The Love Song of Jonny Valentine

CHAPTER 2. Los Angeles (First Day)

Walter waited for the room service guy who’d delivered my breakfast to leave before tasting it first for me. He always makes some joke about how it’s not poisoned but it might as well be, because it’s a three-egg-white omelet with spinach, no hash browns or toast, which are straight carbs, and coffee, no dairy. Walter eats meat and fried food and ordered a salad like once in his life, since he’s from Nashville, where he has three daughters he’s on the child-support hook to his old lady for and where we’ll play later in the tour and which still has a strong country base that’s difficult for pure pop acts to penetrate. He’s about 250 pounds, which is half muscle from lifting four days a week, but half fat because he says walking from a hotel or venue to the car service counts as cardio. He says chasing around his daughters used to keep his weight down. Now he just has to walk briskly by my side, but I’m not supposed to run indoors because of injury risk and I definitely shouldn’t in public or it might spark crowd interest and trigger a stampede. I bet he was fun with his daughters, though.

I thought of asking him about the legal letter and telling him about the Internet fan-forum messages, but first of all, Walter never went on the Internet, and second, even though he wouldn’t tell Jane, I didn’t want to make it so he had to lie to her.

He left to eat in one of the hotel restaurants with the rest of the crew, and I sipped my drink and imagined the coffee beans were fighting the early onset dementia that Grandma Pat had maybe passed down to me and Jane, and they were using the paralyze spell from Zenon, which freezes your enemies for a few seconds. There should be an early onset dementia spell, too, which places your enemy in an old-age home.

After breakfast Walter came back to escort me down to the basement service exit, and I put on my sunglasses and a Detroit Tigers hat because I’d been wearing the Dodgers hat three days in a row. You never want to alienate fans in different markets, even though my following is all girls who think you score a touchdown in baseball. Jane is like, Let the paparazzi take your photo but make it look like you’re not letting them take it, so the baseball hat and sunglasses are perfect for that. And plus the baseball hat is my trademark now. Jane once showed me a big website that’s only candids of me in different hats.

In the bus parking lot, the star/talent bus was parked all the way past our five other buses and four eighteen-wheelers. Me and Walter boarded it and said hi to the driver, Kenny, and Jane weighed me on the scale near the front. Eighty-eight pounds. I’d started the tour eighteen days ago at eighty-six. You almost always drop weight when you’re performing, no matter how bad you’re eating, but I’d been raiding the minibars and gift-basket amenities more than normal, and now that I’d seen the number, I could tell I was getting beefier.

She didn’t say anything about it, but she didn’t have to. She just whipped out the hotel bill and said, “Three packages of candy. Thirty-two minutes on the bike, either now or later.”

“I sang and danced for two hours last night.”

“Are we going to argue about this every morning? That’s only six hundred calories, and it’s not sustained cardio that raises your metabolism,” she said. “You want your next publicity photos to show you with a gut, too?”

I chose the bike now, because it’s worse to have it waiting for you and I didn’t like seeing eighty-eight any more than she did. Before I left the driver’s section, Walter stepped on the scale. “I’ve gained six pounds,” he said, and patted his belly. I wanted to laugh, but Jane was already in a bad mood.

I walked into the living room, over the wooden floors and past the tan leather couches and TV and kitchen and bar and the three rows of bucket seats, up to the door leading to me and Jane’s bedrooms and the additional bunk beds. In front of the door was the mounted stationary bike. I strapped the seat-belt harness over me and programmed the bike on medium-intensity intervals. What would Jane say if I asked her about the letter in her room about my father? She’d probably pretend it was nothing, like about an impostor or something. She’d go even crazier if she found out I’d gone down to the lobby by myself to get the key-card for her room.

I biked and listened on my iPod to an album by a new British singer Jane downloaded for me, who’s got decent phrasings but a flat upper range. When this one track had about a minute of white noise, I overheard Jane and Rog talking quietly two rows up in the bucket seats. “I can’t believe I’ll be forty in three weeks,” she said. “The number sounds wrinkled.”

“Nonsense,” Rog said. “You look early thirties. If I were straight, I’d do you in a second.”

She looks early thirties from a distance because she’s short and how she dresses, and sometimes if she’s turned around and I don’t realize it’s her, I think she’s in her twenties. But when you have face time with her, if I had to play the age game, I’d guess forty-two or even — three.

“As if I’d let you, with your gray-haired balls,” Jane said, and they laughed. Jane’s going gray and is naturally mousy brown but dyes it blond, and Rog would be salt-and-pepper but he dyes it black. He says none of the queers in L.A. would even think about going for him if he didn’t, even though he’s a super-successful choreographer and voice coach who used to sing and dance on Broadway. He won’t say his age but I saw on our payroll that he’s fifty-three and makes $315,000 a year with bonuses for tours.

