The Love Song of Jonny Valentine

by Teddy Wayne

  It wasn’t MJ, which pumps straight into my veins, and I don’t know how you could listen to him and not dance, but when Zack saw I was tapping my foot to it and turned the volume up, it didn’t make me want to dance. It made me want to throw or break something. When it was over he said, “I’ll put it on your iPod next time. Because fuck the major labels, right?”

  “Right.”

  The Latchkeys weren’t guys who’d leak something you said to the media.

  He ruffled my hair and said, “We’re gonna convert you to a punk before this tour is over, right here in one of our three-star suites.” He looked at the bassist. “Also, you pronounce it buh-nahl?”

  “Yeah,” the bassist said. “What do you say, bay-nul?”

  “Buh-nahl sounds so pretentious. What do you guys say?”

  He asked the room, but it was obvious he was only asking the guys in the band. They both pronounced it the way the bassist did, and the lead guitarist, Steve, said, “Zack, you lose the pronunciation battle once again, you working-class Jersey boy.”

  It was the first time I’d seen them make fun of him at all. Zack smiled but his eyes dropped when he did, not a real smile, and he said, “You’re so banal-retentive, Steve.” They laughed, and he said to Vanessa, “So you know, I’m only doing this if you’re into banal sex.” She thought it was funny, and he said, “I’m into doing it hard-core banal. Banal sex, all night long, while watching interracial banal porn. Double-banal penetration, where it’s twice as banal as normal.” He did a fake bite of her neck, and said, “Jonny, you want a drink? Beer, whiskey?”

  Everyone was waiting to see if I’d drink with them. If I said no the wrong way, like I did with the kids at Matthew’s birthday party, they’d know I’d never had alcohol before. Before I could answer, Steve said, “Milk?” like it was the funniest line anyone had ever come up with, the asshole, and the girls all giggled.

  “I’m good,” I said to Zack. Then I looked straight at Steve. “But I’ll take some of your mom’s milk.”

  There was silence for a few seconds. Everyone looked around at each other trying to figure out if what I said was funny or not, until Zack said, “Oh, snap, Jonny schooled you, Steve-o, lactation-style.”

  Everyone laughed again at what Zack said, but it was like they were really laughing at my line, and he put his arm around my shoulders again and pulled me into him, and while the others were talking he said to me, “You coming out tonight?”

  I’d been planning on lying about a media interview early in the morning and how I couldn’t stay up late. “For sure,” I said.

  We hung out in the room awhile longer. I didn’t talk much, but I picked up that they had all met at college at Harvard and formed there under the name the Archdukes of Hazzard, which Zack said was the most preposterous band name of all time, and graduated a few years ago, and they released The Latchkeys Open Up last year. It sounded like college was a lot of fun for them there, that they were celebrities at school but not real celebrities. Maybe that’s why they didn’t seem to let it get to their heads now, since they’d had it build up slowly, from nobodies in high school to sort of famous in college to not famous again after college to pretty famous now, not like some musicians I’ve met who go straight from nobodies to super-famous and act like they were never nobodies. Last year I asked Jane if she thought I should go to college. She’d said, “I didn’t go, and I was as smart as anyone at that marketing firm and would’ve been promoted soon if I hadn’t had you and lost my job.” That was all she said. I wouldn’t want to study for an extra four years anyway, or five, when you count the year I don’t have to get tutored for if I get my California GED when I’m seventeen. But Jane was smart in a different way from the Latchkeys.

  The other Latchkeys, even Steve, were nicer to me than before. They almost seemed like they were relatives more than friends, the way they teased each other. All my dancers and vocalists and musicians are at least seven or eight years older than me, and Jane makes sure I don’t hang out with them too much because they might be bad influences or cannibalize my focus. Watching the Latchkeys mess around with each other was like when the Cardinals win a big game and they have a pile-on at home plate. It made you happy to see them do it, but part of you was jealous since you wanted to be in the pile-on, too. The only time I get close to that is when all my backup singers and the band sing a line with me, like in “Love Is Evol,” where they yell the last line of the chorus, “Love bleeds you dry, never leaves you full, love eats you up, love is evol!”

