The Love Song of Jonny Valentine

by Teddy Wayne

  They wouldn’t know about Zenon, though, so I stayed quiet. The girls didn’t say as much except for Vanessa, who used those kinds of words and argued with them all, especially Zack. Making smart music got you smart groupies who understood what you were doing with your sound, even if it meant a smaller overall base. I had fans who’d never even heard of MJ.

  They were discussing the one movie I had seen, Back to the Future, and Zack was like, “It represents not merely a nostalgic desire to regress to the safety of adolescence, but to the conservative fifties, the notion that we only have to roll back the biological and temporal clocks and we’ll be happier. It’s a total by-product of the anxieties of the cold war . . .”

  The song that was playing switched into something familiar, and after a few bars I picked up that it was “Summa Fling,” but a remixed club version I’d never heard before. It sounded decent, but it cut down my lyrics to the words “Summa fling, two-month thing, I wanna sing to my summa fling,” and overlaid a lot of other beats not in the original song. My producer for that album, Charles, had the philosophy that the music had to hook the listener but the vocals were what kept them there, and when you had someone with my vocal strength, you didn’t mess around with overproduced songs. We probably got a good royalty rate for the sampling. Jane watches that stuff like a hawk.

  “This one of yours?” Zack asked me, and he gave me a little wink no one else could see so I knew he’d requested it from Irena. I said it was, and he said it was cool and told the other Latchkeys they should do their own remix about briefly dating the valedictorian of summer school called “Summa Cum Laude Fling,” and took Vanessa’s hand and danced with her. A ton of people in the crowd were dancing, too, and even if it was only like a quarter of my original, it somehow felt cooler to watch people here dancing to it while I drank ginger ale than it did when they danced at my concerts. Part of it was because the crowd was older and where we were, but the biggest reason was that Zack had requested the song, which meant he knew about the club remix already, and he was dancing to it.

  The one thing I didn’t like about the remix was the original has a long fadeout, where I’m singing the chorus over and over for about thirty seconds, and what I like about fadeouts is how, after the song is over, it feels like it’s still playing somewhere, only you can’t hear it. It’s a nice idea, that just because you’re not listening to a song in front of you doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist somewhere else. It works even better for “Summa Fling,” since it’s like, Even this two-month relationship is going on in some way, that’s why I’m singing about it forever. The remix had a hard stop. You know a song is over then.

  They ordered a second round of drinks from a new waitress, and Zack asked for a double rye. When it came, he said, “Jonny, let me get some of your ginger ale?” I handed it to him, and he brought it down below the coffee table with his rye and poured half his drink into mine. He passed it back to me without looking.

  The drink smelled mostly like ginger ale, but also like Jane’s breath when she drank. I took a sip. It was sweet, but it stung my tongue like an arrow piercing your armor in Zenon and slid down my throat like a mage’s fireball that caused some damage. But it got easier with each sip, until when I was halfway through Zack reached for my glass again and dumped in the rest of his drink. The fireball fell inside my stomach, but it was a relaxing fireball, and it spread out like a smoke cloak in Zenon for hiding yourself, and then it was like the damage was healing. What doesn’t kill me only makes me stronger. Now I got why Jane does this. You don’t worry about anything anymore. I could say something dumb that everyone knew about Back to the Future and not care how the Latchkeys reacted, like that I thought the coolest part was how different everyone’s lives became in the future after one little thing changed in the past.

  By the time I was almost done with my drink, Vanessa was sitting on Zack’s lap on his chair and making out with him like in a music video. My vision was getting blurry, and I didn’t have the energy to keep it straight, so I only saw their outline, and then I had this picture in my head of Zack sitting in an armchair like the one he was in, but it was in a home, in a real living room, and there was a fireplace behind him and he was reading the newspaper, and I went up to him as he patted his lap and I crawled onto it and sat there while he read the paper.

  And the weirdest part was, I was getting hard. Probably it was because my eyes were sort of on Vanessa’s legs where her skirt was riding up on her thighs and I could almost see her underwear, so I focused my eyes on her there and got harder and shut my eyes totally and put my drink on the table and thought about what Vanessa looked like naked and humping her.