“Listen.” Jane twisted the thick silver ring she wears on her right hand’s middle finger. “When we go to Salt Lake City, the Mormons are gonna freak the fuck out if they see a gay working with Jonny.”

“I can’t wait,” Rog said.

“I know, but this time, it might be best if you lay low at the hotel and don’t come to the arena.”

The white-noise track on my iPod started up with music, but I pressed pause. Jane had never told Rog not to come to the arena before. If it was cover for a business decision, it didn’t make sense, because it was our album sales that were flat, not our ticket sales, which were still okay even if we weren’t selling out every single show within three minutes like last time.

Rog said, “Jane, we’re going to Salt Lake City next week, not in 1897.”

“Still, I don’t want to take the risk.”

“Who’s going to help him with his preshow tune-up?”

“I booked a woman for the night.” She twisted her ring some more.

I couldn’t see Rog’s face, but I knew he wasn’t happy. “I don’t like the idea of someone else messing with his routine.”

Jane got into her business-negotiations voice, which is like half an octave lower and she enunciates more clearly and with her diaphragm. “Rog, it’s one night. Please don’t make this difficult.”

Rog’s always asking Jane for salary advances, so he got quiet and said, “All right, I’ll lay low.”

I finished my workout and sang “Breathtaking” on the final stretch to simulate singing while I’m out of breath at the end of a concert and showered in me and Jane’s bathroom and went into my bedroom for tutoring with Nadine. She asked what I wanted to start with, and I said language/reading, which I’m best at even though I don’t do any pleasure reading, then science and history and math for last, which I used to be a numbskull at but I’ve gotten better from studying revenues and market breakdowns with Jane, and when it’s a subject that affects you, you care about it more, and Nadine tells me I have to work hard at math since I don’t want people cheating me out of my money when I’m older, except Jane shows me exactly how it’s getting diversified and invested in our portfolio. We don’t do Spanish till next year, so I can use it in interviews and maybe even sing a song in it to boost my Latin-market presence, but she teaches me a new word each session. Yo soy un cantante de música pop.

We finished our work early, so we did freewriting time at the end with a prompt from Nadine. Sometimes it’s song ideas, only I’m not allowed to write my own songs until I’m older and until then we have to go through the normal process, where the label rents studios for two weeks and invites all these professional songwriters and producers to collaborate on an album. Each song costs about eighty thousand dollars to produce from songwriting to mixing and mastering, not including marketing, so we figured out that a twelve-song album costs almost a million. Marketing is where the money really goes. It’s better to have a poorly produced album with a robust marketing budget than a top-shelf producer but weak marketing muscle.

Today, though, she said, “Jonny, write down all the feelings you had today.”

I said, “What do you mean?”

“Tell me a feeling you had.”

If I told her about the legal letter and the Internet message, she’d want to talk more about it and would probably mention it to Jane since she’s as scared as anyone about child predators. So I decided I wouldn’t tell anyone about it.

Finally I said, “When I heard the wake-up call, I was mad.”

“Why were you mad?”

“Because I hate being woken up.”

The bedroom door was open a few inches, and she got up and closed it. Her shirt rode up her back a few inches when she did it, and it showed her pale skin. She’s five-three and won’t tell me how many pounds but I’d guess 110 because she’s not fat and is only twenty-six and a half, but she also never goes to the gym so it’s not a toned 110. It’s better to be a toned 120 than a flabby 110. Muscular marketing for mediocre content. “Why do you hate it?”

“I want to sleep.”

“Why else, though?”

“Beats me.” The name of Tyler’s smash hit and album, but I bet Nadine didn’t even know that. I’ve never heard of the bands she likes.

“I want you to think about this, Jonny.” She squinted as the sun bounced through my window onto her eyes and turned them from blue to green. “The only way to understand yourself is by articulating your thoughts.”

“Articulating is when you separate out the notes you’re singing,” I said. “You want me to sing my thoughts?”

“It also means figuring out what you want to say, and saying it. Using language to describe what you mean.”

I articulated, “I get tired.”

“You get tired in the mornings?”

“No, I mean I get tired of waking up early every day.”

“When you’re on tour, you mean?”

“No. Every day.”

She wedged her pen behind her ear so it got lost in her black hair. “You’ve never said this before.”

I shrugged, and she asked why I was saying this for the first time. I was about to say, “Because you asked,” but Bill, the head crew guy, who was riding on our bus today because he had to confab with Jane and the label over crew changes when we got to L.A., knocked on the door and stuck his head in. He has a big beard he’s always scratching and muscles on his arms like little rocks are poking out under his skin with tattoo sleeves on both of them. In a few years I can lift with Walter but not now because we want to keep me slim and boyish. I wonder if Albert Derrick Valentino lifts.

Bill said, “Three hours, guys, and the driver needs a break so we’re stopping for grub.”

