The Love Song of Jonny Valentine

CHAPTER 13. Nashville (First Day)

The next morning I watched out the bus window as Bill directed the final loading of the eighteen-wheelers near us. He just did it like normal, like nothing had happened the night before. A silver wedding ring was on his finger. Elsa.

I told Walter I was getting air for a second and stepped outside and went up to Bill. “Hey, is Els—” It wasn’t worth him asking Jane how I knew his wife’s name. “Is there anything else to know about the Nashville setup? Is it standard or special prep?”

He said, “Standard.” He never said more to me than he needed to.

Jane looked hungover but not too bad on the bus. I waited until we were a few hours on the road and she’d had a chance to hydrate before I reminded her that she promised I could go with Walter tonight to visit his daughters and I was giving them a game system and a copy of The Secret Land of Zenon that was supposed to be waiting at the hotel for me.

“Sure,” she said. Her eyes were closed and she was reclining in her seat. I was going to ask her to call the hotel to confirm the game system was there, but I didn’t want to push it. She asked Rog to sit next to her, which was my cue to leave her alone and let them talk.

At the hotel, before I left with Walter in the car service, Jane called to say she was staying in that night. I wasn’t sure if it was because she was seeing Bill or she was actually staying in. “Do you want to come with us?” I asked.

“No, thanks,” she said, and she was so tired-sounding, I was pretty sure she was hanging at the hotel. “You sure you don’t want to stay in tonight, too? You don’t have many days off coming up.”

“I promised Walter.”

“Just because you promised doesn’t mean you have to do it. We could order room service, watch pay-per-view.”

“I love hanging out with Walter,” I said. “He’s the best.”

“All right. Do what you want,” she said, and hung up.

“Yeah, and do what you want with Bill every other night,” I said to the dial tone. “Maybe I’ll die tonight like your other baby you never told me about.”

We brought the game system and Zenon along in the car, and Walter was jittery in the backseat. He hadn’t seen his daughters since last summer, or his ex-wife, Callie. He’s all calm when he has to push away a hundred fans who might stampede me and him, but seeing his own family got him nervous.

Callie’s house was in an okay part of town, with streets that had some trees and grass, but her house was kind of depressing. It looked thinner than my bedroom and connected to the houses on both sides of it, with flimsy wood that was painted yellow and peeling. Walter was really jittery when we walked up to the house and he rang the bell. Callie opened the door in her winter coat. She wasn’t fat, which I was expecting, but she also wasn’t cute. Walter wasn’t that handsome, either, so I guess they were a good match. “Hi, Walter,” she said.

“Hey, Callie,” he said.

He waited a second before leaning forward to hug her. I’d never seen him hug anyone before. Standing there for five seconds with them was so awkward, it felt as painful as sitting on the tour bus for eight hours. He returned to his spot, and like he’d just remembered I was there, too, he said, “This is Jonny.”

“I know,” she said. “It’s great to finally meet you, Jonny.”

I said hi and handed her the game system in a box and told her it was for her daughters. She thanked me and set it down inside and said she’d head out and would be back at eight. She called out, “Girls, your father’s here!” and walked out before they could get there.

They were six and seven and ten years old, and the youngest two, Danny and Pris, squealed a lot when they saw Walter and jumped on him and called him Daddy, which was weird for me to see. They didn’t know who I was. But the oldest, Sally, was quieter, and she only let Walter hug her the way Callie did, with her arms mostly by her sides. She knew who I was, so maybe that was part of why she was shy. It’s okay to be shy if you’re a girl, but it’s really bad if you’re a boy, like Michael is, except a lot of it was from being on camera. I’m less shy on camera than I am off it. Someone’s going to watch it later, so you have to step it up.

“What do you girls want to eat for dinner?” Walter asked.

“Pancakes,” Pris said.

“The pancake place,” Danny said.

“They’re into pancakes now,” Sally said.

“Okay,” Walter said. “How about we make them here?”

“The pancake place,” Danny said again.

“You sure?” Walter asked.

I could tell Walter didn’t want to go out to dinner. It wasn’t because he was cheap, though, since he was always sneaking me little presents in L.A. And I liked the idea of him making pancakes for dinner for his kids. Plus I didn’t want to deal with crowd interference, especially after Memphis. I pointed to the box and said, “I’ve got a video game system for you guys if we can eat here.”

