Teddy Wayne - The Love Song of Jonny Valentine

I didn’t know anything about saying a few words. Jane was staring at the kids, and one kid in particular. He had no hair, like all the others, and was even skinnier than the rest, almost a skeleton with skin pasted on top, and his cheeks were sunk into his mouth so deep it was like a skull.

“Hi,” I said. I was quiet for like five seconds. All I could think of saying was something like, “The one reason I’m here is because we’re doing a PR scramble to save my career and you guys have such crap lives it’ll make people forget I drank alcohol with the Latchkeys, even though if I saw a photo spread of a pop star doing this I’d see through it in a second, but people only remember the last thing about you.”

“It’s awesome to be here with you guys,” I said.

I sang “You Hurt Me,” which sounds good a cappella. It was going fine until I got to the chorus:

Oh, yeah, girl, you hurt me

You always make me cry

Oh, yeah, girl, you hurt me

You make me wanna die

As I was singing the last line I was like, This is a bad choice for kids who might actually die. The PR rep stiffened, and I wondered if she knew I was supposed to sing the chorus like six times in a row at the end. And this fucked-up part of me wanted to sing it, and get super-falsetto on the word die, and sing it in the PR rep’s face.

Jane was still staring at the kid with the skull. Every other part of him was all shriveled up but his eyes seemed huge. When I got to the chorus again I replaced die with cry, even if rhyming with the same word is a hack move. I bet the kids didn’t notice, though.

I signed some autographs and posed for photos with them and Jane, and we moved to another wing. This time, I thought I heard the PR rep say, “Now, Jonny, this is the playroom for the bird unit. Do you feel comfortable going in?”

I didn’t see why she’d think I’d be uncomfortable around birds, as long as they were in cages, or why there’d even be birds at a children’s hospital, so I said, “Totally.”

I realized my mistake the second we walked in and saw a few kids who had parts of skin like the leftover cheese mixed with tomato sauce that gets stuck to the top of a pizza box. The PR rep explained that they were kids who had recovered enough from their burns to play, but a bunch of them still had to wear gloves and masks. I stared at my red Nikes, but I couldn’t help turning my head to look, like I was checking where Tyler Beats was on the charts. She whispered, “Sure you’re okay?” and I knew I couldn’t back out of it, so I mumbled yes and went on with her.

A nurse brought us over to one blond girl around my age who wasn’t burned that much, at least her face wasn’t at all, but you could see a big bandage like a tank top on her chest before it got covered by her blue hospital shirt.

She got excited and said she owned everything of mine and listened to it all the time. I thanked her and told her I needed the love of my true fans like her and sang “U R Kewt,” but as I was singing I had another fucked-up thought, which was that when she grew up she might have a beautiful face but if a guy ever got her shirt off he’d lose his boner, so she’d dream of meeting a guy who loved her even though her breasts were all burned, but she’d always try to hide it until she found that person, and the more she hid it the more she’d be embarrassed by it, until her being embarrassed by it would be worse than the actual burns, so after a while if she finally found someone who did love her still, she’d think something was wrong with them for loving her and wouldn’t want them anymore, and everyone in this unit and in the whole hospital was like a character whose body was damaged bad in Zenon and couldn’t hardly walk anymore and what didn’t kill them did not make them stronger.

When I finished the song I told her to always follow her dreams, and that if you’re following your dreams no one can ever take anything away from you, which is even more of a crap idea for someone like her. I whispered to the PR rep that I had to use the bathroom, and she got the hint because she said we could move on somewhere else. Before I could go, though, the girl said, “You know why I love your songs?”

I said no. She said, “Your songs are always nice to listen to.” That was the most broad-spectrum compliment I ever heard, but I said thanks and walked away. “Most of the time they’re pretty,” the girl added, and I stopped. “But once in a while they’re not. That’s my favorite thing.”

“You mean the lyrics?” I asked.

“No, the words are,” she said. “But the way you sing them isn’t always. Even when the song is about having fun, sometimes it sounds like you aren’t having any at all. It’s like the song is happy, but you’re not. Like when someone’s smiling in a picture, but their eyes are sad. It’s really beautiful.”

I couldn’t believe a tween girl had this response to my song. This was the sort of thing a critic would write about a Latchkeys song, or even Vanessa would say to Zack about one of their songs. Or how someone might feel about an MJ song. It was way better than the usual stuff I heard from fans, about how they listened to me nonstop and followed all the news about me and I was their favorite singer. They only listened to me nonstop because we courted the radio stations, and they followed the news about me because our publicists fed material to the media each week, and I was their favorite because the label had marketed me to them. If none of that happened, they wouldn’t actually care about the music. This girl did. I wanted to ask her if she meant I sounded punk, but she wouldn’t know what punk was and Jane would wonder why I was asking that and she was signaling with her eyebrows for me to hurry up, so I said, “Thank you.”

I found the bathroom down the hall and locked myself in a stall and tried to pee, but nothing came out. While I was pushing like crazy but nothing was happening, I wondered if I could get hard now if I tried, after everything I’d seen, like if it would still work properly. At first I couldn’t, even when I pictured Lisa Pinto and Vanessa’s legs and the time I walked in on one of my dancers changing in Houston.

I opened my eyes and looked down. A tiny black hair poked out of the skin around all the peach fuzz. I pulled on it and it didn’t come out. Then I got hard, and I even had to wait a little for it to go down before I left, since I didn’t want to be walking around dying kids with a super-hard boner and a grin on my face after finding my first pube.

I was going to turn left to join up with everyone outside the burn unit, but to my right there was a glass window with golden light coming from inside. All these rows of babies were inside, hooked up with wires inside clear rectangles. “What’s here?” I called to the PR rep, who was talking with the photographers and Jane.

“I see you’ve found our premature infants,” she said.

“Jonny, don’t wander off,” Jane called.

“What are they inside?” I asked the PR rep.

“Those are called incubators. They simulate the mother’s tummy for babies that are born too early, to help protect them.”

“Cool,” I said, which was stupid, but I was really thinking about how they were like the force-field spell in Zenon. “Can I see them?”

“Yes, but we have to be very quiet, and it’s best not to touch them,” she said. “They need some attention, but too much isn’t good for them.”

Jane was like, “You know, I think we’re running behind schedule.”

“I want to go in,” I said.

“We’re very late,” she said.

The PR rep said, “It’ll only take a minute.”