The Love Song of Jonny Valentine (11 page)

I leaned against the wall of the elevator going down. When I sat at the island counter I put my head down by the newspapers as Peter prepped my breakfast. He refilled my coffee mug. “Looks like you need a double today, little sensei.”

“Thanks.” I tilted my head up. “Maybe some food will wake me up.”

The entertainment section was buried at the bottom of the newspapers pile, and I saw why: A photo of me was on its front page. I pulled it away just enough so I could read the article. Peter was too busy cooking to notice.

THE CULT OF JONNY

Exactly how does a 46-year-old male music critic open a review of a Jonny Valentine concert he is forced to attend? And to maintain proper journalistic house style, must he
really
refer to an 11-year-old boy hereafter as “Mr. Valentine”?

Well,
forced
is an unfair verb. Mr. Valentine (indeed, my sadistic editor grinningly assures me, I must) has world-class pipes and dancing talent and stage charisma to spare. A few songs are downright catchy, even to ears from which poke a few stray hairs. Besides the annoyingly can’t-get-it-out-of-your-head chorus of “Guys vs. Girls,” several other numbers in the Angel of Pop’s repertoire last night at Staples Center showcase the singer’s live-performance attributes, notably “Breathtaking” and “Crushed.”

Yet no one, not even Mr. Valentine’s most enthralled fans, goes to a Jonny Valentine concert expecting a fully developed auditory experience. Rather, they go for the spectacle, to surrender and sublimate and take part in the cult of personality swirling around a human being who, I suspect, may not yet be in possession of, you know,
an actual personality
. (Perhaps that’s the point: Onto this blank canvas his audience can paint whatever image they desire of him, or, even better, through gender metamorphosis, of themselves-as-Jonny.)

If Jonny Valentine is ever to grow as a pop artist, he will have to ditch everything about his act, from the infantile lyrics to the cheesy choreography to the overproduced
packaging, and deliver something that speaks to who he is, if and when he eventually figures that out—not to his management’s carefully crafted presentation of an innocuous crooner of the bubbliest bubblegum. I, for one, wouldn’t mind seeing his vocal cords matched up with something a little more authentic. With his chops, he might even be—gasp!—great. Until then, we’ll have to make do with limp offerings like “RSVP (To My Heart)” and “Roses for Rosie,” which—

Peter pushed my plate over, so I stopped reading and hid the entertainment section under the pile. I felt dizzy again and took one bite of my omelet, thinking it would give me some strength. But as soon as it went down my throat, my vision went all fuzzy like a TV when the cable isn’t plugged in and all these walls crashed around my head at once like the trash compactor in
Star Wars,
and I fell forward on the counter and heard Peter say, “Jonny! Fuck!”

I must have woken up soon, because Peter was shaking me awake and Jane was just getting there. I hadn’t fallen off the chair, but I’d spilled my coffee and food all over the countertop.

“I don’t know what happened,” he said. “He keeled over—”

“He’s waking up!” Jane said. “Give him some air!”

Peter backed off but Jane leaned in real close to my eyes. “Jonathan, can you hear me?” she breathed in my face.

I blinked my eyes a few times. “Yeah.”

“Are you okay, baby? Do you feel faint?”

I was moving and speaking in slo-mo. “I feel . . .” Her eyeballs popped out huge and scared right up against mine. She couldn’t find out I’d taken zolpidem without her permission. “I feel fine.”

She put her hand on my forehead and kissed the skin to test my temperature. It always felt nice when she did that, cool and soft. Like she wasn’t afraid of catching whatever I had. “I’m taking you to the doctor.”

“But the bus.”

“They’ll wait.”

She drove us to Dr. Henson’s office fast. He had a lot of celeb patients, and there was a special waiting room for us so the normal
people wouldn’t Tweet that they were in a doctor’s office with us. Even his super-rich patients might do that.

