by Teddy Wayne
“Once you do that, you’re competing with everyone else,” Jane said. “No other singers own the tweens like Jonny does. We’ve still got a few years.”
“We have to think about the future and evolve,” Stacy said. “They’re not going to stay little kids forever. And neither is Jonny, you know?”
Jane stirred her gimlet with her straw and picked a mint leaf out and chewed on it. “What are you suggesting?” she asked.
“For starters, how do you feel about Jonny dating someone? Someone famous, obviously.”
For a second the only famous person I could think of was Madonna, and how weird we’d look as a couple but that I could always say I once dated Madonna, and then I realized she meant someone my age. Jane’s eyebrows moved together and wrinkled up her skin in this one spot over her nose. She calls it her thinking wrinkle. Botox can’t get rid of it.
“Dating?” she asked, like she’d never heard the word before.
“Not real dating-dating,” Stacy said. “We’ve got a girl in our stable named Lisa Pinto, about Jonny’s age, done some TV acting, whose first album drops in February. She’s a total sweetheart, and she’s immensely popular with Latinos. It’d be great publicity for both of them if they were seen out together in L.A. a few times. If you’re comfortable with that.”
Jane said, “Well—”
“And who knows, maybe a real romance will blossom!” Stacy laughed. “What do you think about that, Jonny? Here’s Lisa’s album cover.”
She pulled up the picture on her phone. Lisa had black hair in a ponytail and wore pink gym shorts and a white tank top over her tan skin and stood in front of a school bus, and the album’s title, School’s Out!, was spelled on the side of the bus. I felt the tingling that tells me a boner’s coming, but I had a napkin on my lap so no one could tell.
“She looks nice,” I said.
Whenever the media or fans ask me if I’m dating anyone, I have to say that I’m not seeing anyone in particular right now but I’m always looking out for that special someone and I love all girls. Jane says this makes all my female fans think they have a chance, especially the fat ones, who are the most rabid and loyal. And if I ever did date someone, it would crush them and they’d turn their attention to someone else.
Jane didn’t bring that up. Instead, she said, “It’s something we’ll have to mull. I don’t like the idea of Jonny . . . sexualizing himself at this age to sell a few more units.”
“Totally understood,” Stacy said.
She turned her lips into her mouth and raised her eyebrows, which was Ronald’s cue to say, “We’ve also considered upgrading Jonny’s dance routines and voice work. Stacy’s got a great relationship with the woman who worked with Tyler, and she completely transformed him during his midteen years. I know you’re loyal to Rog, but what do you think about Jonny meeting with this woman, to see if they hit it off?”
“Jonny really trusts Rog.”
I don’t know why she didn’t tell them she’d already asked Rog to sit out Salt Lake City. Maybe because she wants it to sound like it’s her idea alone.
“Sure, but Rog is”—Stacy laughed to herself again—“how shall I put this delicately? Rog’s vocal techniques are antiquated, and his choreography is antiquated, and if we want to keep Jonny’s message current, we’ve got to surround him with current support.”
Jane chewed on another mint leaf. I swallowed a fry and said, “I really trust Rog.”
Stacy said, “I know, Jonny, but maybe you could just meet Holly—I bet you’d like her—and pick up a tip or two and see how it goes?”
Jane was watching me. “No, I think I’d prefer Rog’s techniques,” I said. Jane hid her smile behind her gimlet, and it always makes me smile when I see her doing it, but I stuffed a few fries in my mouth so I wouldn’t give myself away. A glob of ketchup dripped on the sleeve of my white track sweater. It looked like I’d punched someone in the nose and gotten his blood all over my sleeve.
“Okeydoke, gang, let’s drop the shop talk for now and enjoy our lunch,” Ronald said. “Jane, take a look at the rest of the folder when you get a chance. We’ll meet again when the tour’s over to review everything. Unless sales for the Garden show pick up, we’ll have to make some changes going forward.”
