The Love Song of Jonny Valentine

CHAPTER 12. Birmingham (Second Day)

Jane woke me up early in my room with my iPod repeating the Latchkeys song. “We’ve got an hour booked at the children’s hospital,” she said. “There’ll be photographers from a few glossies on hand.”

“Where will you be?” I asked.

She looked at her phone. “I’m coming along.”

It made me want to ask why we couldn’t have brought along the Latchkeys to help with their PR problem, too. But they probably wanted that image. You can get away with a lot more as a rock band.

The car took me and Jane because it wouldn’t look good if we brought Walter, though I was surprised she wasn’t taking Rog along for support. The glossies with photographers there had to embargo the information, so there wasn’t any other media. It was easy to get in, and the PR rep for the hospital met us and brought us to a waiting room that had been cleared out.

Jane was silent the whole ride in, I guess since she was still pissed and thinking about how to fix the problem, and when the PR woman was telling us about the different wings we could visit, Jane nodded along but it looked like she wasn’t even listening.

I stayed in a waiting room they’d cleared out for me while Jane and the PR woman filled out some forms with the three photographers in another room. There were only travel and fashion and home-decoration and golf glossies on the table, but then I saw the front page of the New York Times, and at the bottom it said “Jonny Got His… Gin? Op-Ed, Page A30.”

The article had a drawing of a mother in a hooded robe holding her baby, with this light glowing around both their heads, except the mother’s face was a drawing of my face, and the baby’s face was Jane’s face.

The latest granular amateur video to swallow up Internet bandwidth and tabloid headlines depicts 11-year-old Jonny Valentine, the tweeny-bopper known for such saccharine pop confections as “Guys vs. Girls” and “RSVP (To My Heart),” dizzily imbibing drinks that may or may not have contained alcohol in a Memphis nightclub. That such an exposé registers as merely mild surprise to the jaded public makes it all the more dismaying.

Still, that jaded public gulped down the gossip like it was one of Jonny’s possibly non-virgin drinks and pointed fingers everywhere. While any number of parties should bear at least some responsibility — the venue, for starters — there is one person justly deserving the criticism heaped upon her the last 24 hours of the voracious news cycle: Jonny’s 39-year-old mother-manager, Jane Valentine, renowned for her own hard-partying lifestyle, who was spotted at another exclusive Memphis club the night her son was reveling with 20-something rock stars whose most-quoted lyric is the deathless couplet “I drink and I drug / No, I don’t wanna hug.”

Paraphrasing the old public service announcement: It’s 10 p.m.: do you know where your parents are?

To be sure, we live in an age of over-parenting, where babies are trained from the womb for the Ivy League and every precious exhalation from junior is deemed worthy of a picture and status update. Ms. Valentine, who has a reputation in the music industry for meddling too heavily in her son’s affairs, might be accused of a Hollywood strain of this practice. Yet a far more egregious fault is the blithe under-parenting she practiced the other night when indulging in behavior befitting someone half her age, desperately seeking attention and stimuli while neglecting the stewardship of her child.

Although we may have not yet fully regressed into an infantile nation of Jane Valentines, disseminating photos of our vacations so that we can feel famous and glamorous for 15 seconds to 15 online acquaintances — but not paying any real attention with our own eyes to our surroundings — we are not far from the tipping point. As a mother of three toddlers juggling a career in law, I feel traitorous in passing judgment on the hardworking and single Ms. Valentine, although I—

I heard the door opening and Jane’s voice with the PR rep, so I turned the paper over. The rest of it, I could tell, was slamming Jane for not paying enough attention to me. I wished I could tell them how she stayed in bed with me two nights ago when I was sick. Newspapers always get only half the story. They’re even sloppier than glossies, because their deadlines are tighter. Internet media doesn’t even try to fact-check.

And this writer made it sound like she was above it all, better than Jane and better than celebrity news, but she was using us for content the same as a gossip blogger to advance her career, and gulping it down just like the public. The people reading it weren’t above celebrity news, either.

But now I knew why Jane had to be in the photos and why she was acting so strange today.

The PR rep told me she’d lead me on a tour of a few wings with the photographers trailing behind. The first hallway was all slick and shiny and fluorescent, with nurses and doctors and regular-looking people who were probably parents of the sick kids. The rep opened a door and said this was a playroom for children with leukemia, and several of them were fans of mine, and would I mind singing a song to them?

Jane never likes for me to sing for free, but she jerked her head up and down a few inches, so I said sure. Some of the kids wore masks, and a bunch didn’t have hair. There was a TV and some toys and games, with a few parents and staff hanging out, but not much else. It was a pretty depressing place to have to play in.

They clapped a little when they saw me. The PR rep said, “This is Jonny Valentine, and he’s a very special guest. He’s going to say a few words and sing you a song.”

I didn’t know anything about saying a few words. Jane was staring at the kids, and one kid in particular. He had no hair, like all the others, and was even skinnier than the rest, almost a skeleton with skin pasted on top, and his cheeks were sunk into his mouth so deep it was like a skull.

