by Teddy Wayne
“Nah. I like working for you guys, and getting to hang out with you, and I’ve got my friends in L.A. and everything.”
He didn’t have that many friends in L.A. besides the guys he knew at his gym, though. He mostly hung out in his bungalow when he had time off, and if the label hadn’t recommended him as a bodyguard from a connection he had, he’d be a trainer in some bottom-shelf Hollywood gym.
“I read a fortune cookie just after I moved to L.A.,” he went on. “It said, ‘To live in the future you must break with the past.’ And I know these cookies tell you whatever you want to hear, but still.”
“So that’s why you came to L.A.? To break with the past?”
His eyes were still closed. “Yeah. But it’s more like a break in your head. Like that song of yours, ‘I Loved a Girl’? Where you realize it’s over, so you have to let it go?”
I’d always thought that song, which was actually called “Once Loved a Girl,” was just about an ex-girlfriend who didn’t love you as much in return. The chorus goes, “Once loved a girl, in the past tense, she never committed, stayed on the fence.” Maybe Walter was right.
“I had to keep telling myself, ‘I don’t love Callie anymore,’ ” he said. “Because when you really love someone, it means they can hurt you. I even had this picture of us kissing, from a photo booth, and I tore it apart in the middle. Like that other song of yours.”
He meant the chorus from “Heart Torn Apart”: “Before I felt whole, now there’s a hole in the part, where my heart used to be, ’cause you’ve torn it apart.” It’s not a hack rhyme because it’s the part and apart.
“So you did it enough that you really don’t love her anymore?” I asked.
He opened his eyes for the first time. “I’m tired, brother.”
He closed them again, and I left him alone and listened to MJ on my iPod until we got home. Walter told himself Callie couldn’t hurt him anymore, but anyone could see she was still his Major Vulnerability, right in front of him, even if she was halfway across the country most of the time. Maybe that’s what it was with most people, the person closest to them. I always figured Jane and my father both wanted to end things because of creative differences, but maybe he had it coming, too, and they were each other’s Major Vulnerability, and so she kicked him out. My songs are always about a girl dumping me and I still love her and want her back, but dating is different from people who have a kid. Except it could be that he wants to come back now, like Walter does, even if he won’t admit it.
CHAPTER 14
Nashville (Second Day)
When the wake-up call rang at seven in the morning and I said, “Thank you,” it felt like forks scratching away at the bottom of my throat. I hoped the coffee might soothe it, but it made it worse. I couldn’t find any Throat Coat in my suitcases, so I knocked on Jane’s door. She opened it in her towel.
“Jane,” I croaked, and she gave me a look like, What the hell is wrong with you? “My throat is really sore.”
“Do you feel sick?”
“No, only my throat.”
She ordered up a pot of hot water and some honey and steeped Throat Coat in a mug for me, but I still sounded like junk. “I bet it was that stupid impression,” she said. I’d shown it to her when I got in last night and she told me it was bad for my voice and to knock it off. “How long did you do it for?”
“Maybe two hours.”
“For Christ’s sake,” she said. “I can’t believe he let you do it for that long.”
“Who?”
“Walter. He knows you’re not supposed to strain your voice.”
“He didn’t know it hurt my throat.”
“It hurt, and you still did it?”
“A little. I didn’t think it would do this.”
“Jesus, how old are you? Okay, stop talking, just stop,” she said. “Don’t talk again, and keep drinking the tea. Can you sing tonight?”
I didn’t know if I was allowed to talk, so I shrugged. I could tell from a few minutes of this that it would be a pretty frustrating life if you were totally mute. I wasn’t sure what would be worse, being mute or deaf. For one, you couldn’t sing music, and for the other, you couldn’t hear it.
“Let me figure this out. In the meantime, get ready for your session with Nadine, and I’ll tell her you’re not supposed to talk.”