That was a pretty bad note to end the shop talk on, and I could tell Jane was covering up an angry mood the rest of the lunch. Her and Stacy ate half their salads and Ronald finished his steak as they picked up their gossip about real estate and restaurants and Ronald’s new ski château in Germany. He joked, “I know, what’s a five-foot-five Jew doing skiing in Germany?” When we signed with the label, Jane told me, “You always want a Jew to be in charge of your business,” and she laughed and said, “But an honest Jew.” Ronald’s an honest Jew and an industry legend.
I finished my lamb burger, but when the waitress came to clear our plates, Jane handed her mine with half my fries left. Stacy said it was awesome meeting me and she couldn’t wait to touch base again after the tour. Walter came in to escort us out of the restaurant, where a car was waiting for us with all the paparazzi. Jane let me do one trademark spin move before I got into the backseat, but when they asked me to sing the chorus from “Guys vs. Girls,” she said, “Come to his concert tomorrow night!” She could work as my publicist if she wasn’t my manager.
In the car with me and Walter she talked on her phone. I was drifting in and out of sleep, like Walter was, so I heard parts, like when Jane said, “Some bimbo he probably fucked once and had to promote so she doesn’t file a harassment suit . . . No, no progress on the other thing.” The other thing could’ve been a million things, but if I asked, she’d make something up about a sponsorship deal or whatever.
Jane lost the call as we drove up Laurel Canyon. She said to herself, “Peruse.” Then she told me we were invited to the twelfth-birthday party that night of this TV exec’s son.
“I’m tired.”
“I know, baby. But we should go to this. We only have one free night in L.A.”
“I just want to go to sleep tonight.”
“You can sleep for a whole week straight after the tour,” she said. “There are going to be a lot of film and TV people there.”
“We can take a meeting whenever we want.”
“Yes, but you know it’s always better when you meet them socially. An exec comes up with an idea while he’s drunk, he thinks it’s the most brilliant thing ever. We have to, baby.”
I thought Walter had been sleeping, but his mouth moved a little, like he’d heard it and wasn’t saying anything. Or maybe I didn’t see it right, because I was so tired and my eyes couldn’t stay sharp. The outside was just a blur of green trees and brown roofs.
“Can’t you just go without me?”
“It’s not as fun without you,” she said. “And they invited us both.”
Which meant they really invited me, and she’d be letting them down if she showed up without me. My head was hurting like just after a 120-decibel concert and my eyelids were too heavy to keep arguing.
“Fine,” I said. I fell asleep for real and woke up when we reached the security gate to our community. When you come home there should be a smell or sight or something you recognize, but coming back to our house hasn’t felt like that yet after upgrading from the three-bedroom the label rented for us the first year in L.A. and buying our six-bedroom in the Hills. I asked why we needed six bedrooms when it’s just me and Jane plus a couple staff and Walter in his bungalow, and she said that half of showbiz is about perception and you need to create buzz to sustain buzz, and real estate’s an evergreen source of buzz.
But it felt more like coming home getting off the school bus in St. Louis or when Michael Carns’s mother would drop me off when I was old enough to have my own keys, even if our apartment wasn’t a source of buzz, because it only had one bedroom that Jane let me sleep in after my father left and she took the couch that folded out in the living room, and we didn’t have fancy kitchen applia
nces the manufacturers give us for free now hoping we’ll mention them in an interview, and it was always dirty since Jane hates cleaning and couldn’t afford to pay anyone. We have a few pictures left, but that’s it.
Walter went off to his bungalow since he had the night off, and me and Jane walked through the front door and past the paintings the decorator picked out in our foyer and some framed photos of me and Jane with other celebs in the entry room, and I cut through the awards room that I walk into every day for motivation, with all my plaques and trophies in a case, except there aren’t any Grammys yet and it’s mostly crap like the People’s Choice Awards.
I said hi to Sharon in the kitchen while she was spraying the countertop. “How is the tour, Mr. Jonny?” she asked when she hugged me. Her smell was a combination of cleaning products and this cream that black women moisturize their hair with that she keeps like four bottles of in her bathroom. Sharon is from Barbados and one time she let me weigh her. She’s 223 pounds and I bet her breasts and butt are at least forty pounds of that. They’re the biggest of anyone I know, including singers and dancers with implants.