“Hi,” I said. I was quiet for like five seconds. All I could think of saying was something like, “The one reason I’m here is because we’re doing a PR scramble to save my career and you guys have such crap lives it’ll make people forget I drank alcohol with the Latchkeys, even though if I saw a photo spread of a pop star doing this I’d see through it in a second, but people only remember the last thing about you.”

“It’s awesome to be here with you guys,” I said.

I sang “You Hurt Me,” which sounds good a cappella. It was going fine until I got to the chorus:

Oh, yeah, girl, you hurt me

You always make me cry

Oh, yeah, girl, you hurt me

You make me wanna die

As I was singing the last line I was like, This is a bad choice for kids who might actually die. The PR rep stiffened, and I wondered if she knew I was supposed to sing the chorus like six times in a row at the end. And this fucked-up part of me wanted to sing it, and get super-falsetto on the word die, and sing it in the PR rep’s face.

Jane was still staring at the kid with the skull. Every other part of him was all shriveled up but his eyes seemed huge. When I got to the chorus again I replaced die with cry, even if rhyming with the same word is a hack move. I bet the kids didn’t notice, though.

I signed some autographs and posed for photos with them and Jane, and we moved to another wing. This time, I thought I heard the PR rep say, “Now, Jonny, this is the playroom for the bird unit. Do you feel comfortable going in?”

I didn’t see why she’d think I’d be uncomfortable around birds, as long as they were in cages, or why there’d even be birds at a children’s hospital, so I said, “Totally.”

I realized my mistake the second we walked in and saw a few kids who had parts of skin like the leftover cheese mixed with tomato sauce that gets stuck to the top of a pizza box. The PR rep explained that they were kids who had recovered enough from their burns to play, but a bunch of them still had to wear gloves and masks. I stared at my red Nikes, but I couldn’t help turning my head to look, like I was checking where Tyler Beats was on the charts. She whispered, “Sure you’re okay?” and I knew I couldn’t back out of it, so I mumbled yes and went on with her.

A nurse brought us over to one blond girl around my age who wasn’t burned that much, at least her face wasn’t at all, but you could see a big bandage like a tank top on her chest before it got covered by her blue hospital shirt.

She got excited and said she owned everything of mine and listened to it all the time. I thanked her and told her I needed the love of my true fans like her and sang “U R Kewt,” but as I was singing I had another fucked-up thought, which was that when she grew up she might have a beautiful face but if a guy ever got her shirt off he’d lose his boner, so she’d dream of meeting a guy who loved her even though her breasts were all burned, but she’d always try to hide it until she found that person, and the more she hid it the more she’d be embarrassed by it, until her being embarrassed by it would be worse than the actual burns, so after a while if she finally found someone who did love her still, she’d think something was wrong with them for loving her and wouldn’t want them anymore, and everyone in this unit and in the whole hospital was like a character whose body was damaged bad in Zenon and couldn’t hardly walk anymore and what didn’t kill them did not make them stronger.

When I finished the song I told her to always follow her dreams, and that if you’re following your dreams no one can ever take anything away from you, which is even more of a crap idea for someone like her. I whispered to the PR rep that I had to use the bathroom, and she got the hint because she said we could move on somewhere else. Before I could go, though, the girl said, “You know why I love your songs?”

I said no. She said, “Your songs are always nice to listen to.” That was the most broad-spectrum compliment I ever heard, but I said thanks and walked away. “Most of the time they’re pretty,” the girl added, and I stopped. “But once in a while they’re not. That’s my favorite thing.”

“You mean the lyrics?” I asked.

“No, the words are,” she said. “But the way you sing them isn’t always. Even when the song is about having fun, sometimes it sounds like you aren’t having any at all. It’s like the song is happy, but you’re not. Like when someone’s smiling in a picture, but their eyes are sad. It’s really beautiful.”

I couldn’t believe a tween girl had this response to my song. This was the sort of thing a critic would write about a Latchkeys song, or even Vanessa would say to Zack about one of their songs. Or how someone might feel about an MJ song. It was way better than the usual stuff I heard from fans, about how they listened to me nonstop and followed all the news about me and I was their favorite singer. They only listened to me nonstop because we courted the radio stations, and they followed the news about me because our publicists fed material to the media each week, and I was their favorite because the label had marketed me to them. If none of that happened, they wouldn’t actually care about the music. This girl did. I wanted to ask her if she meant I sounded punk, but she wouldn’t know what punk was and Jane would wonder why I was asking that and she was signaling with her eyebrows for me to hurry up, so I said, “Thank you.”

I found the bathroom down the hall and locked myself in a stall and tried to pee, but nothing came out. While I was pushing like crazy but nothing was happening, I wondered if I could get hard now if I tried, after everything I’d seen, like if it would still work properly. At first I couldn’t, even when I pictured Lisa Pinto and Vanessa’s legs and the time I walked in on one of my dancers changing in Houston.

I opened my eyes and looked down. A tiny black hair poked out of the skin around all the peach fuzz. I pulled on it and it didn’t come out. Then I got hard, and I even had to wait a little for it to go down before I left, since I didn’t want to be walking around dying kids with a super-hard boner and a grin on my face after finding my first pube.