So Nadine reminded me the next unit was on slavery and we were going to read some autobiographies of slaves, and she showed me a few and I said, “Nadine, can we get the kid versions of these?” and she said no, they cut out all the sad stuff and whitewashed what it really meant to be a slave, and it’s important to hear from the victims of exploitation themselves since history is always written by the victors. I asked, “Why are all the guys who write history named Victor?” and she was like, “Ha-ha, very cute, Jonny,” and messed up my hair, which Jane doesn’t like people to do but I didn’t have a show that night, and I don’t mind when Nadine does it.

I asked Jane could I please get a vanilla shake, and she sized me up and pinched the side of my waist and got about half an inch of chub. It stung but she said yes, so long as I did seven additional minutes of cardio before we got to L.A., and I said, “I’ll do a million minutes of high-intensity intervals.” She let me get a small, and I drank it without stopping except when we passed a cemetery on the highway and I held my breath. Jane taught me that game on our first tour, but she doesn’t play it herself.

Me and Rog went into my room for voice lessons. He recorded the start time and told me we’d logged 2,568 hours of practice together and had 7,432 to go. Jane read in a book you need to practice ten thousand hours at anything to become the best at it. Me and Nadine figured out last week when we were on fractions that at this rate I’ll reach ten thousand hours in about eight and two-thirds years, so when I’m twenty and one-half years old, which is around the peak age for global presence in the music industry for girls because they get cellulite and wrinkles after that, but guys peak a little older. I asked Jane if I’ll be as good as MJ after ten thousand hours, and she said, “No, you’ll be better than MJ.” Ronald says a more attainable goal is becoming the next Tyler Beats, and he’s the head of the label so he knows. Jane spends a lot of time studying his career, and if she isn’t sure about something, she asks people what Tyler would do. He started off in the teen demo, but evolved into broad-spectrum appeal.

First Rog was pissed that Jane let me have a shake since dairy is crap for the vocal cords. Then when I reminded him I’m allowed one dairy per day for the calcium and my voice sounded off on the word calcium, he was like, “Did your voice just crack?” and I had to say for the millionth time, “No, I’ll let you know when I hit puberty,” and I rolled up the sleeves of my T-shirt and said, “See, no hair?”

We did octaves warm-ups like we always do on “Oh, say can you see,” since the first time I ever did octaves was when the music teacher Mrs. Vincent had all the second-graders sing that line the lowest we could and the highest, and now it’s like my superstitious ritual. She’d gone through each of us in class and most of the kids didn’t have hardly any range. Then she got to me. I hit my lowest octave and her face changed like, What? because it’s way lower than my speaking voice, and she said, “Can you do that again?” and I did it again no problem. She asked me to do the highest I could, and I did it probably 2.5 octaves higher. I didn’t have the 3.4 range I have now, which Rog thinks I’ll get a clean four octaves eventually because I have a lean muscle aperture. Mrs. Vincent asked me to repeat both, so I did, and she told me to sing the whole song, which I knew from baseball games and was the main way I’d practiced singing before. I added some vibrato for the last line even though I didn’t know the name of it then but I’d seen singers do it on reality shows. When I was finished she was very still and quiet and just said, “That’s very nice, Jonathan, very nice.”

That night Jane said Mrs. Vincent had called her and told her I had the best natural voice she ever heard, and Jane was crying when she hung up and said she always knew I was talented from the way I’d echo songs playing in the supermarket, when I’d wait behind the checkout aisle for her to finish her Schnucks shifts, and that this was the start of something big. I was only seven years old but I was like, “Okay, but why are you crying if you’re happy, Mommy?” and Jane was hugging me and said, “Because you’re my beautiful baby boy, Jonathan.” My father had already left by then. I don’t know what he would’ve said.

Me and Rog ended with an analysis session of Buddy Holly’s “Everyday.” He’s been on a Buddy Holly kick lately, and he said to pay attention to the simplicity of the melody and instrumentation, the drummer just beating out the rhythm by slapping his knee, how it wouldn’t work without Holly’s vocal control and textural smoothness. He had me imitate his “a-hey” and the way he slows down and ranges up and down the scale within a word like his voice is going over a speed bump. I told him to pass on to whoever top-lines the next album that I wanted to do something like this in a song.

When we wrapped up, I said, “Don’t worry, I won’t let anyone mess with my routine in Salt Lake City.”

“Thanks.” He stopped putting his notes away and looked at me. “But after, let Jane know you prefer my techniques. We’re in this together. Right?”

“Right.”

“Good. You’re going to have a long career if you stick with what I tell you.”

As a voice coach, Rog is one of the best out there, but there are probably better choreographers. That’s one reason he has me focus on my singing, even though he says it’s since anyone can dance but no one can sing as naturally angelic as me.

