Read The Love Song of Jonny Valentine Online
Authors: Teddy Wayne
Tags: #Literary, #Coming of Age, #General, #Fiction
The Love Song of Jonny Valentine (26 page)
“You take medication for leukemia?” the woman asked.
“To prevent it,” I said. “It’s to prevent me from getting leukemia, and it’s really dangerous if I miss a day. It runs in my family. My father had it.”
I couldn’t tell if she believed it or not. People get freaked out by anything to do with health. “I can’t call her?” she asked again.
“No, she’ll get worried and it’ll ruin her meeting. Please, miss, I have to get in there.”
She peered around like Angela did in Vegas, but she was slicker and did it just with her eyes. She made a key-card and said she was only doing this because it was an emergency. I asked if she wanted an autograph, but she said, “Um, thanks, that’s all right.”
I sped back to Jane’s room and listened outside the door and went in. Her computer was in the bedroom, which was lucky, since sometimes she brought it to concerts. If she caught me using it, I’d say I was reading about the nightclub incident and my own key-card worked on her door.
While it booted up I looked around, but I didn’t see any more legal letters, only her usual junk and clothes on the floor and even more dumped on the bed, though I kept the light off so I didn’t get a great look. Except she had a copy of
The New Yorker
magazine open and facedown on the desk, which didn’t make sense because she never reads it except once when they ran a profile of Ronald and it mentioned me a few times. When I turned it over, though, I saw why:
Jonny Valentine’s concert last night was anemic even by today’s nadir of pop-music standards. One would be hard-pressed to imagine a hypothetical performance an audience might find more alienating.
—The Kansas City
Star
.
When my manager’s manager told me I’d been invited to perform at the historic Apollo Theater in Harlem, I was so excited that one of my handlers screamed for me with excitement.
The day before my performance, an old movie called “The Jazz Singer” was on TV. The star, Al Jolson, had really great makeup, with black paint all over his face. Not only did he look badass, but it seemed like the perfect way to cover a pimple—and, boy, I had a honker right on my button nose! It also made his lips look a lot fuller, and I’ve always been insecure about my thin lips. So I sent my handler’s manager’s handler to buy me some industrial-strength Midnight Black Hole paint and bright red gloss to make my lips really pop.
I wanted to surprise everyone, so I didn’t put on the paint until just before I went onstage. There was another movie I’d seen a couple weeks before that I also thought was cool, because it starred a guy with a kick-ass mustache. I don’t have much facial hair, but I let it grow in the week leading up to the awards, then just before I put on the black paint I shaved everything but the mustache so I could look like him. I also had the movie playing behind me on a big screen with a close-up of the guy I was trying to look like, so everyone would know the mustache was on purpose. Check it out sometime, even if foreign movies normally suck—“Triumph of the Will.”
It was time to sing my song called “I Like Girls with Curves.” But I wanted to do something special for this performance and tweak my lyrics a little. Fortunately, there was a book lying around backstage that had a similar title. I just plucked out a few lines and mixed them into the verses, and changed the chorus to “I Like, and Wholeheartedly Endorse, the Bell Curve.”
Yet the star is only as good as
his backup dancers. It was almost Halloween, so I thought my dancers should dress up—and my all-time favorite costume is ghosts. My second favorite? You guessed it: dunces. I got all my dancers ghost outfits with dunce caps, and told them to cover their faces, too. Hey,
I’m
the star, you know? But I felt bad that they weren’t getting as much attention, so I researched which shape is most visible from a distance, got them some wood in that shape, and had them light the wood on fire for better visibility. I also wanted to single out the three dancers who’d been with me longest—Krista, Carl, and Kiersten—by putting up a banner with the first letters of their three names. Except the guy who made the banner thought Carl was spelled with a “K”! Maybe we’ll get a discount next time. They were doing this new dance I’d choreographed in which they go around in a circle totally in sync on horses. Aww, yeah: Ghosts in dunce caps on horseback with flaming crosses!
In the middle of all this perfection, something went wrong—suddenly the big-screen video stopped, the background music cut, and the house lights went down. What a low-budget production! The TV crew was still filming, though, so to show everyone I was against “The Man” and wasn’t afraid to stand up to corporate America, I started yelling about how cheap they were. I’ve been studying vocabulary lists—stay in school, kids!—so instead of saying “cheap,” I decided to whip out one of my bigger words.
“Y’all are niggardly!” I shouted. “Goddamn niggardly! Get ’em for being niggardly!”
I then repeated the word
niggardly
seventeen times. Everyone started talking, probably to ask what
niggardly
meant. “Oh, I’m sorry,” I said. I figured I had to speak down to the level of people who don’t understand big words, so I should have shortened it and referred to it just by its first letter. “I guess I should’ve called it ‘the N-word.’ Is that better?”
I kept getting calls after the show from a group named the NAACP, which I assume stands for the National Association for Awesome Costume Parties. They probably want to know where I got my ghost costumes and dunce caps.
I’m going to ask the NAACP if they want to sponsor my next tour through the South!
♦
I recognized the writer’s name, because he flew in from New York to hang out with me for a day for a softball profile in a music glossy last
year. I must have made him a few months’ rent on his crap apartment by now. Not only did he not sound like me at all in this article, but we only released “I Like Girls with Curves” as a digital single because we knew it was weak. I understood the jokes about the KKK and a bunch of the rest, but I didn’t think it was that funny. People in the cultural-elite demo usually aren’t. They just like making fun of my music so they feel special about liking their own boring classical music that no one listens to anymore, the same way that
New York Times
writer bashed Jane to feel better about how good a mother she is. They’re probably even happy that no one else listens to classical music now, so they can feel
really
special. If you listened to Mozart when he was alive, it was like saying you listened to MJ. And they’re just as into reading and talking about celebrities, only their celebrities are politicians and serious musicians and writers and movie directors. Jane’s big into publicity that reaches people high up on the cultural food chain, though, even if they’re way out of my fan base, because there’s always a trickle-down effect. I’m sure she was happy about this.