I was going to turn left to join up with everyone outside the burn unit, but to my right there was a glass window with golden light coming from inside. All these rows of babies were inside, hooked up with wires inside clear rectangles. “What’s here?” I called to the PR rep, who was talking with the photographers and Jane.

“I see you’ve found our premature infants,” she said.

“Jonny, don’t wander off,” Jane called.

“What are they inside?” I asked the PR rep.

“Those are called incubators. They simulate the mother’s tummy for babies that are born too early, to help protect them.”

“Cool,” I said, which was stupid, but I was really thinking about how they were like the force-field spell in Zenon. “Can I see them?”

“Yes, but we have to be very quiet, and it’s best not to touch them,” she said. “They need some attention, but too much isn’t good for them.”

Jane was like, “You know, I think we’re running behind schedule.”

“I want to go in,” I said.

“We’re very late,” she said.

The PR rep said, “It’ll only take a minute.”

“Thank you, but we’re late to Jonny’s sound check,” she said, which was a lie. Sound check wasn’t until after I tutored with Nadine and we could always cut that short and make up the time later.

“I’m going in.” Jane wouldn’t stop me now.

“I’ll wait out here,” she said. Her face was icy, the most since she’d been at the hospital, even more than in the burn unit. Her body was turned sideways, and she hadn’t looked inside the window once the whole time.

It was weird. When we walked into the room, I felt like I’d already been here, right in the room with all the premature babies, like at the start of the tour or something. That drawing of Jane as a baby in the New York Times had mixed me up. But I stopped thinking about it once I saw them. They were like half the size of regular babies and were sleeping in their little boxes, with bluish skin and pinched eyes and tiny arms and legs and scraps of hair. One of the nurses asked us not to go closer than a few feet and told the photographers not to snap any photos, so we stood and watched.

I wished I could hold one of them, since I’d never held a baby before and they were still pretty cute. It’s kind of hard not to find a cute baby. And it’s just as hard to find a cute adult. Jane says that’s a reason I’ll maintain my appeal, my naturally boyish looks. The second I develop facial hair I’ve got to learn how to shave.

The nurse talked about the challenges premature babies face, and it sounded bad, like a lot of them develop brain and vision problems, and unlike most of the other kids in the hospital who’d gotten bad luck later in life but at least they probably had some normal years first, these babies were damaged from the start all because they were born too soon. It could happen to anyone, but it happened to these babies. I could’ve been one of these babies, or the girl in the burn unit, or the kid with leukemia, or the girl in the wheelchair in St. Louis, or that fat woman Mary Ann in Schnucks, or Walter or Nadine or Rog, or the PR rep, or even Tyler Beats, which is the best of all those, but it wouldn’t be anything I chose, just something that happened to me, and maybe you choose a few things after that, but it’s mostly not up to you.

Right away I wanted to get out of the premature infants room and to leave the hospital completely, so I whispered to the PR rep that I was ready to go to my sound check, and she led us all out. Jane was typing on her phone a few feet away from the window with her back to us.

We went to the PR rep’s office, and she told me I could wait in there while her and Jane and everyone dealt with photo release forms in another room. Her computer was on, and the screen showed the hospital’s website. I didn’t wait, I just went around to her side of the desk and opened a new window and got into my email account. As I waited to sign in, I noticed a framed candid photo next to the printer of the PR rep and this bald guy with a big smile and a bulky polo shirt and dorky jean shorts and their son, hiking somewhere.

My email had tons of spam again. One message said “How to become rich and famous in 30 days!” which sounds like something only idiots would fall for, but I did do it almost that fast, if you time it from when Jane uploaded my first YouTube videos to when we signed with the label. Most successful musicians take much longer to make it, Rog always tells me, and I’m the lucky exception, and he thinks that when stories like mine get so much press, it gives young musicians the wrong idea that they can hit it big overnight, so they don’t work as hard at their craft, they just hope someone will come along and discover them on the Internet.

I searched for Albert’s name, and my stomach jumped up to my chest because there was one new email from him, written a few days after I’d sent him the photo. I opened it but it was longer than his others and I was afraid of Jane coming back and catching me reading it.

I’ve had to print Nadine’s homework instructions from hotel printers before, so I figured out how to print it. Except the printer got jammed, and I had to yank out the smeared page and reprint.

I heard different voices down the hall. The page started printing, and I signed out of email and closed the window and hoped the printer would work this time or else I was screwed.

The voices were coming closer. The page came out halfway and stopped for a second and I nearly punched the printer, because it was like it kept delivering a premature infant. But it restarted and got the rest out. I grabbed it and folded it into my pocket and sat in the guest chair and pretended to look bored while my blood drummed a hip-hop beat inside my head as Jane came in with the PR rep to get me. I couldn’t get out of that hospital soon enough, and neither could Jane. In the car service, she said, “I hope those vultures are satisfied.”

I didn’t get a chance to read the email since she took me straight to my room at the hotel and waited with me until Nadine showed up for our session. The letter was like a heat source in Zenon burning up my pocket as Nadine chattered on about word problems and why water freezes and other stuff I couldn’t focus on. Finally we took a break and I went to the bathroom and read the email.