Danny ran over and ripped open the box’s packaging and it was like she’d forgotten all about the pancake place. Little kids are easy to distract. That’s why it’s annoying to have girls younger than eight or so at concerts, because they lose interest in the whole concert if they don’t like one song. Older kids, it takes a few songs in a row they don’t like before they’re gone. That’s why you have to keep producing and pump out an album every eighteen months max, or your fan base will forget about you and move on to the next artist.

I helped them set up the system in the living room and explained how to play Zenon as Walter poked around the kitchen right next to us. I’d never seen Walter cook before, since Peter always made him food at home or he ordered in, and here he was getting out pancake batter and butter and pans and everything. But he actually knew what he was doing, and once I got the girls set up with Zenon, I watched him cook. His face was super-serious, like making these pancakes was the most important job in the world not to fuck up.

Me and the girls played Zenon and ate the pancakes Walter made fresh batches of every few minutes. One time, when he thought no one was looking, he stuck a couple twenty-dollar bills in one of the girls’ pink backpacks on the floor. I ate and tried not to think about how much cardio I’d owe and let the girls switch off playing and stepped in to show them how to do certain actions, though later I stopped touching the controller, because sometimes with games it’s best just to let kids figure out for themselves what to do and what not to do, even if their characters keep getting damaged. Also they didn’t get the idea of experience points, even Sally, who asked, “How do you know what to do if you don’t know how many points it gets you?” and I was like, “That’s why it’s different from other games, you have to play it a long time to get a sense of what helps you, but sometimes it still surprises you.”

Pris laughed at the voice of this archer Shamino who sounded like a baritone demon, so I turned off the character sounds and did the voices for all the characters in his voice. She laughed every time I did it, and Danny did, too, even though it wasn’t really funny. Then I whipped out my impression of Walter, whose voice wasn’t far from Shamino’s, and made up dialogue in his voice, like, “Pris, you must bestow upon me the last pancake in your inventory or I will eat you, brother.”

Walter never laughs, but he smiled and said, “You got me, brother.” It hurt a little to do the impression, since I had to make my voice all gravelly and scratchy like Lennon on “Twist and Shout,” but it was worth it, and after a few minutes even Sally started laughing, so I said everything in his voice the rest of the night, like, “Where’s the bathroom, brother?” It was a fun night, like hanging out with the Latchkeys, even if it was cooler to say you were with a rock group at a club instead of eating pancakes with three little girls and your bodyguard at their mother’s house.

When I went to the bathroom, I saw an old desktop computer in a small room next to it. I thought they might not have the Internet, because they were so poor, but they did. Everyone has the Internet except me. So I closed the door behind me, even though Walter wouldn’t actually care and I could just tell him I was doing an assignment for Nadine. A spreadsheet was open called “budget.xls.” Callie only budgeted $150 a week for groceries for her and her daughters, and I could tell from the ingredients Walter used that she shopped at supermarkets way below Schnucks. I sometimes saw Peter’s receipts for food at the organic stores, which was for me, Jane, Walter, Sharon, and him, and they were over a thousand dollars each time, but some of that was wine and liquor.

I went into my email. I wondered if my father had heard about Memphis and everything or if he was the kind of person who didn’t hear about things like that. There was one more email from him, written a few hours ago. It was strange to picture him going on a computer somewhere in New York today and writing to me. It was strange to think of him at all in a way that wasn’t just like, I wonder who the hell my father is.

I thought I would have heard back from you if you really were Jonathan or knew him. Now I guess it was a joke. Please don’t screw around with people like that in the future. It’s not nice. I just wanted to connect with my son and tell him a little about my life.

I wanted to write that it was me, I wasn’t making it up, I wanted to hear more about his life, but I didn’t have a chance to do it because I could never get on the Internet, and he was the one who didn’t make it clear if he was coming to my concert in Cincinnati or not. I almost even said to the computer, Fuck you. But I wrote

I don’t get to go on email alot but it is really me. Did you see my TV morning show appearance where I mentioned Pittsburgh and Australia and peanut butter? Where did you live in Australia? Why did you move there? Do you have any pictures you can send? Or from when you were in the Wrecking Balls? And are you coming to my concert in Cincinnati?

