Teddy Wayne - The Love Song of Jonny Valentine

“If you say so.”

“Great,” she said. “We’re going to use it for a lot of visual promo content. And Bill knows what he’s talking about.”

Walter laughed quietly to himself. “Something funny, Walter?” Jane said.

“If he knew what he was talking about, it wouldn’t have gotten broke in the first place.”

Jane kept driving without talking, but it was the kind of not talking that said a lot. It wasn’t the smartest thing for Walter to say that to her, but I thought again of him jumping in front of me to catch a bullet. General Jonny and Private Walter.

“Don’t mind me,” Walter said. “It’s not my place. You going out tonight, or are we driving straight home?”

“Home,” Jane said. “And I’d appreciate it if you kept your mind on security issues, Walter.”

He kept looking out the window. “Sorry, Miss Valentine.”

Jane turned on the radio to a classic rock station. We didn’t talk the rest of the way. When we got home, Walter mumbled good night to us and went off to his bungalow, and Sharon was still up and asked us if we wanted anything. Jane said she was going to sleep and reminded me we had a six a.m. wakeup.

My body was tired but my mind was racing from the concert, so I asked Sharon to make me some decaf green tea with honey from the kettle, not the microwave or the hot-water faucet. It would take longer that way.

It was just me and Sharon awake in the house. She leaned over the island counter. “How was the concert, Mr. Jonny?”

“One of the dancers kept messing up and it threw me off, and then the swing that carries me over the crowd, it broke when I was inside.”

She put her hand over her mouth. “It broke?”

“But there are three safety devices. So I didn’t get hurt.”

“Oh, good.” She swept my hair to the side. “They’re not going to make you do it anymore?”

“No,” I said. “Jane said she wouldn’t let them put me in it again for a million dollars.”

Sharon said that she worried so much about me when I did tricks in my concerts, but now she could relax. I finished my tea while she read the front page of the L.A. Times on the counter. She’s taking an adult-education writing class and they have to read the front page every day. When I was done, she looked up from the paper and said, “I love watching you drink your tea. You’re so serious about it.”

She took my mug and opened the dishwasher and bent over to put the mug in the back of the bottom row. Her butt was like two huge boulders guarding the entrance to a cave in Zenon. And I felt like I wanted to disappear inside that cave and close out the world around me and hide in there. I imagined running around the island and grabbing the chub around her hips and under her purple sweatpants and humping her. Thinking about it got me hard, and in my mind I was holding on to her so tight, she was captured like an animal and could never escape. Sharon wasn’t just chubby, she was fat, but there was something about a fat body that was better than a chubby body. Like, either be skinny or be fat, but don’t be somewhere in the middle. It’s sort of like how it’s okay to be super-famous or not famous at all, but don’t be a D-list celeb.

She went to bed. I was still hard, so I tried in my bathroom, but couldn’t make it happen. At least a groupie could never accuse me of getting her pregnant, except I’d have to issue a public statement like, “It’s impossible, I can’t even do it on my own,” and a policeman would have to watch me in private to see if it was true, and they’d give me an adult glossy to help, and we’d also have to bring in Walter to make sure the policeman wasn’t a child predator. I was wired, and I figured Jane was asleep from her zolpidem by now. She probably hadn’t locked her door since she hadn’t been drinking, and I didn’t know when my next chance to go on the Internet was. At her door, I heard her breathing heavy, almost snoring, so I crept inside. Her computer was on top of a suitcase so she wouldn’t forget it. I took it into her bathroom and booted it up. If she caught me, I’d tell her I couldn’t sleep and was researching slave autobiographies for Nadine.

There were eight new emails, and my stomach jumped up like it did when the swing fell. But they were all spam. He hadn’t posted anything new that I could find in my fan forums, either. I looked at my Facebook page to see how many new likes and comments I had. Jane had posted a photo of my Phoenix show, and there were 31,158 likes and 5,385 comments.

I didn’t want Jane to catch me, even though browsing my Facebook page wasn’t that bad and showed I was interested in growing my social media platform, and I closed out. An over-the-counter pill wouldn’t cut it tonight, so I popped one and a half zolpidems from her medicine cabinet. It’s like the sleep command in Zenon, when you can select how many hours you want to sleep for, and you do it right away and wake up refreshed. Only it’s not as deep as regular sleep, and plus you have to be careful not to take it too much or it doesn’t work as good. That’s Jane’s problem.

I woke up to Jane tapping my head. It didn’t make sense, but I was still so sleepy that for a second, with my eyes closed, I thought it was my father waking me up, except I imagined him as the soldier in that war movie we saw.

“C’mon, make hay while the sun shines, you sleepy numbskull,” she said. “You have an estimated twenty-three thousand, three hundred and sixty days left on earth. Make this one worth it.”

That was Jane’s Jonny Valentine Departing the Realm Countdown. I mumbled okay, but when she left the room I fell asleep again. She came in again. “Jonathan, seriously, we have to be out the door in forty-nine minutes.”

I looked at my Cardinals alarm clock. I’d taken the zolpidem six and a half hours before. In Zenon, the only time you get woken up early is because of nearby enemies.

She watched to make sure I got out of bed. I was really out of it, though. My legs were spaghetti, and I felt like if I inhaled too much my chest would pop open.

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.)