Fangirl (5 page)

Who's my Band-Aid when my feelings get cut

It's you, my best friend, my best man, no one compares

Josie didn't pretend to know what being “in love” was anyway, having never been before, but all she knew was that the feelings she had for Christopher weren't the kind that she felt when, say, she saw Peter Maxx sing. Peter made her want to do more than, well, just kiss.

Recently, someone had asked Josie on her Formspring account, “What's your definition of being ‘in love'?”

Josie thought long and hard about it. This was a topic she had spent many hours, if not years, pondering. And, naturally, she wrote over a hundred songs about this very subject by age fourteen.

An hour later, after careful consideration, she posted:

I would think that being in love means I am as passionate about a person as I am about music. But, even as I write this, I feel like that is a naïve definition. The truth is, I only know infatuation.

And infatuation is how she described the kinetic movement she felt with every tingle in her chest when she watched Peter Maxx sing.

Josie had never before felt like this about any celebrity. Actually, make that anyone—famous or not.

Peter Maxx was her first and only crush. Period.

Josie was a goner from the first day she saw a video of him singing his breakout ballad, “No Regrets.”

You flew into my world

We took off like jets

No regrets. . . .

The pop song became the go-to slow dance at every high school prom, not to mention Josie's freshman year anthem.

Make a wish

Take this kiss

Girl, I've waited a lifetime for this. . . .

Now the teen star had brought his sexy self to her hometown of Bakersfield, California.

The sellout crowd of 10,225 started chanting twice as loud as before. When Ashley noticed Josie still wasn't joining in, she knocked her in the ribs with a peer-pressure elbow. “C'mon, besterz!”

“Okay, fine,” Josie relented, flashing a smile.

“PETER! PETER! PETER! PETER!”

Peter sat with
his eyes closed listening to the crowd chant his name.

The headset-clad stage manager peeked his head through the half-open dressing room door. “Fifteen minute warning, Peter!” he announced.

“Okay, y'all clear out now,” Bobby said pleasantly to the dozen or so roadies, dancers, band mates, and various crew ritualistically gathered in the cinderblock-walled locker room.

After the door closed, Peter unzipped the inside pocket of his messenger bag and pulled out a manila envelope and reached inside, grabbing hold of a Ziploc bag filled with photos. One by one—about a dozen in all—he pulled them out and laid them on the table. Each picture had one thing in common: they contained an image of his mother. Holding him as a baby. Helping him blow out the candles on his first birthday cake. Hugging him after he got his first guitar at age four.

Peter had stopped praying many years ago. Raised Baptist, his parents instilled in him solidly Christian values, but, as Peter got older, the idea of talking to God seemed kind of silly. From his perspective, no matter how hard he prayed, his mom would never come back. One day when he was thirteen and was asking God to send various messages to his mom, Peter
had a revelation: Why not just speak directly to mom?
I don't need a middle man.

Ever since, Peter pulled out the photos and talked softly to his mom, just as he was doing minutes before taking the stage in Bakersfield.

“Mom,” he began. “I wish you were with us here. Dad's doing good. A little stressed lately. But good. He'll always love you, Mom. I don't think he will ever love anyone else again.”

Peter felt calm for the first time that day.

“Yeah, things with Sandy . . . well, they're so-so. I think it's hard to find a girl these days who'll just take me for who I am. But, that's okay. I'm figuring it out.”

Peter then unrolled a purple yoga mat and placed it on the cement floor. He sat on the mat and lay on his back. He lowered his eyelids across his eyes as if they were blankets. He placed his arms at his side, tilted his palms up, and inhaled through his nose, filling his lungs with so much air his chest stretched his T-shirt, then released it with a forceful, smooth exhale. He could feel the muscles around his eyes relax and the pinching in his gut dissipate. His head tingled as a result of the burst of oxygen into his system. Peter repeated the deep breathing for several minutes, until every muscle in his body had relaxed and his mind was still.

Ten minutes later, Peter, his breathing so subtle his chest barely rose, slowly wiggled his fingers, then his toes, then gently rolled onto his left side and took a final deep breath. Centered. Focused. Ready.

Knowing that thousands of fans awaited him, Peter stood up, kissed his forefinger, and touched the picture of his mom standing on the front porch of their old house in Tennessee. “Okay, gotta go, Mom. Love you.”

Peter pulled the pictures down from the mirror and placed them inside the baggie, zipped it tight, and stuffed it back inside the envelope.

“Yo, Peter,” Big Jim shouted through the door. “We ready?”

Peter had one last ritual to perform before taking the stage.

He picked up his phone.

@PeterMaxxNow
hey, Bakersfield. I can hear ya guys. Are we ready to do this?!

Fascinating what a message 140 characters or less could instantly do to a crowd of anxious fans. Every inch of the arena floor vibrated, even in the dressing room.

He looked in the mirror as the makeup lady dabbed some antishine powder on his forehead. The chorus of chanting fans echoed down the hall to his dressing room.

That sound never got old. It reminded him why all those morning wake-up calls and dog-and-pony radio station and shopping mall appearances were ultimately worth it. That sound also reminded him of his childhood, when the dream to become the world's next big singer-songwriter began.

PETER! PETER! PETER!

Write a great song,
someone will record it. Market a great song, someone will buy it. But sing a great song, and someone will
feel
it.

As Peter stood under the bright lights at his silver-bedazzled microphone for the next two hours singing straight from his heart to the hearts of his fans, Josie was definitely feeling Peter Maxx.

Shortly after eight o'clock, when a guitar-carrying Peter finally walked onstage to eardrum-piercing screeching, Josie's first thought was that a bicep flex and stubble of chin hair never looked so hot. Her second thought: there was nowhere else in the world she'd rather be than right there. While other fans captured him on video with their phones, Josie closed her eyes and soaked in the moment.