The other reason is that he’s the oldest person on our team. Definitely older than Walter. Up close his eyes crinkle into wrinkles like cat whiskers, and he’s super-tan, but when he looked at me just then, I thought, Man, if I played the age game right now, I’d guess Rog is like sixty, which I don’t usually think because he’s still in good shape, but last week when we were finishing up the Southwest leg of the tour, he was teaching me a new eight-count move with a jump and a deep knee bend, and when he demoed it for me there was a loud crack! like his knees were going, Uh, thanks but no thanks for the ten million hours of dance practice, Rog, and he acted like it didn’t hurt but he didn’t do any more demos the rest of the day and iced it for half an hour later and popped a bunch of Vikes and told me not to tell Jane since she gets too nervous about other people’s health, which isn’t really true. She only gets nervous about mine and hers.

I said, “I know, Rog.”

We had two nights in L.A. with a concert the second night, so all the backup singers and dancers and crew guys were excited about going home with a day off. But me and Jane didn’t have it off, because the talent’s work is never done, so we had the big strategy session with Ronald scheduled for lunch, which is why we had the early start. I was like, Jane, can’t you go without me, I never have any creative input in these meetings anyway, but she said that Ronald specifically requested me to be present, and Ronald controls the purse strings so we have to pick our battles.

We finally got back into L.A. after a century on the highway. Our bus dropped me and Jane and Walter off at the Ivy. It’s the main L.A. restaurant Jane knew about before we moved here, and the minute we signed for my advance from the label she took me there for dinner.

There were about ten paparazzi, which isn’t that much. You could tell they were bottom-feeder paparazzi, not just because they were stuck working the daytime Ivy shift, but because they dressed really bad and stood out from the lunch crowd. My bus doesn’t have any markings on it, so they didn’t know who it was until we got out. Then they were all like, “Jonny, how’s the tour?” or “Jane, looking hot, give us a smile,” which I thought she might do since me and her got our teeth whitened by Dr. Kim pretour, but she didn’t, and Walter barked in his policeman voice, “Guys, give ’em some air, you’ll all get your nice pictures but you gotta back up!” I always let Jane do the talking and I just smile and once in a while dance if they ask but never sing. You have to save it for when people pay. They shouted for me to do my trademark spin move, but Jane shook her head at me. People must have asked MJ to do the moonwalk all the time, too.

We went up the stairs and through the patio and Julian at the front smiled at us and told us our table was ready. Jane likes the table right next to the fireplace, with her back to the wall. Walter stayed outside and Jane ordered a burger for him to go.

Ronald wasn’t there yet, so Jane got an Ivy gimlet plus a Diet Coke for me and asked the waiter to take away the bowl of mixed nuts, even though he told her there weren’t any peanuts. When he brought me my drink I said, “Thank you,” and “Thank you” again when he set Jane’s down since she never makes eye contact with waiters. Maybe it’s because she used to be a waitress before Schnucks and before she was a secretary for a few months at a marketing firm, and she said it was the worst job she ever had, so that should make you friendlier to waiters, except we go to gourmet restaurants where they’re paid pretty good, and she worked at a diner. But she’s a generous tipper, and sometimes it shows up in the press that she gave a tip bigger than the meal, so people might think she does it for that, but it’s really because she used to get stiffed by her customers all the time.

Jane worked on her phone while we waited. I straightened up in my seat to see. I wondered if she knew about the comments from Albert Derrick Valentino, too. But she wasn’t on any fan sites or Twitter. She was browsing my mobile app and probably coming up with ideas for how to diversify it and attract more JV/Varsity Club memberships. She has a lot of street cred in the industry for her innovation in the digital space, and she’s an excellent multitasker and doesn’t waste time when she’s working. She says it’s from years of packing grocery bags and dealing with screaming mothers and crying babies and her asshole supervisor and incompetent coworkers. Ronald calls her “the Architect” because right when she started she had an idea of how to build my career and insisted she would be my manager, even though the label strongly recommended an experienced manager, but she was always into movie stars and celebs and used to take old copies of InStyle and Us Weekly and Star home from Schnucks and read them for hours at night, except now they’re tentative allies who could betray us any second and we’ve got to be careful.

Ronald was late, so Jane asked for another gimlet and Diet Coke. When he showed up in a few minutes he apologized for the delay, but Jane said, “That’s fine, we just ordered our first drinks.”

Ronald is only a couple inches taller than Jane and balding but he has a raspy voice that makes everyone pay attention and dresses in expensive suits so he seems taller. He’d brought a woman a few years younger than Jane that we’d never met before. She wore black-framed glasses that made her look smart, and she was thin without looking like she had to work out for it.

“This is Stacy Palter,” he said. “She’s our new EVP of creative.”

