The Love Song of Jonny Valentine

by Teddy Wayne

  Cleveland (First Day)

  On the morning of Jane’s birthday, Nadine gave me my first set of final exams on the bus and in the hotel before she went back to L.A. in two days for winter break. The next day was going to be history plus language/reading, which meant an essay on slavery. I think I did okay overall, because it was vocab (superb), math (middling), and science (subpar), but I wasted a few minutes at the start imagining taking them in a real classroom, with all the other students getting nervous before and comparing the answers after. It wasn’t exactly like having teammates, because you were basically competing against them, but it sounded sort of fun.

  When I finished, Jane said she’d reserved a nice lunch for us. She didn’t look so hot. All these tiny blue veins I’d never noticed before popped out under her eyes like the roots of a plant, and she was really skinny, skinnier than when the tour started, but not in a good way. She still had chub in some areas, like her stomach and hips, but was too skinny in others, like her forearms and face. Rog is always stressing the importance of a balanced dancer’s body to prevent injury. Jane’s is imbalanced.

  Walter escorted me and Jane out the hotel through the lobby to the car service, since Cleveland doesn’t have anything set up for celebrities. Right after the revolving doors, this guy was standing there in a cheap suit, holding a big white envelope. “Jane Valentine?” he asked.

  “No autographs or interviews, sorry,” she said, and Walter started to move between them while keeping an eye on me.

  He quickly pushed the envelope on her before Walter could provide buffer. “You’ve been served,” he said, and walked away. She watched him for a few seconds and folded the envelope up and stuffed it in her bag.

  “Why’d he say that?” I said.

  “It’s nothing,” she said. “Walter, get the door, please.”

  I slid into the car. “What’s in the envelope?”

  “Just some papers I needed,” she said.

  “What kind of papers?”

  “Boring business stuff.”

  “But why did he dis you?”

  “What?”

  “He said, ‘You’ve been served,’ like what people say when they dis someone or block their shot in basketball. Only they usually say, ‘You got served.’ ”

  “It’s to let you know he’s from the delivery service.” Her body seemed smaller and her face was tighter than usual, like she’d shrunk into a Jane Valentine doll. Walter looked like he didn’t know what just happened, either. “Can we have quiet time until we get to the restaurant? I need to email a few people back.”

  The restaurant was an Italian hot spot for Cleveland, the type of place where there’d be write-ups of us locally and they’d get syndicated out to the nationals. Maybe that was why Jane chose it, to show me and her went out to eat in restaurants like a normal mother and son. But when it’s a third-tier city, their trendy places always feel desperate, like they’re trying to be a cool place in L.A. or New York but not coming close. Jane always puts down pop acts that imitate someone else, because they’ll never do it too good and it looks worse when they fail. She says you have to make your own brand, no one wants a knock-off. I’m like, But you’re always trying to make me into the next Tyler Beats. She says we’re imitating his career trajectory, not his music. She’s always on the label about getting songwriters and producers who understand that distinction, except I’m not sure she can hear the difference herself in the music.

  Jane ordered a mimosa when the waiter seated us and went to the restroom and had another waiter stand by me since Walter had stayed outside. When she came back, the white envelope was poking out of the unzipped part of her bag and was opened. Without making it obvious, I peeked at the writing in the corner. It said “Meacham Weiss & White,” and it had a New York City address. So it was another legal letter, and not from her L.A. lawyers. I don’t think she had lawyers in New York. It could have been something about business, or about me and her drinking, or about my father. No way she’d tell me, though.

  She kept watching the room like there were paparazzi everywhere, and slurped down her mimosa by the time the waiter came back for our food order. When she asked for a third in the middle of her Caprese salad, I said maybe she should switch to water. “It’s my birthday, Jonathan,” she said. “I’m entitled to a couple drinks.”

  The waiter was this young guy, and he looked like he was about to piss his pants because he had a tough logic question of who should he listen to, the adult or the child celebrity, so Jane held up her glass and said, “Refill it.”

