The Love Song of Jonny Valentine

CHAPTER 10. Memphis (Second Day)

I had a hangover. I should’ve put out a glass of water for myself like I do for Jane, and I woke up like three times in the middle of the night but was too tired to get up for the bathroom, even though I knew it would make me feel better. Usually I’m good about doing hard things now that will help me in the future. Deferring gratification, Jane says. An extra hour of vocal practice targeting your weaknesses in the present means an extra thousand in sales a year from now. It’s what separates one-hit wonders from musicians with career longevity.

I took a couple baby aspirin from my toiletry kit when my wake-up call rang at eight a.m., which helped a little, but I still felt like I’d just done thirty minutes of high-intensity cardio on a zolpidem. I got down about half my omelet, but had to run to the bathroom and barely made it in time before it came back up.

I don’t know how Jane does this.

By the time Nadine met me for my morning tutoring, I’d recovered enough so that she didn’t notice anything, except for once when I forgot what eleven times twelve was and she said, “Come on, slowpoke, what’s with the lethargy?”

I tried napping in the afternoon before sound check, but I only turned around in my bed a bunch. Zack probably had good hangover advice, but I couldn’t remember his room number. I called the front desk and asked for the room of Zack Ford.

“One moment, sir,” the woman said, and I was so surprised, I didn’t have anything planned to say when Zack picked up and said hello. I guess they weren’t famous enough to have to use fake names. Or maybe they did it so groupies could find them. That was Mi$ter $mith’s trick. He’d mention how cool his hotel was during his interlude banter, and you’d see all these girls in the lobby waiting for him postshow. He sings about hotel groupies in his song “$ext $candal,” which he couldn’t play on our tour. It wouldn’t work for me, because I couldn’t exactly be like, Hey, your Marriott is really cool, I’ve got an awesome room with a view right down the hall from my mother.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hi. You have a name?”

“It’s me. Jonny.”

“Jonny.” He laughed. “I thought you were some girl.”

My speaking voice was high, but I didn’t think it was that high. I made it a little lower, enough so it wasn’t obvious what I was doing. It’s easy for me to control, which is one thing Rog says is a huge weapon in a singer’s arsenal, impersonation, since it means you can be a different singer to suit the subject. I’ve been working on an impression of Walter, to spring it on him one day when it’s good. It kind of hurts my throat, since his voice is so gravelly, so I can’t practice too much. “No, it’s me.”

“So, as my Uncle Morris from Nebraska says, what can I do you for?”

I realized if I told him I got sick off two drinks I would sound like a kid. “That was fun last night,” I said.

“Yeah, we’ll have to do it again.”

I waited for him to say something else, but he didn’t, so I said, “That was all I wanted to say.”

“The soul of wit. I like it,” he said. “I’ve got to get ready for sound check, but I’ll catch you later.” He hung up before I could say good-bye. My stomach jabbed me when I heard the dial tone, but I think it was because I needed to go to the bathroom again.

I didn’t know where the Latchkeys’ room was at sound check and didn’t see them, but it didn’t matter since I was feeling more and more like junk the rest of the day. For my sound check I took it easy, almost spoke the words, which I was allowed to do if I felt like it, so no one paid attention. In the star/talent room there was a super-big spread with barbecue and buffalo wings and ribs and sweet potato fries in addition to my rider requests, and I knew Jane hadn’t approved it and she hadn’t scoped out the room, but I couldn’t imagine putting anything in my stomach anyway, so I told Walter to go nuts. When the Latchkeys went on to open, I realized I hadn’t eaten anything after my morning omelet, and I was starving, so I ate a few sweet potato fries to test it out, and my stomach seemed fine. I moved on to the wings and ribs and some meat loaf, and before I knew it I’d eaten probably two dinners. I added up all the calories from the nutritional listings, and it was around seventeen hundred. I’d have to offset it with high-intensity cardio for ten thousand hours.

