by Teddy Wayne
I went to the room and filled up on desserts to make up for what I’d vomited, and also because Jane wouldn’t get pissed this time since she was upset about the swing. I took a slice of Eureka lemon cheesecake and an espresso crème brûlée from Spago that the salad bar had kept cold and warm, and took bites while playing Level 65 of Zenon. No one came in after shows, not even Walter, who stayed outside and said, “Good show, brother,” like he always did. I think he thinks I want to be by myself postshow, which I mostly do, but around him, I don’t have to be on, the way I do with other people.
As my character was coming up on a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere, I heard Walter and another voice outside my door, and Walter did his two knocks and a pause and a knock. He stepped in and said, “Roberto wants to talk to you.”
I said okay. Roberto slumped in and closed the door and sat down on one of the beanbag chairs. I kept playing Zenon.
“Hey, Jonny,” he said. “I’m real sorry about tonight. I was off, and I know it fucked with your rhythm. That’s on me.”
I went inside the farmhouse, and there was a mother and father and daughter eating stew at a table lit with one large candle. The father said, “Greetings, noble warrior, we are honored by your presence and invite you to share in our supper, meager though it be.” I sat down with them.
“So,” Roberto said, “I wanted to man up in person.”
I nodded and ate the stew and took a bite of the Spago cheesecake.
“Your mom.” He ran a hand over the back of his buzz cut. My male dancers aren’t allowed to have longer hair than me. “Jonny, your mom wants to fire me. Just for what happened tonight.”
I stood up from the table and took the candle. “Yeah, she told me.” I brought the candle over to a curtain and put it against the material. It caught fire slowly before ripping into an orange rectangle. The father leaped up to fight me, but I drew my sword, and he ran out of the farmhouse with his wife and daughter behind him.
“It was a little mistake, Jonny. We all make mistakes.”
“I don’t,” I said. “That’s why I’m in the star/talent room and you’re in the band/vocalist room.”
The flames caught on the wooden walls and floor of the farmhouse and spread out on both sides. Out of the corner of my eye, Roberto was looking down and shaking.
“I know,” he said, like he was crying even though there weren’t any tears. “I’m real distracted lately. It’s my pops, man. He’s real sick.”
The fire blazed on the entire wall and the screen was turning reddish from the heat, like when you close your eyes after staring at a bright light. “What does he have?”
“I don’t know.” He was shaking more now but he still wasn’t crying. “Something’s fucked-up with his heart and he’s got all these doctor appointments and his insurance doesn’t cover shit. And I’m the only one in my family who makes any money.”
The fire was everywhere, and the screen got so red I couldn’t hardly see anything, way thicker than the red smoke onstage. The farmer probably thought I was crazy for staying inside so long, but I’d never seen it get so hot like that in the game before. I ran out of the farmhouse in the direction I remembered the door was, and knocked against something solid with a sound effect, but I found the door and the screen lost all the redness and I could see again in the cool blue night air with the white moon hanging like a fingernail clipping, and my body was all blackened but not burned or damaged, and I dropped to the ground and sucked in air like a fish in a boat.
I’d gained twenty-seven experience points.
I finally turned to Roberto. “I’ll talk to her.”
He took a long time getting up, breathing slow in and out of his nose. “Thank you,” he said. “I won’t fuck up again.”
He left and closed the door like he was trying not to wake up a baby, and I ran away from the farmhouse once I could breathe again, past the family who was beating their fists on the dirt and moaning at the smoky sky, and the level’s gem appeared on the ground before me.
Walter came in and told me we were ready to go, so he gave me an Angels hat I squashed down almost to my eyes because I forgot my sunglasses, and he escorted me through the personnel exit. Jane’s car was waiting right near the entrance. I jumped in the back and slid down into my usual postshow slouch even though the windows were tinted almost black.
We had a smooth venue exit since only a couple paparazzi were camped outside the personnel lot, and Jane just got the car pretour so they didn’t recognize it or the plates. Once we were on the freeway I told her I’d changed my mind about Roberto. She only nodded and said, “So I talked with Bill about the swing.”
