The Love Song of Jonny Valentine

by Teddy Wayne

  “I forgive you for being somewhat distracted. You’ve had a lot of stressors recently.”

  “I’m good at handling stressors.”

  She smiled and said, “I apologize for the pop-psychology jargon.”

  “I forgive you, too,” I said.

  This time she laughed. She has a pretty laugh. I should tell my next producer to sample it and see if we could use it somehow. I bet she wouldn’t charge us, either.

  “Maybe you’ll be okay after all,” she said, like she was watching me from very far away.

  “I’ll be fine. This is a blip on the radar. The vultures will move onto the next thing in a minute.”

  “That’s not what I meant,” she said. “But, yes, that’s true.”

  I didn’t ask what she meant. The last line of my father’s email was still bouncing around in my head as we drove to the venue and during sound check and in the star/talent room before the concert and while the Christian opener, which was called 3 Days Dead, played their fake alt-rock. They’d been drinking beer preshow, which if it wasn’t against Christian protocol, it still probably wasn’t the most religious thing to do and definitely not professional, and it got me pissed that the Latchkeys had to go home when these guys were way worse people and musicians. The concert finally snapped me out of it. You really do have to focus when you’re singing and dancing, and it ended up being a strong show, since the crowd was into it and I fed off their energy. There were all these signs up about the nightclub incident like LET THE HATERS HATE, WE ♥ U JONNY and THIS BIRD WILL ALWAYS BEE THERE FOR YOU and NO MATTER WHAT, YOU ARE THE ANGEL TO MY EYES. I told my instrumentalists not to come out for the second encore, and did an a cappella version of “U R Kewt” instead because I liked how it sounded with the kids with leukemia even though it was an idiotic choice for them. At the end of the concert I stayed out extra-long when they were cheering and invited up two cute girls onstage, which I never do, since it looks like I’m not a one-girl guy, which is the image we want to promote, and looped my arms around them and let them kiss me on each cheek at once.

  But the minute I got back into the star/talent room, I reread my father’s email and still couldn’t figure out if he meant he was coming to my Cincinnati concert. I was hoping for more clues to his life, like what sports he liked, or what he thought of my music. I’d want him to like it, but the idea of some guy in his forties listening to my music was weird, too. Except he wasn’t just some guy, he was my father, so maybe it was okay.

  Jane came in but I’d put the letter away and was unwinding with Zenon, and she told me she was going out for a late dinner with a promoter, and Walter would take me home and she’d see me in the morning before our ride to Nashville. “You sure that’s a good idea?” I asked.

  “I’m having dinner with another adult in a restaurant, Jonathan,” she said. “I think that’s allowed.”

  I was going to tell her about the New York Times article, but I kept quiet because this meant she’d be gone from her room and I had a chance to get inside it and write back.

  Me and Walter took the car service back to the hotel, and because it was our first real face time since the scandal broke, he told me not to give a shit about it, it was just tight-asses who had nothing else to do and they’d quickly move on to the next thing because they love getting worked up over bullshit so they don’t have to think about things like wars and people starving and bankers stealing from everyone, and anyway part of being a rock star is acting wild, and I reminded him, “I’m not a rock star, I’m a pop star,” since the difference is that rock stars might seem bigger to people like him but they also drive off a lot of listeners with either their sound or their image, so most only secure a niche audience, but pop stars have a chance at dominating the entire market because there’s fewer offensive elements. To be a rock star, you basically have to push your freakiness, but pop stars in my mold have to be more relatable and push their normalness, which is not the regular normal, it’s like a super-normal, so all I’m supposed to talk about in interviews is sports and girls and spending time with my family and friends even though the only family I see is Jane and now I’ll probably never talk to Michael Carns again, but if fans don’t love you as a person, they won’t love your music.