  Next thing I knew, someone was shaking me awake. It was Vanessa. “Wake up, sleepy boy,” she said, almost like Jane singing, “Go to sleepy, little baby.”

  I don’t know how long I was out for, but it was way worse than waking up early from zolpidem. The Latchkeys and the girls were all getting their stuff together and leaving. The nightclub was still pretty packed, though not as much as before. I swung my feet onto the ground and wobbled back to a sitting position on the couch before Vanessa broke my fall backward with her arms. “Easy there, fella,” she said. “Zack, help?”

  Zack bent down right in front of me. His eyebrows looked concerned. A long lock of his hair touched my forehead. “You okay, little man?”

  I made sure I wasn’t going to fall again before I stood up. “I’m solid.”

  Zack gave me a fake punch on my cheek, lightly touching it with his knuckles, and said, “Cool. Walk out with me.” He put his jacket and hat on me and his hand on my back again, but this time I think it was to make sure I didn’t collapse or depart the realm.

  We left through the secret passage from before and there was a long line for cabs, but Irena let us cut in front and told us to come back anytime. I went with Zack and Vanessa again. The cab ride seemed longer than the way there, since we were quieter and time always goes slower after you’ve left something than before you’ve arrived. Zack sat in the middle, and after a few minutes Vanessa leaned on his shoulder and fell asleep, and I got tired, too, and my head found its way onto his other shoulder, but I wasn’t falling asleep and I didn’t really want to be asleep, I just wanted to stay like that forever, smelling the cigarettes in his jacket I was wearing and his cologne me and him were both wearing and resting on his shoulder as we drove silently in the dark of a strange city.

  We arrived at the hotel after the two other cabs. Zack and Vanessa took me up to my floor in the elevator. I was hoping we’d pretend to sneak around again, but I think they were too tired. They escorted me inside my room and took Zack’s jacket and hat off me. “Change into pajamas,” Zack said. “You don’t want your mom asking why you’re still in your clothes.”

  While I changed in the bathroom, I was hoping Zack and Vanessa would say they were so tired, could they just crash on my couch? And I’d be like, “Yeah, I don’t really like my bed and I kind of want to sleep on the couch, too,” so I’d go on one of the couches and they’d take the other two, and we’d have a sleepover like I used to have with Michael and maybe even make a cushion fort. I changed my clothes super-fast so I could tell them they could crash there if they wanted, in case they were afraid to ask.

  But when I came out, they weren’t in the living room. “Zack?” I called.

  They weren’t in the bedroom, either. I guess they wanted a real bed. I got under the covers. It had that feeling of being too big, like it was an ocean and I was a stone someone skipped in it, where you watch it carefully at first to count how many times it skips, and then it sinks, and you pick up the next stone and forget about the last one.

  CHAPTER 10

  Memphis (Second Day)

  I had a hangover. I should’ve put out a glass of water for myself like I do for Jane, and I woke up like three times in the middle of the night but was too tired to get up for the bathroom, even though I knew it would make me feel better. Usually I’m good about doing
hard things now that will help me in the future. Deferring gratification, Jane says. An extra hour of vocal practice targeting your weaknesses in the present means an extra thousand in sales a year from now. It’s what separates one-hit wonders from musicians with career longevity.

  I took a couple baby aspirin from my toiletry kit when my wake-up call rang at eight a.m., which helped a little, but I still felt like I’d just done thirty minutes of high-intensity cardio on a zolpidem. I got down about half my omelet, but had to run to the bathroom and barely made it in time before it came back up.

  I don’t know how Jane does this.

  By the time Nadine met me for my morning tutoring, I’d recovered enough so that she didn’t notice anything, except for once when I forgot what eleven times twelve was and she said, “Come on, slowpoke, what’s with the lethargy?”

  I tried napping in the afternoon before sound check, but I only turned around in my bed a bunch. Zack probably had good hangover advice, but I couldn’t remember his room number. I called the front desk and asked for the room of Zack Ford.