I’d forgotten about the swing because I was so happy about getting the gem on Level 65. “What’d he say?”
Usually Jane looked at me in the rearview mirror when she talked to me about something serious, but she just faced straight ahead and her hands tightened around the wheel. “He said they figured out what the issue was and resolved it, but there are apparently three separate safety devices on it, so even if it happens next time, you’re protected by three levels of defense.”
Walter’s eyes shifted over to Jane before he turned his head out the window.
“It didn’t feel that safe,” I said.
“I know, baby. That’s what I told him. But he swears it is. And it really is the technical highlight of the show, and the fans are going to expect it now.”
I thought about climbing back into the swing. When something bad happens once, you always think about it after. It was like how I’d choked onstage one time on my bottle of water, in New Orleans, and now every time I took a sip I worried I’d do it again, mostly because choking on water would be such a crap way to depart the realm. At least crashing in the swing would be cool.
“If you say so.”
“Great,” she said. “We’re going to use it for a lot of visual promo content. And Bill knows what he’s talking about.”
Walter laughed quietly to himself. “Something funny, Walter?” Jane said.
“If he knew what he was talking about, it wouldn’t have gotten broke in the first place.”
Jane kept driving without talking, but it was the kind of not talking that said a lot. It wasn’t the smartest thing for Walter to say that to her, but I thought again of him jumping in front of me to catch a bullet. General Jonny and Private Walter.
“Don’t mind me,” Walter said. “It’s not my place. You going out tonight, or are we driving straight home?”
“Home,” Jane said. “And I’d appreciate it if you kept your mind on security issues, Walter.”
He kept looking out the window. “Sorry, Miss Valentine.”
Jane turned on the radio to a classic rock station. We didn’t talk the rest of the way. When we got home, Walter mumbled good night to us and went off to his bungalow, and Sharon was still up and asked us if we wanted anything. Jane said she was going to sleep and reminded me we had a six a.m. wakeup.
My body was tired but my mind was racing from the concert, so I asked Sharon to make me some decaf green tea with honey from the kettle, not the microwave or the hot-water faucet. It would take longer that way.
It was just me and Sharon awake in the house. She leaned over the island counter. “How was the concert, Mr. Jonny?”
“One of the dancers kept messing up and it threw me off, and then the swing that carries me over the crowd, it broke when I was inside.”
She put her hand over her mouth. “It broke?”
“But there are three safety devices. So I didn’t get hurt.”
“Oh, good.” She swept my hair to the side. “They’re not going to make you do it anymore?”
“No,” I said. “Jane said she wouldn’t let them put me in it again for a million dollars.”
Sharon said that she worried so much about me when I did tricks in my concerts, but now she could relax. I finished my tea while she read the front page of the L.A. Times on the counter. She’s taking an adult-educa
tion writing class and they have to read the front page every day. When I was done, she looked up from the paper and said, “I love watching you drink your tea. You’re so serious about it.”
She took my mug and opened the dishwasher and bent over to put the mug in the back of the bottom row. Her butt was like two huge boulders guarding the entrance to a cave in Zenon. And I felt like I wanted to disappear inside that cave and close out the world around me and hide in there. I imagined running around the island and grabbing the chub around her hips and under her purple sweatpants and humping her. Thinking about it got me hard, and in my mind I was holding on to her so tight, she was captured like an animal and could never escape. Sharon wasn’t just chubby, she was fat, but there was something about a fat body that was better than a chubby body. Like, either be skinny or be fat, but don’t be somewhere in the middle. It’s sort of like how it’s okay to be super-famous or not famous at all, but don’t be a D-list celeb.