So it looks like you might really know Jonathan or maybe I am writing to Jonathan himself. Please forgive me for being suspicious. When I tried to reach out in the past I only heard from people who are pulling my leg. If you aren’t him, please pass this on to him:

You must be turning 12 pretty soon. I don’t remember much about being 12 except that was when I started thinking about girls. I’m sure you have a lot more options than I did! If I’m able to send you a birthday present, I’ll do it.

Did you know I played drums in high school? I was even in a band for a year. We called ourselves the Wrecking Balls. It was heavy metal. We were pretty bad, so I know you didn’t get your musical talent from me!

I couldn’t get in touch the last few years on account of being in Australia and I feel awful about it. Jane doesn’t want anything to do with me. It’s hard to make amends when you’re not allowed to make them. There are many things I would like to say to you but I don’t feel comfortable saying them over an email. But I do want to say one thing, better late than never. I’m sorry to you for not being there because there are some things in life you can’t replace, and one of them is a father’s love.

Al

P.S. When you have your concert in Cincinnati I might be there too.

I had a million questions. Did he mean he’d be at my concert, or he was only going to be in Cincinnati? And if I even wanted to meet him, was it against the law because of the letter in Jane’s room? And when he tried to contact me before, did he go through the label and no one believed him or Jane stopped him like he made it sound and like I bet she did with Michael Carns because his image wasn’t cool enough, or did he just put it out on the Internet and I never saw it?

I pictured me and my father taking a plane to Sydney for the music festival there I almost played in and him inviting all the friends he’d made there to come hear me. He’d introduce me to the crowd, and he’d be as famous in Sydney as me, and he’d manage my Australia/New Zealand tour because he had so many connections there. He’d be like the Australian Jane. Except he’d also play drums to back me up, and for the drum solo in “RSVP (To My Heart),” when it’s supposed to sound like my heart beating faster and faster because the girl just sent her RSVP to be my girlfriend, I’d do my trademark spin move right next to my father while he played, and you wouldn’t be able to tell who the crowd was cheering for, him or me, because they all knew him and they didn’t really know me since I didn’t have a foothold in the Australian market yet. And at night we’d hang out with his Australian friends, who were normal guys who had no idea who I was. They just liked my father.

Then I figured out where I’d heard the words better late than never before. I’d been at this boy Richard Nester’s birthday party. It was a fancy white house, with a huge lawn we played Red Rover on. All the other parents picked up their kids at the end, and after a while it was just me and Richard and Richard’s parents. They kept calling Jane at Schnucks, but she wasn’t picking up or available, and when they asked me where my father worked, I said he didn’t work at a place, my mother did, and even at that age I could tell they were a little embarrassed for me. Finally he showed up in our crap Dodge, and he didn’t even come out to get me or apologize to them, he only honked a few times from the big circular driveway they had. When I got in the car, he said, “Well, better late than never, kid.” He must say that a lot. In the car he talked on his phone to Jane and got angry, and instead of going home he drove for a long time on the highway without talking. I didn’t know where we were going and knew he didn’t have a plan, either, but there was something cool about that. We ended up at a diner on the highway and he said I could order whatever I wanted, he didn’t care, so I ate French toast for dinner, and by the time we got home it was dark. They got in one of their big fights, I remember. They must’ve broken up soon after, because that’s the last time I can remember him driving me anywhere.

Nadine called out that break was over. I folded the letter again. It would have been smarter to tear it up and flush it down the toilet, but I didn’t want to do it. I kind of liked having it inside my pocket, even though it would’ve done bad on one of Nadine’s composition tests since it didn’t use evocative language, which was actually what we did next.

I was writing the composition, on Nadine’s logic question:

The police are separately questioning you and your friend about a crime, and offer you both the same deal. You can either testify against your friend (say he is guilty) or claim he is innocent. (1) If only one of you testifies against the other, then the person who testified is freed, and his partner is put in jail for 12 months. (2) If you both claim the other is innocent, you are both put in jail for 1 month. (3) If you both testify against each other, you are both put in jail for 3 months. What should you do?

I couldn’t think straight, because the last few words from my father’s email kept playing on repeat in my head, and it was like I saw them written all over the walls in a jail cell: a father’s love a father’s love a father’s love a father’s love a father’s love

I finally said, “You should say the other guy’s innocent and hope he says it, too, because then you both have just a month in jail.”

Nadine explained that you should actually say the other guy is guilty, because you can’t guarantee he’ll cooperate and say you’re innocent. So if he does say you’re innocent, you get freed, and if he says you’re guilty, it’s not as bad as if you said he was innocent, and the other guy is probably using the same strategy, so you have to plan for that. I bet Jane would’ve figured it out even if she hasn’t studied logic, because of her street smarts.

“That’s not very nice to do, if it’s your friend,” I said.

“Well, it’s the right answer for a logic problem, but I agree. In real life I’d rather hang out with someone who says his friend is innocent,” she said. “Hey, you doing okay today?”

“I’m fine.”

“I forgive you for being somewhat distracted. You’ve had a lot of stressors recently.”

“I’m good at handling stressors.”

She smiled and said, “I apologize for the pop-psychology jargon.”

“I forgive you, too,” I said.

