Teddy Wayne - The Love Song of Jonny Valentine

It wasn’t MJ, which pumps straight into my veins, and I don’t know how you could listen to him and not dance, but when Zack saw I was tapping my foot to it and turned the volume up, it didn’t make me want to dance. It made me want to throw or break something. When it was over he said, “I’ll put it on your iPod next time. Because fuck the major labels, right?”

“Right.”

The Latchkeys weren’t guys who’d leak something you said to the media.

He ruffled my hair and said, “We’re gonna convert you to a punk before this tour is over, right here in one of our three-star suites.” He looked at the bassist. “Also, you pronounce it buh-nahl ?”

“Yeah,” the bassist said. “What do you say, bay-nul ?”

“ Buh-nahl sounds so pretentious. What do you guys say?”

He asked the room, but it was obvious he was only asking the guys in the band. They both pronounced it the way the bassist did, and the lead guitarist, Steve, said, “Zack, you lose the pronunciation battle once again, you working-class Jersey boy.”

It was the first time I’d seen them make fun of him at all. Zack smiled but his eyes dropped when he did, not a real smile, and he said, “You’re so banal-retentive, Steve.” They laughed, and he said to Vanessa, “So you know, I’m only doing this if you’re into banal sex.” She thought it was funny, and he said, “I’m into doing it hard-core banal. Banal sex, all night long, while watching interracial banal porn. Double-banal penetration, where it’s twice as banal as normal.” He did a fake bite of her neck, and said, “Jonny, you want a drink? Beer, whiskey?”

Everyone was waiting to see if I’d drink with them. If I said no the wrong way, like I did with the kids at Matthew’s birthday party, they’d know I’d never had alcohol before. Before I could answer, Steve said, “Milk?” like it was the funniest line anyone had ever come up with, the asshole, and the girls all giggled.

“I’m good,” I said to Zack. Then I looked straight at Steve. “But I’ll take some of your mom’s milk.”

There was silence for a few seconds. Everyone looked around at each other trying to figure out if what I said was funny or not, until Zack said, “Oh, snap, Jonny schooled you, Steve-o, lactation-style.”

Everyone laughed again at what Zack said, but it was like they were really laughing at my line, and he put his arm around my shoulders again and pulled me into him, and while the others were talking he said to me, “You coming out tonight?”

I’d been planning on lying about a media interview early in the morning and how I couldn’t stay up late. “For sure,” I said.

We hung out in the room awhile longer. I didn’t talk much, but I picked up that they had all met at college at Harvard and formed there under the name the Archdukes of Hazzard, which Zack said was the most preposterous band name of all time, and graduated a few years ago, and they released The Latchkeys Open Up last year. It sounded like college was a lot of fun for them there, that they were celebrities at school but not real celebrities. Maybe that’s why they didn’t seem to let it get to their heads now, since they’d had it build up slowly, from nobodies in high school to sort of famous in college to not famous again after college to pretty famous now, not like some musicians I’ve met who go straight from nobodies to super-famous and act like they were never nobodies. Last year I asked Jane if she thought I should go to college. She’d said, “I didn’t go, and I was as smart as anyone at that marketing firm and would’ve been promoted soon if I hadn’t had you and lost my job.” That was all she said. I wouldn’t want to study for an extra four years anyway, or five, when you count the year I don’t have to get tutored for if I get my California GED when I’m seventeen. But Jane was smart in a different way from the Latchkeys.

The other Latchkeys, even Steve, were nicer to me than before. They almost seemed like they were relatives more than friends, the way they teased each other. All my dancers and vocalists and musicians are at least seven or eight years older than me, and Jane makes sure I don’t hang out with them too much because they might be bad influences or cannibalize my focus. Watching the Latchkeys mess around with each other was like when the Cardinals win a big game and they have a pile-on at home plate. It made you happy to see them do it, but part of you was jealous since you wanted to be in the pile-on, too. The only time I get close to that is when all my backup singers and the band sing a line with me, like in “Love Is Evol,” where they yell the last line of the chorus, “Love bleeds you dry, never leaves you full, love eats you up, love is evol !”

I went to the bathroom. Someone’s iPhone was charging on the sink. This was really dumb to do, but I went into the Web browser the way Jane does and checked my email. Still nothing from Albert, and it’d been over half a week. I Googled “Jonny Valentine St. Louis concert.” A million articles came up about the concert with headlines saying things like “Stalker Threatens Jonny Valentine at Concert.” I clicked on the first one, from a media blog:

Jonny Valentine Receives Violently Sexual Threats During Televised Performance from Old Man; NAMBLA to Produce Next Album?

So! As if we needed further confirmation that Jonny Valentine concerts are attended exclusively by lovelorn prepubescent girls and rapey old men, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch is reportingthat a 57-year-old St. Louis man was arrested after hurling a slew of violently sexual epithets at the Angel of Poop Pap SmearsPop during his live televised performance(many of which the mikes picked up; listen to some genius’s sound editin which only the slurs are audible and remixed over the insipid instrumentals of “Guys vs. Girls”). The would-be ass-ailant was found with both a knife and a journal on his person, which allegedly further detailed the actions he would perform upon Jonny’s nubile body (is it just us, or is he looking a little tubby in this clip?). As the sexual and musical deviant awaits legal judgment, let’s all listen to the Jonny Valentine sexual-epithet remixa few more times, shall we?

I didn’t feel like listening to the remix, plus they’d hear it out in the main room, but I did read the comments below:

Sick. And yet profoundly gratifying. I’m a horrible person.

Proposed title of remix: “(rapey old) Guys vs. (lovelorn prepubescent) Girls”?

Yes. Just… yes.

OK, don’t take this the wrong way, but give Jonny seven years and I’LL be writing the same things in my diary. Just sayin’.

Best. Heckler. Ever.

Once you start reading them it’s hard to stop when it’s about you, even though you know pretty much exactly what you’re going to find and they just get worse and worse the farther you go down. It’s like people are afraid to be the first one to be an asshole, but once some others clear the way, they get super-excited about it. Except with most blogs, the blogger himself is the biggest asshole, so all the commenters think it’s okay to write whatever they want from the start. They think they’re being clever, making fun of me, but it’s just a bunch of losers who’re angry they’re stuck in boring jobs at offices all day and this is their only way to be creative. If they were actually creative, they wouldn’t be reading the media blogs, they’d be the ones the media blogs are covering . Which is what they wish happened, and that’s why they were reading a media blog in the first place, just like how Jane used to read all the glossies when she worked at Schnucks. But even the guy who wrote the post wasn’t creating anything. He was only linking to other publications and writing a little filler, like a crap DJ who remixes other people’s songs so it seems like he’s done something new, but he’s really just spliced them together like anyone with half a brain could do.