Stacy smiled like an emoticon and said, “Jonny, I’m a huge fan of ‘Guys vs. Girls’ and just about everything else you’ve recorded. And, Jane, I’m really excited to be working with you.”

Jane smiled back a little when she said hello. After they sat down, she asked, “So, Stacy, how long have you been in the industry? I only ask because you seem quite young to be head of creative.” Jane was good at flipping someone’s advantage into a weakness.

Stacy laughed once to herself and looked at Ronald for a second and said, “Well, I began as an intern while I was at Columbia—”

“Did you work with Dan Freedman there?” Jane asked.

“Which department is he in?”

“Creative.”

“Oh!” Stacy laughed again. “I’m so sorry, I meant Columbia University, not Columbia Records. I interned for a few indie labels when I was a student there. Econ major.”

Jane smiled but didn’t say anything, so Stacy talked about how she’d gotten a job in the industry after she graduated and then became Ronald’s assistant and worked in creative at another label before Ronald poached her.

Ronald grinned with his crooked old-person teeth like he was her father and they were used to joking around. “Enticed, Stacy, I enticed you back,” he said. “Stacy’s got a gimlet eye for spotting talent and knows how to position artists better than anyone else at the label.” I was trying to figure out if gimlet eye meant the same thing as Jane’s drink, but didn’t want to interrupt Ronald, who added, “The opening group that’s filling in for the rest of the tour, the Latchkeys? Stacy found them.”

“I haven’t had a chance to give them a listen yet,” Jane said.

“They play edgy rock, literate lyrics. The front man, Zack Ford, dresses in a vintage suit,” Stacy said. “Stones meets the early Strokes.”

“Doesn’t seem like a fit with Jonath — Jonny’s sound,” Jane said.

“It isn’t, exactly, but they have a big teen-girl fan base, which loves Zack,” Stacy said. “They’ll catapult off and age up Jonny’s listenership. And they’ll certainly fill more seats in the Midwest than Mi$ter $mith.”

Whenever Jane’s studying the career longevity of pop stars, she’s like, Thank God you’re not black.

Jane sort of cleared her throat and took a sip of her gimlet. Ronald said, “Stacy also helped develop Tyler Beats — though, obviously, not for us,” and Jane looked up and asked, “Really?” and Stacy told her how she saw videos of Tyler singing on YouTube before anyone knew who he was, the same way I was discovered, and she got her label to sign him right away, and Ronald said she was instrumental in packaging him, especially overseas.

So Stacy actually did have a gimlet eye for spotting talent, which was what made her different from the fakes on those reality shows that pick singers who have no originality, and made her really different from the people who watch those shows who have no clue what makes a good singer and vote mostly on personality and song selection. People who don’t have any talent themselves always want to believe they can at least spot good talent, like that’s a talent itself. But they usually can’t except when someone’s a singing and dancing freak, like with MJ. Or Tyler Beats, though maybe it wasn’t so obvious when Stacy signed him. My skills were raw before the label groomed me.

Stacy excused herself to the restroom. “Is she even thirty, Ronald?” Jane asked. Ronald sighed and said yes and that everyone in this industry is young and you know that, and Jane was like, “I’ve simply noticed you tend to promote a lot of young women who’ve worked for you, is all,” and Ronald said she wouldn’t have gotten the job if she weren’t extremely qualified, and they had some fresh ideas they wanted to bring up with us and Jane would be well served to listen with an open mind. She picked up her menu even though she always gets the grilled salad.

When Stacy came back she asked me how the tour was going.

“It’s good. A lot like the last one.” I didn’t mention I was seeing a few empty seats this time around. She’d already know anyway.

“Any fun stories?”

I was starving and tore off a piece of walnut-raisin bread. Jane wouldn’t say anything in front of them about it. I repeated what she’d coached me to say if they asked about the tour: “No, we’ve been working super-hard, so we don’t have much time for messing around. But the shows are hella fun.”

Jane’s been trying to get me to say hella more in interviews to make up for any conversational accent I have left from St. Louis, so I knew this would please her and make her forget about the bread.

Ronald laughed and put his hand on my shoulder and said, “Kid’s got a work ethic like a Korean immigrant,” and Jane laughed with him, but Stacy looked down at her drink and half smiled.

They gossiped about which musicians and execs were going to rehab or were out of rehab and whose careers were crashing or stalling or supernova-ing. When our food came, Ronald said, “So let’s get down to brass tacks,” and Stacy took a folder out of her bag whose cover page said

JONNY VALENTINE 2.0 BRAND-EXTENSION STRATEGY

Stacy said, “Peruse this at your leisure. It’s a comprehensive overview of the market, Jonny’s salability and performance strengths and stumbling blocks, and what directions we can go in. I’ll touch on the main bullet points.”