“It’s good,” I said. “We’re working super-hard.”
“You look skinny,” she said. “We have to get some meat on those bones.”
“I just ate,” I said, even though I was still a little hungry since I didn’t finish the fries. I was only skinny compared to Sharon.
“Okay.” She went back to spraying. “But don’t work too hard, Mr. Jonny.”
Jane came in and told Sharon that the gardeners were coming tomorrow and the painters were coming two days after, and Sharon said, “Yes, ma’am,” real quiet the way she always does when she answers her.
Jane said, “And you really need to do a more careful job in the foyer. I found a sheet of dust behind the white table.”
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Valentine,” Sharon said.
Jane told me we were eating at six before she went to her office. When she was gone, I told Sharon not to take it personal and that Jane was pissed at me because I didn’t want to go to this dumb party and she was taking it out on her. Sharon said, “I know, Mrs. Valentine has a lot of pressure on her, too,” which isn’t what I meant, but I guess the important thing is Sharon didn’t feel so bad. Jane’s good at making people think they screwed up even when they didn’t really. It does motivate you to do better, though, except I don’t think Sharon needs much motivation to clean the foyer.
The staircase was being renovated with marble, which I didn’t know about, but Jane’s always working on improvements to the house, some for her, some for me. When I wanted a basketball court, she said it would cost too much, and I was like, Please, Jane, I’ll add another concert to the next tour to pay for it, and she said what she usually says when I ask for something big, which is, All right, but just because I’m the only mother you have and you’re the only son I have. I asked her a few months ago if we could clear out the land behind us and build a baseball diamond like the one me and Michael Carns used to talk about building in St. Louis so I can play with Walter on it, and with a springy backboard so I can play catch when he isn’t around. She says depending on what tour and merch profits are, we can think about it.
That’s partly why it’s not familiar when I come home, because of the renovations and it never smells like much besides Sharon’s cleaning products. I asked Nadine once if you replaced one thing at a time in our house until everything was new, would it still be the same house? She said that was a very smart question, and that the human body replaces all its cells every seven to ten years, so you could say that I was a completely renovated person from when I was born. We spent an entire session discussing it. I decided it was a totally new house. Nadine wasn’t so sure.
I took the elevator upstairs and went to my room. A Jonny Valentine doll had fallen on the floor. It was one that sang the chorus from “Guys vs. Girls” when you pulled the string.
“If Jonny is reading this, he can contact me,” I said to it. Then I smiled huge at it. “How’s the tour? Any fun stories?”
I pulled the string. It played the “Guys vs. Girls” chorus up to gotta so slow you couldn’t hardly make out the words and stopped. It must’ve broken when it fell.
In slow motion, making my voice baritone so it sounded like a broken recording, I said, “Kid’s . . . got . . . a . . . work . . . eth . . . ic . . . like . . . a . . . Ko . . . re . . . an . . . im . . . mi . . . grant.” I stuffed the doll back on the shelf with all the other Jonny Valentine dolls and action figures and angel figurines, under the shelf with the Jonny Valentine backpacks and messenger bags and lunch boxes, and above the shelf with the Jonny Valentine necklaces and bracelets and nail polish and purses and other garbage for girls that would be gay for me to have in my room if it didn’t have my face on it, and next to the bookshelf that had about a hundred copies of my ghostwritten autobiography, by this skinny bald guy with thick glasses in his fifties named Alan Fontana who interviewed me for a couple hours, then just used Wikipedia to write a bunch of made-up stuff about girls and sports and music pretending to be in my voice, like one page has a picture of me looking in a jewelry-store window and it says, “Sometimes all I think about is getting jewelry for girls.” They’d never write the real truth, like, “Sometimes all I think about is getting boners for girls.”
The ketchup stain on my sleeve probably wouldn’t come out, so I threw it in the garbage and walked into my closet and found the bin labeled TRACK SWEATERS and took out a new white one. I’d worn that sweater the last four days on the tour when I wasn’t performing, so I felt a little bad throwing it out, since I don’t get to wear old clothes much to keep up with the trends, and also because it was like, Sorry, sweater, even though it was my fault I got ketchup on you, fuck you, you have to depart the realm now.
