible time to have this conversation,'" he says. Perhaps to make sure the news had sunk in, Simpson promptly e-mailed a snapshot of the pregnancy test. (Us Weekly, eat your heart out). "I was definitely scared," Wentz says, "just thinking, This is something that's going to exist for the rest of your life and you can't fuck it up."

Wentz allows that the pregnancy was unplanned. "It was a happy accident," he says. "But I think that certain things happen for a reason in your life, and maybe it was time to put the wild child in a cage."

Photograph by Alex Tehrani

The fact is Wentz has never displayed the feral behavior one might expect from a rock star­—especially one whose camera-phone genital study was seen by more people than the finale of Friends. Sure, girls throw themselves at him, he says, but "isn't it a little more thrilling to go on the hunt? It's like if a cow put itself between a pair of buns. I think most people think the rock lifestyle is crazier than it is. Maybe for some it is, but not really for me or our band."

As for drugs, Wentz has long preferred the professionally prescribed variety. The son of a law professor and a private-school admissions officer, Wentz grew up in the prosperous Chicago suburb of Wilmette and was a high-school soccer star. But the all-American idyll wasn't all it seemed. "I was diagnosed with ADHD and depression and, I don't know, you name it­—whatever happened to be the trendy disorder that week," he says.

The problems snowballed throughout his adolescence, and in his twenties, Wentz started having frequent panic attacks. As Fall Out Boy were nurturing a following, his anxiety became overwhelming. On one occasion during an early Warped Tour, he remembers, he stood frozen and weeping in the Denver airport, unable to board his flight. "I was like, Man, I don't want to do this. It doesn't seem worth it," he says. Though he was briefly on lithium­—which was "zombifying, you're, like, drooling"­—Xanax and Klonopin were his favorites. "For a while, I was a total drugstore cowboy," he adds. "I had The Pill Book, which is awesome because I could learn every shape and number, and then be like, 'Those are the blue footballs, those are the bars ...'"

One chilly day in February 2005, Wentz sat in a car in a Best Buy parking lot outside Chicago and swallowed a handful of Ativan. He then began woozily contacting friends and family members, who persuaded him to drive to the nearest emergency room. He eventually wrote about the incident in the song "Hum Hallelujah." Then, about a year ago, he quit everything except for the sleep aids cold turkey. "Dude, after Heath Ledger," he says, "I was just like, Man, this is not going to end up good."

Simpson played a role too. "I realized I'd found my soul mate, and it made me want to be a better person," he says. "Now, with the baby, I want to be the best dad I can be."

The following day the "emogul" is seated on a stage with five top-tier hospitality execs. The occasion is a press conference to mark the opening of the gleaming, 30-story ME Barcelona, and Wentz has agreed to say a few words to the international travel press. He looks intensely absorbed as one suit after another extols the virtues of Sol Meliá, a multinational hotel group in the midst of a massive and probably ill-timed expansion. It's an impressive performance on his part, considering that the speeches are in Catalan and nobody thought to give him one of the instant-translation headsets.

Photograph by Alex Tehrani

Later, sitting in a poolside cabana under a steady drizzle, Wentz seems a bit uncertain about the whole Barcelona deal. "It doesn't really make a whole lot of sense," he admits. "But we'll try anything, dude." Of course, for Wentz's many haters, this relentless branding is just another infraction on an ever-growing rap sheet that goes roughly like this:

Count 1: Pete Wentz is a douchebag. He cops to the charge every chance he gets. Take, for example, the video for "I Don't Care," Folie à Deux's first single, which ends with a bouncer decking Wentz, then peeling off a mask to reveal that the downed man is actually Hills twit Spencer Pratt. "me and spencer pratt being knocked out at the same time," Wentz blogged. "thats like getting two d-bags with one stone." If you admit to being a douchebag, can you actually be one?

Count 2: He's the prince of oversharing. Guilty. Many of FOB's lyrics refer directly to Wentz's personal life, though he swears the new record is not autobiographical. "I'm 29, man. I'm not even trying to be angsty anymore. I'm no longer mad at my dad for throwing away my porn collection or whatever." Then again, anyone seeking a fix of Wentzian self-disclosure can get their fill free online, where he maintains no less than four blogs. One is about the band, another is about Clandestine, another includes his reviews of things he likes (including the musical Wicked), and the last is for updating close friends and anyone obsessed enough to stumble across it. Those who do will find a remarkable mix of sincere reflections, self-lacerations ("if anyone ever really knew me, they'd string me up and leave me as a sign of what not to become"), and enigmatic bits of raw poetry. "i want love in handcuffs," he wrote after midnight on June 19, 2007. "meth bake sales to lower global warming. sweat shop work to burn calories."

Count 3: He can't play bass, and he spins around like an idiot. The spinning thing is kind of impressive, actually, given how rarely he collides with a mike stand. But no, he can't play bass.

Count 4: He took a picture of his Johnson. Like you haven't. The difference is that Wentz's Johnson somehow made it online. Interestingly, "Penisgate," as he calls it, is one of the things that brought Wentz and Simpson together. Simpson, after all, had recently survived her own public shaming on Saturday Night Live. "She just called me up and made me feel a lot better," he says.

Count 5: He married Ashlee Simpson. It was true love, he says. "I've had a thing for that girl for a really, really long time."

Count 6: He's a sellout. "The idea of selling out is one of those things that just seems so ancient to me," Wentz says. "It seems so, like, nineties." In fact, the band has SELL OUT BOY T-shirts on tour­—for a tidy profit.

Wentz, who considers Jay-Z a role model, is always seeking new branding opportunities. While he doubts the world is ready for a Pete Wentz fragrance, he says, "In a weird way, it's one of the things I'd be most interested in doing." But there is a limit. Although Fall Out Boy have done numerous sponsorship deals, Wentz protested publicly when Island Def Jam released­—allegedly without his approval­—a cut of the "I Don't Care" video to iTunes that featured a few too many adoring close-ups of a Nokia phone. "this is NOT the edit the band approved," he blogged furiously. "sorry to let you down."

Count 7: He's a fame whore. "The tabloids are a lose-lose for me," he says. "I don't need to do image maintenance. My band was playing arenas and had a platinum record, all pre-paparazzi." Simpson is now the focus of attention. "When me and Ashlee are on the red carpet together, I'm like her purse."

Photograph by Alex Tehrani

Meanwhile, anyone hoping for a Wentz-family reality series can forget it. "I get pitched, like, Newlyweds 2 once a week, dude," he says. "For like, fuck-you money. Move-to-an-island-after-this money. I just can't do it."

Still, he's self-aware enough to realize that his haters will despise him no matter what. "People are like, 'This dude represents eyeliner and girls' jeans and a swoopy haircut and whining on your blog,'" he says. "I'm the flag of that. So when people want to burn the flag, I'm the dude they go after."

There is a bright side, however. "People, when they meet me, are always like, 'Aw, man. I was sure I was gonna hate you,'" he says. "So as long as you aren't, you know, Hitler, they wind up thinking, like, Oh, this dude's okay!"

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