by Teddy Wayne
I went over to the computer and Googled my name in a new window. It was the same stuff I always saw, tons of pictures and videos and fan sites and articles and blog posts and the “Jonny Valentine Legal Countdown Page” this gay guy set up that has a timer ticking down to my eighteenth birthday that Jane tried to take down but he has a legal right to keep up because he’s not explicitly being a child predator. It was at 2,248 days, one hour, thirty-three minutes, and sixteen seconds. I watched it tick down a few more seconds.
There was too much to go through, and some of it I couldn’t access anyway since Jane had a parental block on and it thought a lot of regular sites were porn sites, sort of like how normal-looking guys might be child predators.
I was about to close the browser and get out before she caught me, but I noticed a piece of paper sticking out of an envelope at the corner of the desk. It was one page, and there were a lot more underneath it in the envelope. The stationery address listed a law office in L.A. called Bergman Ellis Jacobson & Walsh and the top said
VIA OVERNIGHT MAIL AND EMAIL
Re: Albert Derrick Valentino
Jane always told me my father didn’t have a middle name, so I almost didn’t recognize his name at first. I tried reading it:
Per our telephone conversation on 1/12, until we are able to determine the identity of the individual(s) referred to in the letter dated 1/7, we cannot seek any judicial remedy. However, we recommend the following precautionary measures.
The rest of the page was all legal language, and I’m usually okay at understanding financial terms because Jane reviews my contracts with me, but I couldn’t figure any of this out, and I was afraid to take out the other papers from the envelope in case I screwed up the order. I slipped the page back in where it had been and spun in the chair once around the room to make sure I was still alone and for fun.
Then, even though it was a high-risk decision, since if Jane caught me she wouldn’t just enforce check-ins, she’d take away my game system, too, I double-checked that Jane’s computer was preset for private browsing like it always is, and Googled “Albert Valentino.”
All the usual info about him being my father and how nobody knows anything about him came up, like that he left our house when I was five or six, and even I don’t know which it is or when they got divorced because Jane doesn’t hardly ever talk about him. The times I’ve asked, she says something like, Jonathan, remember that your father left and the one person in this whole world who will always stick with you is me, everyone else will try to take from you, but people who love you will give to you.
Once in a million years, though, she’ll slip and say something nice about him, like when we saw this war movie on TV two Christmases ago with a telegenic young Irish actor, the first time he came on-screen Jane whispered to herself, “God, Al,” and at the end of the movie, when the Irish actor jumps in front of his general before a grenade goes off and he departs the realm, Jane cried a Jacuzzi, and it had to be because the actor looked like my father, since it was a mostly crap movie and he was the caliber of actor who you could tell was repeating someone else’s words. I only have a couple memories of him and don’t totally remember what he looked like, just brownish hair and that he smelled like cigarettes. If we ever had any pictures, Jane threw them out.
Then I Googled something I’d never Googled before: “Albert Derrick Valentino.”
There weren’t many hits, and they were all about people or things that weren’t my father, but I went to the second page anyway, and when I did, something stopped me. His name showed up in a Jonny Valentine fan forum.
A bunch of comments from a message on December 24 were from haters, saying I was gay or sounded like a girl or they hope I’ll get electrocuted onstage when I cry into my mike. When Jane sees this stuff she’s like, It’s not the Internet that makes people stupid and annoying, they were always stupid and annoying, now it’s in our face. But at the bottom of the message, a commenter named “Albert Derrick Valentino” wrote, “If Jonny is reading this, he can contact me.”
His email address was listed, but that was it. There were a lot of impostors pretending to be either me or Jane or sometimes my brother or sister who don’t even exist and once in a while my father, but I never saw anyone use a middle name, and especially with our old last name, which only the rabid fans know about, not the lay fans, and not say he was my father. The media never pays them any attention because they know they’re fakes, but I always guessed my real father never went to the media. Or maybe he did, but Jane shut it down by threatening a publicity freeze-out to whoever was going to break the story.