This time she laughed. She has a pretty laugh. I should tell my next producer to sample it and see if we could use it somehow. I bet she wouldn’t charge us, either.

“Maybe you’ll be okay after all,” she said, like she was watching me from very far away.

“I’ll be fine. This is a blip on the radar. The vultures will move onto the next thing in a minute.”

“That’s not what I meant,” she said. “But, yes, that’s true.”

I didn’t ask what she meant. The last line of my father’s email was still bouncing around in my head as we drove to the venue and during sound check and in the star/talent room before the concert and while the Christian opener, which was called 3 Days Dead, played their fake alt-rock. They’d been drinking beer preshow, which if it wasn’t against Christian protocol, it still probably wasn’t the most religious thing to do and definitely not professional, and it got me pissed that the Latchkeys had to go home when these guys were way worse people and musicians. The concert finally snapped me out of it. You really do have to focus when you’re singing and dancing, and it ended up being a strong show, since the crowd was into it and I fed off their energy. There were all these signs up about the nightclub incident like LET THE HATERS HATE, WE ♥ U JONNY and THIS BIRD WILL ALWAYS BEE THERE FOR YOU and NO MATTER WHAT, YOU ARE THE ANGEL TO MY EYES. I told my instrumentalists not to come out for the second encore, and did an a cappella version of “U R Kewt” instead because I liked how it sounded with the kids with leukemia even though it was an idiotic choice for them. At the end of the concert I stayed out extra-long when they were cheering and invited up two cute girls onstage, which I never do, since it looks like I’m not a one-girl guy, which is the image we want to promote, and looped my arms around them and let them kiss me on each cheek at once.

But the minute I got back into the star/talent room, I reread my father’s email and still couldn’t figure out if he meant he was coming to my Cincinnati concert. I was hoping for more clues to his life, like what sports he liked, or what he thought of my music. I’d want him to like it, but the idea of some guy in his forties listening to my music was weird, too. Except he wasn’t just some guy, he was my father, so maybe it was okay.

Jane came in but I’d put the letter away and was unwinding with Zenon, and she told me she was going out for a late dinner with a promoter, and Walter would take me home and she’d see me in the morning before our ride to Nashville. “You sure that’s a good idea?” I asked.

“I’m having dinner with another adult in a restaurant, Jonathan,” she said. “I think that’s allowed.”

I was going to tell her about the New York Times article, but I kept quiet because this meant she’d be gone from her room and I had a chance to get inside it and write back.

Me and Walter took the car service back to the hotel, and because it was our first real face time since the scandal broke, he told me not to give a shit about it, it was just tight-asses who had nothing else to do and they’d quickly move on to the next thing because they love getting worked up over bullshit so they don’t have to think about things like wars and people starving and bankers stealing from everyone, and anyway part of being a rock star is acting wild, and I reminded him, “I’m not a rock star, I’m a pop star,” since the difference is that rock stars might seem bigger to people like him but they also drive off a lot of listeners with either their sound or their image, so most only secure a niche audience, but pop stars have a chance at dominating the entire market because there’s fewer offensive elements. To be a rock star, you basically have to push your freakiness, but pop stars in my mold have to be more relatable and push their normalness, which is not the regular normal, it’s like a super-normal, so all I’m supposed to talk about in interviews is sports and girls and spending time with my family and friends even though the only family I see is Jane and now I’ll probably never talk to Michael Carns again, but if fans don’t love you as a person, they won’t love your music.

He took me to my room and made sure everything was secure before going to his room. I waited until I heard his door click shut to make sure he hadn’t gone down to the hotel bar, and waited another twenty minutes to be safe. Then I pulled my Florida Marlins cap down and wore sunglasses and went down to the lobby. If I got busted by Jane, I’d say it was her job to be watching me, not going out at night. Anyway, I wasn’t nearly as scared this time, now that I’d done it by myself in Vegas and with Zack in Memphis. Jonny Tubman.

I found a woman with a helmet of dyed blond hair at a desk who looked young enough to recognize me, and went up when no one else was around and took my hat and sunglasses off and said, “Hi, I’m Jonny Valentine, and I’m a guest in your hotel.”

“Oh, hi!” she said in this super-friendly Southern accent. “I heard you were — how may I help you, Mr. Valentine?”

“I need to get into my mother’s room, but she’s out. It’s under Jane Valentino, room 1722. I’m 1723.”

She typed on her computer. It always sounds the same when workers like her type on a computer, like a million little clicks in a row. It’s got to be depressing spending ten thousand hours to be that good at a job like that.

“I see something was messengered here for you today,” she said.

I wasn’t expecting anything, and when we got sent print clips, they usually went to Jane. I gave her my label’s name and asked if it was from them.

“Bergman Ellis Jacobson and Walsh,” she read off the screen. “It sounds like a law firm.”

“And it’s for me?” I asked, which was stupid, because then she read more closely and said, “Oh, my mistake. It’s for Jane Valentino. They mixed up the room numbers.”

That was really dumb of me. I could’ve read it without Jane knowing, then returned it. It wasn’t worth trying to get it from the woman now, when I was already hoping to get access to Jane’s room. She typed some more.