I hadn’t vomited before a concert since I saw Dr. Henson, from getting rest and being back in the performance groove, so I thought it would be okay. While I was waiting backstage, though, I had lethargy again, and Jane asked if everything was all right, and when I said yeah, she wiped all this sweat off my forehead that I hadn’t even noticed and had the makeup woman give me another coat of foundation.

The second I went onstage, I knew I’d made a mistake with the barbecue. I opened with “Love Is Evol,” which requires a lot of dancing around from me, and when I did my first split, my stomach gurgled and was like, Fuck you for poisoning me, Jonny. I adjusted and made it more of a crooner-style walk-around onstage, which Rog lets me do if I don’t feel up to the choreography, and I had my dancers do the heavy lifting. It settled my stomach a little. I just wouldn’t do any serious dancing the rest of the show.

But my singing was off, too. I’d drunk all the Throat Coat in the world in the afternoon, but it was like I kept running out of saliva, and when I reached for high notes, which are usually a meaty fastball down the middle of the plate for me, I could feel my voice cracking, so I had to rein that in also, which screwed me for “Breathtaking,” where I’m supposed to hit a high C that sounds like my breath is being taken away. I wasn’t even sharp on “Kali Kool,” which is my easiest song, but at least it’s a sing-along so I could hold the mike out and let the crowd carry it.

I was sweating over my face and down my back, and when I brought this chubby girl with glasses onstage to sing to, she almost looked scared for me, because the sweat was dripping down my nose and I had to keep wiping it off with my sleeve.

The feeling passed for a few songs, and I got greedy and danced a little before the heart-shaped swing finale, and right when the swing came down my stomach bubbled again, and it turned a lot worse as the swing locked down and lifted me up. This was my nightmare, having an accident in front of all these people where they could tell I’d had one. I couldn’t crouch down and puke, since it would fall through the holes in the bottom, and vomiting wasn’t even going to help anything. I was trapped. And the more I worried about it, the gurglier my stomach became, which made me think about it more. The vicious cycle of performance anxiety, Rog calls it, but usually it’s about singing worse because you’re afraid you will, not about having diarrhea in your pants.

The audience was pretending to text and singing along with “U R Kewt” so loudly that I couldn’t hardly hear the band or my own vocals, which made me pissed. If they actually cared about hearing me sing they’d let me sing, but it’s really all for them, which is why like eighty percent of pop lyrics are about you, not her or an actual name, so the listeners can pretend it’s them. Or so they can pretend to be me for a few hours, even though they’re almost all girls, like the L.A. Times writer said, except at that moment if they knew what my stomach was going through, none of them would want to be me, and I couldn’t stop the show or anything, so for their sake I had to clench my muscles and fight through it and hold everything in while it was bursting to get out.

And then I had the thought of what would happen if I said fuck it, and pulled down my pants and sprayed diarrhea all over their heads and their iPhones shooting unauthorized video and their Be Jonny’s Valentine heart-design T-shirts with the picture of me next to a Photoshopped picture of them, just me coating the entire stadium with Jacuzzi jets of endless diarrhea. It was like, you all caused this in me, even though this one time it was the alcohol, but if I didn’t have to perform it wouldn’t be so bad, so now you get to feel what I’m feeling.

Thinking about that made me laugh, which I never do in concert, and the laugh helped the terrible feeling pass again. I made it through to the end without any problems. I was going to tell Zack about it. He’d find it funny. Except I’d have to make it seem like the diarrhea was from food poisoning and not from the alcohol.

After the concert I ran to the bathroom just in case, and I’m glad I did, since whatever I’d been keeping in was super-excited to get out. When Jane came to pick me up, I must have looked drained, because she asked if I felt okay and I told her I’d had some diarrhea but I was fine now.

But as we pulled up at the hotel, I grabbed my stomach and Jane quickly took me to her room to use the bathroom. I was taking awhile, so she opened the door, and I squeezed my legs together a little to hide my penis, but not all the way or it would look like I had a vagina. “How do you feel?” she asked.

“Not so good.”

“What did you eat?”

“A lot.”

“Did you sleep okay? Or take any pills?”

She’d turned into Dr. Henson all of a sudden. “No.”