I Googled “Albert Derrick Valentino Jonny Valentine.” A bunch of different fan sites came up, and he’d posted the same message in each of their forums, all on December 24, at different times over the whole day. So it probably wasn’t a spam-bot. It was a real person. I just didn’t know if it was actually my father.
My hand was shaking over the touch pad like it does sometimes holding the mike preshow, and I got worried Jane would come back and find me reading it. I scribbled the email address on a piece of hotel stationery in case the post got erased and made sure the letter was exactly where it had been and left her room with the lights on like it was before even though it’s wasteful.
Back in my room next door I buried the stationery in the pocket of a pair of jeans in a suitcase. Was that message really from my father or an impostor? If it was an impostor, how did he know my father’s middle name? And if it was my father, why didn’t he say anything else besides telling me I could contact him, which was a weird way to say it?
I was thinking about it so much I got even more awake. I could have taken the zolpidem, but I was also excited to get back to Zenon now that I’d pretended to be playing it in real life.
So I loaded my saved game, and after a few minutes of traveling through a forest I encountered a horse. First I tried riding the horse, which didn’t do anything. I reloaded and damaged the horse, and it jumped up on its back legs and kicked at me, but my two-handed sword was too powerful and I got it all bloody and its horse ghost floated up in the air, except that didn’t give me any experience points, either. The second time I reloaded, I fed it a loaf of bread in my inventory. My experience points went up by seventeen, and a gem appeared on the ground.
I picked up the gem, and a few seconds later the Emperor’s minion jumped out from behind a tree. He was a regular-looking soldier in chain-mail armor, with a curved sword and shield. We battled, and he reduced my damage to seven percent and I thought I was going to depart the realm, but I came back and knocked his shield away and hacked him down to zero percent, and the narrator’s voice and screen said, “You have defeated the minion of Level Sixty-three and advanced to the next level of The Secret Land of Zenon. You must pass through thirty-seven additional levels until you encounter the Emperor.”
That’s the other cool thing, how you don’t have a name in it. Other games, they’d give you a stupid name, like Kurgan or Dragonslayer or even just the Warrior. In Zenon you’re only you.
Finishing a level always helped me feel less wound up. I turned off the game and popped the zolpidem. I’d be able to conquer sleep now, and sleep was the Emperor’s minion. We had an early start and a big day tomorrow.
CHAPTER 2
Los Angeles (First Day)
Walter waited for the room service guy who’d delivered my breakfast to leave before tasting it first for me. He always makes some joke about how it’s not poisoned but it might as well be, because it’s a three-egg-white omelet with spinach, no hash browns or toast, which are straight carbs, and coffee, no dairy. Walter eats meat and fried food and ordered a salad like once in his life, since he’s from Nashville, where he has three daughters he’s on the child-support hook to his old lady for and where we’ll play later in the tour and which still has a strong country base that’s difficult for pure pop acts to penetrate. He’s about 250 pounds, which is half muscle from lifting four days a week, but half
fat because he says walking from a hotel or venue to the car service counts as cardio. He says chasing around his daughters used to keep his weight down. Now he just has to walk briskly by my side, but I’m not supposed to run indoors because of injury risk and I definitely shouldn’t in public or it might spark crowd interest and trigger a stampede. I bet he was fun with his daughters, though.
I thought of asking him about the legal letter and telling him about the Internet fan-forum messages, but first of all, Walter never went on the Internet, and second, even though he wouldn’t tell Jane, I didn’t want to make it so he had to lie to her.
He left to eat in one of the hotel restaurants with the rest of the crew, and I sipped my drink and imagined the coffee beans were fighting the early onset dementia that Grandma Pat had maybe passed down to me and Jane, and they were using the paralyze spell from Zenon, which freezes your enemies for a few seconds. There should be an early onset dementia spell, too, which places your enemy in an old-age home.
