by Teddy Wayne
After the song, I hugged her so I could feel her breasts and moved the mike away and whispered, “Stay backstage and meet me after,” and she nodded. I didn’t know what I’d do with her. It’s not like I had any privacy. I walked her to the backstage entrance instead of returning her to the crowd, and finished my set thinking about her more and more and how I hoped someone posted photos of us on the Internet that Lisa Pinto would see, and her PR people would issue some statement in a glossy through her like, “I understand other girls will be interested in Jonathan, but we have a relationship built on mutual trust,” and I forgot about my father.
When I came backstage I couldn’t find her. She wasn’t waiting around my room, either. She probably figured I wasn’t serious about inviting her or someone told her she had to leave the backstage area. Or maybe she got bored and went back to her seat to be with her friends. Now it was like the opposite of a boner. A no-ber. A subpar no-ber.
I did find Jane and asked her if we could order some food in at the hotel while we watched TV since I didn’t like what they gave me in my room. “Something came up and I have to go out,” she said. “But you can order whatever you like. Even dessert. And we’ll have a birthday lunch tomorrow.”
She gave me a kiss on the head and left. She didn’t even try to make up an excuse like a promoter this time. Just because you promised doesn’t mean you have to do it. At least this meant she didn’t ask me why I’d said “Al” twice in a row before singing a line from out of nowhere.
So Jane left, the girl left, and my father never showed. Walter came up to me and said, “Ready whenever you are, brother.”
I said, “Walter, I want you to find me a girl here.”
“What?”
“Find an older girl who’s here without her parents and invite her to my room.”
He made his smile/frown. “That’s not gonna happen.”
“I’m allowed to meet my fans backstage. It’s like my senior prom.” I added what I knew would get him: “I won’t tell Jane.”
You could see him weighing it in his mind, like I’d said he was innocent and bailed him out before but here was something that could get him thrown right back in jail with the death penalty.
He played with the all-access pass hanging around his neck. “Just this once.”
I went into my room and waited, but I was getting nervous and pacing around the room, so I turned on Zenon. I was on Level 96 and close to the end, though the final levels were the toughest and taking longer to complete, and I couldn’t get past the minion on this one. It might look lame if a girl came in while I was playing video games, but I didn’t have anything cool in my room the way the Latchkeys did, like guitars or big books, so I rested on a beanbag chair and kept trying different positions that looked like the most relaxed.
A groupie would probably expect me to have some music on, so I plugged my iPod into my portable speakers and chose a playlist with “Billie Jean” on it to pump myself up. It’s an iconic opening few bars, and even though it sounds like a million other drumbeats with a kick, snare, and hi-hat, you know what it is right away. Then that bass line starts up, and if you didn’t know what it was before, now you definitely do. That’s the best, something unique so you instantly recognize it but also similar enough to what you’ve heard before. You can’t challenge the listener that much, but if you only give them what they already know, you might have quick commercial success but no rotation stamina. And if it’s too complex, you don’t like it till you’ve heard it a few times, and it’s more important than ever to hook listeners within the first seven seconds or they switch to the next video on YouTube or the next song on the radio. Rog tells me MTV cut down the audience’s attention span, but MJ had it way easier with television than the Internet, even if MTV didn’t play him at first because he was black.
It’s a perfect pop song. The tempo is 117 beats per minute, which I think is the best for a dance song, right about where your heart rate should be for low-intensity fat-burning cardio, and the spare instrumentation highlights the vocals while still driving the song, which is a tough combo. It would be nice if I ever had a song like that, which a broad-spectrum audience will remember forever and which anyone with a pulse loves, instead of singing for tween girls and having them forget about it six months later.
It took ten thousand hours, and I checked outside my door a couple times. After twenty minutes Walter knocked. “Mr. Valentine, a fan of yours would like to meet you,” he said in a serious voice after I unlocked it, but he didn’t do it in a winking way.
Behind him was a girl who was fifteen or sixteen. She had a cute face, but she was also kind of chubby. Like, really chubby. Even under her winter coat, I could tell. I didn’t know if because Walter was such a big guy she seemed thin to him, but I bet there were skinnier girls in the crowd who would’ve come to my room. Except maybe he’d picked someone who, if she blabbed on the Internet about this, no one would believe them since she wasn’t hot enough. That was probably it. “Hello,” I said.
“Hey,” she said, and she walked past Walter and into my room before I could invite her in. She looked around. “So this is it? I thought it’d be fancier.”
Walter made eye contact with me, and I nodded, and he closed the door from the hallway. “Most of the time they are,” I said. “This venue sucks.”
“This city sucks,” she said. “Where do you live?”
“L.A.”
“I heard L.A. sucks, too. The second I turn eighteen, I’m moving to New York or San Francisco.”
“For college?”
She snorted. “I’ll work in a coffee shop or something. I’m friends with this older girl? Amanda? She moved to San Francisco and makes enough at this yuppie teahouse to pay rent and go to shows. That’s all I want.” She took off her coat and threw it on a chair. She wore a skirt with black fishnet stockings, and her chub muffin-topped out under her T-shirt. “What do you have to drink here?” I listed all the diet sodas and chilled teas. “I meant like alcohol.”