  “One moment, sir,” the woman said, and I was so surprised, I didn’t have anything planned to say when Zack picked up and said hello. I guess they weren’t famous enough to have to use fake names. Or maybe they did it so groupies could find them. That was Mi$ter $mith’s trick. He’d mention how cool his hotel was during his interlude banter, and you’d see all these girls in the lobby waiting for him postshow. He sings about hotel groupies in his song “$ext $candal,” which he couldn’t play on our tour. It wouldn’t work for me, because I couldn’t exactly be like, Hey, your Marriott is really cool, I’ve got an awesome room with a view right down the hall from my mother.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Hi. You have a name?”

  “It’s me. Jonny.”

  “Jonny.” He laughed. “I thought you were some girl.”

  My speaking voice was high, but I didn’t think it was that high. I made it a little lower, enough so it wasn’t obvious what I was doing. It’s easy for me to control, which is one thing Rog says is a huge weapon in a singer’s arsenal, impersonation, since it means you can be a different singer to suit the subject. I’ve been working on an impression of Walter, to spring it on him one day when it’s good. It kind of hurts my throat, since his voice is so gravelly, so I can’t practice too much. “No, it’s me.”

  “So, as my Uncle Morris from Nebraska says, what can I do you for?”

  I realized if I told him I got sick off two drinks I would sound like a kid. “That was fun last night,” I said.

  “Yeah, we’ll have to do it again.”

  I waited for him to say something else, but he didn’t, so I said, “That was all I wanted to say.”

  “The soul of wit. I like it,” he said. “I’ve got to get ready for sound check, but I’ll catch you later.” He hung up before I could say good-bye. My stomach jabbed me when I heard the dial tone, but I think it was because I needed to go to the bathroom again.

  I didn’t know where the Latchkeys’ room was at sound check and didn’t see them, but it didn’t matter since I was feeling more and more like junk the rest of the day. For my sound check I took it easy, almost spoke the words, which I was allowed to do if I felt like it, so no one paid attention. In the star/talent room there was a super-big spread with barbecue and buffalo wings and ribs and sweet potato fries in addition to my rider requests, and I knew Jane hadn’t approved it and she hadn’t scoped out the room, but I couldn’t imagine putting anything in my stomach anyway, so I told Walter to go nuts. When the Latchkeys went on to open, I realized I hadn’t eaten anything after my morning omelet, and I was starving, so I ate a few sweet potato fries to test it out, and my stomach seemed fine. I moved on to the wings and ribs and some meat loaf, and before I knew it I’d eaten probably two dinners. I added up all the calories from the nutritional listings, and it was around seventeen hundred. I’d have to offset it with high-intensity cardio for ten thousand hours.

  I hadn’t vomited before a concert since I saw Dr. Henson, from getting rest and being back in the performance groove, so I thought it would be okay. While I was waiting backstage, though, I had lethargy again, and Jane asked if everything was all right, and when I said yeah, she wiped all this sweat off my forehead that I hadn’t even noticed and had the makeup woman give me another coat of foundation.

  The second I went onstage, I knew I’d made a mistake with the barbecue. I opened with “Love Is Evol,” which requires a lot of dancing around from me, and when I did my first split, my stomach gurgled and was like, Fuck you for poisoning me, Jonny. I adjusted and made it more of a crooner-style walk-around onstage, which Rog lets me do if I don’t feel up to the choreography, and I had my dancers do the heavy lifting. It settled my stomach a little. I just wouldn’t do any serious dancing the rest of the show.

  But my singing was off, too. I’d drunk all the Throat Coat in the world in the afternoon, but it was like I kept running out of saliva, and when I reached for high notes, which are usually a meaty fastball down the middle of the plate for me, I could feel my voice cracking, so I had to rein that in also, which screwed me for “Breathtaking,” where I’m supposed to hit a high C that sounds like my breath is being taken away. I wasn’t even sharp on “Kali Kool,” which is my easiest song, but at least it’s a sing-along so I could hold the mike out and let the crowd carry it.