She went to bed. I was still hard, so I tried in my bathroom, but couldn’t make it happen. At least a groupie could never accuse me of getting her pregnant, except I’d have to issue a public statement like, “It’s impossible, I can’t even do it on my own,” and a policeman would have to watch me in private to see if it was true, and they’d give me an adult glossy to help, and we’d also have to bring in Walter to make sure the policeman wasn’t a child predator. I was wired, and I figured Jane was asleep from her zolpidem by now. She probably hadn’t locked her door since she hadn’t been drinking, and I didn’t know when my next chance to go on the Internet was. At her door, I heard her breathing heavy, almost snoring, so I crept inside. Her computer was on top of a suitcase so she wouldn’t forget it. I took it into her bathroom and booted it up. If she caught me, I’d tell her I couldn’t sleep and was researching slave autobiographies for Nadine.
There were eight new emails, and my stomach jumped up like it did when the swing fell. But they were all spam. He hadn’t posted anything new that I could find in my fan forums, either. I looked at my Facebook page to see how many new likes and comments I had. Jane had posted a photo of my Phoenix show, and there were 31,158 likes and 5,385 comments.
I didn’t want Jane to catch me, even though browsing my Facebook page wasn’t that bad and showed I was interested in growing my social media platform, and I closed out. An over-the-counter pill wouldn’t cut it tonight, so I popped one and a half zolpidems from her medicine cabinet. It’s like the sleep command in Zenon, when you can select how many hours you want to sleep for, and you do it right away and wake up refreshed. Only it’s not as deep as regular sleep, and plus you have to be careful not to take it too much or it doesn’t work as good. That’s Jane’s problem.
CHAPTER 4
Los Angeles (Third Day)
I woke up to Jane tapping my head. It didn’t make sense, but I was still so sleepy that for a second, with my eyes closed, I thought it was my father waking me up, except I imagined him as the soldier in that war movie we saw.
“C’mon, make hay while the sun shines, you sleepy numbskull,” she said. “You have an estimated twenty-three thousand, three hundred and sixty days left on earth. Make this one worth it.”
That was Jane’s Jonny Valentine Departing the Realm Countdown. I mumbled okay, but when she left the room I fell asleep again. She came in again. “Jonathan, seriously, we have to be out the door in forty-nine minutes.”
I looked at my Cardinals alarm clock. I’d taken the zolpidem six and a half hours before. In Zenon, the only time you get woken up early is because of nearby enemies.
She watched to make sure I got out of bed. I was really out of it, though. My legs were spaghetti, and I felt like if I inhaled too much my chest would pop open.
I leaned against the wall of the elevator going down. When I sat at the island counter I put my head down by the newspapers as Peter prepped my breakfast. He refilled my coffee mug. “Looks like you need a double today, little sensei.”
“Thanks.” I tilted my head up. “Maybe some food will wake me up.”
The entertainment section was buried at the bottom of the newspapers pile, and I saw why: A photo of me was on its front page. I pulled it away just enough so I could read the article. Peter was too busy cooking to notice.
THE CULT OF JONNY
Exactly how does a 46-year-old male music critic open a review of a Jonny Valentine concert he is forced to attend? And to maintain proper journalistic house style, must he really refer to an 11-year-old boy hereafter as “Mr. Valentine”?
Well, forced is an unfair verb. Mr. Valentine (indeed, my sadistic editor grinningly assures me, I must) has world-class pipes and dancing talent and stage charisma to spare. A few songs are downright catchy, even to ears from which poke a few stray hairs. Besides the annoyingly can’t-get-it-out-of-your-head chorus of “Guys vs. Girls,” several other numbers in the Angel of Pop’s repertoire last night at Staples Center showcase the singer’s live-performance attributes, notably “Breathtaking” and “Crushed.”
Yet no one, not even Mr. Valentine’s most enthralled fans, goes to a Jonny Valentine concert expecting a fully developed auditory experience. Rather, they go for the spectacle, to surrender and sublimate and take part in the cult of personality swirling around a human being who, I suspect, may not yet be in possession of, you know, an actual personality. (Perhaps that’s the point: Onto this blank canvas his audience can paint whatever image they desire of him, or, even better, through gender metamorphosis, of themselves-as-Jonny.)