  I went to the bathroom. Someone’s iPhone was charging on the sink. This was really dumb to do, but I went into the Web browser the way Jane does and checked my email. Still nothing from Albert, and it’d been over half a week. I Googled “Jonny Valentine St. Louis concert.” A million articles came up about the concert with headlines saying things like “Stalker Threatens Jonny Valentine at Concert.” I clicked on the first one, from a media blog:

  Jonny Valentine Receives Violently Sexual Threats During Televised Performance from Old Man; NAMBLA to Produce Next Album?

  So! As if we needed further confirmation that Jonny Valentine concerts are attended exclusively by lovelorn prepubescent girls and rapey old men, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch is reporting that a 57-year-old St. Louis man was arrested after hurling a slew of violently sexual epithets at the Angel of Poop Pap Smears Pop during his live televised performance (many of which the mikes picked up; listen to some genius’s sound edit in which only the slurs are audible and remixed over the insipid instrumentals of “Guys vs. Girls”). The would-be ass-ailant was found with both a knife and a journal on his person, which allegedly further detailed the actions he would perform upon Jonny’s nubile body (is it just us, or is he looking a little tubby in this clip?). As the sexual and musical deviant awaits legal judgment, let’s all listen to the Jonny Valentine sexual-epithet remix a few more times, shall we?

  I didn’t feel like listening to the remix, plus they’d hear it out in the main room, but I did read the comments below:

  * * *

  Sick. And yet profoundly gratifying. I’m a horrible person.

  * * *

  Proposed title of remix: “(rapey old) Guys vs. (lovelorn prepubescent) Girls”?

  * * *

  Yes. Just . . . yes.

  * * *

  OK, don’t take this the wrong way, but give Jonny seven years and I’LL be writing the same things in my diary. Just sayin’.

  * * *

  Best. Heckler. Ever.

  * * *

  Once you start reading them it’s hard to stop when it’s about you, even though you know pretty much exactly what you’re going to find and they just get worse and worse the farther you go down. It’s like people are afraid to be the first one to be an asshole, but once some others clear the way, they get super-excited about it. Except with most blogs, the blogger himself is the biggest asshole, so all the commenters think it’s okay to write whatever they want from the start. They think they’re being clever, making fun of me, but it’s just a bunch of losers who’re angry they’re stuck in boring jobs at offices all day and this is their only way to be creative. If they were actually creative, they wouldn’t be reading the media blogs, they’d be the ones the media blogs are covering. Which is what they wish happened, and that’s why they were reading a media blog in the first place, just like how Jane used to read all the glossies when she worked at Schnucks. But even the guy who wrote the post wasn’t creating anything. He was only linking to other publications and writing a little filler, like a crap DJ who remixes other people’s songs so it seems like he’s done something new, but he’s really just spliced them together like anyone with half a brain could do.

  Zack’s toiletry kit was on the counter. For a second I thought about opening it but I didn’t. Next to it was a bottle of cologne, except it wasn’t like a regular cologne you buy in a store or see an ad for, it was a specialty cologne with no name, just a handwritten label listing ingredients. I unscrewed th
e top and sniffed it. It was definitely his woods smell.

  It was probably worse to do this than to peek inside his toiletry kit, but I dabbed a little on my finger and smeared it on my neck. Now I smelled like Zack. I sucked my gut in and joined the others.

  After an hour or so the drummer called a cab company and requested three cars for nine people. Zack said, “Jonny, Vanessa, and I will take one, you all split the other two.”

  One of the girls said, “How should we divide it up? Guys versus girls, Jonny?”

  She said it sweetly, you could tell, so I quickly half sang, “Why’s it gotta be that way?” and this time everyone laughed and didn’t need Zack to make a follow-up joke. I was going to hang out with the Latchkeys every night on this tour, and I didn’t care if I was tired all day.

