Teddy Wayne - The Love Song of Jonny Valentine

“You’re supposed to cut right,” he said.

It was true. There used to be a seesaw to the left, the one with me and Jane in the photo in my bedroom, and I had to cut right. It wasn’t there anymore, so I forgot.

I said, “Sorry.”

We ran it a few more times until we completed a pass for the camera crew. I spiked the ball and did my trademark spin move when Kevin asked me. He said they had enough tape, and told me and Michael to say our good-byes before they drove him home. “Bye, Michael,” I said.

“Bye.”

“Stay in touch.”

He smiled. He needed braces soon. “Yeah,” he said. “Like when you left the first time.” He didn’t sound sad when he said it. It was like his eyes were seeing through me and through the seesaw that wasn’t there anymore.

I thought he was done, but he kept going. “My parents wanted to fly me out to visit. We couldn’t get through to you.”

“I never knew that.” I really didn’t. “The label doesn’t tell me a lot. They probably thought you were a fan. There are a lot of impostors who pretend to know me.”

He would’ve loved going into the locker rooms of any team and backstage at any concert we wanted. Maybe I could still invite him out to L.A. He could sleep in one of the extra rooms and we could finally try staying up all night, now that I knew how to make coffee.

“I know.” He shuffled into a car without looking back at me. “You’re busy with your label. And getting free clothes. And going on fake dates. Like all the other celebs.”

He shut the door. I stared at the tinted window he was behind. I wanted to knock on it, open it up and tell him I was sorry, I didn’t mean to talk to him like that, this is how people talk in L.A., I’m still the same kid who played football with you for hours after school and ate Doritos till three a.m. while we watched infomercials and used to cry imagining your funeral, and there was a weasel in here?

Except I wasn’t the same kid, and neither was he, and if he visited we wouldn’t have a fun time together and I wouldn’t be able to stay up all night because it would throw off my schedule for the next day and I wasn’t allowed junk food and he probably didn’t even remember the weasel joke.

Jane came over and asked how it all went as his car took off. “I think they’ll edit it good,” I said.

“Was it nice seeing your school?”

“I guess.”

“And Michael?”

I traced the pass route for “Oh Baby” on the ground with my red Nikes. “He was fine.”

“Just fine?”

“I don’t know. It was sort of weird. He said he tried to visit but couldn’t get through to me. I told him the label doesn’t pass on personal messages.”

She nodded. “I’ve explained to you before how it’s hard for people from your past to adjust to you. They can get jealous, or resentful, or try to use you. You know that’s why I cut everyone from St. Louis off.”

“Michael wasn’t like that, though.”

She stroked my hair out of my eyes and gave me a kiss on my forehead as if I’d fainted again. “I know, baby. I’m so sorry.”

“It wasn’t you who was acting weird, it was Michael.”

“Yeah, but—” She straightened up and got into her business mode and said, “They’re taking us somewhere else. It’s a surprise, so we have to be blindfolded. We’ll ride together.”

They had a limo for us, and Robin and a camera guy sat inside with us and made us put on blindfolds. In the dark, I imagined it was like a hostage situation. Me and Jane were being kidnapped, and the kidnappers told Jane they would only let one of us live, so she told them, “Fuck you, let my baby go,” and they let me out of the car, but then I found my way back to them because the car left a trail of gasoline, and I killed them all even though it was too late to rescue Jane, since they’d slashed her neck and blood was oozing everywhere.

They took our blindfolds off, Jane’s first, and I heard her say, “No way. Absolutely not.” I wriggled out of mine. We were in the parking lot of Schnucks. “Turn the camera off. Now .”

Robin said, “Phil, turn it off.”

“First, how did you know I worked here?” Jane asked.

“It’s not exactly classified information.”

“Well, I’m not going in, if that’s your plan.”

Robin sighed and said she’d talk to Kevin. The camera guy left with her. “This is ridiculous,” Jane said to me. “They’re deliberately trying to belittle me.”

“Won’t this help the heartland ID with us?” I asked.

“I don’t care.”

Kevin came inside. “Jane? You have a problem with this?”

“I’m not doing it.”

“Listen,” he said. “We made a lot of concessions already, namely not interviewing any family members or friends. We need more footage. So I’m afraid this is a deal breaker.”

“Me not agreeing to humiliate myself is a deal breaker?”

“What’s humiliating about this? It’s a job you used to have. I used to work at a hardware store. This is what people do. If you don’t want to do it, we won’t run the profile.”

I almost said out loud what I knew Jane was thinking, that this guy didn’t know what it was like to be a celebrity, even a backstage celebrity like Jane, that he might run a TV show but no one cared what dumb job he had before, but Jane had image maintenance to worry about.

She looked out at the Schnucks again, the big red letters over the brown front. “B-roll footage only. Robin doesn’t come in. If anyone I know works there, we’re not talking to them. Deal?”

He agreed. Jane’s good at bargaining. She always reminds me how the label tried to screw us on our first deal and her business advisers were pressuring her to sign but she knew she had leverage and used it when less sophisticated people would’ve just buckled. You extend a fair offer to the other party but make it clear you’re not giving them anything beyond that. People respect that you’re not conning them and you’re also not a pushover.

She put on her sunglasses as she got out of the car. “No sunglasses, please,” Kevin said. She took a sharp breath in through her nose and placed them on top of her head and walked fast to the entrance. The camera guy raced to catch up.

I asked Kevin if I could go in. I hadn’t even been inside a supermarket in forever, and I’d been in this one hundreds of times. He said, “You can put on your hat and sunglasses and go in, but stay away from your mom, okay?”

Kevin walked inside with me and the hired security guard. The doors dinged open. Everyone knows how music can make you remember something, but even a sound like that double-ding brought me back to how I imagined the double-ding sound was saying, Jon- ny, when Michael’s mother used to drop me off after school before she took Michael to his violin lessons or his tutor or his speech therapist, and I’d do my homework in the staff room, and when her shift was over Jane would let me choose a candy bar to use her employee discount on. For a long time I always picked Butterfinger, but when I was old enough to know Jane was allergic to peanuts, I switched to 3 Musketeers in case the crumbs fell in her car and made her depart the realm, and then we’d drive home together.

I hung around the front fruit displays as Jane went down the main aisle, not saying anything while she walked ahead of the camera guy and Kevin and the security guard. A few people turned around because of the camera, but not all that many, since it was a small handheld and it’s not so strange to see a camera out in public, even in a St. Louis Schnucks.

I followed a little farther in, ducking behind the other displays like in Zenon when projectile weapons or spells are coming for your head. She made it about three-quarters to the end of the aisle when a woman from an empty checkout register in one of the Schnucks polo shirts intercepted her. “Jane?” she asked. “Jane Valentino, is that you?”