  She left for the bathroom before he came back, and when he did I said, “If she asks for another drink, can you make it very low on alcohol?” and he was cool about it and said, “Certainly, sir.” He wasn’t the kind of guy who’d talk to the tabloids. Plus he’d lose his job if he did. That was the best defense against employee leaks.

  She didn’t ask for a fourth drink, but she also didn’t finish her salad. Her walk to the car service for the Wolstein Center was a little wobbly, but she held it together and didn’t slur her speech or anything. That was the thing with Jane, you couldn’t always tell if she’d had too much or not. She could be a decent actor.

  The concert was tight, because we all knew it was one of our last tune-ups before New York. I pulled out the hottest girl from the front rows to sing to, and I didn’t care if it made the others jealous. But I didn’t try telling her to wait for me backstage this time. Even if it worked and Jane wasn’t around, Walter would shut it down.

  When I did get backstage, Jane was pacing around the hallway near my room. She had a glass of white wine in her hand. White doesn’t stain your teeth. “Are you going out?” I asked.

  “Yes, I am.” The words came out fast, like she was vomiting them.

  “Why are you walking around here?”

  “I’m not allowed to walk?” She spilled a little wine on the carpet.

  “Tell Walter I’ll be in my room,” I said. Jane seemed not like she wasn’t herself, but like she was super-herself, two or three times the regular amount. She had tiny drops of sweat covering her nose and her face looked white in parts and splotchy and red in others.

  Before I turned the doorknob, Jane said, “Make sure you warm up your vocals more before New York. You were flat a few times tonight.”

  I wasn’t flat at all. It was one of my best performances on the whole tour. I was going to say, “Maybe Bill can help me with my warm-ups,” but when I turned, she was wavering and put one hand against the wall for support and dropped the wineglass in the other. It broke in a few big pieces, and then she crumpled in the opposite direction onto the carpet.

  I screamed, “Jane! Fuck!” What Peter said, with my name, when I fainted in the kitchen.

  Her eyes were closed and she was breathing, but when I shook her, she didn’t wake up, and for a second I thought I was going to faint, too. “Help! Somebody help me!” I yelled, almost the lyrics to that Beatles song. It’s like I was derivative of other people even in an emergency. A voice down the hall shouted for someone to call the medical team. Sometimes a few girls faint during my shows and the medical teams from the venues have to help them, but this wasn’t normal fainting.

  I stopped shaking her, because it could’ve been making it worse. I kept saying, all quiet, “Jane, wake up.” And then this was stupid, but I whispered to myself, “Don’t depart the realm.” She was the one who was sick, but I was having trouble taking full breaths and my heart was squeezing up and releasing like some animal that hides in its shell and pops out once in a while to see if the coast is clear. All this commotion whirled up around me, walkie-talkies crackling and people running and barking directions at each other and a few adults I didn’t know testing her pulse and breathing. In a minute a couple guys from the medical team ran over with a stretcher.

  “Clear some space!” one of the guys said, and even though I was glad they were helping, in my mind I was like, Fuck you, she’s my mother. But I moved over and he listened
to her heartbeat and checked her breathing. They carefully put her on the stretcher and carried her off to an elevator down the hall.

  Walter rushed up to me as the elevator doors closed, wheezing like an accordion. If he ever has to carry me away from a crowd racing after us, we’re screwed. That’s the downside of strength training over cardio.

  He asked what happened. “She just collapsed,” I said. “I think she’s been drinking all day.”

  He looked at the broken glass on the ground near us. “That must be it. She’ll be okay.”

  I wasn’t sure she would, but when Walter said it, I mostly believed it, and my heartbeat started to go back to normal, the slow verse after the fast chorus. We found the medical offices on the basement level, where a woman was eating fast food. Girls and guys, burgers and fries, all gets ruined with a coupla lies.

  “They’ve already taken your mother to the hospital,” she told us.