I just did writing and math exercises and a new vocab test with Nadine, but my performance was subpar, which means the opposite of superb. I wondered if that was like the word Zack used when it sounds the same but means the opposite. I broke the rule of not talking by asking Nadine if there was a name for words that sound like they’re mixed up and also mean the opposite, but she said she didn’t think so. It’s like those guys who can sing two different tones at once with their throats. I’ve tried a million times and can’t do it. The only way is like we did on an alternate take of “Breathtaking,” when they overlaid me singing the chorus in a lower octave, but my producer didn’t like it. You have to keep the emotional message in pop songs pure, or you confuse the audience.
When Jane picked me up in a few hours for sound check with a thermos of Throat Coat and honey, she asked me to speak, and I still sounded like a frog. “If you can’t sing by tonight, we’ll lip-synch it,” she said. “I had to fight tooth and nail with the venue to let us do it. They wanted to back out of various clauses in the contract.”
I suck at lip-synching. It always looks fake. I’ve never had to do it for a full concert before. “Where’s Walter?” I whispered as we got in the elevator.
“He’s got some appointments in town this afternoon. Stop talking and keep drinking.”
My voice was softening and I knew I could handle the banter interludes, but at the start of sound check, when I tested out the lines “Please don’t send a text, please don’t you depart, please send an RSVP to my heart,” it sounded terrible and made my throat worse, and Rog told me not to sing anymore. I had to stand there like a numbskull and pretend to sing while they piped in my vocal tracks and I got worried that everyone would catch me faking it later. People get more upset over someone pretending to be good and lying to them than someone who’s horrible but open about it. Jane told me they wouldn’t, that concertgoers don’t hardly even listen to the singers, they only want to see you and feel like they’re connecting with the star by singing along, and I would’ve asked how they could connect with me if they’re not even listening to me, but I didn’t want to strain my voice.
Except for one time where I came in late to the line “I picked you flowers, you picked apart my life” in “Roses for Rosie,” which no one noticed because I was in the heart-shaped swing, I pulled it off during the concert. It kind of made me think there wasn’t much point in actually singing. Rog said I gave a powerhouse performance, and he always tells the truth after shows. Jane walked me to the star/talent room and joked that we should do it for our next concert in Cincinnati, even though my voice would be better by then.
I’d forgotten Cincinnati was next. I wondered if he was coming to the show.
“Get your stuff ready quickly, baby, so we can get out of here,” Jane said outside my room.
“Okay,” I said as I opened the door. “Where’s Walter?”
She whipped out her phone and said, “Hmm?”
“Where’s Walter? He wasn’t here all night.”
She typed into her phone on my Twitter account, “Thanx 4 the love and support, Nashville! Next stop: Cincinnati! #ValentineDays,” and linked to a candid stage shot of me.
“I told you,” she said. “He had appointments.”
“What appointments?”
“I don’t know. He used to live here.”
“Call him.”
“I’m not going to call him now. The venue security can escort us to the car,” she said. “Come to my room when you’re ready.”
She walked away. “Did you fire him?” I asked.
She stopped and waited there. Then she came back and pushed me int
o my room and shut the door. “He was irresponsible in letting you do that impression of him, when he should have known it would hurt your voice, and it almost caused us to lose a lot of money.”
“You fired him?”
“He’ll be paid for the rest of the tour.”
My legs turned to noodles. “You did this with the Latchkeys. You can’t do this with Walter.”
“Walter understands he made a fireable mistake. He’ll find someone else to work for.”
That almost made me more upset than her firing him, the idea of Walter being the bodyguard for someone else like it was no big deal. “He’s my best friend.” Saying those words made me feel like I was about to cry.
“You can’t be best friends with a man thirty years older than you.”
“Yes, I can.” I could feel tears filling up in my eyes. I tried holding them back.
She took a step closer to me and said, “Stop crying.”
“Hire Walter back,” I said.
“I said stop it, Jonathan.” She tried to put her hands to my face, I guess to wipe my tears away, but I pushed her arms away and she accidentally sort of rapped her knuckles on top of my head, which wouldn’t have hurt if it was only the knuckles, but the huge silver ring on her right hand caught me hard and it stung. I pulled back from her quickly and touched my head. It pounded like an echo.