I almost forgot what I’d come in for, so I signed into my email and read my father’s letter again, and it was different here, since it was like he’d written these words himself, not ones I’d printed out later.
I’d had all these questions before for him, but now I didn’t know what to write. Or I knew some things, but I couldn’t click on the reply button and type them in. I just stared at it.
I heard the elevator ding down the hall and two people laughing, and one of them sounded a lot like Jane, so I signed out of the email fast, which I was getting a lot of practice at, and closed the computer, which made the room completely dark, and the voices were louder and one of them was
definitely
Jane’s, I can ID her laugh a mile away, and I remembered there were closets in the living room, so I ran out of the bedroom and almost tripped over a suitcase, but I heard Jane sliding her key-card and it kept beeping from her not doing it right, and I didn’t have time to hide in the closet so I crouched in the small space between the back of the big white U-shaped couch and the wall. I was doing that a lot lately, like I was in the movies. General Jonny, hiding from the enemy.
“Abracadabra,” Jane said, slowly. She was drunk.
There weren’t any sounds for a few seconds as the door shut, and I didn’t want to lift my head. But then there were footsteps, and something bumped hard against one of the sides of the couch. A man’s voice, low and steady, said, “Don’t fucking move.” I couldn’t tell whose it was, but it sounded familiar.
“Yes, sir,” said Jane in this little-girl voice that was a million miles from what she used when she was bitching out the TV producer. I could tell she was putting it on, that she wasn’t actually in danger, but the guy sounded like he wasn’t pretending at all.
Then shoes hitting the ground one after another, high heels falling to the floor, a zipper unzipping, jeans being shaken off, keys and a belt and change jingling and clanging when they hit the ground, and the man saying, “Take off your clothes and stand there.” I still couldn’t place his voice.
I held my breath, since I was sure they could hear me breathing. Once you pay attention to the sound of your breathing or your heartbeat, it’s like the loudest sound in the world and you have a hard time doing it regularly. It’s the reason why you’re supposed to be
aware
of your breathing while you sing but you should never
think
about it, because you’ll screw it up.
The man said, “You like being my little slut, don’t you?” and Jane again said, “Yes, sir,” and I heard a loud slap and Jane moaned and the guy said, “Shut up,” and Jane said, “I’m sorry, sir,” and heat rose up in my body like it wanted me to jump over the couch and tackle him, even though I knew from her voice that Jane was playing along. But I’d get in
major
trouble.
My eyes had adjusted to the darkness, and I peeked up a tiny bit to see if I could watch them without them catching me, since their eyes probably hadn’t adjusted yet and they were off to the side. Jane’s back was to me, and the guy was standing in front of her totally naked except for dark socks and his boner sticking straight up out of his pubes. A man looks weird with just long socks and a boner. I couldn’t see him too good, only that his arms were covered with tattoos.
Oh, man. The head crew guy. Bill.
Bill had joined us when we began assembling the crew for this tour and getting the stagecraft down, so the longest this could’ve been going on was a few months, but he’d never been at our place in L.A. He didn’t talk to me much.
“God, you’re so beneath me,” Bill said.
“I’m sorry,” Jane said in her little-girl voice.
“You don’t even deserve my cock tonight,” he said. “I’m just gonna jerk off on you.”
“Yes, sir,” she said again, and I heard him jerking off. After a minute he said, “I need moisturizer or something,” and she ran in and out of the bathroom and handed him something, and he took a few more minutes, and I closed my eyes and thought of me telling Lisa Pinto she was my little slut and her calling me
sir,
but the way Jane said it, and then Bill took a step toward her and made this sound like an animal growling.
He went to the bathroom and peed and used the sink while Jane pulled a bunch of tissues from a box and wiped herself off. Bill came back and Jane went to the bathroom, and he sat down on the couch. I peeked over again. His hands were behind his head like a pillow, and it looked like his eyes were closed. He was still naked. His penis was small now and hanging to one side. That looked even stranger than a boner, a grown man with a soft penis that wasn’t all that much bigger than mine.
When Jane came back, she sat down next to him and asked, “Want some?” Bill took a long gulp of water before giving it back.
“It’s my birthday on the sixth,” Jane said. Bill grunted, though it wasn’t like one of the grunts from before. “Maybe we could do something special that night.”
“Maybe,” Bill said. “Where are we gonna be?”
“Cleveland.”
“Beautiful,” he said. “You can really paint Cleveland red in early February.”
She was quiet until she said, “I had to go to the children’s hospital today. For photo ops.”
“Yeah?” he asked, but it was more just saying it than a question. “How was it?”
“I’m never going to a children’s hospital again.”
“It’s no worse than a regular hospital, when you get down to it.”
“It is, to me.”
“Right,” Bill said. “My sister lost a baby, too, you know.”
Too?
I almost asked.
“You told me,” Jane said. “You said hers was stillborn. Mine lived two weeks.”
I thought it was hard not to jump out before when he slapped her, but it took everything in me to stay still now. I couldn’t remember Jane being pregnant. Maybe it was before I was born. It wasn’t something I could ask her about normally, but now I really couldn’t be like, Oh, I know about it because I heard you talking about it with Bill after he jerked off on you in your hotel room I’d broken into so I could email a guy who says he’s my father but he still may be a child predator.
And she didn’t lose
me
. I was right next to her. Closer than she would’ve wanted.