  “What happened to her?” I asked. My heart sped up again. The last five minutes were like an album with a bunch of different tempos for each track. You don’t want too much variation if you’re trying to craft an iconic sound. Only critics care about versatility. Fans want consistency.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “You’ll have to find out at the hospital.”

  In the car service to the hospital, Walter said, “I’ve been through shit like this before, brother. Don’t start getting worried before we see what’s what.” Walter usually knew what to say, but this time he actually made it worse, because if he had to warn me not to worry, maybe there was something to be worried about.

  Before this week I hadn’t been to a hospital since I was born.

  I had on a baseball hat so I wouldn’t be ID’d, but Walter walked right next to me the whole time we went into the hospital, just in case. He found a receptionist and told me to stay in his sight but to stand by a water fountain about fifteen feet away, I think so I wouldn’t hear anything, since he’d never let me stand fifteen feet away in a public space. He must’ve told her who I was so we could get special treatment, because she got all excited before controlling it and shooting a quick glance at me.

  While he was still talking to her, Rog came into the receptionist area. He spotted me first, then saw Walter and went over to him. It looked like he was taking over the job of talking to the receptionist. He doesn’t like Walter, I don’t think, and I bet Walter doesn’t like Rog but he’s better at hiding it. After a minute, Walter gave up and came back to me. “Rog is finding out what’s going on,” he said. Rog’s voice got loud a few times, until he motioned for us to come over and told us we could wait in a special room.

  A Latina nurse with chubby upper arms led us to a small room on another floor, a conference room with nothing in it but a round table with glossies and a few chairs. Rog left with her to find out more details about Jane. Me and Walter didn’t say anything until he asked, “You want to play a game or something?”

  “What game?”

  “What games do kids play now?”

  “I only play Zenon and other video games. I don’t know any other games, really.”

  “Me neither.”

  I imagined playing games with my father, but maybe he’d be too old to be into them, so then I thought about playing with Jane’s dead baby, and that he was a boy and my younger brother. I’d teach him how to throw a baseball, and Jane would definitely build us a field then. Maybe he’d have musical talent, too, but if he didn’t it wouldn’t matter, and even if he did, when he got old enough I’d say to him, You don’t have to go into the industry, just stay in school, I’ll do it alone and support our family, little man.

  If something happened to Jane, would Walter move in full-time with me? He was fun to hang out with, and I asked Jane a million times if he could move into the house from his bungalow but she wanted to establish some boundaries. But he didn’t know how to do half of what Jane did. Nadine was too young to take care of me. I still didn’t really know my father, and he never even came to the concert in Cincinnati like he said he might, so there was no guarantee he’d do anything if Jane died. And I’d have to find a new manager, and they might steal my money or make career-killing business decisions.

  I thought about Jane’s funeral, the same way I used to picture Michael in his coffin. All her industry friends and acquaintances were there, like Ronald and Rog and the TV exec and his wife and everyone who worked for us at the house. They were all listening to whoever was onstage talking about Jane, but none of them actually knew her. Anyone she was friends with, she’d known for two years at the most. We wouldn’t be inviting the people who knew her from Schnucks, and she definitely wouldn’t want Albert there. And there’d be no point in flying Grandma Pat out there, if she even could fly anymore. I’d be the only one who knew her from before.

  They’d probably play a song of mine at the funeral, or ask me to sing live. The only one that would make any sense for a funeral was “Heart Torn Apart,” even though that’s about breaking up with a girl.

  In her coffin, Jane was wearing a black dress and had a lot of makeup on to make it seem like she was still alive. I finished singing “Heart Torn Apart,” and I looked at the crowd and said, “Fuck you all, you did this to her but you want to pretend like she did it to herself,” and climbed into the coffin with Jane and closed it on top of us and locked it from inside, and in a few hours I’d run out of air and depart the realm next to her.