She discussed the record industry for a little while, but I tuned out and ate my lamb burger and drowned my fries in ketchup and thought of the opening lines to “Guys vs. Girls” the way I always do when I see a burger now, even a lamb burger from the Ivy: “Girls and guys, burgers and fries, all gets ruined with a coupla lies.” It was the same stuff about shrinking sales and a contraction in concertgoers from the recession and media fragmentation and limited control over talent perception that Jane had been complaining about a lot the last few months.

Then Stacy said, “We think, after this tour, it’s time to reassess Jonny’s image and his music.”

Jane’s fingers gripped her fork tighter but she kept her voice calm. “What do you mean, reassess?”

“Ish. Reassess-ish,” Stacy said. “I don’t want to step on any toes here, but Jonny’s second album hasn’t done nearly as well as the first even though we poured in marketing resources for it and he had the shoulders of a major platform to stand on.”

I pictured a huge platform with a pair of shoulders and no head that I was standing on.

Jane said, “Debuts traditionally outperform sophomore albums, if you’ve had the kind of market penetration Jonny had.”

Stacy looked to Ronald for the thousandth time, and he was like, “Jane, we know that, but please hear us out.”

“Jonny, you turn twelve in two months, right?” Stacy asked. “So the deliverables for your last album under contract would, best-case, be ready later this year, and when it hit shelves, you’d be around thirteen.”

I wondered if anyone else noticed she’d said last album under contract, not next album. Stacy talked quickly, though, and turned back to Jane. “That’s the perfect time to make him a tad more… adult. Nothing drastic — we’re just talking clothes, hair, and songs and videos that connect more with the teen audience and not so much the tween demo.”

“Once you do that, you’re competing with everyone else,” Jane said. “No other singers own the tweens like Jonny does. We’ve still got a few years.”

“We have to think about the future and evolve,” Stacy said. “They’re not going to stay little kids forever. And neither is Jonny, you know?”

Jane stirred her gimlet with her straw and picked a mint leaf out and chewed on it. “What are you suggesting?” she asked.

“For starters, how do you feel about Jonny dating someone? Someone famous, obviously.”

For a second the only famous person I could think of was Madonna, and how weird we’d look as a couple but that I could always say I once dated Madonna, and then I realized she meant someone my age. Jane’s eyebrows moved together and wrinkled up her skin in this one spot over her nose. She calls it her thinking wrinkle. Botox can’t get rid of it.

“Dating?” she asked, like she’d never heard the word before.

“Not real dating-dating,” Stacy said. “We’ve got a girl in our stable named Lisa Pinto, about Jonny’s age, done some TV acting, whose first album drops in February. She’s a total sweetheart, and she’s immensely popular with Latinos. It’d be great publicity for both of them if they were seen out together in L.A. a few times. If you’re comfortable with that.”

Jane said, “Well—”

“And who knows, maybe a real romance will blossom!” Stacy laughed. “What do you think about that, Jonny? Here’s Lisa’s album cover.”

She pulled up the picture on her phone. Lisa had black hair in a ponytail and wore pink gym shorts and a white tank top over her tan skin and stood in front of a school bus, and the album’s title, School’s Out! was spelled on the side of the bus. I felt the tingling that tells me a boner’s coming, but I had a napkin on my lap so no one could tell.

“She looks nice,” I said.

Whenever the media or fans ask me if I’m dating anyone, I have to say that I’m not seeing anyone in particular right now but I’m always looking out for that special someone and I love all girls. Jane says this makes all my female fans think they have a chance, especially the fat ones, who are the most rabid and loyal. And if I ever did date someone, it would crush them and they’d turn their attention to someone else.

Jane didn’t bring that up. Instead, she said, “It’s something we’ll have to mull. I don’t like the idea of Jonny… sexualizing himself at this age to sell a few more units.”

“Totally understood,” Stacy said.

She turned her lips into her mouth and raised her eyebrows, which was Ronald’s cue to say, “We’ve also considered upgrading Jonny’s dance routines and voice work. Stacy’s got a great relationship with the woman who worked with Tyler, and she completely transformed him during his midteen years. I know you’re loyal to Rog, but what do you think about Jonny meeting with this woman, to see if they hit it off?”

“Jonny really trusts Rog.”

I don’t know why she didn’t tell them she’d already asked Rog to sit out Salt Lake City. Maybe because she wants it to sound like it’s her idea alone.

“Sure, but Rog is”—Stacy laughed to herself again—“how shall I put this delicately? Rog’s vocal techniques are antiquated, and his choreography is antiquated, and if we want to keep Jonny’s message current, we’ve got to surround him with current support.”

Jane chewed on another mint leaf. I swallowed a fry and said, “I really trust Rog.”

Stacy said, “I know, Jonny, but maybe you could just meet Holly — I bet you’d like her — and pick up a tip or two and see how it goes?”