She ran cold water over a washcloth and wiped off my face and gave me a glass of water and told me to drink all of it, but it squirted out a few minutes later. Diarrhea would be my new word for a song that you listen to and forget right away.

Jane sat on the garbage can near the toilet. It was an expensive-looking garbage can, gold-plated with a sturdy lid, so it supported her. It was kind of stupid to have such a nice garbage can in a place where people go to have diarrhea. She kept sponging up the sweat on my face and feeding me glasses of water and gave me a couple anti-diarrhea pills, but it didn’t do much to stop it. “I should call a doctor,” she said.

Maybe the doctor would take a blood test or something and find alcohol in there. “Don’t,” I said. “It’s embarrassing. And I’m already feeling better.”

She got a call on her phone, told me she’d be back in a minute, and closed the door behind her. I tried to listen, but it was hard because of the door and she was talking quietly and every fifteen seconds or so I’d shoot out another stream of water. All I heard was two sentences: “I’m staying in tonight… Not here.”

She came back a minute later. “I think you should sleep here with me tonight,” she said.

I was trying to figure out who could have called her and what it was about. But she’d lie if I asked. “Okay,” I said.

I stayed on the toilet another hour, and Jane got my pajamas from my room. And this is the most embarrassing part, but she ordered the smallest size of adult diapers from the lobby. Somehow they had them, and she made me wear a pair to be safe, because she said she didn’t want me shitting on her in bed. I had just enough strength to smile but not enough to laugh.

Jane wore her white satin nightgown to bed, and I climbed in and turned onto my side so my stomach hurt less. She spooned me and rubbed my stomach lightly, which might irritate it, but it was soothing. For a second I pretended it was Lisa Pinto doing it, but I was too sick to get a boner anyway.

She stroked my stomach some more and put her arm under my neck and cradled me inside it. “Can you sing the lullaby?” I asked.

She didn’t answer, but she sang it. I liked this part the most this time:

Way down yonder

In the meadow

Lies a poor little lamby

Bees and butterflies

Flitting round his eyes

Poor little thing is crying Mammy

I said, “It’s like the bees and butterflies are the diarrhea now flitting round my stomach.”

She laughed and said to make sure I told that to Nadine for extra credit. Then she said, “We haven’t done a sick night in bed in a while, huh?”

“I think the last time was that Christmas you gave me season tickets to the Dodgers and I ate some bad sushi.”

“Right. Two Christmases ago.”

On my father’s last Christmas with us he gave me my first baseball glove. I didn’t start playing Little League till after he left, and I don’t remember ever playing with it with him, so he probably left when it was winter. I used it the rest of the time in St. Louis, but we lost it when we moved. It was fake leather and a child’s model, and my new glove is premium leather and bigger and was autographed by Albert Pujols when we visited the locker rooms at Angel Stadium last year. It’d be nice to have my first glove still, though.

“Did my father play baseball?” I asked.

Jane’s breathing stopped its regular flow for a second. “What do you mean?”

“In high school or something, did he ever play?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Were the Cardinals his favorite team?”

“Jonathan, I know you’re curious,” she said. “But it’s really best not to think about him. Some people get good luck, and they get two good parents. Some people have bad luck, and they don’t get any. And most people end up somewhere in the middle, and that’s what you got.”

“I only want to know if the Cardinals were his favorite team. Because he lived in St. Louis, but he grew up in Kansas you said, so maybe he liked the Royals.”

“I don’t know, baby,” she said, and kissed the back of my neck. “But it doesn’t matter. The Cardinals are my favorite team, because of you, and I’m the one who stuck around.”

“Why didn’t he?” I asked, but I knew what she’d say.

“It’s been a long night.”

“I just want—”

“We’re not discussing this any further. Go to sleep.”

She waited a few seconds. “Remember this?” she asked, and gave me a wet zerbert on the back of my neck. I squirmed and giggled, and she pretended to chew my neck with a myum-myum noise.

Neither of us took a zolpidem, since it would be dangerous for me to have one and she wanted to be able to wake up in case she had to help me.