After breakfast Walter came back to escort me down to the basement service exit, and I put on my sunglasses and a Detroit Tigers hat because I’d been wearing the Dodgers hat three days in a row. You never want to alienate fans in different markets, even though my following is all girls who think you score a touchdown in baseball. Jane is like, Let the paparazzi take your photo but make it look like you’re not letting them take it, so the baseball hat and sunglasses are perfect for that. And plus the baseball hat is my trademark now. Jane once showed me a big website that’s only candids of me in different hats.
In the bus parking lot, the star/talent bus was parked all the way past our five other buses and four eighteen-wheelers. Me and Walter boarded it and said hi to the driver, Kenny, and Jane weighed me on the scale near the front. Eighty-eight pounds. I’d started the tour eighteen days ago at eighty-six. You almost always drop weight when you’re performing, no matter how bad you’re eating, but I’d been raiding the minibars and gift-basket amenities more than normal, and now that I’d seen the number, I could tell I was getting beefier.
She didn’t say anything about it, but she didn’t have to. She just whipped out the hotel bill and said, “Three packages of candy. Thirty-two minutes on the bike, either now or later.”
“I sang and danced for two hours last night.”
“Are we going to argue about this every morning? That’s only six hundred calories, and it’s not sustained cardio that raises your metabolism,” she said. “You want your next publicity photos to show you with a gut, too?”
I chose the bike now, because it’s worse to have it waiting for you and I didn’t like seeing eighty-eight any more than she did. Before I left the driver’s section, Walter stepped on the scale. “I’ve gained six pounds,” he said, and patted his belly. I wanted to laugh, but Jane was already in a bad mood.
I walked into the living room, over the wooden floors and past the tan leather couches and TV and kitchen and bar and the three rows of bucket seats, up to the door leading to me and Jane’s bedrooms and the additional bunk beds. In front of the door was the mounted stationary bike. I strapped the seat-belt harness over me and programmed the bike on medium-intensity intervals. What would Jane say if I asked her about the letter in her room about my father? She’d probably pretend it was nothing, like about an impostor or something. She’d go even crazier if she found out I’d gone down to the lobby by myself to get the key-card for her room.
I biked and listened on my iPod to an album by a new British singer Jane downloaded for me, who’s got decent phrasings but a flat upper range. When this one track had about a minute of white noise, I overheard Jane and Rog talking quietly two rows up in the bucket seats. “I can’t believe I’ll be forty in three weeks,” she said. “The number sounds wrinkled.”
“Nonsense,” Rog said. “You look early thirties. If I were straight, I’d do you in a second.”
She looks early thirties from a distance because she’s short and how she dresses, and sometimes if she’s turned around and I don’t realize it’s her, I think she’s in her twenties. But when you have face time with her, if I had to play the age game, I’d guess forty-two or even -three.
“As if I’d let you, with your gray-haired balls,” Jane said, and they laughed. Jane’s going gray and is naturally mousy brown but dyes it blond, and Rog would be salt-and-pepper but he dyes it black. He says none of the queers in L.A. would even think about going for him if he didn’t, even though he’s a super-successful choreographer and voice coach who used to sing and dance on Broadway. He won’t say his age but I saw on our payroll that he’s fifty-three and makes $315,000 a year with bonuses for tours.
“Listen.” Jane twisted the thick silver ring she wears on her right hand’s middle finger. “When we go to Salt Lake City, the Mormons are gonna freak the fuck out if they see a gay working with Jonny.”
“I can’t wait,” Rog said.
“I know, but this time, it might be best if you lay low at the hotel and don’t come to the arena.”
The white-noise track on my iPod started up with music, but I pressed pause. Jane had never told Rog not to come to the arena before. If it was cover for a business decision, it didn’t make sense, because it was our album sales that were flat, not our ticket sales, which were still okay even if we weren’t selling out every single show within three minutes like last time.
Rog said, “Jane, we’re going to Salt Lake City next week, not in 1897.”
“Still, I don’t want to take the risk.”
“Who’s going to help him with his preshow tune-up?”