“I’m terribly sorry, Mr. Valentine, but I’m not authorized to let anyone but Ms. Valentino into the room,” she said.

“But I’m her son. That’s the name she uses for hotels. We’ve both been all over the news.”

“I know, but we’d need her to list you, and she hasn’t done that. I could call her on the number listed here, if you want?”

“No,” I said, probably too quickly. I slowed down. “She’s at a big business meeting with a promoter and she told me not to interrupt her. This is important. My leukemia medication is in her room and I need to take it.”

“You take medication for leukemia?” the woman asked.

“To prevent it,” I said. “It’s to prevent me from getting leukemia, and it’s really dangerous if I miss a day. It runs in my family. My father had it.”

I couldn’t tell if she believed it or not. People get freaked out by anything to do with health. “I can’t call her?” she asked again.

“No, she’ll get worried and it’ll ruin her meeting. Please, miss, I have to get in there.”

She peered around like Angela did in Vegas, but she was slicker and did it just with her eyes. She made a key-card and said she was only doing this because it was an emergency. I asked if she wanted an autograph, but she said, “Um, thanks, that’s all right.”

I sped back to Jane’s room and listened outside the door and went in. Her computer was in the bedroom, which was lucky, since sometimes she brought it to concerts. If she caught me using it, I’d say I was reading about the nightclub incident and my own key-card worked on her door.

While it booted up I looked around, but I didn’t see any more legal letters, only her usual junk and clothes on the floor and even more dumped on the bed, though I kept the light off so I didn’t get a great look. Except she had a copy of The New Yorker magazine open and facedown on the desk, which didn’t make sense because she never reads it except once when they ran a profile of Ronald and it mentioned me a few times. When I turned it over, though, I saw why:

Jonny Valentine’s concert last night was anemic even by today’s nadir of pop-music standards. One would be hard-pressed to imagine a hypothetical performance an audience might find more alienating.

— The Kansas City Star.

When my manager’s manager told me I’d been invited to perform at the historic Apollo Theater in Harlem, I was so excited that one of my handlers screamed for me with excitement.

The day before my performance, an old movie called “The Jazz Singer” was on TV. The star, Al Jolson, had really great makeup, with black paint all over his face. Not only did he look badass, but it seemed like the perfect way to cover a pimple — and, boy, I had a honker right on my button nose! It also made his lips look a lot fuller, and I’ve always been insecure about my thin lips. So I sent my handler’s manager’s handler to buy me some industrial-strength Midnight Black Hole paint and bright red gloss to make my lips really pop.

I wanted to surprise everyone, so I didn’t put on the paint until just before I went onstage. There was another movie I’d seen a couple weeks before that I also thought was cool, because it starred a guy with a kick-ass mustache. I don’t have much facial hair, but I let it grow in the week leading up to the awards, then just before I put on the black paint I shaved everything but the mustache so I could look like him. I also had the movie playing behind me on a big screen with a close-up of the guy I was trying to look like, so everyone would know the mustache was on purpose. Check it out sometime, even if foreign movies normally suck—“Triumph of the Will.”

It was time to sing my song called “I Like Girls with Curves.” But I wanted to do something special for this performance and tweak my lyrics a little. Fortunately, there was a book lying around backstage that had a similar title. I just plucked out a few lines and mixed them into the verses, and changed the chorus to “I Like, and Wholeheartedly Endorse, the Bell Curve.”

Yet the star is only as good as his backup dancers. It was almost Halloween, so I thought my dancers should dress up — and my all-time favorite costume is ghosts. My second favorite? You guessed it: dunces. I got all my dancers ghost outfits with dunce caps, and told them to cover their faces, too. Hey, I’m the star, you know? But I felt bad that they weren’t getting as much attention, so I researched which shape is most visible from a distance, got them some wood in that shape, and had them light the wood on fire for better visibility. I also wanted to single out the three dancers who’d been with me longest — Krista, Carl, and Kiersten — by putting up a banner with the first letters of their three names. Except the guy who made the banner thought Carl was spelled with a “K”! Maybe we’ll get a discount next time. They were doing this new dance I’d choreographed in which they go around in a circle totally in sync on horses. Aww, yeah: Ghosts in dunce caps on horseback with flaming crosses!

In the middle of all this perfection, something went wrong — suddenly the big-screen video stopped, the background music cut, and the house lights went down. What a low-budget production! The TV crew was still filming, though, so to show everyone I was against “The Man” and wasn’t afraid to stand up to corporate America, I started yelling about how cheap they were. I’ve been studying vocabulary lists — stay in school, kids! — so instead of saying “cheap,” I decided to whip out one of my bigger words.

“Y’all are niggardly!” I shouted. “Goddamn niggardly! Get ’em for being niggardly!”

I then repeated the word niggardly seventeen times. Everyone started talking, probably to ask what niggardly meant. “Oh, I’m sorry,” I said. I figured I had to speak down to the level of people who don’t understand big words, so I should have shortened it and referred to it just by its first letter. “I guess I should’ve called it ‘the N-word.’ Is that better?”

I kept getting calls after the show from a group named the NAACP, which I assume stands for the National Association for Awesome Costume Parties. They probably want to know where I got my ghost costumes and dunce caps.

