Teddy Wayne - The Love Song of Jonny Valentine

He might have a whole new family in Pittsburgh. I played it on my last tour. Maybe he came, or even took them. The oldest any of his kids could be was around five, which was just outside my base’s age range, but some were that young. Or he could have a boy, one he played catch and watched Pirates games on TV with or took to games, and taught him how to swing and the proper fielding position and how managers do a double switch, which is the hardest thing to understand, and I had to watch a million games before I figured out how it worked. I don’t know why, but that last part about the double switch made my stomach feel like it does preshow, all knotted up and swirly at the same time and like I had to throw up. Except preshow you do throw up and you feel better. This sat there like a huge bag of Doritos you wished you hadn’t eaten but you couldn’t stop yourself.

My face must have moved a lot because I heard Zack say, “Everything working okay?” and I said, “Yeah,” without moving my eyes. I read the email:

Please send this to Jonathan. Jane still calls him that right? Here’s my license but I don’t live in Pittsburgh anymore. I live in New York, just moved here last year after a few years in Australia mostly working in construction. Now you have to hold up your end of the bargain. Send me a regular picture of Jonathan to prove you know him and tell me something about Jane only he would know.

So he wasn’t taking some other kid to Pirates games, unless he’d had one there before he went to Australia. I could easily see the guy in the driver’s license bouncing around Australia, living with different women who took him in, seeming all exotic to them since he had an American accent and knew how to operate forklifts and cement mixers. Jane thought about adding an Australia/New Zealand segment on the first tour, and to work in an appearance at a big Sydney music festival, but the label didn’t think we had enough of a foothold there yet. I wonder if he would’ve come to the concert.

I’d passed by a million guys doing construction on the street in my life, but I never thought that that’s what my father did. Jane just said he didn’t do hardly any work.

Jane was always worried about child predators getting ahold of candids of me, even though I didn’t see any difference between those and published shots. And I couldn’t tell him anything too personal about Jane in case he was still just pretending to be my father or was going to go to the media. The more we limit awareness of Jane, the more freedom she has to operate behind the scenes.

I checked again to make sure the Latchkeys weren’t watching me. They weren’t. One of them was on his iPhone, and Zack said, “Please tell me you’re not on Twitter again.”

He said, “We’ve already gotten a thousand more followers since our profile in Vice .”

Zack was like, “Because our fans definitely aren’t sheepish hipsters. I mean, sheeplike hipsters. Sheepish hipsters would be, what, bashful practitioners of countercultural lifestyles.”

One of the guys said, “And neither are we.”

A second one said, “So we’re all in agreement that we’re not sheeplike, right? Guys? Yes?”

The third one said, “And neither is the guy at our Austin show who wore the ringer T-shirt that said I HATE IRONIC T-SHIRTS.”

The first guy said, “Doing anything meta is a hipster thing. So is saying that anything meta is a hipster thing.”

The second one said, “And disavowing your hipsterness is the surest sign that you are a hipster.”

Zack said, “Some of my best friends are black hipsters.”

They hadn’t laughed until that last one, and then they returned to doing what they were doing. The Latchkeys were like the Harlem Globetrotters with words. I’d pay $19.95 to watch them talk on Internet live-stream. They must’ve known each other for a long time, the way they talked so fast and all sounded like each other. I didn’t sound anything like Jane or even Walter.

I asked the guy with the iPhone if he could take my photo and email it to me. “So I can make sure I’m able to download photos,” I said, since it was a strange thing to ask.

“Sure,” he said. “With all of us?”

“That’s okay, it can be just me.”

“As long as we’re not being narcissistic,” he said. Fuck him for making fun of me for asking for a photo with myself, when I was just trying to protect them in case I was emailing with an impostor.

Zack got up. “Can I get in there? I’ll be the envy of everyone back home who said I’d never amount to anything.” He winked at me. “Or I’ll sell it on eBay and we’ll split the profits.”

Maybe it was okay if only Zack got in there, and even if the guy was an impostor and was going to email the photo to a gossip site, it’d look cool that I was hanging out with Zack backstage in his green velvet suit. I told him yeah, and he said, “Copacetic,” and put his arm around my shoulders. He smelled like the woods and cigarettes again.

I gave the other guy my email and Zack said to send it to him, too. It showed up in my inbox. I had to figure out what to tell him about Jane. And I didn’t want to let him know it was me who was emailing him. I wrote

Jane is very allergic to peanuts.

That wasn’t too private, but I don’t think many other people know about it. Jane’s savvy about containing info in our circle.

I Googled “Albert Valentino Pittsburgh.” I didn’t find anything till a few pages in, a short article in a no-name Pittsburgh newspaper from four years ago.

CRIME BLOTTER

TWO MEN ARRESTED IN BARROOM BRAWL

Two men were arrested early Sunday in connection with a dispute in the parking lot of Schmidt’s Tavern in Southside Flats.

According to a police statement, Jefferson Smithfield, 35, and Albert Valentino, 40, turned to fisticuffs after a verbal dispute. The owner of Schmidt’s, John Schmidt, is suing the two men for damages to the exterior of the bar sustained during the altercation.

Smithfield has a prior conviction for unlawful possession and delivery of a controlled substance. Valentino has no prior record.

Both men were processed and released Sunday evening.

They didn’t have a picture of his mug shot or anything. But I thought of the guy in the driver’s license posing in the police station, which wasn’t hard because ID photos already look like mug shots without the height marker behind you. If you see a celeb who still looks good in a mug shot, then you know that person’s really good-looking and doesn’t need to rely on makeup and lighting and Photoshop.

Then I imagined him getting in a fight outside a bar. The other guy, Jefferson Smithfield, was drunk and insulting my father and telling him he sucked. He was like, “And I don’t believe Jonny Valentine is your son, like you always say.” Finally my father was like, “I am Jonny’s dad, and if you say one more thing to me, I’m gonna kick your ass,” and the other guy smiled like in the movies and said, “You’re a loser and a liar.” My father didn’t say anything. He just threw an uppercut and knocked him out cold through one of the bar windows, which is why he got sued for damages to the exterior of the bar sustained during the altercation. He waited there for the cops because he hadn’t done anything wrong. That wasn’t how it could’ve actually been, since I wasn’t famous four years ago, but maybe he’d gotten in fights like that outside bars in Australia and they didn’t have muscular enough media there to report it.

The newspaper didn’t have any more stories about him, and I couldn’t find anything else by Googling his name with Pittsburgh or Australia or New York. I told the Latchkeys I’d see them later and asked if they wanted anything from my food spread, but Zack said, “Thanks, we’re solid.”