  “Can you find out what’s going on?” I asked Walter. He said he’d find Rog and to only unlock the door for him or Rog. He left, and I distracted myself by singing “Heart Torn Apart” quietly. He didn’t come back when I finished, so I picked up a men’s glossy. The table of contents mentioned my name, and I didn’t normally get any coverage in men’s glossies. It was a half-page fashion spread, with a stock photo of me and some text:

  Kickin’ It Elementary School

  The most stylish singer these days may just be

  JONNY VALENTINE

  Yes, yes, we know what you’re thinking: fashion cues from someone whose mother might still lay out his clothes for him? But before you recoil and go back to home-brewing your own beer (see page 87), take a gander at Jonny Valentine’s ensemble. Little dude’s got game. From his bespoke track sweaters and graphic tees to his snazzy (usually red) sneaks and perfectly fitting jeans that are just relaxed enough to bust a move in, the kid outdresses musicians twice his age. And we haven’t even brought up The Jonny, that coif for the ages you should seriously consider requesting next time you’re getting sheared instead of your lame-ass crew-cut. Your girlfriend will surely thank us—and so what if your d-bag bros laugh at you? (Why does it gotta be that way?)

  There were a bunch of arrows pointing at my different clothes and naming the designers and their off-the-rack prices, and then one at my head with how much a haircut costs at Christian’s salon for normal customers. I might’ve usually been excited at getting a positive fashion write-up in an adult glossy, even if the guys who wrote for this one really do love clothes and hair products, but they’re afraid people will think they’re gay, so they write like they’re the least gay guys out there. But when you’re waiting in a hospital to hear if your mother’s dead, a fashion spread seems like a pretty stupid thing, especially when you think of how many adults are involved in something like this. When I’ve done staged fashion shoots, not like the fake candids we did in Denver, there’s a photographer, his assistant, the glossy staff that needs to be on set, plus all the people who helped plan it. Then you’ve got all the staff it takes for production at the glossy, whatever number that is. Even if someone’s quoting me, it takes a bunch of adults to make it happen. All that work, just because an eleven-year-old opened his mouth near a mike. If they’d spent as much time studying medicine, they could all be doctors.

  At least they didn’t figure out that I started wearing track sweaters in the last year to cover up my gut chub. There was a big discussion with the label about how to do that.

 
; Finally Walter knocked. “You were right,” he said. “She drank too much and wasn’t eating enough. But she’s gonna be okay.”

  “Can I see her?”

  “She can’t see anyone till tomorrow, no exceptions. I tried.”

  There are a few places where being a celebrity or rich doesn’t get you everything you want, whenever you want it. Not many, but a few. I guess hospitals were one of them. “But she’ll be okay? You sure?”

  “I’m sure,” he said. “I told you not to worry. This happens all the time. Happened to me once in Nashville. Got the shit pumped out of my stomach.”

  Walter weighed about three times what Jane weighed, so it wasn’t exactly the same, but that made me feel a little better. I said, “And maybe the stomach pump will even make her a little skinnier, because she’s been worried about her love handles lately.”

  He looked down at the men’s glossy on the table, which was open to my spread, and at me for a couple seconds. “Hey, you know you can walk away from all this, right?”

  “We’re using the car service to get home, aren’t we?”

  “No,” he said. “This whole thing. You don’t have to sing if you don’t want. You’ve made enough money to live on the rest of your life. You can walk away from it if you don’t like it anymore.”

  This was like what Nadine had told me, except Walter never came close to saying anything like this before.

  “Why are you telling me that?” I asked. “Do you want to quit or something, right after I got your job back for you?”

  “That’s not it,” he said. “There’s a lot of other things in life, and maybe love handles shouldn’t be the most important to you.”

  “It’s not my love handles. It’s Jane’s.” Except I did worry about growing my own, sometimes.

  He closed up the men’s glossy and looked at me for a few seconds. “Sure. Forget what I said, okay?”

  It wasn’t so easy to forget something like that, but I told him I had to use the bathroom before we left. He walked me to one down the hall, cleared the area inside, and stood guard outside. As I went in, he said, “I’m gonna find some coffee. Don’t come out till I’m back, okay?”