Teddy Wayne - The Love Song of Jonny Valentine

Zack’s toiletry kit was on the counter. For a second I thought about opening it but I didn’t. Next to it was a bottle of cologne, except it wasn’t like a regular cologne you buy in a store or see an ad for, it was a specialty cologne with no name, just a handwritten label listing ingredients. I unscrewed the top and sniffed it. It was definitely his woods smell.

It was probably worse to do this than to peek inside his toiletry kit, but I dabbed a little on my finger and smeared it on my neck. Now I smelled like Zack. I sucked my gut in and joined the others.

After an hour or so the drummer called a cab company and requested three cars for nine people. Zack said, “Jonny, Vanessa, and I will take one, you all split the other two.”

One of the girls said, “How should we divide it up? Guys versus girls, Jonny?”

She said it sweetly, you could tell, so I quickly half sang, “Why’s it gotta be that way?” and this time everyone laughed and didn’t need Zack to make a follow-up joke. I was going to hang out with the Latchkeys every night on this tour, and I didn’t care if I was tired all day.

We took two elevators down to the lobby, and I went in Zack’s. It wasn’t that cold out, but Zack gave me his leather jacket so I didn’t have to go back to my room. It was big on me, like an overcoat, and it smelled like him mixed with cigarettes. He took a red wool hat out from the pocket. “Wear this,” he said, and he pulled it over my head and ears. “For warmth and cunning disguise.”

Two cars came first, and Zack told the others to take them, and him and Vanessa smoked cigarettes while we waited. “Don’t ever quit smoking these,” he said to me.

Vanessa hit his shoulder and said, “Don’t listen to him, Jonny. Don’t start smoking them. Seriously.”

“I won’t,” I said. “I don’t want to fuck up my voice.”

“You do have a pretty goddamn golden voice,” Zack said. “Not like me. I’ve got the bronze. But I can write a verse-chorus-verse to opiate the masses. Other than that, I’m basically useless as a member of society.” I don’t think he really thought that way about himself, but if he did even a tiny bit, he was wrong. His friends loved him and people wanted to be around him and he made people feel smarter and funnier. If I told him, though, it would sound gay.

Zack told the cab driver the Velvet Lounge and gave him the address. The guy looked in the rearview mirror once at me, but I didn’t know if it was because he recognized me or he was wondering why a kid was with two adults.

Would the nightclub let me in? Or did it not matter if you were with adults? But maybe they had to be your parent? Zack looked too young to pretend to be my father. Except he could’ve had me when he was very young, and we were more like friends who partied than a father and son. You see some father-son actors like that in L.A.

Vanessa sat in the middle, and Zack made out with her. She allowed it for a minute but kept whispering, “Not now,” and finally she said, “Heel, boy,” and straightened out her skirt and turned to me and asked, in a teacher-type voice, what I usually did at night on tour.

“I usually have dinner with my mother and do homework and play video games and watch TV,” I said.

That definitely sounded like I was a little kid, but Vanessa wouldn’t make fun of me. She said, “You must miss your friends at home.”

“I don’t really ha — I don’t really miss them. I only tour a few times a year, and I have a lot of fun.”

“Jonny falls into the proud tradition of the rogue wandering troubadour,” Zack said. “All’s he needs is his harmonica and guitar”—Zack pronounced it gee -tar—“and a warm place to rest his head and nothing else, no, sir.”

I knew he was joking around, but I kind of liked that idea, me as the traveler who only needed his instruments. Except I wasn’t that type of musician. I needed instrumentalists and vocalists and dancers and buses and eighteen-wheelers and a bodyguard and a manager and a PR liaison. Sometimes I look around at the people and equipment and promo materials put together and am like, No one would notice if I disappeared, even though it’s all there because of me. If I was never famous, the people whose lives would be attached to mine would be Jane plus Michael Carns.

Also Zack said sir in a much less annoying way than Lisa Pinto did.

Zack paid with a twenty-dollar bill when the cab stopped. There were lots of adults in their twenties in a red-velvet-rope line before a black bouncer who made Walter’s body look like mine. The other Latchkeys came over while Vanessa found her friends near the door. “We tried to skip the line,” Steve told Zack, “but no dice.”

“Sounds like we’re huge in Memphis,” Zack said. “Jonny, come with us?”

He put his hand on my back and walked us up to the bouncer with the other guys behind us. Halfway there, Zack took his hat off my head. “Hello,” he said all polite to the bouncer, who was letting in a couple women in short skirts and wasn’t looking at him. He stood between me and the other people in line so they couldn’t see, which made me less nervous, since I didn’t want people taking photos. This was getting more and more dangerous, but if I had to be doing this with anyone, I was glad it was Zack. “My name is Zack Ford, and I’m the lead singer of the rock group the Latchkeys. We’re opening for Jonny Valentine here tomorrow night, and we were hoping to enter your establishment.”

“Got to get to the end of the line, sir,” the bouncer said.

“Jonny has a curfew, unfortunately, so waiting in line isn’t a great option.”

The bouncer turned to us, and the way he sized me up, I could tell he’d heard of my name but didn’t know what I looked like, and for all he knew I could’ve just been some kid pretending to be Jonny Valentine, the way the guy emailing me could be some perverted pedophile pretending to be my father. I don’t have much penetration into the urban-male demo.

Zack pulled out his iPod and shuffled through some albums before holding it up. “Look,” he said. “Jonny’s debut album. Triple-platinum smash. You still want to send us to the back of the line?”

The bouncer compared the iconic close-up of my face with The Jonny just brushing my eyebrows on the album cover and me in real life. I didn’t want to smile, or it might look like we were fooling him, but it was hard not to when I’d seen that Zack owned my album and he knew it’d gone triple platinum. “Hold on,” the bouncer said.

He went inside, and came out soon with a redheaded woman in her twenties, who looked at us and asked, “How many in your party, Mr. Valentine?”

I pointed to the other Latchkeys and the girls and told her nine. The bouncer unhooked the rope and let us in, and Zack let me go first but I could tell he was right behind me. The woman said her name was Irena and if we had any problems or wanted anything to ask her. She led us inside and through a door on the right, not the main entrance to the nightclub, and down two long hallways that must have been a special access for celebrities, and I could hear the girls behind me getting excited since they never did anything like this. I tried to pretend I’d done this before, but really I’d only been to industry events that were like nightclubs with Jane, not a real nightclub, and definitely not without Jane.

Finally we came out into the main room. It wasn’t decorated like a regular nightclub, it was more like a huge living room with wooden furniture and old couches and chairs like the kind Jane said she wants to decorate our living room with after she saw a spread of an Oscar-winning actress’s house in a glossy, and part of me thought about asking Zack to invite her over, but it would be super-lame to call my mother and also I’d be in serious trouble.