“There isn’t any,” I said. “Tonight. ’Cause the venue sucks. Usually there’s whiskey and beer.”
“Whatever.” She went over to the food spread but didn’t touch it, and was like, “So, we gonna turn the lights off?”
“Okay,” I said, and I went over to flip the switch, and when I turned around she was right next to me in the dark and leaning down to cleave her mouth to mine. My lips were closed at first, but they opened up when her tongue pushed between them. It was like a wet worm darting around inside.
She cleaved our mouths again, the other meaning. “I used to think your music was shit,” she whispered, “until I heard this band here, the 99 Percent Dilution, do a punk cover of ‘Guys vs. Girls.’ ”
“Thanks,” I said, before I realized she’d also insulted me.
The beanbag chair was near us, so she pushed and lowered me onto it, where it made a crunching sound. “Have you heard it?” she asked.
“No. What’s it like?”
“It has this, like, angry energy?” she said. “And so then I listened to your song. I mean, I’d heard it before, at the mall or on the radio or whatever, but I wasn’t really listening. And I still think it’s a shitty pop song, but I heard all this pent-up anger from you, too. It’s like you’re punk and you have no idea.”
I said thanks again, but it was another insult, like I was too stupid to know who I was. At least she sounded smarter than most of my fans. She reminded me of the girl in the hospital who said I sounded sad when I was singing about happy things. Everyone sees what they want in songs, the way Walter said they do with fortune cookies.
She climbed on top of me and kept kissing me and licking my neck. I wasn’t hard yet. I got boners every two minutes except when a girl was actually humping me. I thought of the things Bill had said to Jane, and got a little bit of something. Maybe if I said something he’d said out loud, I’d get fully hard. “You like being my—”
I couldn’t say the final words. She s
topped and pulled her head back a few inches. “Yeah?”
“You like being my fan?”
“I told you, I only like that one cover of your song. I just want to give you the best blow job of your life.”
That did get me sort of hard for a second, hearing the words blow job, or maybe it was blowjob, one word. My computer dictionary wouldn’t have it, and I couldn’t ask Nadine. Maybe Walter would know. It was right in time, because she unzipped my jeans and stuck her hand down my pants as my half-boner was going up. A half-erection would be an Eric. She grabbed it and wrenched her hand around it a few times like she was unscrewing a stuck jar. It didn’t feel too good. Like, except for the fact that a girl was touching my penis, it would’ve been better to do it myself or not have anything happen at all. If I asked if she had moisturizer, or checked if they had butter or olive oil in the fridge, she might have thought it was weird.
It hurt so much, actually, that my Eric turned into a no-ber, and though my eyes were closed, I could tell it was shrinking a lot. The more I concentrated on getting it hard, the softer and tinier it got. Pretty soon it was going to become like negative size and turn into a vagina. She moved her hand faster, which only hurt worse and made me more nervous that she could tell how small and soft it was.
She stopped. “Are you even old enough to get a hard-on?”
“Yep,” I said. “It’s just that I already had a bunch today.”
“Oh.” She went back to trying to jerk me off.
I wished Zack could somehow see me doing this. Not like a video or being in the room, but knowing I was getting a hand job now, even if it wasn’t working and was mostly painful.
Suddenly I got hard again, and she pulled my pants down to my ankles and tried to do the same to my boxers. But I didn’t want her to see that I only had one pube, so I stopped her from doing that and instead poked my penis through the fly.
She put her mouth over it, which felt a ton better than the hand job, and if all hand jobs were the same as that one, then I was fine never getting another in my life. The blow job was the opposite. It was like melting inside the heat of her mouth, and I didn’t feel anything else on my body, except when her teeth hit it a couple times. I’d be okay getting some more of these in my life. I bet real sex is like your body completely disappearing inside the girl’s body.
After a minute she took a break. “I’m Dana, by the way.”
“I’m Jonny.”
“No duh,” she said.
She went back to the blow job, but I could tell there was no way it was going to happen. I wasn’t even getting as close as I got when I masturbated by myself. Finally she asked, “Are you gonna come soon?”
“Probably not,” I said. “I already comed a couple times today.”
She stopped and I stuck my erection back inside my boxers and pulled up my jeans and was careful not to zip up my penis. She sat down on the beanbag chair to my side, but there wasn’t enough space for us both to lie down, so I sat up on it, too.
“Have you done that before?” She smiled like she had a little secret. “I feel like I totally corrupted you.”
“No, I do it all the time.”
Her smile went away. “You really know how to make a girl feel special.”
I could have told her she was the first girl I’d even kissed except for Alyssa Hernandez in a game of Spin the Bottle in fourth grade. But I’ve heard that you never want to tell girls you like them too much. When you sing about how much you like them, it’s okay, because you’re not singing to one girl, you’re singing to all of them, so they’re all competing with the others. It’s like Jane giving access to the glossies, just enough but not everything, and they all want to nab an exclusive.