Jane was watching me. “No, I think I’d prefer Rog’s techniques,” I said. Jane hid her smile behind her gimlet, and it always makes me smile when I see her doing it, but I stuffed a few fries in my mouth so I wouldn’t give myself away. A glob of ketchup dripped on the sleeve of my white track sweater. It looked like I’d punched someone in the nose and gotten his blood all over my sleeve.

“Okeydoke, gang, let’s drop the shop talk for now and enjoy our lunch,” Ronald said. “Jane, take a look at the rest of the folder when you get a chance. We’ll meet again when the tour’s over to review everything. Unless sales for the Garden show pick up, we’ll have to make some changes going forward.”

That was a pretty bad note to end the shop talk on, and I could tell Jane was covering up an angry mood the rest of the lunch. Her and Stacy ate half their salads and Ronald finished his steak as they picked up their gossip about real estate and restaurants and Ronald’s new ski château in Germany. He joked, “I know, what’s a five-foot-five Jew doing skiing in Germany?” When we signed with the label, Jane told me, “You always want a Jew to be in charge of your business,” and she laughed and said, “But an honest Jew.” Ronald’s an honest Jew and an industry legend.

I finished my lamb burger, but when the waitress came to clear our plates, Jane handed her mine with half my fries left. Stacy said it was awesome meeting me and she couldn’t wait to touch base again after the tour. Walter came in to escort us out of the restaurant, where a car was waiting for us with all the paparazzi. Jane let me do one trademark spin move before I got into the backseat, but when they asked me to sing the chorus from “Guys vs. Girls,” she said, “Come to his concert tomorrow night!” She could work as my publicist if she wasn’t my manager.

In the car with me and Walter she talked on her phone. I was drifting in and out of sleep, like Walter was, so I heard parts, like when Jane said, “Some bimbo he probably fucked once and had to promote so she doesn’t file a harassment suit… No, no progress on the other thing.” The other thing could’ve been a million things, but if I asked, she’d make something up about a sponsorship deal or whatever.

Jane lost the call as we drove up Laurel Canyon. She said to herself, “Peruse.” Then she told me we were invited to the twelfth-birthday party that night of this TV exec’s son.

“I’m tired.”

“I know, baby. But we should go to this. We only have one free night in L.A.”

“I just want to go to sleep tonight.”

“You can sleep for a whole week straight after the tour,” she said. “There are going to be a lot of film and TV people there.”

“We can take a meeting whenever we want.”

“Yes, but you know it’s always better when you meet them socially. An exec comes up with an idea while he’s drunk, he thinks it’s the most brilliant thing ever. We have to, baby.”

I thought Walter had been sleeping, but his mouth moved a little, like he’d heard it and wasn’t saying anything. Or maybe I didn’t see it right, because I was so tired and my eyes couldn’t stay sharp. The outside was just a blur of green trees and brown roofs.

“Can’t you just go without me?”

“It’s not as fun without you,” she said. “And they invited us both.”

Which meant they really invited me, and she’d be letting them down if she showed up without me. My head was hurting like just after a 120-decibel concert and my eyelids were too heavy to keep arguing.

“Fine,” I said. I fell asleep for real and woke up when we reached the security gate to our community. When you come home there should be a smell or sight or something you recognize, but coming back to our house hasn’t felt like that yet after upgrading from the three-bedroom the label rented for us the first year in L.A. and buying our six-bedroom in the Hills. I asked why we needed six bedrooms when it’s just me and Jane plus a couple staff and Walter in his bungalow, and she said that half of showbiz is about perception and you need to create buzz to sustain buzz, and real estate’s an evergreen source of buzz.

But it felt more like coming home getting off the school bus in St. Louis or when Michael Carns’s mother would drop me off when I was old enough to have my own keys, even if our apartment wasn’t a source of buzz, because it only had one bedroom that Jane let me sleep in after my father left and she took the couch that folded out in the living room, and we didn’t have fancy kitchen appliances the manufacturers give us for free now hoping we’ll mention them in an interview, and it was always dirty since Jane hates cleaning and couldn’t afford to pay anyone. We have a few pictures left, but that’s it.

Walter went off to his bungalow since he had the night off, and me and Jane walked through the front door and past the paintings the decorator picked out in our foyer and some framed photos of me and Jane with other celebs in the entry room, and I cut through the awards room that I walk into every day for motivation, with all my plaques and trophies in a case, except there aren’t any Grammys yet and it’s mostly crap like the People’s Choice Awards.

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.

I got in bed to take a nap, but I couldn’t fall asleep. First, I was looking at my stomach. A little chub folded up at the bottom even when I was lying on my back, and way more if I sat up. And when I bent my legs, right above my knees the skin pooched out. Maybe it was muscle, but even if it was, no one else would be able to tell.