Sharon had brought my five suitcases up to my room. I freaked out that she’d thrown all my clothes in the laundry, including the jeans with Albert Derrick Valentino’s email address in them, but the suitcases were still filled. I took the piece of paper out and stuck it in the jeans I was wearing.
I started to play Zenon, but it wasn’t as fun without other people in the next room, even if they’re not paying attention. It’s nice to know other people are near you at least while you’re playing games. It’s best when Walter’s in the room with you, but he had the rest of the day off in his bungalow and said he was going to grab a shit-ton of shut-eye, brother, we were all getting worked to the goddamn bone on this tour. Walter finished high school though he talks like he didn’t, but besides nonstrategy decisions, he’s probably one of our smartest staff.
A new stack of tabloids and glossies Jane wanted me to study was next to my bed, right near this photo on my bedside table of me and Jane when I was about seven or eight that a friend of hers took. It’s a nice photo, with her sitting on one end of the seesaw in the park near our apartment in St. Louis and me all the way up on the other end, but Jane doesn’t want it out in a hallway because she has an ugly perm and about ten pounds more chub.
You have to give the glossies enough access so they’re grateful but not too much or they think they can walk all over you with a character assassination. Jane’s savvy at adjusting the level. My picture was only in one of them. It was an onstage shot during the Houston show, and the headline was JONNY HEATS UP HOUSTON! with a capsule description of my tour. That show was one of my worst so far, actually, but the glossies never review your performance unless you bombed so bad it becomes a media story.
I took that issue and one of the tabloids into my bathroom and locked the door and turned on the fan for sound. There wasn’t any regular moisturizer, since my dermatologist doesn’t want me messing with lotions and maybe causing acne, but on the sink was a bottle of the SPF 50 sunscreen Jane makes me slather on. I sat on the toilet and turned in the tabloid to a photo spread headlined FIT AND OVER 40!—THESE OLDER STARS STILL LOOK LIKE STARLETS! It was candids of a bunch of actresses in bathing suits and workout clothes. I got
hard and rubbed with the lotion and touched myself to a photo of an actress with red hair doing yoga outside and bending over, and in one hand held the glossy picture of me onstage next to her. After about five minutes both arms got tired, so I packed the glossy in one of my suitcases. It wasn’t going to happen yet, but I could feel myself getting closer, sort of like what I think the inside of our teakettle is like just before it boils the water for Jane’s laxative tea. I bet within a year I’ll be able to do it, way before I’ve had ten thousand hours of practice.
I got in bed to take a nap, but I couldn’t fall asleep. First, I was looking at my stomach. A little chub folded up at the bottom even when I was lying on my back, and way more if I sat up. And when I bent my legs, right above my knees the skin pooched out. Maybe it was muscle, but even if it was, no one else would be able to tell.
The only way to find out if the fan-forum messages were really from my father or if someone just knew his full name would be to email him and see how he answered, which would mean setting up an email account different from the one I use for Nadine since Jane had access to it. I couldn’t do it from Jane’s computer, and there wasn’t any other way to get on the Internet in the house. If she found out, she’d make sure I never got another chance.
I closed my eyes, but I kept seeing his name in my head like it was on the screen:
Albert Derrick Valentino
And I imagined what he might look like, sort of like when the police try to figure out what a missing kid looks like years later. All I could come up with was a combination of me and Jane, like if me and her had a baby and he was born already in his forties.
Even though I was so tired, I knew I couldn’t fall asleep, so I took one over-the-counter sleeping pill from the bathroom and got drowsy, and I woke up a couple hours later. Sometimes you wake up, especially in a hotel or something, and for a second you’re not sure where you are, or which direction you’re facing in your bed. With me, sometimes it’s like I forget I live in L.A. and I think I’m still back at our apartment in St. Louis and that I’m in the small bed there and I expect the walls to be closer and my bed against the one window with my Cardinals team-picture poster over my head, and instead I open my eyes and the other wall is like twenty feet away and my huge bed is in the middle of the room and there are all these photos on the walls of me with other celebs.
