Teddy Wayne - The Love Song of Jonny Valentine

During the word games, I told her the period mark joke instead. She gave me credit for a Creative Stroke, but warned me not to repeat it in any interviews.

Jane said that me and Lisa Pinto were going to do an exclusive photo op of a staged date for a glossy on our next stop in Denver. I didn’t ask her why she changed her mind. There were always two reasons: Ronald told her she should do it, or there was a lot of money. I didn’t care, though, since I’d get to see how cute Lisa Pinto was in person. You can’t always tell from photos. Sometimes girls are disappointed when they meet me. I’ve read a few blog posts.

Before I left in the morning, Rog knocked on my door. He seemed twitchy. “Good luck tonight,” he said. “You know the warm-up routine?”

“Rog, I’ve done it like a million times.”

“Just let me know how it goes later, okay?”

“Roger that, Rog,” I said, which he never finds funny.

“And try to remember the name of whoever works with you. Can you do that?”

“No, I’m a numbskull who can’t remember anyone’s name. Who are you, again? And who am I?”

“No kidding, Jonny, as a favor to me. Please.”

I promised him I would. “Thanks,” he said. “This is a really tough time in the industry. So… I appreciate it.” He beat it down the hall, because he must’ve been afraid Jane would catch him. It looked like he had a little limp when he walked fast. It wasn’t hard to see why he was worried about someone younger teaching me.

When we got to sound check at EnergySolutions Arena, Jane introduced me to this English woman named Patricia and said she’d be helping with my warm-ups. I couldn’t figure out a way to ask her last name for Rog without being obvious. She looked young enough to be one of my backup dancers. Her arms were like toned snakes in her tank top and she had a pretty smile like white piano keys even though she’s from England. The English musicians I’ve met have the worst teeth, except for the young ones who are pop singers. They’ve got American teeth. Jane stayed and worked on her computer while we did vocal exercises in the star/talent room but glanced up a bunch of times.

The Latchkeys sound checked next, and though I’m supposed to rest up in the star/talent room and drink Throat Coat and I wanted to play some Zenon, I watched them. It wasn’t a full performance, but they had a tight sound, with lots of ambient noise. Zack was what made them different. He was the lead singer and rhythm guitarist, and his musicianship was fine, but his voice was sonorous and had real range. Most male baritones can’t reach the high notes easily or give them any feeling. And he wore a dark green velvet suit. I couldn’t make out the lyrics, but each song had a different girl’s name in it and other words that began with that letter, like “Erica’s Elfin Ears.” I found a copy of their set list to read the names of the others, and one called “Vera’s Vulva” was crossed out and next to it someone had written, “R-rated! Oh, my!”

When I was back in my room playing, I found myself humming along to their song called “Jealous Julia.” I wanted to hear it again, but Jane was always busy before shows and wouldn’t be able to download it for me. So I asked Walter to escort me to the band/vocalist room. Outside their door I said, “Walter, you can wait out here if you want.”

He smiled and said, “No problem. Like dropping you off a block from school.” You didn’t have to explain anything to Walter, and his feelings never got hurt.

I knocked on the door and the bassist opened it, I forget his name, either Steve or Tim. He said hi and invited me in. It was the four of them, and they were sitting around eating food and reading books and magazines that weren’t glossies. Some up-tempo rock was playing with a male singer. Zack put down his book whose name I couldn’t see except for a huge letter U .

“Stately, plump Jonny Valentine,” he said.

I looked down at my stomach. The hotel scale that morning said I was maintaining at eighty-six. “It’s a joke, you’re not plump,” he said. “Your sound check rocked, by the way. I listened in.”

I smiled wide and said I’d heard theirs and wanted to download their songs but I didn’t have the Internet. “There’s no Wi-Fi in your room?” he asked.

“My mother doesn’t let me go on.” Two of the Latchkeys looked at each other like this was the funniest thing they ever heard.

Zack took my iPod and plugged it into his laptop. “Not letting children go on the Internet anymore.” He made a tsk-tsk sound. “What is the world coming to? I’ll give you not only our first album for free, but the rough cut of our next one. But don’t leak it to anyone, right?”

I said, “Right,” and he gave me a handshake and said, “All right, I trust you because you’re the man, and because I don’t have trust issues despite what my therapist says.” I stared at the laptop while it was transferring to my iPod. “If you want to hang out and surf the Net, like the kids say these days, feel free. I won’t tell your mom if you don’t.”

I said thanks and he went back to his book. There were like fifty emails, but it was all spam. That’s what my regular email account usually looked like, too. If you were an alien and looked at someone’s email, you’d think the only merch they sold domestically was prescription sex pills.

An email in the middle was from “Albert Valentino.” There was an attachment of a photo of a driver’s license with the name Albert Derrick Valentino. I almost said something out loud, and looked up. No one was paying attention.

The guy’s hair was almost the same chestnut color as mine is naturally, except it was thinner and he didn’t have it in The Jonny, obviously, but more slicked back. His skin was much paler than mine but that’s also from living in L.A. and spray-tanning once a week with Jane at this salon where they serve you sugarless pink lemonade, and his eyes were also blue like mine. He was a pretty good-looking guy, better bone structure than Jane. I got my pug nose from him, and Jane’s right, it’s cuter on a kid than it will be when I’m an adult, but it still worked for him. He was six feet tall. Jane is only five-two, so if it was really my father, I might not be so short, but shorter pop stars are more successful because they’re better dancers and your head is oversized for your body, which plays better on TV, and plus it helps since people love seeing a huge voice coming out of someone tiny. If I was bigger it wouldn’t be so impressive to them.

He’d turned forty-four years old in November, so he’d had me when he was thirty-two. The license showed an address in Pittsburgh, and it expired over a year ago.

When you’ve seen a million pictures of yourself, you start to see yourself in other people’s features sometimes. I guess part of it’s because you almost forget it’s you in pictures. Instead it’s the glossy magazine version of you, so you compare that person with other people. And depending on what the picture’s in, like a glossy or tabloid or newspaper or website or teen glossy or whatever, it feels like a different version of you, even if it’s the same exact picture. Most people don’t see themselves so much besides in the mirror, which is the opposite of how you look in real life to others, so when they see pictures of themselves something always feels off. But I see so many photos of myself that I can picture myself in them better than I can picture my own reflection. Except everyone takes a ton of photos of themselves, so they probably react a little more like celebs.

Anyway, I could see myself not in his eyes themselves but more around the eyes, since he had deep purple bags there, and when I didn’t sleep enough I got them, too, only not as purple. It really was my father. All those times I’d imagined what he looked like, and now I knew. Or knew from a driver’s license. If he’d sent a thousand pictures, I would’ve studied each one in close-up.