Jane’s mouth was in an O and her eyes were stuck in place. I could tell she was really upset now, so I just let myself bawl, more than I do for “Heart Torn Apart,” a bunch of ugly heaving sobs.
“I’m sorry,” she said, still stuck.
I shook my head no and forced the tears out faster.
“I’m sorry,” she said again, and she moved her arms out a little to see if it was okay to hug me, so I pretended to flinch, and then I waited until she saw that before I hurled myself into her arms and cried the hardest yet into her chest. I didn’t even hardly have to force it, smothering my tears and snot into her dress over her implants, and she was half crying, too, and said, “I’m so sorry, baby, I’m sorry, I’m a terrible mother.”
I waited a minute without letting up the tears. Then I squeaked out, “Bring him back,” and she said, “Okay, Jonathan, okay, I’ll get him back.”
I took a little while to calm down, since I really did get myself worked up even if part of it was acting at the end. Maybe Jane’s right. I should be in the movies.
CHAPTER 15
Cincinnati
Walter joined us on the bus in the morning. He was quiet around Jane and kept to himself near the front of the bus, but later, when she went to the bathroom for like the fourth time in two hours, he came up to my seat and said, “Thanks, brother,” and fist-bumped me.
Jane kept talking to Rog about her fortieth birthday in two days, and he was telling her age is mental more than physical and the more she thought about it, the bigger a deal she was making it. The vicious cycle of aging.
“Look at me,” he said. “I don’t think about it or talk about my age, so no one else does.”
Jane looked at him like, Um, other people do think you’re old. But she said, “It’s different for women.”
I looked back at Nadine reading in the bucket seats. Jane was only about thirteen or fourteen years older, but from their faces, she looked like she could’ve been her mother.
Rog gave her a back rub like he does a lot when she’s upset. It’s also usually a way get her to stop talking. She went on for another hour, though. He’s a pretty patient listener. Jane thanked him for being her human Xanax, and it reminded me of that detective-show actor’s song about Xanax. She said, “You’ll make a good manager someday, after you retire from dancing,” and Rog said, “Well, that’s a ways off, but I’ve had the best teacher.”
On our driver break at a rest stop, I went outside to get some air and Walter came with me. He said, “Mind if I smoke?”
This was the first time I’d seen him smoke on this tour. He’s always trying to quit but never lasts more than a few weeks. I said I didn’t mind. We didn’t talk, he just smoked facing away from me. Rog came walking back to the bus with a cardboard tray from Starbucks with two chais for him and Jane. He got her hooked last tour. “Walter, would you please smoke away from Jonny?” he asked.
“I am,” Walter said.
“The wind is carrying it back,” Rog said. “Do what you want to your own lungs, but let’s not ruin his, okay?”
Walter flicked away his cigarette. Those two didn’t talk too much.
We didn’t have anything scheduled for that night in Cincinnati, so me and Jane watched TV in her room and ordered in. When I asked for lasagna with sweet potato fries on the side, she didn’t say anything, even though it’s a double-carber. She was being super-nice to me because of Walter, but I didn’t push it with dessert. Besides, I’d eaten a ton of salads the last week. “Can we do this tomorrow night?” I asked when she walked me back to my room.
“You’ve got a show.”
“I mean after. Can we watch some TV together?”
“Sure,” she said.
The second we got into Cincinnati, I looked out the bus, in the hotel lobby, through the hotel window, everywhere I could, for my father. Maybe he was going to come to my hotel, since sometimes if a fan spots me they leak where I am on the Internet, or the media knows about it. If you really want to find out where I’m staying, it’s not so hard, which is why we have to take so many precautions and throw up so many buffers. Or he might be coming to my show, except I didn’t know how he’d meet me.
I didn’t see him. So I did my best to tune it out and got into the Jonny Zone way earlier than I normally do. I felt rested the next day, zero damage, my voice was back in condition, and I had an A-plus workout in the hotel gym in the morning with Jane, where we competed to see who could do more crunches and had less stomach chub. I won both, but it’s not fair because Jane’s a woman and she was turning middle-aged the next day.