  I was sweating over my face and down my back, and when I brought this chubby girl with glasses onstage to sing to, she almost looked scared for me, because the sweat was dripping down my nose and I had to keep wiping it off with my sleeve.

  The feeling passed for a few songs, and I got greedy and danced a little before the heart-shaped swing finale, and right when the swing came down my stomach bubbled again, and it turned a lot worse as the swing locked down and lifted me up. This was my nightmare, having an accident in front of all these people where they could tell I’d had one. I couldn’t crouch down and puke, since it would fall through the holes in the bottom, and vomiting wasn’t even going to help anything. I was trapped. And the more I worried about it, the gurglier my stomach became, which made me think about it more. The vicious cycle of performance anxiety, Rog calls it, but usually it’s about singing worse because you’re afraid you will, not about having diarrhea in your pants.

  The audience was pretending to text and singing along with “U R Kewt” so loudly that I couldn’t hardly hear the band or my own vocals, which made me pissed. If they actually cared about hearing me sing they’d let me sing, but it’s really all for them, which is why like eighty percent of pop lyrics are about you, not her or an actual name, so the listeners can pretend it’s them. Or so they can pretend to be me for a few hours, even though they’re almost all girls, like the L.A. Times writer said, except at that moment if they knew what my stomach was going through, none of them would want to be me, and I couldn’t stop the show or anything, so for their sake I had to clench my muscles and fight through it and hold everything in while it was bursting to get out.

  And then I had the thought of what would happen if I said fuck it, and pulled down my pants and sprayed diarrhea all over their heads and their iPhones shooting unauthorized video and their Be Jonny’s Valentine heart-design T-shirts with the picture of me next to a Photoshopped picture of them, just me coating the entire stadium with Jacuzzi jets of endless diarrhea. It was like, you all caused this in me, even though this one time it was the alcohol, but if I didn’t have to perform it wouldn’t be so bad, so now you get to feel what I’m feeling.

  Thinking about that made me laugh, which I never do in concert, and the laugh helped the terrible feeling pass again. I made it through to the end without any problems. I was going to tell Zack about it. He’d find it funny. Except I’d have to make it seem like the diarrhea was from food poisoning and not from the alcohol.

  After the concert I ran to the bathroom just in case, and I’m glad I did, since whatever I’d been keeping in was super-excited t
o get out. When Jane came to pick me up, I must have looked drained, because she asked if I felt okay and I told her I’d had some diarrhea but I was fine now.

  But as we pulled up at the hotel, I grabbed my stomach and Jane quickly took me to her room to use the bathroom. I was taking awhile, so she opened the door, and I squeezed my legs together a little to hide my penis, but not all the way or it would look like I had a vagina. “How do you feel?” she asked.

  “Not so good.”

  “What did you eat?”

  “A lot.”

  “Did you sleep okay? Or take any pills?”

  She’d turned into Dr. Henson all of a sudden. “No.”

  She ran cold water over a washcloth and wiped off my face and gave me a glass of water and told me to drink all of it, but it squirted out a few minutes later. Diarrhea would be my new word for a song that you listen to and forget right away.

  Jane sat on the garbage can near the toilet. It was an expensive-looking garbage can, gold-plated with a sturdy lid, so it supported her. It was kind of stupid to have such a nice garbage can in a place where people go to have diarrhea. She kept sponging up the sweat on my face and feeding me glasses of water and gave me a couple anti-diarrhea pills, but it didn’t do much to stop it. “I should call a doctor,” she said.

  Maybe the doctor would take a blood test or something and find alcohol in there. “Don’t,” I said. “It’s embarrassing. And I’m already feeling better.”

  She got a call on her phone, told me she’d be back in a minute, and closed the door behind her. I tried to listen, but it was hard because of the door and she was talking quietly and every fifteen seconds or so I’d shoot out another stream of water. All I heard was two sentences: “I’m staying in tonight . . . Not here.”

  She came back a minute later. “I think you should sleep here with me tonight,” she said.

  I was trying to figure out who could have called her and what it was about. But she’d lie if I asked. “Okay,” I said.