Still, maybe the right thing to do now was to kiss her again or squeeze her breasts or something. It would’ve been good to have Zack around for advice on things like this. I wasn’t sure what would be best, so I put my hand behind her head to give her a little neck rub. She flinched, but then she saw what I was doing and let me. Her muscles stayed pretty tight while I rubbed, though.
“How’d you get here tonight?” I asked. “Did your parents drop you off?”
I thought back to my father carrying me in his arms back to Jane at the riverfront concert. That was maybe my only real memory of them being in the same place together besides in our apartment.
“Yeah, right,” Dana said. “They don’t drive me anywhere. I can’t wait till I get my license. I took the bus.”
Every time one of us moved, the beanbag popped and snapped at a million decibels. I didn’t know what to say to girls offstage or when I wasn’t signing autographs or posing for pictures, and I really didn’t know what to say after something like this. “What bands are you into?” she said.
I could tell if I said MJ, she’d think it was gay. She might not even know what MJ stood for. And I couldn’t say Tyler Beats, who I bet she thought also sang shitty pop songs. There’s no way all the members of the 99 Percent Dilution combined had the talent that either of them had in their toenails. If no one’s heard of you, there’s a reason for it.
“The Clash is a major influence for me,” I said.
Right after I said that, the song “Stay” by Maurice Williams came on the playlist, which made what I said about the Clash sound like a lie. That was when Rog was teaching me how to sing falsetto. I don’t like doing it other than for MJ songs, because I sound like a girl, so it’s only on “You Hurt Me.” “Stay” is very short, about a minute and a half. That’s part of what makes it such a strong song, right as you’re getting into it, it ends and leaves you wanting more. It makes you feel what Maurice Williams is singing about, which is what any good song does, but usually not with track length.
“They’re cool,” she said. “I’m more into the Pistols. But I mostly listen to Cincinnati bands. You know the Upper-Middle Classmen? I’ve seen like nine of their shows this winter.”
“No. You know the Latchkeys?”
“Ugh. They suck. They’re like corporate indie rock for the masses. The Urban Outfitters of bands.”
I stopped rubbing her neck. “What do you mean?”
“They’re the type of music you can tell was cooked up in some laboratory by a group of record executives to sound exactly like it wasn’t.”
“No, they met in college. And they sound like the Stones meets the early Strokes.”
“Whatever,” she said. “They’re still rich white boys pretending to be something they’re not. Their front man, Nick something?”
“Zack. Zack Ford.”
“More like Zack Fake. I saw an interview with him? He was trying so hard to be clever. Only rich white boys try to be clever. I was like, ‘Really?’ ”
“He is clever. He can make up funny songs on the spot. And he’s not rich. He’s working-class from New Jersey.”
“He’s rich now,” she said. “All that matters is what you are now.”
That wasn’t true, because you always knew who you were before and you kept thinking of yourself like that even if no one else did, but once she said that, I knew Zack wouldn’t even care if he knew about me getting a blow job. He probably wasn’t thinking about me at all except for being pissed that he took me along to the nightclub even though I’m the one who got them in because no one in Memphis gives a fuck who the Latchkeys are, which was why they were lucky to be asked on my tour in the first place with my Walmart fans.
“You want any food?” I said. “You looked super-hungry before.”
“No,” she said. “If I’m not back by ten I’ll be in deep shit.” I’d wanted her to leave before that, but once she said she wanted to leave, I kind of hoped she’d stick around.
She opened the door. Walter was right outside on a chair. I asked him to get the car service for her. “You gonna remember me?” she said.
Dana probably gave blow jobs to everyone in the Upper-Middle Classmen, whoever they were, and to all the other Cincinnati bands, but she wasn’t hot enough to get backsta
ge for any bands with national profiles, so I was the most famous person she’d ever give a blow job to, which was the only reason she’d remember me, and down the road she’d probably change what happened in her memory so she could feel proud of that one time she made Jonny Valentine come.
“Totally,” I said. “What’s your last name?”
“Hollister.”
“Like the clothing company. They send me stuff sometimes.”
In my head so I wouldn’t forget I repeated to myself, Dana Hollister, Dana Hollister, Dana Hollister.
“Diana Hollister,” I said out loud.
“Dana,” she said. “Dana Hollister.”
“Right. Dana.”
Walter escorted her out, and after I closed the door, “Stay” finished and the playlist ended and it was quiet. I played Zenon while I waited for Walter. I had my game saved right before the level’s minion who kept killing me, but this time, instead of running into the room and attacking him, I realized I could run in, attack him once, and run out before he could counterattack. It took a lot longer, but eventually I wore him down and advanced to the next level. Sometimes in Zenon you just have to take your time and not be in a rush to attack.
Me and Walter didn’t talk about it on the ride back except when he said, “Don’t expect that to become a regular service, brother. When you’re older you can do it all you want.” I guess I couldn’t ask him how to spell blow job now. And I didn’t tell him I didn’t want to do it again for a while anyway. Unless maybe I got a skinnier girl next time.
CHAPTER 16