If Jonny Valentine is ever to grow as a pop artist, he will have to ditch everything about his act, from the infantile lyrics to the cheesy choreography to the overproduced packaging, and deliver something that speaks to who he is, if and when he eventually figures that out—not to his management’s carefully crafted presentation of an innocuous crooner of the bubbliest bubblegum. I, for one, wouldn’t mind seeing his vocal cords matched up with something a little more authentic. With his chops, he might even be—gasp!—great. Until then, we’ll have to make do with limp offerings like “RSVP (To My Heart)” and “Roses for Rosie,” which—
Peter pushed my plate over, so I stopped reading and hid the entertainment section under the pile. I felt dizzy again and took one bite of my omelet, thinking it would give me some strength. But as soon as it went down my throat, my vision went all fuzzy like a TV when the cable isn’t plugged in and all these walls crashed around my head at once like the trash compactor in Star Wars, and I fell forward on the counter and heard Peter say, “Jonny! Fuck!”
I must have woken up soon, because Peter was shaking me awake and Jane was just getting there. I hadn’t fallen off the chair, but I’d spilled my coffee and food all over the countertop.
“I don’t know what happened,” he said. “He keeled over—”
“He’s waking up!” Jane said. “Give him some air!”
Peter backed off but Jane leaned in real close to my eyes. “Jonathan, can you hear me?” she breathed in my face.
I blinked my eyes a few times. “Yeah.”
“Are you okay, baby? Do you feel faint?”
I was moving and speaking in slo-mo. “I feel . . .” Her eyeballs popped out huge and scared right up against mine. She couldn’t find out I’d taken zolpidem without her permission. “I feel fine.”
She put her hand on my forehead and kissed the skin to test my temperature. It always felt nice when she did that, cool and soft. Like she wasn’t afraid of catching whatever I had. “I’m taking you to the doctor.”
“But the bus.”
“They’ll wait.”
She drove us to Dr. Henson’s office fast. He had a lot of celeb patients, and there was a special waiting room for us so the normal people wouldn’t Tweet that they were in a doctor’s office with us. Even his super-rich patients might do that.
I got sent to the examination room right away while Jane filled out paperwork. The nurse told me to strip to my underwear and measured and weighed me. I was down to eighty-
six, so at least there was that. While I waited I thought about the L.A. Times article. Normally I don’t pay attention to the critics, because they either decide from the start that they hate me, or they come up with a lot of big words to explain why they actually like me, because they can’t just come out and admit they’re into my music. Smart people always have to give reasons. But this guy was saying he could like me, if my image was completely different. I couldn’t bring it up with Jane, though, especially now that the label was reassessing me. She’d say music critics are guys with ponytails and potbellies who never got good enough at an instrument to be in a band, so they take it out on the real musicians. Even when they love something in a review, they have to mention a few things they don’t like in the second-to-last paragraph, to prove they’re smart, and then the next sentence is always, “But these are minor quibbles in a near-masterpiece of an album.”
Dr. Henson came in in a few minutes. He was fake-cheerful like usual, with his kind of chub face but slim body. Some people can’t lose weight in their face no matter what. Jane doesn’t have that problem.
He always put out his hand when he came into the room and said, “Jonny, high five! Now down low!” and pulled it away before you could hit him and he said, “Too slow!” and giggled like he was the first guy to invent that trick. I guess it’s like me doing interlude banter, acting all upbeat and saying pretty much the same lines even when I don’t feel it. Jane gives him tickets to L.A. shows for his daughters so we always get excellent service. He was probably there last night, but we don’t discuss it. It’s not professional.
“I hear you’ve had a little fainting spell?” he said as he perused some papers. Doctors never talk right to you. They’re always reading something else at the same time like you’re not interesting enough.
“This morning,” I said, and in case he wasn’t there, I added, “I had a show last night.”
He put his stethoscope on my chest in a few different spots. It felt like an ice cube. “Give me some deep breaths with those powerhouse lungs of yours,” he said. “Did you eat normally?”