I’m going to ask the NAACP if they want to sponsor my next tour through the South! ♦

I recognized the writer’s name, because he flew in from New York to hang out with me for a day for a softball profile in a music glossy last year. I must have made him a few months’ rent on his crap apartment by now. Not only did he not sound like me at all in this article, but we only released “I Like Girls with Curves” as a digital single because we knew it was weak. I understood the jokes about the KKK and a bunch of the rest, but I didn’t think it was that funny. People in the cultural-elite demo usually aren’t. They just like making fun of my music so they feel special about liking their own boring classical music that no one listens to anymore, the same way that New York Times writer bashed Jane to feel better about how good a mother she is. They’re probably even happy that no one else listens to classical music now, so they can feel really special. If you listened to Mozart when he was alive, it was like saying you listened to MJ. And they’re just as into reading and talking about celebrities, only their celebrities are politicians and serious musicians and writers and movie directors. Jane’s big into publicity that reaches people high up on the cultural food chain, though, even if they’re way out of my fan base, because there’s always a trickle-down effect. I’m sure she was happy about this.

I almost forgot what I’d come in for, so I signed into my email and read my father’s letter again, and it was different here, since it was like he’d written these words himself, not ones I’d printed out later.

I’d had all these questions before for him, but now I didn’t know what to write. Or I knew some things, but I couldn’t click on the reply button and type them in. I just stared at it.

I heard the elevator ding down the hall and two people laughing, and one of them sounded a lot like Jane, so I signed out of the email fast, which I was getting a lot of practice at, and closed the computer, which made the room completely dark, and the voices were louder and one of them was definitely Jane’s, I can ID her laugh a mile away, and I remembered there were closets in the living room, so I ran out of the bedroom and almost tripped over a suitcase, but I heard Jane sliding her key-card and it kept beeping from her not doing it right, and I didn’t have time to hide in the closet so I crouched in the small space between the back of the big white U-shaped couch and the wall. I was doing that a lot lately, like I was in the movies. General Jonny, hiding from the enemy.

“Abracadabra,” Jane said, slowly. She was drunk.

There weren’t any sounds for a few seconds as the door shut, and I didn’t want to lift my head. But then there were footsteps, and something bumped hard against one of the sides of the couch. A man’s voice, low and steady, said, “Don’t fucking move.” I couldn’t tell whose it was, but it sounded familiar.

“Yes, sir,” said Jane in this little-girl voice that was a million miles from what she used when she was bitching out the TV producer. I could tell she was putting it on, that she wasn’t actually in danger, but the guy sounded like he wasn’t pretending at all.

Then shoes hitting the ground one after another, high heels falling to the floor, a zipper unzipping, jeans being shaken off, keys and a belt and change jingling and clanging when they hit the ground, and the man saying, “Take off your clothes and stand there.” I still couldn’t place his voice.

I held my breath, since I was sure they could hear me breathing. Once you pay attention to the sound of your breathing or your heartbeat, it’s like the loudest sound in the world and you have a hard time doing it regularly. It’s the reason why you’re supposed to be aware of your breathing while you sing but you should never think about it, because you’ll screw it up.

The man said, “You like being my little slut, don’t you?” and Jane again said, “Yes, sir,” and I heard a loud slap and Jane moaned and the guy said, “Shut up,” and Jane said, “I’m sorry, sir,” and heat rose up in my body like it wanted me to jump over the couch and tackle him, even though I knew from her voice that Jane was playing along. But I’d get in major trouble.

My eyes had adjusted to the darkness, and I peeked up a tiny bit to see if I could watch them without them catching me, since their eyes probably hadn’t adjusted yet and they were off to the side. Jane’s back was to me, and the guy was standing in front of her totally naked except for dark socks and his boner sticking straight up out of his pubes. A man looks weird with just long socks and a boner. I couldn’t see him too good, only that his arms were covered with tattoos.

Oh, man. The head crew guy. Bill.

Bill had joined us when we began assembling the crew for this tour and getting the stagecraft down, so the longest this could’ve been going on was a few months, but he’d never been at our place in L.A. He didn’t talk to me much.

“God, you’re so beneath me,” Bill said.

“I’m sorry,” Jane said in her little-girl voice.

“You don’t even deserve my cock tonight,” he said. “I’m just gonna jerk off on you.”

“Yes, sir,” she said again, and I heard him jerking off. After a minute he said, “I need moisturizer or something,” and she ran in and out of the bathroom and handed him something, and he took a few more minutes, and I closed my eyes and thought of me telling Lisa Pinto she was my little slut and her calling me sir, but the way Jane said it, and then Bill took a step toward her and made this sound like an animal growling.

He went to the bathroom and peed and used the sink while Jane pulled a bunch of tissues from a box and wiped herself off. Bill came back and Jane went to the bathroom, and he sat down on the couch. I peeked over again. His hands were behind his head like a pillow, and it looked like his eyes were closed. He was still naked. His penis was small now and hanging to one side. That looked even stranger than a boner, a grown man with a soft penis that wasn’t all that much bigger than mine.