  He took me to my room and made sure everything was secure before going to his room. I waited until I heard his door click shut to make sure he hadn’t gone down to the hotel bar, and waited another twenty minutes to be safe. Then I pulled my Florida Marlins cap down and wore sunglasses and went down to the lobby. If I got busted by Jane, I’d say it was her job to be watching me, not going out at night. Anyway, I wasn’t nearly as scared this time, now that I’d done it by myself in Vegas and with Zack in Memphis. Jonny Tubman.

  I found a woman with a helmet of dyed blond hair at a desk who looked young enough to recognize me, and went up when no one else was around and took my hat and sunglasses off and said, “Hi, I’m Jonny Valentine, and I’m a guest in your hotel.”

  “Oh, hi!” she said in this super-friendly Southern accent. “I heard you were—how may I help you, Mr. Valentine?”

  “I need to get into my mother’s room, but she’s out. It’s under Jane Valentino, room 1722. I’m 1723.”

  She typed on her computer. It always sounds the same when workers like her type on a computer, like a million little clicks in a row. It’s got to be depressing spending ten thousand hours to be that good at a job like that.

  “I see something was messengered here for you today,” she said.

  I wasn’t expecting anything, and when we got sent print clips, they usually went to Jane. I gave her my label’s name and asked if it was from them.

  “Bergman Ellis Jacobson and Walsh,” she read off the screen. “It sounds like a law firm.”

  “And it’s for me?” I asked, which was stupid, because then she read more closely and said, “Oh, my mistake. It’s for Jane Valentino. They mixed up the room numbers.”

  That was really dumb of me. I could’ve read it without Jane knowing, then returned it. It wasn’t worth trying to get it from the woman now, when I was already hoping to get access to Jane’s room. She typed some more.

  “I’m terribly sorry, Mr. Valentine, but I’m not authorized to let anyone but Ms. Valentino into the room,” she said.

  “But I’m her son. That’s the name she uses for hotels. We’ve both been all over the news.”

  “I know, but we’d need her to list you, and she hasn’t done that. I could call her on the number listed here, if you want?”

  “No,” I said, probably too quickly. I slowed down. “She’s at a big business meeting with a promoter and she told me not to interrupt her. This is important. My leukemia medication is in her room and I need to take it.”

  “You take medication for leukemia?” the woman asked.

  “To prevent it,” I said. “It’s to prevent me from getting leukemia, and it’s really dangerous if I miss a day. It runs in my family. My father had it.”

  I couldn’t tell if she believed it or not. People get freaked out by anything to do with health. “I can’t call her?” she asked again.

  “No, she’ll get worried and it’ll ruin her meeting. Please, miss, I have to get in there.”

  She peered around like Angela did in Vegas, but she was slicker and did it just with her eyes. She made a key-card and said she was only doing this because it was an emergency. I asked if she wanted an autograph, but she said, “Um, thanks, that’s all right.”

  I sped back to Jane’s room and listened outside the door and went in. Her computer was in the bedroom, which was lucky, since sometimes she brought it to concerts. If she caught me using it, I’d say I was reading about the nightclub incident and my own key-card worked on her door.

  While it booted up I looked around, but I didn’t see any more legal letters, only her usual junk and clothes on the floor and even more dumped on the bed, though I kept the light off so I didn’t get a great look. Except she had a copy of The Ne
w Yorker magazine open and facedown on the desk, which didn’t make sense because she never reads it except once when they ran a profile of Ronald and it mentioned me a few times. When I turned it over, though, I saw why:

  Jonny Valentine’s concert last night was anemic even by today’s nadir of pop-music standards. One would be hard-pressed to imagine a hypothetical performance an audience might find more alienating.

  —The Kansas City Star.

  When my manager’s manager told me I’d been invited to perform at the historic Apollo Theater in Harlem, I was so excited that one of my handlers screamed for me with excitement.

  The day before my performance, an old movie called “The Jazz Singer” was on TV. The star, Al Jolson, had really great makeup, with black paint all over his face. Not only did he look badass, but it seemed like the perfect way to cover a pimple—and, boy, I had a honker right on my button nose! It also made his lips look a lot fuller, and I’ve always been insecure about my thin lips. So I sent my handler’s manager’s handler to buy me some industrial-strength Midnight Black Hole paint and bright red gloss to make my lips really pop.

