Teddy Wayne - The Love Song of Jonny Valentine

He took me to my room and made sure everything was secure before going to his room. I waited until I heard his door click shut to make sure he hadn’t gone down to the hotel bar, and waited another twenty minutes to be safe. Then I pulled my Florida Marlins cap down and wore sunglasses and went down to the lobby. If I got busted by Jane, I’d say it was her job to be watching me, not going out at night. Anyway, I wasn’t nearly as scared this time, now that I’d done it by myself in Vegas and with Zack in Memphis. Jonny Tubman.

I found a woman with a helmet of dyed blond hair at a desk who looked young enough to recognize me, and went up when no one else was around and took my hat and sunglasses off and said, “Hi, I’m Jonny Valentine, and I’m a guest in your hotel.”

“Oh, hi!” she said in this super-friendly Southern accent. “I heard you were — how may I help you, Mr. Valentine?”

“I need to get into my mother’s room, but she’s out. It’s under Jane Valentino, room 1722. I’m 1723.”

She typed on her computer. It always sounds the same when workers like her type on a computer, like a million little clicks in a row. It’s got to be depressing spending ten thousand hours to be that good at a job like that.

“I see something was messengered here for you today,” she said.

I wasn’t expecting anything, and when we got sent print clips, they usually went to Jane. I gave her my label’s name and asked if it was from them.

“Bergman Ellis Jacobson and Walsh,” she read off the screen. “It sounds like a law firm.”

“And it’s for me?” I asked, which was stupid, because then she read more closely and said, “Oh, my mistake. It’s for Jane Valentino. They mixed up the room numbers.”

That was really dumb of me. I could’ve read it without Jane knowing, then returned it. It wasn’t worth trying to get it from the woman now, when I was already hoping to get access to Jane’s room. She typed some more.

“I’m terribly sorry, Mr. Valentine, but I’m not authorized to let anyone but Ms. Valentino into the room,” she said.

“But I’m her son. That’s the name she uses for hotels. We’ve both been all over the news.”

“I know, but we’d need her to list you, and she hasn’t done that. I could call her on the number listed here, if you want?”

“No,” I said, probably too quickly. I slowed down. “She’s at a big business meeting with a promoter and she told me not to interrupt her. This is important. My leukemia medication is in her room and I need to take it.”

“You take medication for leukemia?” the woman asked.

“To prevent it,” I said. “It’s to prevent me from getting leukemia, and it’s really dangerous if I miss a day. It runs in my family. My father had it.”

I couldn’t tell if she believed it or not. People get freaked out by anything to do with health. “I can’t call her?” she asked again.

“No, she’ll get worried and it’ll ruin her meeting. Please, miss, I have to get in there.”

She peered around like Angela did in Vegas, but she was slicker and did it just with her eyes. She made a key-card and said she was only doing this because it was an emergency. I asked if she wanted an autograph, but she said, “Um, thanks, that’s all right.”

I sped back to Jane’s room and listened outside the door and went in. Her computer was in the bedroom, which was lucky, since sometimes she brought it to concerts. If she caught me using it, I’d say I was reading about the nightclub incident and my own key-card worked on her door.

While it booted up I looked around, but I didn’t see any more legal letters, only her usual junk and clothes on the floor and even more dumped on the bed, though I kept the light off so I didn’t get a great look. Except she had a copy of The New Yorker magazine open and facedown on the desk, which didn’t make sense because she never reads it except once when they ran a profile of Ronald and it mentioned me a few times. When I turned it over, though, I saw why:

Jonny Valentine’s concert last night was anemic even by today’s nadir of pop-music standards. One would be hard-pressed to imagine a hypothetical performance an audience might find more alienating.

— The Kansas City Star .

When my manager’s manager told me I’d been invited to perform at the historic Apollo Theater in Harlem, I was so excited that one of my handlers screamed for me with excitement.

The day before my performance, an old movie called “The Jazz Singer” was on TV. The star, Al Jolson, had really great makeup, with black paint all over his face. Not only did he look badass, but it seemed like the perfect way to cover a pimple — and, boy, I had a honker right on my button nose! It also made his lips look a lot fuller, and I’ve always been insecure about my thin lips. So I sent my handler’s manager’s handler to buy me some industrial-strength Midnight Black Hole paint and bright red gloss to make my lips really pop.

I wanted to surprise everyone, so I didn’t put on the paint until just before I went onstage. There was another movie I’d seen a couple weeks before that I also thought was cool, because it starred a guy with a kick-ass mustache. I don’t have much facial hair, but I let it grow in the week leading up to the awards, then just before I put on the black paint I shaved everything but the mustache so I could look like him. I also had the movie playing behind me on a big screen with a close-up of the guy I was trying to look like, so everyone would know the mustache was on purpose. Check it out sometime, even if foreign movies normally suck—“Triumph of the Will.”

It was time to sing my song called “I Like Girls with Curves.” But I wanted to do something special for this performance and tweak my lyrics a little. Fortunately, there was a book lying around backstage that had a similar title. I just plucked out a few lines and mixed them into the verses, and changed the chorus to “I Like, and Wholeheartedly Endorse, the Bell Curve.”

Yet the star is only as good as his backup dancers. It was almost Halloween, so I thought my dancers should dress up — and my all-time favorite costume is ghosts. My second favorite? You guessed it: dunces. I got all my dancers ghost outfits with dunce caps, and told them to cover their faces, too. Hey, I’m the star, you know? But I felt bad that they weren’t getting as much attention, so I researched which shape is most visible from a distance, got them some wood in that shape, and had them light the wood on fire for better visibility. I also wanted to single out the three dancers who’d been with me longest — Krista, Carl, and Kiersten — by putting up a banner with the first letters of their three names. Except the guy who made the banner thought Carl was spelled with a “K”! Maybe we’ll get a discount next time. They were doing this new dance I’d choreographed in which they go around in a circle totally in sync on horses. Aww, yeah: Ghosts in dunce caps on horseback with flaming crosses!

In the middle of all this perfection, something went wrong — suddenly the big-screen video stopped, the background music cut, and the house lights went down. What a low-budget production! The TV crew was still filming, though, so to show everyone I was against “The Man” and wasn’t afraid to stand up to corporate America, I started yelling about how cheap they were. I’ve been studying vocabulary lists — stay in school, kids! — so instead of saying “cheap,” I decided to whip out one of my bigger words.

“Y’all are niggardly!” I shouted. “Goddamn niggardly! Get ’em for being niggardly!”