When Jane came back, she sat down next to him and asked, “Want some?” Bill took a long gulp of water before giving it back.

“It’s my birthday on the sixth,” Jane said. Bill grunted, though it wasn’t like one of the grunts from before. “Maybe we could do something special that night.”

“Maybe,” Bill said. “Where are we gonna be?”

“Cleveland.”

“Beautiful,” he said. “You can really paint Cleveland red in early February.”

She was quiet until she said, “I had to go to the children’s hospital today. For photo ops.”

“Yeah?” he asked, but it was more just saying it than a question. “How was it?”

“I’m never going to a children’s hospital again.”

“It’s no worse than a regular hospital, when you get down to it.”

“It is, to me.”

“Right,” Bill said. “My sister lost a baby, too, you know.”

Too? I almost asked.

“You told me,” Jane said. “You said hers was stillborn. Mine lived two weeks.”

I thought it was hard not to jump out before when he slapped her, but it took everything in me to stay still now. I couldn’t remember Jane being pregnant. Maybe it was before I was born. It wasn’t something I could ask her about normally, but now I really couldn’t be like, Oh, I know about it because I heard you talking about it with Bill after he jerked off on you in your hotel room I’d broken into so I could email a guy who says he’s my father but he still may be a child predator.

And she didn’t lose me. I was right next to her. Closer than she would’ve wanted.

There was a long silence. Jane said, “I missed you. I don’t like going this long without seeing you.”

“It’s only been three days.”

“I know.” I could hear her tracing her fingers over his chest. “Still.”

For some reason this made me even more upset. I tried to remember all the other times Jane had said she was meeting with a promoter or something so she wasn’t coming back to the hotel. Sometimes I bet it was real, and the rest it was Bill.

“You want to go to the bedroom?” she asked.

“Mmm.” He stretched and stood up. “I gotta go.”

“Can’t you just stay a little?”

“You know I have to check in with Elsa before she goes to sleep, and I won’t do it from here.”

“You can come back after.”

“I never sleep well with you, and we’re loading up early tomorrow.”

“Okay,” she said, even more quietly, like she’d really been slapped this time.

He put his clothes on there, and when he was dressed he gave her a quick kiss on the mouth and said, “We’ll do something nice for your birthday, okay?” and she said, “Uh-huh,” and he walked out quickly and let the door shut on its own behind him.

Jane didn’t move, but I knew she was awake, probably with her eyes open. I could almost hear her thinking in the dead quiet of the room. I didn’t know what was going through her head, but I was sure it wasn’t about my digital apps or the Asian market or anything like that. Finally she went to the bathroom, and I thought about making a run for it, but it was risky. A pill bottle opened with a popping sound. It was smarter to wait it out.

From now on, when I looked at Bill, I’d know he was cheating on his wife. I kind of hoped I’d run into him in the hall, even if it meant getting in trouble. I’d ask him if Elsa was a fan, because I could make a courtesy call to her to say hi. Just to make him sweat.

And when Jane told me she had to go to an unexpected dinner with a regional promoter, I’d know she was lying. It’s also probably why she defended Bill for the heart-shaped swing. Plus it made me pissed that of all the guys on the tour, she chose him. He was muscular and good-looking and the best at his job, but he was an asshole. If she had to pick someone, it should’ve been Zack. He’s not much younger than some of the other guys she’s been with.

She started snoring like a quivering bird from the bedroom, and I climbed out carefully from behind the couch and left. When I got to my room, I called the label. It was late, but someone would be there. A girl picked up, and I identified myself as Client 463, password Breathtaking, and asked if I could get Zack Ford’s cell phone number. She said he was no longer a client of the label but they still had it on file.

I called his number. It rang a few times, and I thought it was going to go to voice mail, but then Zack said hello.

“It’s Jonny,” I said, so he didn’t think I was a girl again.

“Jonny,” he said in a flat voice. That was it.

“Where are you?” I asked.

“In my kitchen. Making couscous. It’s a glamorous life.”

I’d meant what city, in case Jane was lying about that, too, but she’d told the truth. “So you’re not with the label anymore?”

“Nope,” he said. “Their lawyers found a variety of clever ways to cleave us. Cleave in the sense of separate, not join. That’s called a contronym, by the way, when a word means its own opposite.”

If he’d stayed on the tour I could’ve learned all this stuff, plus new bands I’d never heard of and ideas about movies and smart jokes. Now I couldn’t.

“I’m sorry I made it so you had to leave,” I said. “If I’d known, I wouldn’t have even come to the nightclub with you.”

“It’s okay. We’ll find another label.”

“And I wouldn’t have had any of the alcohol.”

Right when I said it, I could hear him tense up in his kitchen in L.A. “Anyway, it was nice talking to you, Jonny,” he said. “And watch out for yourself out there. It’s a cutthroat industry.” He hung up before I could even say good-bye.

Maybe he thought I was taping him for a tabloid or something, except that would make me look worse than him. That was probably the last chance I’d get to talk to him. I didn’t blame him. I’d left Michael Carns behind in St. Louis and I’d left Zack behind in Memphis, even if officially we made him leave. I was like the criminal who told the police my friend was guilty.