“I booked a woman for the night.” She twisted her ring some more.
I couldn’t see Rog’s face, but I knew he wasn’t happy. “I don’t like the idea of someone else messing with his routine.”
Jane got into her business-negotiations voice, which is like half an octave lower and she enunciates more clearly and with her diaphragm. “Rog, it’s one night. Please don’t make this difficult.”
Rog’s always asking Jane for salary advances, so he got quiet and said, “All right, I’ll lay low.”
I finished my workout and sang “Breathtaking” on the final stretch to simulate singing while I’m out of breath at the end of a concert and showered in me and Jane’s bathroom and went into my bedroom for tutoring with Nadine. She asked what I wanted to start with, and I said language/reading, which I’m best at even though I don’t do any pleasure reading, then science and history and math for last, which I used to be a numbskull at but I’ve gotten better from studying revenues and market breakdowns with Jane, and when it’s a subject that affects you, you care about it more, and Nadine tells me I have to work hard at math since I don’t want people cheating me out of my money when I’m older, except Jane shows me exactly how it’s getting diversified and invested in our portfolio. We don’t do Spanish till next year, so I can use it in interviews and maybe even sing a song in it to boost my Latin-market presence, but she teaches me a new word each session. Yo soy un cantante de música pop.
We finished our work early, so we did freewriting time at the end with a prompt from Nadine. Sometimes it’s song ideas, only I’m not allowed to write my own songs until I’m older and until then we have to go through the normal process, where the label rents studios for two weeks and invites all these professional songwriters and producers to collaborate on an album. Each song costs about eighty thousand dollars to produce from songwriting to mixing and mastering, not including marketing, so we figured out that a twelve-song album costs almost a million. Marketing is where the money really goes. It’s better to have a poorly produced album with a robust marketing budget than a top-shelf producer but weak marketing muscle.
Today, though, she said, “Jonny, write down all the feelings you had today.”
I said, “What do you mean?”
“Tell me a feeling you had.”
If I told her about the legal letter and the Internet message, she’d want to talk more about it and would proba
bly mention it to Jane since she’s as scared as anyone about child predators. So I decided I wouldn’t tell anyone about it.
Finally I said, “When I heard the wake-up call, I was mad.”
“Why were you mad?”
“Because I hate being woken up.”
The bedroom door was open a few inches, and she got up and closed it. Her shirt rode up her back a few inches when she did it, and it showed her pale skin. She’s five-three and won’t tell me how many pounds but I’d guess 110 because she’s not fat and is only twenty-six and a half, but she also never goes to the gym so it’s not a toned 110. It’s better to be a toned 120 than a flabby 110. Muscular marketing for mediocre content. “Why do you hate it?”
“I want to sleep.”
“Why else, though?”
“Beats me.” The name of Tyler’s smash hit and album, but I bet Nadine didn’t even know that. I’ve never heard of the bands she likes.
“I want you to think about this, Jonny.” She squinted as the sun bounced through my window onto her eyes and turned them from blue to green. “The only way to understand yourself is by articulating your thoughts.”
“Articulating is when you separate out the notes you’re singing,” I said. “You want me to sing my thoughts?”
“It also means figuring out what you want to say, and saying it. Using language to describe what you mean.”
I articulated, “I get tired.”
“You get tired in the mornings?”
“No, I mean I get tired of waking up early every day.”
“When you’re on tour, you mean?”
“No. Every day.”
She wedged her pen behind her ear so it got lost in her black hair. “You’ve never said this before.”
I shrugged, and she asked why I was saying this for the first time. I was about to say, “Because you asked,” but Bill, the head crew guy, who was riding on our bus today because he had to confab with Jane and the label over crew changes when we got to L.A., knocked on the door and stuck his head in. He has a big beard he’s always scratching and muscles on his arms like little rocks are poking out under his skin with tattoo sleeves on both of them. In a few years I can lift with Walter but not now because we want to keep me slim and boyish. I wonder if Albert Derrick Valentino lifts.