The Love Song of Jonny Valentine (29 page)

“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.

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—”