  We took two elevators down to the lobby, and I went in Zack’s. It wasn’t that cold out, but Zack gave me his leather jacket so I didn’t have to go back to my room. It was big on me, like an overcoat, and it smelled like him mixed with cigarettes. He took a red wool hat out from the pocket. “Wear this,” he said, and he pulled it over my head and ears. “For warmth and cunning disguise.”

  Two cars came first, and Zack told the others to take them, and him and Vanessa smoked cigarettes while we waited. “Don’t ever quit smoking these,” he said to me.

  Vanessa hit his shoulder and said, “Don’t listen to him, Jonny. Don’t start smoking them. Seriously.”

  “I won’t,” I said. “I don’t want to fuck up my voice.”

  “You do have a pretty goddamn golden voice,” Zack said. “Not like me. I’ve got the bronze. But I can write a verse-chorus-verse to opiate the masses. Other than that, I’m basically useless as a member of society.” I don’t think he really thought that way about himself, but if he did even a tiny bit, he was wrong. His friends loved him and people wanted to be around him and he made people feel smarter and funnier. If I told him, though, it would sound gay.

  Zack told the cab driver the Velvet Lounge and gave him the address. The guy looked in the rearview mirror once at me, but I didn’t know if it was because he recognized me or he was wondering why a kid was with two adults.

  Would the nightclub let me in? Or did it not matter if you were with adults? But maybe they had to be your parent? Zack looked too young to pretend to be my father. Except he could’ve had me when he was very young, and we were more like friends who partied than a father and son. You see some father-son actors like that in L.A.

  Vanessa sat in the middle, and Zack made out with her. She allowed it for a minute but kept whispering, “Not now,” and finally she said, “Heel, boy,” and straightened out her skirt and turned to me and asked, in a teacher-type voice, what I usually did at night on tour.

  “I usually have dinner with my mother and do homework and play video games and watch TV,” I said.

  That definitely sounded like I was a little kid, but Vanessa wouldn’t make fun of me. She said, “You must miss your friends at home.”

  “I don’t really ha—I don’t really miss them. I only tour a few times a year, and I have a lot of fun.”

  “Jonny falls into the proud tradition of the rogue wandering troubadour,” Zack said. “All’s he needs is his harmonica and guitar”—Zack pronounced it gee-tar—“and a warm place to rest his head and nothing else, no, sir.”

  I knew he was joking around, but I kind of liked that idea, me as the traveler who only needed his instruments. Except I wasn’t that type of musician. I needed instrumentalists and vocalists and dancers and buses and eighteen-wheelers and a bodyguard and a manager and a PR liaison. Sometimes I look around at the people and equipment and promo materials put together and am like, No one would notice if I disappeared, even though it’s all there because of me. If I was never famous, the people whose lives would be attached to mine would be Jane plus Michael Carns.

  Also Zack said sir in a much less annoying way than Lisa Pinto did.

  Zack paid with a twenty-dollar bill when the cab stopped. There were lots of adults in their twenties in a red-velvet-rope line before a black bouncer who made Walter’s body look like mine. The other Latchkeys came over while Vanessa found her friends near the door. “We tried to skip the line,” Steve told Zack, “but no dice.”

  “Sounds like we’re huge in Memphis,” Zack said. “Jonny, come with us?”

  He put his hand on my back and walked us up to the bouncer with the other guys behind us. Halfway there, Zack took his hat off my head. “Hello,” he said all polite to the bouncer, who was letting in a couple women in short skirts and wasn’t looking at him. He stood between me and the other people in line so they couldn’t see, which made me less nervous, since I didn’t want people taking photos. This was getting more and more dangerous, but if I had to be doing this with anyone, I was glad it was Zack. “My name is Zack Ford, and I’m the lead singer of the rock group the Latchkeys. We’re opening for Jonny Valentine here tomorrow night, and we were hoping to enter your establishment.”

  “Got to get to the end of the line, sir,” the bouncer said.

  “Jonny has a curfew, unfortunately, so waiting in line isn’t a great option.”

