Teddy Wayne - The Love Song of Jonny Valentine

Jane finally cracked, getting up in my father’s face and calling him an asshole and a bunch of other curses, much angrier than when she’d yelled at Kevin the TV producer after the morning-show concert, and he took it without saying anything.

They were about a foot away from each other, near the door, and I was still on the beanbag chair in front of the TV. I could slip out the back door and they wouldn’t even notice. They were arguing over me and they’d totally forgotten about me at the same time.

After half a minute the front door opened again. Walter.

“Calm down, calm down,” he said as he wedged himself between them with his hands out, like they were paparazzi hounding me postshow, but they wouldn’t, or at least Jane wouldn’t.

Walter looked over at me while he was in the middle of them like, Should I kick him out? and I shook my head no real quick. But another part of him was looking at me more like, Sorry about this, brother. It could be all right to live with Walter. He didn’t know how to take care of me or understand anything about the industry, but at least he was savvy about protection. It was a stupid idea, though, because if he was going to take care of anyone, it would be his own daughters, just like Nadine had her own boyfriend and she’d marry him and have her own kids soon.

Jane was all I really had. And I was the only thing she had. Just the two of us.

“Stop it,” I said, and no one heard me, so I used my diaphragm more but without shouting and said, “Please stop it.” This time they all shut up like they’d finally remembered I was there.

My father’s eyebrows were pinched together, waiting for me to say something. “Show me the paper,” I said.

“You don’t need to see this, Jonathan,” he said.

“Show it to me.”

He unfolded the paper and held it out like it was a bad report card. I didn’t understand any of it. Except for a dollar amount at the end. It was a lot of money, more than my father could make in a hundred lifetimes doing construction. But I’d seen the figures from my record deals, gate receipts, and merchandising. We could afford it.

And in a funny way, maybe I wouldn’t have had a career at all if things had been okay with Michael and if my father hadn’t left. Jane wouldn’t have needed to make me busk for extra money, wouldn’t have put my videos up on YouTube, wouldn’t have pulled me out of school and moved us to L.A. I would’ve just been some kid in school who lived in Dogtown and was a super-talented singer who joined a rock band in high school like his father did. And I would’ve had a younger brother around I could play Zenon with and teach how the double switch works in baseball.

“I’ll make sure her lawyers talk to yours,” I said. “We’ll work out a deal. You’ll get enough money to last you a long time.”

“You don’t know what you’re doing,” Jane said to me. She looked at Al. “He has no idea what he’s talking about. I’m in charge of all the finances.”

“You might be in charge of it,” I said. “But I can walk away from all this if I want. This can be my last show.”

That shut her up. I’d never said anything like that before. She looked afraid of me, even.

That time we watched the Cardinals game on TV, my father was all sweaty and talking fast. Now he was calm, and he didn’t look like he was a drug addict, at least not like the ones in movies. He looked like if you cleaned him up and had him lift for a few months, you could put him in a catalog for men’s clothes. Like a guy who got a lot of girls when he was young and women could sense that so he still got a bunch of them.

Jane was an addict, too. Not to drugs, because she couldn’t do as much as she did if she was. That was the difference between addicts like Jane and addicts like my father. Some addicts could still turn their son into a pop star in L.A. and be a successful music manager. Other ones got in fights outside bars in Pittsburgh and stayed in halfway houses and lied about living in Australia.

What my father said was true. People did change. But there was some part of them they could never get away from, no matter how hard they wanted to. He was a bare-minimum worker, then and now. He’d probably always say his friend was guilty and he was innocent, in a logic test and in real life. And he still looked like the type of guy who left his wife after her baby died to raise their other son on her own.

“And whatever’s in this thing sunsets.” I handed him back his legal letter. “Deal?”

He seemed scared, like this was the last thing he expected and he didn’t know what to do. It was the first time I’d ever proposed a business deal, so I should’ve been the one who was scared. Only I wasn’t. I felt like I knew exactly what I was doing. I guess I’d learned from Jane. I bet she was kind of proud, even.

“Yeah. If this doesn’t happen, my lawyer talks to the press about how you’re shutting me out.”

“It will happen.” I thought it would be a lot harder to say the next sentence out loud. It wasn’t, though. “But the deal is going to be that I don’t want to see you anymore.”

You could see him turning it over in his mind.

“No,” said my father. “I want to see you. That’s more important to me than the money. I didn’t come back to charm you so I could get the money, I came back because all I want is to have you in my life so we can do all the things we never did together. I want to take you to Cardinals games again and play video games and travel to Australia and drive you to diners and order French toast for dinner.”

Except that’s not what he really said. I could restart from a game saved right there a million times and he’d never say that. He nodded once. That was it.

“Please leave,” I said, without any diaphragm this time.

He put his lawyer’s letter back in his pocket and stared at the floor and shuffled out. His boots didn’t make a sound on the floor as he left, like he was a ghost in Zenon. I’d waited half my life to meet my father, and after I’d spent half an hour with him, I was never going to see him again. And I’m the one who’d made the deal.

Me and Jane and Walter stood there for a few seconds. Then Walter did something he never did, probably because he was afraid someone would call him a child predator, but he came over and put one of his meaty arms around my shoulders and palmed the top of my head and patted it once.

“I’ll be outside if you need me,” he said.

He left, and Jane moved for the first time in two minutes. She took a while to talk, and when she did, her throat sounded froggy. “I wish you didn’t have to hear all that.”

I shrugged. If she’d just told me everything about my father before, I never would have had to hear all of it right now.

“I know I’m not the perfect mother, but your father…” She wasn’t crying, but her eyes were a little watery. “I’m sorry, baby,” she said, the same way she’d said it in the hospital, and she clutched me to her chest and hugged me and I let her do it but didn’t hug back. I closed my eyes. What I was thinking about instead was the picture in my bedroom in L.A. of us on the seesaw in St. Louis. I imagined us going up and down on it a few times, then her slamming down hard and me flying off into the sky, up past the clouds and airplanes and into space and floating away in all the blackness, with Jane holding her arms out to reach for my body but me departing the realm away from her.

“It’s okay, Jane.” I slid out of her arms and moved back a couple feet. “I think I want to be by myself for a little while.”

She swallowed and rubbed her eyes even though there still weren’t any tears coming out and told me to get her when I was ready. Her phone pinged on the way out, and she looked at it. She started to talk, stopped, and started again.