Teddy Wayne - The Love Song of Jonny Valentine

I picked up the gem, and a few seconds later the Emperor’s minion jumped out from behind a tree. He was a regular-looking soldier in chain-mail armor, with a curved sword and shield. We battled, and he reduced my damage to seven percent and I thought I was going to depart the realm, but I came back and knocked his shield away and hacked him down to zero percent, and the narrator’s voice and screen said, “You have defeated the minion of Level Sixty-three and advanced to the next level of The Secret Land of Zenon. You must pass through thirty-seven additional levels until you encounter the Emperor.”

That’s the other cool thing, how you don’t have a name in it. Other games, they’d give you a stupid name, like Kurgan or Dragonslayer or even just the Warrior. In Zenon you’re only you.

Finishing a level always helped me feel less wound up. I turned off the game and popped the zolpidem. I’d be able to conquer sleep now, and sleep was the Emperor’s minion. We had an early start and a big day tomorrow.

Walter waited for the room service guy who’d delivered my breakfast to leave before tasting it first for me. He always makes some joke about how it’s not poisoned but it might as well be, because it’s a three-egg-white omelet with spinach, no hash browns or toast, which are straight carbs, and coffee, no dairy. Walter eats meat and fried food and ordered a salad like once in his life, since he’s from Nashville, where he has three daughters he’s on the child-support hook to his old lady for and where we’ll play later in the tour and which still has a strong country base that’s difficult for pure pop acts to penetrate. He’s about 250 pounds, which is half muscle from lifting four days a week, but half fat because he says walking from a hotel or venue to the car service counts as cardio. He says chasing around his daughters used to keep his weight down. Now he just has to walk briskly by my side, but I’m not supposed to run indoors because of injury risk and I definitely shouldn’t in public or it might spark crowd interest and trigger a stampede. I bet he was fun with his daughters, though.

I thought of asking him about the legal letter and telling him about the Internet fan-forum messages, but first of all, Walter never went on the Internet, and second, even though he wouldn’t tell Jane, I didn’t want to make it so he had to lie to her.

He left to eat in one of the hotel restaurants with the rest of the crew, and I sipped my drink and imagined the coffee beans were fighting the early onset dementia that Grandma Pat had maybe passed down to me and Jane, and they were using the paralyze spell from Zenon, which freezes your enemies for a few seconds. There should be an early onset dementia spell, too, which places your enemy in an old-age home.

After breakfast Walter came back to escort me down to the basement service exit, and I put on my sunglasses and a Detroit Tigers hat because I’d been wearing the Dodgers hat three days in a row. You never want to alienate fans in different markets, even though my following is all girls who think you score a touchdown in baseball. Jane is like, Let the paparazzi take your photo but make it look like you’re not letting them take it, so the baseball hat and sunglasses are perfect for that. And plus the baseball hat is my trademark now. Jane once showed me a big website that’s only candids of me in different hats.

In the bus parking lot, the star/talent bus was parked all the way past our five other buses and four eighteen-wheelers. Me and Walter boarded it and said hi to the driver, Kenny, and Jane weighed me on the scale near the front. Eighty-eight pounds. I’d started the tour eighteen days ago at eighty-six. You almost always drop weight when you’re performing, no matter how bad you’re eating, but I’d been raiding the minibars and gift-basket amenities more than normal, and now that I’d seen the number, I could tell I was getting beefier.

She didn’t say anything about it, but she didn’t have to. She just whipped out the hotel bill and said, “Three packages of candy. Thirty-two minutes on the bike, either now or later.”

“I sang and danced for two hours last night.”

“Are we going to argue about this every morning? That’s only six hundred calories, and it’s not sustained cardio that raises your metabolism,” she said. “You want your next publicity photos to show you with a gut, too?”

I chose the bike now, because it’s worse to have it waiting for you and I didn’t like seeing eighty-eight any more than she did. Before I left the driver’s section, Walter stepped on the scale. “I’ve gained six pounds,” he said, and patted his belly. I wanted to laugh, but Jane was already in a bad mood.

I walked into the living room, over the wooden floors and past the tan leather couches and TV and kitchen and bar and the three rows of bucket seats, up to the door leading to me and Jane’s bedrooms and the additional bunk beds. In front of the door was the mounted stationary bike. I strapped the seat-belt harness over me and programmed the bike on medium-intensity intervals. What would Jane say if I asked her about the letter in her room about my father? She’d probably pretend it was nothing, like about an impostor or something. She’d go even crazier if she found out I’d gone down to the lobby by myself to get the key-card for her room.

I biked and listened on my iPod to an album by a new British singer Jane downloaded for me, who’s got decent phrasings but a flat upper range. When this one track had about a minute of white noise, I overheard Jane and Rog talking quietly two rows up in the bucket seats. “I can’t believe I’ll be forty in three weeks,” she said. “The number sounds wrinkled.”

“Nonsense,” Rog said. “You look early thirties. If I were straight, I’d do you in a second.”

She looks early thirties from a distance because she’s short and how she dresses, and sometimes if she’s turned around and I don’t realize it’s her, I think she’s in her twenties. But when you have face time with her, if I had to play the age game, I’d guess forty-two or even — three.

“As if I’d let you, with your gray-haired balls,” Jane said, and they laughed. Jane’s going gray and is naturally mousy brown but dyes it blond, and Rog would be salt-and-pepper but he dyes it black. He says none of the queers in L.A. would even think about going for him if he didn’t, even though he’s a super-successful choreographer and voice coach who used to sing and dance on Broadway. He won’t say his age but I saw on our payroll that he’s fifty-three and makes $315,000 a year with bonuses for tours.

“Listen.” Jane twisted the thick silver ring she wears on her right hand’s middle finger. “When we go to Salt Lake City, the Mormons are gonna freak the fuck out if they see a gay working with Jonny.”

“I can’t wait,” Rog said.

“I know, but this time, it might be best if you lay low at the hotel and don’t come to the arena.”

The white-noise track on my iPod started up with music, but I pressed pause. Jane had never told Rog not to come to the arena before. If it was cover for a business decision, it didn’t make sense, because it was our album sales that were flat, not our ticket sales, which were still okay even if we weren’t selling out every single show within three minutes like last time.

Rog said, “Jane, we’re going to Salt Lake City next week, not in 1897.”

“Still, I don’t want to take the risk.”

“Who’s going to help him with his preshow tune-up?”

“I booked a woman for the night.” She twisted her ring some more.

I couldn’t see Rog’s face, but I knew he wasn’t happy. “I don’t like the idea of someone else messing with his routine.”