Teddy Wayne - The Love Song of Jonny Valentine

I didn’t want to get in my pajamas in case he did come, and I definitely didn’t want to take a zolpidem, but I was getting tired, so what I did was, at 9:30 I stayed in my regular clothes and got in bed and left the bedroom door open so if he came I could pretend I was still up.

For a little while I stayed up since I thought every sound outside was Zack knocking on my door, but I must have fallen asleep because then I heard this loud banging from out of nowhere. I scrambled out of bed dizzily and turned on the light in the living room and opened the door, and there was Zack.

“Oh, fuck,” he said. “Were you asleep? It’s only, like, ten-fifteen. I figured you’d still be awake.”

Maybe he thought I was older than eleven. “No, I was up.” I could feel my hair going all directions like I’d been electrocuted. That’s the main problem with The Jonny, it looks messed up when you wake up. Plus after rides in convertibles. Ronald has one.

“Can I see your room?” he asked, and he came inside before I could say anything. He smelled like alcohol and cigarettes more than his cologne. “Goddamn. So this is the real rock star room. We should be partying in here instead of our hovel.”

I got nervous that he was going to move the party here and Jane would catch us, so I said, “It’s all right. Usually they’re nicer than this.”

He smiled. “Tough crowd, little man. You want to come over?”

“Yeah. Except I’m not really supposed to be out now.” That was lame, so I added, “On a night before a concert. The doctor said I had too many late nights.”

“Then we’ll have to evade the authorities,” he said. “Come on.”

I got my sneakers on and took my key-card, and he turned off the lights and cracked the door a few inches and poked his head out in the hall both directions and whispered, “Let’s go!” and walked-ran out and I did the same behind him down the hall, and my body felt tingly and light all over, because I was afraid Jane might catch me or a fan would see me but also because it was the most fun I’d had not in Zenon since probably Phoenix, when they’d opened an amusement park at night just for me and Walter and we go-karted and played laser tag. Zack probably weighed about half what Walter did, but I felt safe with him, too, in a different way, like he could talk us out of any trouble we got into.

At the end of the hall Zack opened the door to a stairwell, and he raced and jumped down three flights of stairs before stopping at another stairwell door. Two escaped slaves in the Underground Railroad, hiding at safe houses until we reached freedom.

Zack crouched down, breathing all heavy like he’d finished a marathon, and put his arm around my shoulders and said, “We got one more sprint and we’re safe. Ready?”

I said ready, and wasn’t hardly breathing, because I was in better shape from being a dancer and all-around entertainer, and rock stars smoke cigarettes and stand in one place all night besides the ones like Mick Jagger who add a few dance moves to their stage repertoire, but my heart was still beating like the drum and bass in a techno song, and we dashed through the door and down another hallway and he put his key-card in a door and it made that click sound and he pushed it open and got us inside to the free states. It’s funny how in real life, though, we were still in Tennessee.

His bandmates were on the sectional couch in the living room, which was smaller than mine but not at all a crap room, with an iPod stereo on the coffee table playing a gritty-textured punk-rock song with a British singer, and they were all drinking either bottles of beer or whiskey in the bathroom cups. There were four girls with them. The girls weren’t that hot, really. They were wearing tights and two of them had bangs and one even had glasses and was a little chubby. Maybe it’s because the guys in the band except for Zack weren’t that good-looking, but whenever Mi$ter $mith was with a girl, she always looked like a model or an actress, and they definitely never wore glasses. In a way I respected the Latchkeys more for not having model groupies. These girls probably had better personalities. Unless they wanted the model groupies but they couldn’t get them, since that was the whole point of becoming a rock star for a lot of guys. I didn’t know that when I started out, but once you see seriously ugly bassists backstage with models, you figure it out. For a normal guy, becoming a rock star is like Luann Phelps getting contacts and losing her lisp.

Mi$ter $mith had an entourage, too, like most black pop and rap stars, and they probably helped him get models. The Latchkeys didn’t have any friends with them on tour, but that was smart financial strategy. It’s hard to have career longevity when you’re controlling the purse strings for twenty people everywhere you go.

One of the girls looked better than the others, though. She was sitting by herself in the center, and was tall and thin, and her nose was long but it still fit her face good. But it was the way she sat, with the posture Jane wants me to have, that you knew she was their leader. Zack sat next to her and put his arm around her, and told me to sit next to him. He said, “Jonny, this is Vanessa, and these are Clara and Samantha and Jane.”

I almost said that that was my mother’s name but I stopped myself in time, and I also knew that if I asked to check email one of the Latchkeys might tell them that Jane doesn’t let me go on the Internet. Zack wouldn’t do it, but I didn’t trust the other guys not to.

The singer on the stereo kept singing “1977” at the start of each verse, and the bassist of the Latchkeys was like, “If we wrote a song named after this year, and someone was listening to it in three or four decades, what would it be about?” and the drummer said, “Like, fucking Facebook,” and the lead guitarist said, “No, articles about Facebook,” and Zack picked up an acoustic guitar from the floor and paused the music and played a pretty riff that was like the textural opposite of the song we’d been listening to, and one of the Latchkeys cupped his hands over his mouth and said, “He’s playing acoustic! Judas !” and Zack said, “Except for acoustic it would be, ‘Jesus!’ and he’d whisper to his band of disciples, ‘Play fuckin’ quiet!’ ” Then he cleared his throat and said the name of the year all serious in a way that made everyone laugh, and made up these lyrics on the spot and sang them soprano:

Status updates and Internet dates

I’d rather eat out a Middle East date

Get your filthy minds outta the gutter

I’m referring to consuming the biblical delicacy

Not cunnilingus on a woman

From a historically war-torn and oil-rich region

Whom I’ve been set up with by our mutual friend, John

Who thinks we have a lot in common

Everyone laughed throughout the song and especially at the end, and so did I to play along but I didn’t get most of the jokes. Zack turned the music back on to a new song and said, “You like the Clash, Jonny?”

I didn’t want to admit I’d heard of them but didn’t know their music. Punk was a genre Rog and Jane didn’t allow on my iPod since the singers were almost all low-caliber, but I’d seen on the iPod that they were the band playing, so I said I liked that song before, and he said, “This song is criminally underrated.”

“Oh, God, not ‘Complete Control,’ ” said the bassist. “You worship that song. It’s so banal.”

“It’s the greatest meta-critique of the music industry in a rock song,” Zack said.

I tried to listen to the lyrics, which were hard to make out, but I liked how it was part singing, part shouting. Normally this music, it’s all shouting because the singer’s got zero vocal chops. I could tell it was about how bad their label was, which is a major no-no. When singers play antimedia songs, they think they’re getting the fans on their side, but the fans don’t actually care and all you’re doing is alienating your ally and mouthpiece. But the fans really don’t care about a song slamming your label, even if most people hate their boss. They don’t even understand what the label does. They just know what’s put out in front of them, like a roast beef sandwich on an airplane, and have no idea anyone else had to feed and kill and cook and package the cow before serving it on their tray. And the funny thing is, they all wish they could be the packaged cow.