Teddy Wayne - The Love Song of Jonny Valentine

Except for one time where I came in late to the line “I picked you flowers, you picked apart my life” in “Roses for Rosie,” which no one noticed because I was in the heart-shaped swing, I pulled it off during the concert. It kind of made me think there wasn’t much point in actually singing. Rog said I gave a powerhouse performance, and he always tells the truth after shows. Jane walked me to the star/talent room and joked that we should do it for our next concert in Cincinnati, even though my voice would be better by then.

I’d forgotten Cincinnati was next. I wondered if he was coming to the show.

“Get your stuff ready quickly, baby, so we can get out of here,” Jane said outside my room.

“Okay,” I said as I opened the door. “Where’s Walter?”

She whipped out her phone and said, “Hmm?”

“Where’s Walter? He wasn’t here all night.”

She typed into her phone on my Twitter account, “Thanx 4 the love and support, Nashville! Next stop: Cincinnati! #ValentineDays,” and linked to a candid stage shot of me.

“I told you,” she said. “He had appointments.”

“What appointments?”

“I don’t know . He used to live here.”

“Call him.”

“I’m not going to call him now. The venue security can escort us to the car,” she said. “Come to my room when you’re ready.”

She walked away. “Did you fire him?” I asked.

She stopped and waited there. Then she came back and pushed me into my room and shut the door. “He was irresponsible in letting you do that impression of him, when he should have known it would hurt your voice, and it almost caused us to lose a lot of money.”

“You fired him?”

“He’ll be paid for the rest of the tour.”

My legs turned to noodles. “You did this with the Latchkeys. You can’t do this with Walter.”

“Walter understands he made a fireable mistake. He’ll find someone else to work for.”

That almost made me more upset than her firing him, the idea of Walter being the bodyguard for someone else like it was no big deal. “He’s my best friend.” Saying those words made me feel like I was about to cry.

“You can’t be best friends with a man thirty years older than you.”

“Yes, I can.” I could feel tears filling up in my eyes. I tried holding them back.

She took a step closer to me and said, “Stop crying.”

“Hire Walter back,” I said.

“I said stop it, Jonathan.” She tried to put her hands to my face, I guess to wipe my tears away, but I pushed her arms away and she accidentally sort of rapped her knuckles on top of my head, which wouldn’t have hurt if it was only the knuckles, but the huge silver ring on her right hand caught me hard and it stung. I pulled back from her quickly and touched my head. It pounded like an echo.

Jane’s mouth was in an O and her eyes were stuck in place. I could tell she was really upset now, so I just let myself bawl, more than I do for “Heart Torn Apart,” a bunch of ugly heaving sobs.

“I’m sorry,” she said, still stuck.

I shook my head no and forced the tears out faster.

“I’m sorry,” she said again, and she moved her arms out a little to see if it was okay to hug me, so I pretended to flinch, and then I waited until she saw that before I hurled myself into her arms and cried the hardest yet into her chest. I didn’t even hardly have to force it, smothering my tears and snot into her dress over her implants, and she was half crying, too, and said, “I’m so sorry, baby, I’m sorry, I’m a terrible mother.”

I waited a minute without letting up the tears. Then I squeaked out, “Bring him back,” and she said, “Okay, Jonathan, okay, I’ll get him back.”

I took a little while to calm down, since I really did get myself worked up even if part of it was acting at the end. Maybe Jane’s right. I should be in the movies.

Walter joined us on the bus in the morning. He was quiet around Jane and kept to himself near the front of the bus, but later, when she went to the bathroom for like the fourth time in two hours, he came up to my seat and said, “Thanks, brother,” and fist-bumped me.

Jane kept talking to Rog about her fortieth birthday in two days, and he was telling her age is mental more than physical and the more she thought about it, the bigger a deal she was making it. The vicious cycle of aging.

“Look at me,” he said. “I don’t think about it or talk about my age, so no one else does.”

Jane looked at him like, Um, other people do think you’re old. But she said, “It’s different for women.”

I looked back at Nadine reading in the bucket seats. Jane was only about thirteen or fourteen years older, but from their faces, she looked like she could’ve been her mother.

Rog gave her a back rub like he does a lot when she’s upset. It’s also usually a way get her to stop talking. She went on for another hour, though. He’s a pretty patient listener. Jane thanked him for being her human Xanax, and it reminded me of that detective-show actor’s song about Xanax. She said, “You’ll make a good manager someday, after you retire from dancing,” and Rog said, “Well, that’s a ways off, but I’ve had the best teacher.”

On our driver break at a rest stop, I went outside to get some air and Walter came with me. He said, “Mind if I smoke?”

This was the first time I’d seen him smoke on this tour. He’s always trying to quit but never lasts more than a few weeks. I said I didn’t mind. We didn’t talk, he just smoked facing away from me. Rog came walking back to the bus with a cardboard tray from Starbucks with two chais for him and Jane. He got her hooked last tour. “Walter, would you please smoke away from Jonny?” he asked.

“I am,” Walter said.

“The wind is carrying it back,” Rog said. “Do what you want to your own lungs, but let’s not ruin his, okay?”

Walter flicked away his cigarette. Those two didn’t talk too much.

We didn’t have anything scheduled for that night in Cincinnati, so me and Jane watched TV in her room and ordered in. When I asked for lasagna with sweet potato fries on the side, she didn’t say anything, even though it’s a double-carber. She was being super-nice to me because of Walter, but I didn’t push it with dessert. Besides, I’d eaten a ton of salads the last week. “Can we do this tomorrow night?” I asked when she walked me back to my room.

“You’ve got a show.”

“I mean after. Can we watch some TV together?”

“Sure,” she said.

The second we got into Cincinnati, I looked out the bus, in the hotel lobby, through the hotel window, everywhere I could, for my father. Maybe he was going to come to my hotel, since sometimes if a fan spots me they leak where I am on the Internet, or the media knows about it. If you really want to find out where I’m staying, it’s not so hard, which is why we have to take so many precautions and throw up so many buffers. Or he might be coming to my show, except I didn’t know how he’d meet me.

I didn’t see him. So I did my best to tune it out and got into the Jonny Zone way earlier than I normally do. I felt rested the next day, zero damage, my voice was back in condition, and I had an A-plus workout in the hotel gym in the morning with Jane, where we competed to see who could do more crunches and had less stomach chub. I won both, but it’s not fair because Jane’s a woman and she was turning middle-aged the next day.

I kept scanning the crowd for my father at U.S. Bank Arena, which is impossible because you can’t pick out one guy from thousands of people mostly in the dark, even if it’s the one grown man there by himself, except for a couple child predators.