Teddy Wayne - The Love Song of Jonny Valentine

They’d set up a circular outdoor stage underneath it, and the crowd was already surrounding it and hollering when the show’s security guys escorted me onstage. It was my usual audience, girls with their mothers or sometimes fathers, plus a few stragglers. When people see a crowd, they always feel like they’re missing out if they’re not part of it. Kevin reminded me they’d air the video from yesterday, Robin would do the ten-minute interview, and then I’d sing three songs over a musical track. They estimated a 3.2 and twenty-two share, with a 1.1 in the twelve-to-seventeen demo, solid numbers for morning TV.

They showed the video on a small screen near us. It was all the regular stuff, video and photo clips of me with voiceovers talking about my career, spliced with shots of St. Louis and me walking around the school. I could be a TV director. It’s pure formula.

They cut to me and Michael meeting, and they edited it as B-roll so it didn’t seem awkward. We walked to the park like a weirdo pair, with him in his Champion sweats and me in my sponsored wardrobe. But they cut it so it seemed like we were having fun, and with “Kali Kool” in the background instead of a love song, it didn’t look too gay, even though it didn’t make any sense to play a song about partying on a beach in California over shots of an empty park in St. Louis in the middle of winter. If you didn’t know, you’d think we were still best friends. I let my eyes get blurry like when I’ve been playing video games for a long time, so I had a sense of what was happening on the screen but didn’t have to watch.

After I could tell they were done with me and Michael, they ran a few shots of our old apartment before the segment wound down. They’d cut the whole Schnucks thing.

I wasn’t nervous for something like this, because I’ve done plenty of live TV, but when they were counting down, it was the last thing I wanted to be doing. I wasn’t tired, so I didn’t want to be sleeping, and I didn’t want to be playing Zenon, either, or hanging out with anyone in particular. What I suddenly wanted was, I wanted to be back at our old apartment, and I wanted to tell Jane to buy it back. We could afford it easily, and we could decorate it the same exact way it looked back then. We wouldn’t stay there or anything, because it was still a crap apartment, but when we came back to St. Louis for shows we could just pop in and remember that it was still around.

But she’d say it was a wasteful expenditure and these kinds of purchases were what bankrupted musicians with stupid business instincts.

Being a consummate professional means doing your job when you don’t want to, so I sucked it up and pasted on a huge smile when the camera light blinked and Robin introduced me as America’s Angel of Pop and the girls screamed like they were getting attacked and I got ready to give answers in Auto-Tune mode, where they sound right but have nothing behind them.

She asked me how I got my start, and I’d gone over this story so much I could recite it in my sleep. I talked about my music teacher in second grade and how I won second place in a local talent competition that year, and like every other interviewer in the history of the world, Robin asked what the kid who won first place was doing now, and I said what Jane coached me on, “I hope she’s still singing, because she was hella good.” You can say hella on TV, even at seven in the morning, Jane told me, but not hell . Networks are idiots.

I talked about how me and Jane decided I was old enough to busk on weekends in the Central West End, and a couple videos of me singing exploded on YouTube one week and my record label called, and a couple years later, with God’s help, here we are. I’m supposed to mention God once in a while, but after Jane’s lie the day before about us praying, it might have been too much Bible thumping.

“Everything happens for a reason,” Robin said.

Something about the TV-host smile on her face made me want to be like, No, it doesn’t, that’s the coastal way of believing in God without actually believing in him, and it’s a stupid thing morons like Mrs. Warfield tell themselves when bad things happen so they feel better about it, that’s why The Secret Land of Zenon is so good, things happen and no one’s keeping track of if it’s for a reason or not, experience points either come or they don’t and you can never totally predict why and sometimes it’s the opposite of what makes sense, like Jane can’t sing and my father probably can’t but I was born with a perfect voice from good luck, and if Jane had gotten an abortion then everyone here would be watching someone else get interviewed right now, or if YouTube hadn’t been invented I might never have been discovered and would be a normal kid in St. Louis who was the star of his school choir but nothing else and Luann Phelps wouldn’t have a crush on me, and there’s a girl in the audience in a wheelchair and if you think that happened for a reason, you have a fucked-up idea of why things happen.

“Totally,” I said.

“Did you ever think you’d become this famous?” Robin asked.

“I don’t think of myself as famous. I’m just a normal kid who likes normal things, sports, video games, hanging out, and who’s getting the chance to live out his dream and share the music and the love. And that’s why I love coming back to St. Louis”—the crowd cheered—“because I never want to forget where I came from.”

Right when I finished, I heard a guy in the crowd shout, “Faggot!” There was some whispering and Robin pretended like she didn’t hear it, but I could tell from her eyes she did and hoped like hell the mikes hadn’t picked anything up, which they probably wouldn’t. I glanced around for Walter, but I didn’t see him and didn’t know where he was. This was the problem with letting someone else run your show. You don’t have full control over performance protocol.

She segued quickly to the next question. “We hear you’ve been dating the actress Lisa Pinto, who has a debut album out on February 14—which is, of course, Valentine’s Day. Can you confirm if you two are going to be celebrating her release together?”

The way she said it, slipping in the reference to the drop date, I knew Stacy in creative had planted it, even though Jane had told the label to lower the volume on it after the tabloid. But Stacy could always claim that the show people just saw the story and ran with it. So I repeated what Jane had told me to say if anyone brought it up.

“Me and Lisa are just good friends,” I said, which was almost less true than saying we were dating, since you could get ice cream once with someone and say you were dating, but to be good friends you’d have to spend a long time with each other, like I did with Michael. “I’m still looking for that special girl to share myself with in my personal life, but until then the best connection I get is when I’m onstage, with my fans.”

“And you have a lot of them,” she said. “Here are some Tweets from two of our viewers.” They showed the Tweets on-screen, and while she read it and the camera was off her, her eyes were scanning around, I think to see if they found the guy who’d shouted before.

i love 2 listen 2 Jonnys voice when everything is Bad it makes me feel like theres something Good in the world thank u Jonny

That NOT awkward moment last night when @TheRealJonny sings “Crushed” and makes eye contact with you in the front row #willyoubemyBOYtoday

“It must make you feel great to hear that,” Robin said.

“If it wasn’t for my fans I wouldn’t be here,” I said. “Everything I do belongs to them.”

She lobbed a couple softballs, like, “What’s your best feature?” and even though I really think it’s my arms because they’ve got zero chub, I always pretend to be a little embarrassed and say, “Well, I don’t know, but people tell me they like my eyes,” and she said, “Can we get a close-up on Jonny’s baby blues?” and the camera zoomed in on them and I batted them like I was shy and the girls went nuts like they always do, it’s like they know they’re supposed to from other times they’ve seen audiences react.