I got sent to the examination room right away while Jane filled out paperwork. The nurse told me to strip to my underwear and measured and weighed me. I was down to eighty-six, so at least there was that. While I waited I thought about the
L.A. Times
article. Normally I don’t pay attention to the critics, because they either decide from the start that they hate me, or they come up with a lot of big words to explain why they actually like me, because they can’t just come out and admit they’re into my music. Smart people always have to give reasons. But this guy was saying he
could
like me, if my image was completely different. I couldn’t bring it up with Jane, though, especially now that the label was reassessing me. She’d say music critics are guys with ponytails and potbellies who never got good enough at an instrument to be in a band, so they take it out on the real musicians. Even when they
love
something in a review, they have to mention a few things they don’t like in the second-to-last paragraph, to prove they’re smart, and then the next sentence is always, “But these are minor quibbles in a near-masterpiece of an album.”

Dr. Henson came in in a few minutes. He was fake-cheerful like usual, with his kind of chub face but slim body. Some people can’t lose weight in their face no matter what. Jane doesn’t have that problem.

He always put out his hand when he came into the room and said, “Jonny, high five! Now down low!” and pulled it away before you could hit him and he said, “Too slow!” and giggled like he was the first guy to invent that trick. I guess it’s like me doing interlude banter, acting all upbeat and saying pretty much the same lines even when I don’t feel it. Jane gives him tickets to L.A. shows for his daughters so we always get excellent service. He was probably there last night, but we don’t discuss it. It’s not professional.

“I hear you’ve had a little fainting spell?” he said as he perused some papers. Doctors never talk right to you. They’re always reading something else at the same time like you’re not interesting enough.

“This morning,” I said, and in case he
wasn’t
there, I added, “I had a show last night.”

He put his stethoscope on my chest in a few different spots. It felt
like an ice cube. “Give me some deep breaths with those powerhouse lungs of yours,” he said. “Did you eat normally?”

I made a tiny tear with my fingernail in the thin paper covering the table. “Yeah. But I vomited preshow, like I usually do.”

“We’ve discussed that. Your singing teacher doesn’t want you to take the antinausea medication because it causes dry mouth?”

Rog is a voice coach, not a singing teacher. “Right. I can’t sing with it. And if I don’t eat before at all and I vomit, I feel even weaker.”

“Did you take anything to help you go to sleep last night?”

I pulled the tear in the paper further, so it looked like one of Jane’s dresses being unzipped in the back.
Fussing and fighting, tearing apart.

“Only when I’m on the road, like we said.”

“You getting enough rest out there?”

“Mostly. If I don’t get a good night’s sleep I can always sleep on the bus.”

Jane did her usual knock on the door, three sharp raps, and Dr. Henson let her in and told me I could get dressed. She said hello and sat down on one of the blue folding chairs. “Did he tell you about the swing?” she asked.

“What swing?”

“Oh, just that there’s this machine, like a metal box, that carries him around in the air over the crowd,” she explained. “And something malfunctioned and it dropped him a few feet before the safety devices kicked in. But there are three safety devices and they figured out the malfunction, so it’s not something to be concerned about. Anyway, I wondered if that could’ve frightened him and caused the fainting.”

He smiled like she was a total moron. Doctors must think about regular people the way I think about people who are tone-deaf. “No, it couldn’t. What could is dehydration, vomiting, strenuous exercise, and both physical and mental exhaustion. This is not what a typical eleven-year-old can handle. Even child actors have far less punishing schedules.”

“He turns twelve in under two months,” Jane said.

Dr. Henson wrote something in his papers. “How long has this tour been going for, when does it end, and when’s the next concert?”

“About two weeks, it ends on Valentine’s Day, and we’re driving to Utah today but the concert isn’t till tomorrow night.”

“He should be fine for that, if you give him plenty of fluids and food today with little exertion,” he said. “But you’re going to have to find a way to get Jonny more rest. I’m serious about this.”

If I admitted I took a zolpidem last night, he’d make sure Jane hid them from me. I don’t think he even knew she gave me some of hers.

“We’ll come up with something,” she said. It was her this-conversation-is-over voice.

“Jonny, would you let your mother and me speak alone for a minute?” Dr. Henson asked. I said sure, and he high-fived me again but didn’t do the down-low part this time. Jane came into the celeb waiting room a few minutes later. On the ride home I asked what he talked to her about.

“I had some questions about my period. He’s my doctor, too, you know,” she said. “Stop talking for a while, okay? You need to rest.” I definitely wasn’t interested in hearing what her questions about her period were, and didn’t even make the joke I thought of, which is that if you wrote out a question about your period, you’d end the sentence with a
period mark
. It was more Nadine’s kind of joke anyway.