She sang along to every song, having memorized the lyrics long ago, her voice growing hoarse. Sweat dripped down her cheeks. At one point, as Peter walked down the stage's front catwalk jutting into the crowd, Peter looked in her direction and cracked a smile.

Did he just look at me, Ash?

I think so.

Get out.

No, for realz!

#ICouldDie.

Lesson #1
of pop superstardom: you can't please everyone.

One fan weighed in with a YouTube video of Peter and his girlfriend doing a duet near the end of the Bakersfield show:

THERE'S ROMANCE AND THEN THERE'S SHOWMANCE. CLICK ON THIS VIDEO AND SEE THAT PHONY-BALONEY SANDY JONES (THE FAKE GF OF PETER MAXX) PERFORMING A DUET LAST NIGHT IN BAKERSFIELD. WARNING: YOU MAY WANT TO HAVE A BARF BAG HANDY
!

Yes,
that
Sandy Jones: the blondest, perkiest member of the G Girls, the opening act for Peter's tour. Peter and Sandy (or “Pandy,” as fan sites cheekily call them) began dating when G Girls made a guest appearance on Peter's hit TV show,
For Pete's Sake.

The blogs charted the rise of Pandy in great detail. Speculation about the couple soon became a global teen obsession. A lot of the rumors weren't true, but what was an undisputed fact was that Peter met Sandy during a dark phase. He was three seasons into his TV show and had released two sugar-sweet pop albums. Even though he'd sold 3.2 million records, practically unheard of in the era of pirated downloads and iTunes, Peter was frustrated that his label wouldn't let him make the record he wanted to make: a
real
album—songs that dealt with love, loss, regret, dreams, secrets, heartbreak.

The low point came when the label forced him to change the opening line of his first single, “Be with You Again.” The line he and his songwriting team had written originally was “I've got this tingling feeling deep inside,” but the label made him change it to, “I've got this feeling that you could be mine.”

“Dad, what's so offensive about that line?” Peter fumed. “I mean, is it
tingle?
You gotta be kidding me! Grampa's leg
tingles
when he falls asleep in the recliner! It is totally outrageous. I've done nothing but play by their rules ever since we came to L.A. I don't think I can do this anymore.”

“Son, I hear ya, but . . .”

“Or is it the
deep inside
part? I mean, are they sickos? For real. They honestly think I'm writing porn or something?”

If it weren't for an iron-clad contract with Retro that essentially gave them total creative control, if it weren't for his dad reminding him how “lucky” he was just to have a recording contract at all, if it weren't for his fans pining for his new album, Peter would have quit right then and there. This was before he learned how to breathe through stressful situations.

Retro promised Peter that his next record, scheduled to drop after the end of his current tour (and just after his seventeenth birthday), would be creatively all his. They promised they wouldn't censor any mentions of sex—indirect or otherwise, that they would allow him to explore his artistry in a way that would appeal to an older audience. But the label insisted he'd have to tour his current album. Or, as the label president bluntly described it to Peter's dad when they hand-shook on
the deal, “Market the piss out of it.”

Fine. Peter decided he could live with that. Though it wasn't exactly inspiring language.

But he still wasn't psyched that he had to promote his current record, which featured twelve songs, five of which he just plain didn't like and was forced to record. In fact, if Peter ever refused to record a song they wanted, his lawyers told him they could sue him for breach of contract. “That's show business, son,” his dad told him. “You do your
business,
and they
show
you the money.”

Peter appreciated everything his father did for him, despite his knack for Donald Trump–isms and for his “the-end-justifies-the-means” attitude. His dad's heart may have been in the right place, but it just so happened to be in the same place as his wallet.

Sandy wasn't offering much of a sympathetic ear. Whenever Peter offered the smallest complaint, she was always quick to remind him, “Shine—don't whine.” Peter figured she got most of her rhyming one-liners from self-help books, but he'd never asked. He just knew that for a seventeen-year-old girl who dropped out of high school last year to join the G Girls, she sure had an impressive arsenal of motivational words at her disposal.

Before heading out on tour, Peter and Sandy walked their first red carpet together at a friend's movie premiere. Until then, the couple had only been photographed by paparazzi—shots of them leaving restaurants, walking at the mall, walking
along the surf in front of his house in Manhattan Beach. But they had not yet “posed” at an official red carpet event.

On the carpet, Peter could barely muster a smile, but Sandy was all pearly whites and well-rehearsed posing (right down to the classic one-hand-on-the-hip “triangle”-shaped modeling pose).

When it came time then to do interviews, she grabbed Peter's hand and hightailed it to the press line. She was outgoing, funny, a goofball, her mouth going a mile a minute. Everything Peter was not. But he liked letting someone else have control for a change. It took the pressure off.

Sandy loved to talk about herself. Peter, however, was shy, slow to get to know, and was known in journalism circles as “a bad interview”—lots of one-word answers, a fair amount of mumbling, and a reluctance to share too much information about his personal life. “I like to keep that for my music,” he explained every time a reporter asked a question that was too personal . . . “Are you in love?” . . . “Will you guys get married?” . . . “Where was your first kiss?” Pure torture. As much as Peter loved being a singer, he hated being a celebrity.

Right after their red carpet debut, an influential blogger called him “moody,” and almost immediately Retro Records hired a so-called “media trainer” to teach him how to be more so-called “media friendly.” When the trainer told Peter he had to start by smiling more, Peter told him he didn't want a job that made him pretend to be happy when he wasn't. The label backed off.