  The bouncer turned to us, and the way he sized me up, I could tell he’d heard of my name but didn’t know what I looked like, and for all he knew I could’ve just been some kid pretending to be Jonny Valentine, the way the guy emailing me could be some perverted pedophile pretending to be my father. I don’t have much penetration into the urban-male demo.

  Zack pulled out his iPod and shuffled through some albums before holding it up. “Look,” he said. “Jonny’s debut album. Triple-platinum smash. You still want to send us to the back of the line?”

  The bouncer compared the iconic close-up of my face with The Jonny just brushing my eyebrows on the album cover and me in real life. I didn’t want to smile, or it might look like we were fooling him, but it was hard not to when I’d seen that Zack owned my album and he knew it’d gone triple platinum. “Hold on,” the bouncer said.

  He went inside, and came out soon with a redheaded woman in her twenties, who looked at us and asked, “How many in your party, Mr. Valentine?”

  I pointed to the other Latchkeys and the girls and told her nine. The bouncer unhooked the rope and let us in, and Zack let me go first but I could tell he was right behind me. The woman said her name was Irena and if we had any problems or wanted anything to ask her. She led us inside and through a door on the right, not the main entrance to the nightclub, and down two long hallways that must have been a special access for celebrities, and I could hear the girls behind me getting excited since they never did anything like this. I tried to pretend I’d done this before, but really I’d only been to industry events that were like nightclubs with Jane, not a real nightclub, and definitely not without Jane.

  Finally we came out into the main room. It wasn’t decorated like a regular nightclub, it was more like a huge living room with wooden furniture and old couches and chairs like the kind Jane said she wants to decorate our living room with after she saw a spread of an Oscar-winning actress’s house in a glossy, and part of me thought about asking Zack to invite her over, but it would be super-lame to call my mother and also I’d be in serious trouble.

  We were in a roped-off section that had another bouncer guarding it, with thirty or forty people in our area and a lot more in the rest of the room, either talking or dancing to the DJ, who was playing some bad hip-hop song, I forget the rapper’s name, but it was one of those where the guy tries to sing and he doesn’t have the range. I want to be like, Stay in your element. You don’t see me trying to rap. I’ve tried it on my own, and I know it’s out of my talent reach.

  Irena brought us to a free area with two couches and two chairs around a chipped and beat-up coffee table. It was sort of like what they had in the hotel room, only we were paying to be here and have other people around us that we weren’t talking to. Zack grabbed one of the chairs and I sat on a couch right near him. Irena
took everyone’s order, which was still whiskey or beer, and when she got to me, she looked at Zack to see what she should do. “Jonny, what soda do you like?” he asked.

  “Ginger ale,” I told him. All soda is crap for the vocal cords, but ginger ale has a little less sugar and doesn’t cause as much mucus production. I couldn’t ask for diet in front of everyone, though.

  “Ginger ale on the rocks,” Zack ordered, which is what I was going to say from now on. He whispered something else to Irena before she went off. When she came back with our drinks and was handing out the last one to Zack, the DJ kicked into the Latchkeys song “Frog-Legs Franny.” I caught Irena smiling at Zack, and I figured he’d requested it, to impress the girls, but they were already impressed, so maybe he just wanted it anyway. “Well, that’s embarrassing,” Zack said after Irena left. By now a bunch of people in our section were looking over at us, mostly at me and Zack.

  The Latchkeys talked about books and movies and musicians I hadn’t heard of. They all had opinions on everything and used words like aesthetic and ideology and polemic. Maybe I knew more about slave autobiographies than them, but that was it. I thought about asking if they’d read The Confessions of Nat Turner, which was the best one I’d read so far, because it was short but also it has the most action and Nat Turner kills a bunch of white people just with a small sword, like he’s in Zenon, except he says he wants to slay his enemies with their own weapons, which in Zenon would mean stealing someone’s weapon and using it against them, and I don’t think the game actually lets you do that since you can’t inspect an enemy’s inventory until he’s dead.