I didn’t have anything else to say, so after I sent the email I looked up a bunch of Australia facts that I could ask him about until they called me to come back in and help them fight one of the Emperor’s minions. We played another hour before Callie came home and the car service picked us up. Callie and Walter were weird again when they spoke, since he had to tell her he’d cooked pancakes for them and she was maybe pissed that he’d made them breakfast for dinner, and she looked doubly pissed in a more serious way when Walter said good-bye to his daughters, and Pris and Danny grabbed his legs and said they didn’t want him to go. He put both their heads in his palms and pretended to pick them up by their heads. Sally stayed on the couch and kept playing Zenon.

Walter sat with his eyes closed and was quieter than usual on the drive back. I didn’t want to break the silence, but eventually I asked, “How did you and Callie meet?”

“High school,” he said. “I thought she was way out of my league, but I asked her to the senior prom, she said yes, and there you go.”

I was surprised he thought she was out of his league, but I just said, “I guess I’ll never go to the prom. I’ll just sing about it in ‘The Big Dance.’ ” I don’t even sing it much. It’s a crap track from before the label figured out my voice.

“Never know, maybe you will.” I hadn’t told him Jane’s idea about school. I bet she hadn’t, either. Nadine could’ve. I didn’t want to discuss it with him.

He was quiet for another minute. “I fucked that one up, didn’t I?” he said.

“That was a fun night. You didn’t fuck anything up.”

“No, not tonight,” he said, and I understood what he meant.

“Then why’d you leave?” I’d never really asked Walter before about why he left his family. Jane told me not to once when I asked her.

“I didn’t,” he said. “She kicked me out. But I had it coming.”

“Why?”

He did this half-smile/half-frown thing he does sometimes. “We had creative differences.” He added, “Sometimes I forget you’re ten years old,” but instead of reminding him I was almost twelve, I said, “Do you wish you could go back?”

“Nah. I like working for you guys, and getting to hang out with you, and I’ve got my friends in L.A. and everything.”

He didn’t have that many friends in L.A. besides the guys he knew at his gym, though. He mostly hung out in his bungalow when he had time off, and if the label hadn’t recommended him as a bodyguard from a connection he had, he’d be a trainer in some bottom-shelf Hollywood gym.

“I read a fortune cookie just after I moved to L.A.,” he went on. “It said, ‘To live in the future you must break with the past.’ And I know these cookies tell you whatever you want to hear, but still.”

“So that’s why you came to L.A.? To break with the past?”

His eyes were still closed. “Yeah. But it’s more like a break in your head. Like that song of yours, ‘I Loved a Girl’? Where you realize it’s over, so you have to let it go?”

I’d always thought that song, which was actually called “Once Loved a Girl,” was just about an ex-girlfriend who didn’t love you as much in return. The chorus goes, “Once loved a girl, in the past tense, she never committed, stayed on the fence.” Maybe Walter was right.

“I had to keep telling myself, ‘I don’t love Callie anymore,’ ” he said. “Because when you really love someone, it means they can hurt you. I even had this picture of us kissing, from a photo booth, and I tore it apart in the middle. Like that other song of yours.”

He meant the chorus from “Heart Torn Apart”: “Before I felt whole, now there’s a hole in the part, where my heart used to be, ’cause you’ve torn it apart.” It’s not a hack rhyme because it’s the part and apart.

“So you did it enough that you really don’t love her anymore?” I asked.

He opened his eyes for the first time. “I’m tired, brother.”

He closed them again, and I left him alone and listened to MJ on my iPod until we got home. Walter told himself Callie couldn’t hurt him anymore, but anyone could see she was still his Major Vulnerability, right in front of him, even if she was halfway across the country most of the time. Maybe that’s what it was with most people, the person closest to them. I always figured Jane and my father both wanted to end things because of creative differences, but maybe he had it coming, too, and they were each other’s Major Vulnerability, and so she kicked him out. My songs are always about a girl dumping me and I still love her and want her back, but dating is different from people who have a kid. Except it could be that he wants to come back now, like Walter does, even if he won’t admit it.