I kept scanning the crowd for my father at U.S. Bank Arena, which is impossible because you can’t pick out one guy from thousands of people mostly in the dark, even if it’s the one grown man there by himself, except for a couple child predators.
Still, it was going good, maybe because I was trying harder in case he was there. On “Breathtaking,” I really went for the high C and nailed it, and I could tell even my backup singers were like, Shit, Jonny’s on tonight. When you can do whatever you want vocally and everyone in the stadium knows it, it’s like gulping down the invincibility potion in Zenon.
Then, when the spotlight whirred around the crowd right after “Breathtaking,” starting out all slow at first with my drummer playing a solo, so I could pick out a girl to bring onstage in the new set list Jane reordered to avoid performance fatigue, it went over a guy in one of the front rows. I only saw him for a second, but he looked like the picture of my father in his driver’s license, just with a beard. In “Breathtaking,” I’m pretending to lose my breath, but now I really did.
All of a sudden, I came up with an idea that would make it so Jane wouldn’t figure out what I was doing. I walked toward the edge of the stage and said into the mike, “Al.”
I was close enough now that I could make out the front rows a little, and when the spotlights flew over I could see them better. The guy was looking straight at me, but so was everyone else in the capacity crowd of 17,090. Except they were all standing in their seats, and since he was the only guy in a row filled with tween girls and a few mothers, he was way taller than everyone else.
The first concert I remember going to was a free outdoor show in St. Louis along the riverfront, so it must have been the summer. I don’t know what the music was, but I was with Jane and my father, and we were standing far back in a packed crowd and I couldn’t see anything onstage. So I walked through the bodies to get a better look, but it was even worse, just a lot of tall adult bodies over me, and after I walked for a little, I couldn’t see Jane or my father anymore.
I’m not sure
how long I was gone, because I didn’t know I should’ve been scared to be off on my own like that, but later my father grabbed my arm and told me to never leave them again like that, and he carried me back to Jane, who hugged me. They both looked really worried, and I remember liking how much me being gone like that scared them.
My father put me on his shoulders the rest of the show so I could see, even though a guy behind us kept complaining, but my father finally turned, with me still on top of him, and said to him in a baritone, “This is the only way my son can see. You have a problem with that?”
The guy didn’t say anything, and I was just old enough to tell he was backing down. We watched the rest of the show like that, with my father holding me on his shoulders above everyone else like he could do it forever.
I was at the perimeter of the stage, right in front of the security line, and the spotlights were whirring faster now and I had to pick someone soon. I said, “Al,” one more time, and watched the guy closely. But he wasn’t responding in any special way, like how I would if my father was onstage and I was in the crowd and he said, “Jonny,” twice in a row while staring at me.
He just put his arm around the girl next to him, who was my age. It wasn’t him. And if it had been him, I didn’t even have a plan for what I’d do next. All the momentum I was feeling during “Breathtaking” departed the realm.
So I quickly sang, “Al always be there for you, too,” a line in “This Bird Will Always Bee There for You,” and used the same trick of switching a name to a regular word like I did for Elsa’s name with Bill, which must’ve made my band be like, Huh? because it wasn’t in tonight’s set list.
I still had to pick someone. In the front row, there was a group of older-than-normal girls, like sixteen years old, when my fan base usually topped out around fourteen or fifteen. One with black bangs was wearing a tight T-shirt with my picture on it. She was short but had a big chest. I almost got a boner onstage seeing my own face stretched out across her breasts like that.
Normally I don’t pick such a hot girl, but if my father was somehow here I didn’t want him to think I could only get ugly girls, so I called her onstage, and all her friends looked jealous. She came up and I sang “Chica” to her, and when I got to the part with the half-rhyme where it goes, “Oh, chica, you make me loco, can’t figure you out, you’re like Sudoku,” I sang it right in her ear, and with her head blocking the view of the crowd, I stuck my tongue in her ear for a second but made it seem like it could’ve been an accident from singing.