At home she had me lie down on the living room couch and eat a new omelet as her and Walter got ready. She even asked Walter to carry me to the car. I was like, Jane, I’m good now, but she insisted. Walter was cool about it. He threw me over his shoulder and said, “You can carry me next time I’m on a bender, brother.” I didn’t mind him carrying me, once he did it. It was kind of fun, actually, and felt familiar, but I couldn’t remember him doing it before.

The car service took us to the studio parking lot, where the buses and eighteen-wheelers were still waiting. We weren’t that late, and all of them except the star/talent bus could’ve left, but I guess they needed to make sure I was really going before they took off, because without the star, the apparatus is irrelevant. The EVP of creative Stacy was standing by my bus, typing on her phone. She looked up when we arrived and inhaled and exhaled like I did with Dr. Henson. I told Walter I could walk fine and he shouldn’t carry me.

“Are you feeling okay, Jonny?” she asked when I came by.

“I was just tired,” I said. “When we find a way to get me more rest, I’ll be fine.”

Her eyebrows were worried. “As long as the doctor cleared you,” she said, looking at Jane. “You up for meeting the Latchkeys?”

“The who?” I was watching Nadine, who’d come out of my bus and was talking with Walter while they both looked over at me.

“The Latchkeys. Your new opener. They’ve boarded their bus, but I can ask them to come out.”

I said sure, and she went into the band/vocalist bus and came out with four guys in their twenties. Three of them were unshaven or had beards and wore regular clothes and looked like normal guys, but the one in back was thin and tall and had midnight black hair that almost covered his eyes and a maroon leather jacket that was all scuffed up. It was the kind of look a stylist would never be able to come up with. Or if she did, it would feel like a stylist did it, instead of it being the look this guy had his whole life.

“Hal, Steve, Tim, Zack, meet Jonny,” Stacy said. “Jonny, meet the Latchkeys.”

They all shook my hand and wore these goofy smiles that older guys always have when they meet me, because they don’t know if they should be impressed or think it’s silly. People say that girls are hard to figure out, but they’re much easier to handle, even the older ones. Guys are the ones who have to think they’re always in control, so they act the way they want to act.

Zack was the tall and thin one, and he was the only one that said something more than hi. “Pleased to meet you, Jonny. I’m Zack. We’re excited to open for you.”

“Me, too,” I said. “I mean, for you guys to open for me.”

He laughed in a way that made me feel like I’d made a funny joke even though I’d messed up. “Just last night a friend who’s a kindergarten teacher said to me, ‘Have a good tour,’ and without thinking, I said, ‘You, too.’ ” Zack looked at one of his bandmates. “But the thing is, she
is
going on a huge kindergarten-teacher East Coast tour, so it made sense.”

They laughed, but it was still early in the morning, so not that hard, and said bye and returned to the bus. After he left his cologne hung in the air. It smelled like the woods mixed with cigarettes.

Stacy said, “Jane, if anything comes up, don’t hesitate to call my personal phone.”

“This isn’t creative’s responsibility, right?” Jane asked. “Olivia’s our usual tour liaison.”

Stacy smiled at me. “Well, I sometimes make an exception and prioritize talent like Jonny.”

Jane pinched her lips and said bye and walked onto our bus. When I got on, she told me I should sleep on my bed for as long as I wanted, since it was like a twelve-hour drive, and Nadine and I could tutor later. So I took a long nap and didn’t need any pills to fall asleep. When I woke up I felt super-strong. I bet if I was alone I could’ve gotten close to coming.

I went out to the seating area and told Nadine I was ready for tutoring. But Jane said she wanted to talk to me about something quickly first, and she came into my room and sat down on the bed with me. “Do you feel better?” she asked.

“A lot.”

“What do you think it was? We got home from the concert too late?”

“No,” I said. “I think it was getting home from the party late the night before.”

She looked down when I said that. “Anyway, I’ve been mulling our options for the next six months or so,” she said. “Even if album sales have lagged, the gate receipts have been respectable. If the live-stream sells well, I think the label would be open to a bigger tour to expand your fan base.”