  I wanted to surprise everyone, so I didn’t put on the paint until just before I went onstage. There was another movie I’d seen a couple weeks before that I also thought was cool, because it starred a guy with a kick-ass mustache. I don’t have much facial hair, but I let it grow in the week leading up to the awards, then just before I put on the black paint I shaved everything but the mustache so I could look like him. I also had the movie playing behind me on a big screen with a close-up of the guy I was trying to look like, so everyone would know the mustache was on purpose. Check it out sometime, even if foreign movies normally suck—“Triumph of the Will.”

  It was time to sing my song called “I Like Girls with Curves.” But I wanted to do something special for this performance and tweak my lyrics a little. Fortunately, there was a book lying around backstage that had a similar title. I just plucked out a few lines and mixed them into the verses, and changed the chorus to “I Like, and Wholeheartedly Endorse, the Bell Curve.”

  Yet the star is only as good as his backup dancers. It was almost Halloween, so I thought my dancers should dress up—and my all-time favorite costume is ghosts. My second favorite? You guessed it: dunces. I got all my dancers ghost outfits with dunce caps, and told them to cover their faces, too. Hey, I’m the star, you know? But I felt bad that they weren’t getting as much attention, so I researched which shape is most visible from a distance, got them some wood in that shape, and had them light the wood on fire for better visibility. I also wanted to single out the three dancers who’d been with me longest—Krista, Carl, and Kiersten—by putting up a banner with the first letters of their three names. Except the guy who made the banner thought Carl was spelled with a “K”! Maybe we’ll get a discount next time. They were doing this new dance I’d choreographed in which they go around in a circle totally in sync on horses. Aww, yeah: Ghosts in dunce caps on horseback with flaming crosses!

  In the middle of all this perfection, something went wrong—suddenly the big-screen video stopped, the background music cut, and the house lights went down. What a low-budget production! The TV crew was still filming, though, so to show everyone I was against “The Man” and wasn’t afraid to stand up to corporate America, I started yelling about how cheap they were. I’ve been studying vocabulary lists—stay in school, kids!—so instead of saying “cheap,” I decided to whip out one of my bigger words.

  “Y’all are niggardly!” I shouted. “Goddamn niggardly! Get ’em for being niggardly!”

  I then repeated the word niggardly seventeen times. Everyone started talking, probably to ask what niggardly meant. “Oh, I’m sorry,” I said. I figured I had to speak down to the level of people who don’t understand big words, so I should have shortened it and referred to it just by its first letter. “I guess I should’ve called it ‘the N-word.’ Is that better?”

  I kept getting calls after the show from a group named the NAACP, which I assume stands for the National Association for Awesome Costume Parties. They probably want to know where I got my ghost costumes and dunce caps.

  I’m going to ask the NAACP if they want to sponsor my next tour through the South! ♦

  I recognized the writer’s name, because he flew in from New York to hang out with me for a day for a softball profile in a music glossy last year. I must have made him a few months’ rent on his crap apartment by now. Not only did he not sound like me at all in this article, but we only released “I Like Girls with Curves” as a digital single because we knew it was weak. I understood the jokes about the KKK and a bunch of the rest, but I didn’t think it was that funny. People in the cultural-elite demo usually aren’t. They just like making fun of my music so they feel special about liking their own boring classical music that no one listens to anymore, the same way that New York Times writer bashed Jane to feel better about how good a mother she is. They’re probably even happy that no one else listens to classical music now, so they can feel really special. If you listened to Mozart when he was alive, it was like saying you listened to MJ. And they’re just as into reading and talking about celebrities, only their celebrities are politicians and serious musicians and writers and movie directors. Jane’s big into publicity that reaches people high up on the cultural food chain, though, even if they’re way out of my fan base, because there’s always a trickle-down effect. I’m sure she was happy about this.

