Teddy Wayne - The Love Song of Jonny Valentine

I said hi to Sharon in the kitchen while she was spraying the countertop. “How is the tour, Mr. Jonny?” she asked when she hugged me. Her smell was a combination of cleaning products and this cream that black women moisturize their hair with that she keeps like four bottles of in her bathroom. Sharon is from Barbados and one time she let me weigh her. She’s 223 pounds and I bet her breasts and butt are at least forty pounds of that. They’re the biggest of anyone I know, including singers and dancers with implants.

“It’s good,” I said. “We’re working super-hard.”

“You look skinny,” she said. “We have to get some meat on those bones.”

“I just ate,” I said, even though I was still a little hungry since I didn’t finish the fries. I was only skinny compared to Sharon.

“Okay.” She went back to spraying. “But don’t work too hard, Mr. Jonny.”

Jane came in and told Sharon that the gardeners were coming tomorrow and the painters were coming two days after, and Sharon said, “Yes, ma’am,” real quiet the way she always does when she answers her.

Jane said, “And you really need to do a more careful job in the foyer. I found a sheet of dust behind the white table.”

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Valentine,” Sharon said.

Jane told me we were eating at six before she went to her office. When she was gone, I told Sharon not to take it personal and that Jane was pissed at me because I didn’t want to go to this dumb party and she was taking it out on her. Sharon said, “I know, Mrs. Valentine has a lot of pressure on her, too,” which isn’t what I meant, but I guess the important thing is Sharon didn’t feel so bad. Jane’s good at making people think they screwed up even when they didn’t really. It does motivate you to do better, though, except I don’t think Sharon needs much motivation to clean the foyer.

The staircase was being renovated with marble, which I didn’t know about, but Jane’s always working on improvements to the house, some for her, some for me. When I wanted a basketball court, she said it would cost too much, and I was like, Please, Jane, I’ll add another concert to the next tour to pay for it, and she said what she usually says when I ask for something big, which is, All right, but just because I’m the only mother you have and you’re the only son I have. I asked her a few months ago if we could clear out the land behind us and build a baseball diamond like the one me and Michael Carns used to talk about building in St. Louis so I can play with Walter on it, and with a springy backboard so I can play catch when he isn’t around. She says depending on what tour and merch profits are, we can think about it.

That’s partly why it’s not familiar when I come home, because of the renovations and it never smells like much besides Sharon’s cleaning products. I asked Nadine once if you replaced one thing at a time in our house until everything was new, would it still be the same house? She said that was a very smart question, and that the human body replaces all its cells every seven to ten years, so you could say that I was a completely renovated person from when I was born. We spent an entire session discussing it. I decided it was a totally new house. Nadine wasn’t so sure.

I took the elevator upstairs and went to my room. A Jonny Valentine doll had fallen on the floor. It was one that sang the chorus from “Guys vs. Girls” when you pulled the string.

“If Jonny is reading this, he can contact me,” I said to it. Then I smiled huge at it. “How’s the tour? Any fun stories?”

I pulled the string. It played the “Guys vs. Girls” chorus up to gotta so slow you couldn’t hardly make out the words and stopped. It must’ve broken when it fell.

In slow motion, making my voice baritone so it sounded like a broken recording, I said, “Kid’s… got… a… work… eth… ic… like… a… Ko… re… an… im… mi… grant.” I stuffed the doll back on the shelf with all the other Jonny Valentine dolls and action figures and angel figurines, under the shelf with the Jonny Valentine backpacks and messenger bags and lunch boxes, and above the shelf with the Jonny Valentine necklaces and bracelets and nail polish and purses and other garbage for girls that would be gay for me to have in my room if it didn’t have my face on it, and next to the bookshelf that had about a hundred copies of my ghostwritten autobiography, by this skinny bald guy with thick glasses in his fifties named Alan Fontana who interviewed me for a couple hours, then just used Wikipedia to write a bunch of made-up stuff about girls and sports and music pretending to be in my voice, like one page has a picture of me looking in a jewelry-store window and it says, “Sometimes all I think about is getting jewelry for girls.” They’d never write the real truth, like, “Sometimes all I think about is getting boners for girls.”

The ketchup stain on my sleeve probably wouldn’t come out, so I threw it in the garbage and walked into my closet and found the bin labeled TRACK SWEATERS and took out a new white one. I’d worn that sweater the last four days on the tour when I wasn’t performing, so I felt a little bad throwing it out, since I don’t get to wear old clothes much to keep up with the trends, and also because it was like, Sorry, sweater, even though it was my fault I got ketchup on you, fuck you, you have to depart the realm now.

Sharon had brought my five suitcases up to my room. I freaked out that she’d thrown all my clothes in the laundry, including the jeans with Albert Derrick Valentino’s email address in them, but the suitcases were still filled. I took the piece of paper out and stuck it in the jeans I was wearing.

I started to play Zenon, but it wasn’t as fun without other people in the next room, even if they’re not paying attention. It’s nice to know other people are near you at least while you’re playing games. It’s best when Walter’s in the room with you, but he had the rest of the day off in his bungalow and said he was going to grab a shit-ton of shut-eye, brother, we were all getting worked to the goddamn bone on this tour. Walter finished high school though he talks like he didn’t, but besides nonstrategy decisions, he’s probably one of our smartest staff.

A new stack of tabloids and glossies Jane wanted me to study was next to my bed, right near this photo on my bedside table of me and Jane when I was about seven or eight that a friend of hers took. It’s a nice photo, with her sitting on one end of the seesaw in the park near our apartment in St. Louis and me all the way up on the other end, but Jane doesn’t want it out in a hallway because she has an ugly perm and about ten pounds more chub.

You have to give the glossies enough access so they’re grateful but not too much or they think they can walk all over you with a character assassination. Jane’s savvy at adjusting the level. My picture was only in one of them. It was an onstage shot during the Houston show, and the headline was JONNY HEATS UP HOUSTON! with a capsule description of my tour. That show was one of my worst so far, actually, but the glossies never review your performance unless you bombed so bad it becomes a media story.

I took that issue and one of the tabloids into my bathroom and locked the door and turned on the fan for sound. There wasn’t any regular moisturizer, since my dermatologist doesn’t want me messing with lotions and maybe causing acne, but on the sink was a bottle of the SPF 50 sunscreen Jane makes me slather on. I sat on the toilet and turned in the tabloid to a photo spread headlined FIT AND OVER 40!—THESE OLDER STARS STILL LOOK LIKE STARLETS! It was candids of a bunch of actresses in bathing suits and workout clothes. I got hard and rubbed with the lotion and touched myself to a photo of an actress with red hair doing yoga outside and bending over, and in one hand held the glossy picture of me onstage next to her. After about five minutes both arms got tired, so I packed the glossy in one of my suitcases. It wasn’t going to happen yet, but I could feel myself getting closer, sort of like what I think the inside of our teakettle is like just before it boils the water for Jane’s laxative tea. I bet within a year I’ll be able to do it, way before I’ve had ten thousand hours of practice.