Teddy Wayne - The Love Song of Jonny Valentine

“Everyone knows that’s a nicer way of saying rebranding,” she said. “And you don’t rebrand something unless it’s not selling.”

Sales for Valentine Days weren’t great compared to Guys vs. Girls, but I wouldn’t have thought they were so low that they’d drop me after just two albums. A lower-tier label would pick me up in a second, but Jane was right, it wouldn’t be the same. I’d be one of those artists who was lucky to crack the charts for a week or two. Everything I’d killed myself for the last two years would be erased. I’d never get fans like the kind the Latchkeys had, and definitely not like what MJ had. We wouldn’t be able to afford Walter, either. We might not even need Walter. And it wouldn’t be worth Jane’s time to personally manage me, so she’d get some cut-rate hack to do the job instead. My career would be in the toilet. No one would care about me anymore or remember me. I’d be diarrhea.

“No, I don’t want that to happen,” I said.

“Then don’t argue anymore. You screwed up, and this is what happens when you screw up. Internet presales are flat as it is, we don’t need some uptight parents’ group banning us.” She let out a long breath. “At least this is partly on Stacy, for picking them as your opener.”

I didn’t know presales were flat, too, which meant less money for promoting the MSG concert, which meant even flatter Internet sales. The vicious cycle of marketing budgets. There was nothing I could say. It was my fault.

I listened to the rough cut of the Latchkeys’ new album on my iPod in bed. One of the tracks began with a few seconds of Zack talking in the studio. They would cut it out of the real version, but you can hear him say, “For real this time, no more fucking around, especially you, Timothy, ” and everyone laughs when he says Timothy before the drummer counts it off. The song itself was B-side material for sure, but I put it on repeat, and every time it looped back, it was like Zack was in my room, coming back to the same moment in a time machine, saying, Good night, little man.

Jane woke me up early in my room with my iPod repeating the Latchkeys song. “We’ve got an hour booked at the children’s hospital,” she said. “There’ll be photographers from a few glossies on hand.”

“Where will you be?” I asked.

She looked at her phone. “I’m coming along.”

It made me want to ask why we couldn’t have brought along the Latchkeys to help with their PR problem, too. But they probably wanted that image. You can get away with a lot more as a rock band.

The car took me and Jane because it wouldn’t look good if we brought Walter, though I was surprised she wasn’t taking Rog along for support. The glossies with photographers there had to embargo the information, so there wasn’t any other media. It was easy to get in, and the PR rep for the hospital met us and brought us to a waiting room that had been cleared out.

Jane was silent the whole ride in, I guess since she was still pissed and thinking about how to fix the problem, and when the PR woman was telling us about the different wings we could visit, Jane nodded along but it looked like she wasn’t even listening.

I stayed in a waiting room they’d cleared out for me while Jane and the PR woman filled out some forms with the three photographers in another room. There were only travel and fashion and home-decoration and golf glossies on the table, but then I saw the front page of the New York Times, and at the bottom it said “Jonny Got His… Gin? Op-Ed, Page A30.”

The article had a drawing of a mother in a hooded robe holding her baby, with this light glowing around both their heads, except the mother’s face was a drawing of my face, and the baby’s face was Jane’s face.

The latest granular amateur video to swallow up Internet bandwidth and tabloid headlines depicts 11-year-old Jonny Valentine, the tweeny-bopper known for such saccharine pop confections as “Guys vs. Girls” and “RSVP (To My Heart),” dizzily imbibing drinks that may or may not have contained alcohol in a Memphis nightclub. That such an exposé registers as merely mild surprise to the jaded public makes it all the more dismaying.

Still, that jaded public gulped down the gossip like it was one of Jonny’s possibly non-virgin drinks and pointed fingers everywhere. While any number of parties should bear at least some responsibility — the venue, for starters — there is one person justly deserving the criticism heaped upon her the last 24 hours of the voracious news cycle: Jonny’s 39-year-old mother-manager, Jane Valentine, renowned for her own hard-partying lifestyle, who was spotted at another exclusive Memphis club the night her son was reveling with 20-something rock stars whose most-quoted lyric is the deathless couplet “I drink and I drug / No, I don’t wanna hug.”

Paraphrasing the old public service announcement: It’s 10 p.m.: do you know where your parents are?

To be sure, we live in an age of over-parenting, where babies are trained from the womb for the Ivy League and every precious exhalation from junior is deemed worthy of a picture and status update. Ms. Valentine, who has a reputation in the music industry for meddling too heavily in her son’s affairs, might be accused of a Hollywood strain of this practice. Yet a far more egregious fault is the blithe under-parenting she practiced the other night when indulging in behavior befitting someone half her age, desperately seeking attention and stimuli while neglecting the stewardship of her child.

Although we may have not yet fully regressed into an infantile nation of Jane Valentines, disseminating photos of our vacations so that we can feel famous and glamorous for 15 seconds to 15 online acquaintances — but not paying any real attention with our own eyes to our surroundings — we are not far from the tipping point. As a mother of three toddlers juggling a career in law, I feel traitorous in passing judgment on the hardworking and single Ms. Valentine, although I—

I heard the door opening and Jane’s voice with the PR rep, so I turned the paper over. The rest of it, I could tell, was slamming Jane for not paying enough attention to me. I wished I could tell them how she stayed in bed with me two nights ago when I was sick. Newspapers always get only half the story. They’re even sloppier than glossies, because their deadlines are tighter. Internet media doesn’t even try to fact-check.

And this writer made it sound like she was above it all, better than Jane and better than celebrity news, but she was using us for content the same as a gossip blogger to advance her career, and gulping it down just like the public. The people reading it weren’t above celebrity news, either.

But now I knew why Jane had to be in the photos and why she was acting so strange today.

The PR rep told me she’d lead me on a tour of a few wings with the photographers trailing behind. The first hallway was all slick and shiny and fluorescent, with nurses and doctors and regular-looking people who were probably parents of the sick kids. The rep opened a door and said this was a playroom for children with leukemia, and several of them were fans of mine, and would I mind singing a song to them?

Jane never likes for me to sing for free, but she jerked her head up and down a few inches, so I said sure. Some of the kids wore masks, and a bunch didn’t have hair. There was a TV and some toys and games, with a few parents and staff hanging out, but not much else. It was a pretty depressing place to have to play in.

They clapped a little when they saw me. The PR rep said, “This is Jonny Valentine, and he’s a very special guest. He’s going to say a few words and sing you a song.”