  I almost forgot what I’d come in for, so I signed into my email and read my father’s letter again, and it was different here, since it was like he’d written these words himself, not ones I’d printed out later.

  I’d had all these questions before for him, but now I didn’t know what to write. Or I knew some things, but I couldn’t click on the reply button and type them in. I just stared at it.

  I heard the elevator ding down the hall and two people laughing, and one of them sounded a lot like Jane, so I signed out of the email fast, which I was getting a lot of practice at, and closed the computer, which made the room completely dark, and the voices were louder and one of them was definitely Jane’s, I can ID her laugh a mile away, and I remembered there were closets in the living room, so I ran out of the bedroom and almost tripped over a suitcase, but I heard Jane sliding her key-card and it kept beeping from her not doing it right, and I didn’t have time to hide in the closet so I crouched in the small space between the back of the big white U-shaped couch and the wall. I was doing that a lot lately, like I was in the movies. General Jonny, hiding from the enemy.

  “Abracadabra,” Jane said, slowly. She was drunk.

  There weren’t any sounds for a few seconds as the door shut, and I didn’t want to lift my head. But then there were footsteps, and something bumped hard against one of the sides of the couch. A man’s voice, low and steady, said, “Don’t fucking move.” I couldn’t tell whose it was, but it sounded familiar.

  “Yes, sir,” said Jane in this little-girl voice that was a million miles from what she used when she was bitching out the TV producer. I could tell she was putting it on, that she wasn’t actually in danger, but the guy sounded like he wasn’t pretending at all.

  Then shoes hitting the ground one after another, high heels falling to the floor, a zipper unzipping, jeans being shaken off, keys and a belt and change jingling and clanging when they hit the ground, and the man saying, “Take off your clothes and stand there.” I still couldn’t place his voice.

  I held my breath, since I was sure they could hear me breathing. Once you pay attention to the sound of your breathing or your heartbeat, it’s like the loudest sound in the world and you have a hard time doing it regularly. It’s the reason why you’re supposed to be aware of your breathing while you sing but you should never think about it, because you’ll screw it up.

  The man said, “You like being my little slut, don’t you?” and Jane again said, “Yes, sir,” and I heard a loud slap and Jane moaned and the guy said
, “Shut up,” and Jane said, “I’m sorry, sir,” and heat rose up in my body like it wanted me to jump over the couch and tackle him, even though I knew from her voice that Jane was playing along. But I’d get in major trouble.

  My eyes had adjusted to the darkness, and I peeked up a tiny bit to see if I could watch them without them catching me, since their eyes probably hadn’t adjusted yet and they were off to the side. Jane’s back was to me, and the guy was standing in front of her totally naked except for dark socks and his boner sticking straight up out of his pubes. A man looks weird with just long socks and a boner. I couldn’t see him too good, only that his arms were covered with tattoos.

  Oh, man. The head crew guy. Bill.

  Bill had joined us when we began assembling the crew for this tour and getting the stagecraft down, so the longest this could’ve been going on was a few months, but he’d never been at our place in L.A. He didn’t talk to me much.

  “God, you’re so beneath me,” Bill said.

  “I’m sorry,” Jane said in her little-girl voice.

  “You don’t even deserve my cock tonight,” he said. “I’m just gonna jerk off on you.”

  “Yes, sir,” she said again, and I heard him jerking off. After a minute he said, “I need moisturizer or something,” and she ran in and out of the bathroom and handed him something, and he took a few more minutes, and I closed my eyes and thought of me telling Lisa Pinto she was my little slut and her calling me sir, but the way Jane said it, and then Bill took a step toward her and made this sound like an animal growling.

  He went to the bathroom and peed and used the sink while Jane pulled a bunch of tissues from a box and wiped herself off. Bill came back and Jane went to the bathroom, and he sat down on the couch. I peeked over again. His hands were behind his head like a pillow, and it looked like his eyes were closed. He was still naked. His penis was small now and hanging to one side. That looked even stranger than a boner, a grown man with a soft penis that wasn’t all that much bigger than mine.