Teddy Wayne - The Love Song of Jonny Valentine

“Hey, Callie,” he said.

He waited a second before leaning forward to hug her. I’d never seen him hug anyone before. Standing there for five seconds with them was so awkward, it felt as painful as sitting on the tour bus for eight hours. He returned to his spot, and like he’d just remembered I was there, too, he said, “This is Jonny.”

“I know,” she said. “It’s great to finally meet you, Jonny.”

I said hi and handed her the game system in a box and told her it was for her daughters. She thanked me and set it down inside and said she’d head out and would be back at eight. She called out, “Girls, your father’s here!” and walked out before they could get there.

They were six and seven and ten years old, and the youngest two, Danny and Pris, squealed a lot when they saw Walter and jumped on him and called him Daddy, which was weird for me to see. They didn’t know who I was. But the oldest, Sally, was quieter, and she only let Walter hug her the way Callie did, with her arms mostly by her sides. She knew who I was, so maybe that was part of why she was shy. It’s okay to be shy if you’re a girl, but it’s really bad if you’re a boy, like Michael is, except a lot of it was from being on camera. I’m less shy on camera than I am off it. Someone’s going to watch it later, so you have to step it up.

“What do you girls want to eat for dinner?” Walter asked.

“Pancakes,” Pris said.

“The pancake place,” Danny said.

“They’re into pancakes now,” Sally said.

“Okay,” Walter said. “How about we make them here?”

“The pancake place,” Danny said again.

“You sure?” Walter asked.

I could tell Walter didn’t want to go out to dinner. It wasn’t because he was cheap, though, since he was always sneaking me little presents in L.A. And I liked the idea of him making pancakes for dinner for his kids. Plus I didn’t want to deal with crowd interference, especially after Memphis. I pointed to the box and said, “I’ve got a video game system for you guys if we can eat here.”

Danny ran over and ripped open the box’s packaging and it was like she’d forgotten all about the pancake place. Little kids are easy to distract. That’s why it’s annoying to have girls younger than eight or so at concerts, because they lose interest in the whole concert if they don’t like one song. Older kids, it takes a few songs in a row they don’t like before they’re gone. That’s why you have to keep producing and pump out an album every eighteen months max, or your fan base will forget about you and move on to the next artist.

I helped them set up the system in the living room and explained how to play Zenon as Walter poked around the kitchen right next to us. I’d never seen Walter cook before, since Peter always made him food at home or he ordered in, and here he was getting out pancake batter and butter and pans and everything. But he actually knew what he was doing, and once I got the girls set up with Zenon, I watched him cook. His face was super-serious, like making these pancakes was the most important job in the world not to fuck up.

Me and the girls played Zenon and ate the pancakes Walter made fresh batches of every few minutes. One time, when he thought no one was looking, he stuck a couple twenty-dollar bills in one of the girls’ pink backpacks on the floor. I ate and tried not to think about how much cardio I’d owe and let the girls switch off playing and stepped in to show them how to do certain actions, though later I stopped touching the controller, because sometimes with games it’s best just to let kids figure out for themselves what to do and what not to do, even if their characters keep getting damaged. Also they didn’t get the idea of experience points, even Sally, who asked, “How do you know what to do if you don’t know how many points it gets you?” and I was like, “That’s why it’s different from other games, you have to play it a long time to get a sense of what helps you, but sometimes it still surprises you.”

Pris laughed at the voice of this archer Shamino who sounded like a baritone demon, so I turned off the character sounds and did the voices for all the characters in his voice. She laughed every time I did it, and Danny did, too, even though it wasn’t really funny. Then I whipped out my impression of Walter, whose voice wasn’t far from Shamino’s, and made up dialogue in his voice, like, “Pris, you must bestow upon me the last pancake in your inventory or I will eat you, brother.”

Walter never laughs, but he smiled and said, “You got me, brother.” It hurt a little to do the impression, since I had to make my voice all gravelly and scratchy like Lennon on “Twist and Shout,” but it was worth it, and after a few minutes even Sally started laughing, so I said everything in his voice the rest of the night, like, “Where’s the bathroom, brother?” It was a fun night, like hanging out with the Latchkeys, even if it was cooler to say you were with a rock group at a club instead of eating pancakes with three little girls and your bodyguard at their mother’s house.

When I went to the bathroom, I saw an old desktop computer in a small room next to it. I thought they might not have the Internet, because they were so poor, but they did. Everyone has the Internet except me. So I closed the door behind me, even though Walter wouldn’t actually care and I could just tell him I was doing an assignment for Nadine. A spreadsheet was open called “budget.xls.” Callie only budgeted $150 a week for groceries for her and her daughters, and I could tell from the ingredients Walter used that she shopped at supermarkets way below Schnucks. I sometimes saw Peter’s receipts for food at the organic stores, which was for me, Jane, Walter, Sharon, and him, and they were over a thousand dollars each time, but some of that was wine and liquor.

I went into my email. I wondered if my father had heard about Memphis and everything or if he was the kind of person who didn’t hear about things like that. There was one more email from him, written a few hours ago. It was strange to picture him going on a computer somewhere in New York today and writing to me. It was strange to think of him at all in a way that wasn’t just like, I wonder who the hell my father is.

I thought I would have heard back from you if you really were Jonathan or knew him. Now I guess it was a joke. Please don’t screw around with people like that in the future. It’s not nice. I just wanted to connect with my son and tell him a little about my life.

I wanted to write that it was me, I wasn’t making it up, I wanted to hear more about his life, but I didn’t have a chance to do it because I could never get on the Internet, and he was the one who didn’t make it clear if he was coming to my concert in Cincinnati or not. I almost even said to the computer, Fuck you. But I wrote

I don’t get to go on email alot but it is really me. Did you see my TV morning show appearance where I mentioned Pittsburgh and Australia and peanut butter? Where did you live in Australia? Why did you move there? Do you have any pictures you can send? Or from when you were in the Wrecking Balls? And are you coming to my concert in Cincinnati?

I didn’t have anything else to say, so after I sent the email I looked up a bunch of Australia facts that I could ask him about until they called me to come back in and help them fight one of the Emperor’s minions. We played another hour before Callie came home and the car service picked us up. Callie and Walter were weird again when they spoke, since he had to tell her he’d cooked pancakes for them and she was maybe pissed that he’d made them breakfast for dinner, and she looked doubly pissed in a more serious way when Walter said good-bye to his daughters, and Pris and Danny grabbed his legs and said they didn’t want him to go. He put both their heads in his palms and pretended to pick them up by their heads. Sally stayed on the couch and kept playing Zenon.