The only way to find out if the fan-forum messages were really from my father or if someone just knew his full name would be to email him and see how he answered, which would mean setting up an email account different from the one I use for Nadine since Jane had access to it. I couldn’t do it from Jane’s computer, and there wasn’t any other way to get on the Internet in the house. If she found out, she’d make sure I never got another chance.

I closed my eyes, but I kept seeing his name in my head like it was on the screen:

Albert Derrick Valentino

And I imagined what he might look like, sort of like when the police try to figure out what a missing kid looks like years later. All I could come up with was a combination of me and Jane, like if me and her had a baby and he was born already in his forties.

Even though I was so tired, I knew I couldn’t fall asleep, so I took one over-the-counter sleeping pill from the bathroom and got drowsy, and I woke up a couple hours later. Sometimes you wake up, especially in a hotel or something, and for a second you’re not sure where you are, or which direction you’re facing in your bed. With me, sometimes it’s like I forget I live in L.A. and I think I’m still back at our apartment in St. Louis and that I’m in the small bed there and I expect the walls to be closer and my bed against the one window with my Cardinals team-picture poster over my head, and instead I open my eyes and the other wall is like twenty feet away and my huge bed is in the middle of the room and there are all these photos on the walls of me with other celebs.

I took the elevator downstairs and asked Sharon to make me a cup of coffee. She always makes the same joke: “Black, like your women, Mr. Jonny,” and I don’t take it with milk but I say, “Ebony and ivory, Sharon,” because everyone makes fun of that song, but Rog told me it was Paul McCartney’s longest number-one Billboard hit after “Hey Jude,” so the joke’s on them.

I asked how Gerald was doing. She hasn’t seen him in four years. They got engaged over Skype. She smiled super-wide and whispered, “I’ve saved enough that I think I can go back this summer.”

“For a vacation?”

“No, for good.”

“Like, to live there?”

“Yes. But don’t tell your mother yet, okay?”

“What about your job here?” I asked.

“I know.” She made this clucking sound. “I’ll miss you a lot.”

“Are you gonna work in someone else’s house there?”

“Maybe,” she said. “They have a lot of hotels I can work in, too. Right on the beach.”

I remembered a line from a crap romantic comedy I’d seen on pay-per-view in New Orleans, and said, “So, you’re gonna leave me for him? Just like that, after two years together?” except I did it with a smile to show I was joking, and then I fake-cried and improvised some new lines like, “You’re gonna leave me, I always knew it, you never loved me, I can’t believe you’re gonna leave me all alone.”

She knew I was messing around, but she got kind of serious with a gentle smile now and said, “You can always visit me, Mr. Jonny. Gerald’s got a couch you can stay on.”

I stopped fake-crying and said, “That’s okay, I can just stay at one of the hotels you’ll work at.”

Her smile went away a little and she said I could and my coffee was ready and she had to finish up some cleaning upstairs.

Jane was ending her exercise in our gym. She probably did a light routine on the elliptical, because our trainer wasn’t there today, and when she’s on her own she wimps out and does like fifteen minutes at low intensity, not enough for cardio benefits and way below what you need for serious fat burning.

She came in with a water bottle and in her sweaty workout clothes and told me our food was waiting for us in the living room. Our chef, Peter, was also off today, so Jane had ordered in salads. When we sat on the couch, she said, “There’ll be a lot of tempting junk food at the party tonight. What do we say to temptation?”

I said, “Temptation is for the weak,” and she gave me a high five and turned on the TV and we watched celeb news on E! and the networks while we ate. Jane flipped through the folder Stacy gave her. In the middle she said, “These idiots in creative are all the same. They’re only looking out for their own careers, not yours. Never forget that. No one else cares as much about your career as I do. If your sales tank, they can move on and get another client. I won’t get another son.”

She kept reading until one of the shows said that Tyler Beats was announcing his Asian tour for next fall. Her head popped up from the folder when the woman said the words Tyler Beats. “That’s what we have to do next,” Jane said. “The real money is in Asia.”

“I thought that’s why we’re doing the Internet live-stream concert, to grab Asian viewers,” I said.

“Yes, so we can get enough of a critical mass there to justify a tour. Once you do that, you’re set. They have stronger brand loyalty.”

A car commercial came on, and Jane’s eyes stayed on the screen, but I could tell her mind was somewhere else. She said, “You have more natural talent than Tyler Beats. But he works harder than anyone else.”

“I work hard, too.” Jane doesn’t watch most of my sessions with Rog, when I sing myself hoarse or dance till I get blisters or analyze songs for hours.

“Not like Tyler,” she said. “The top person is never simply the most talented, or the smartest, or the best looking. They sacrifice anything in their lives that might hold them back.”

I wasn’t sure if she meant anything in particular, and if I brought up Zenon as an example, she might say, Yeah, you have to cut that out. So I shut up while we finished the show and our salads. Jane said she was showering and the car service was picking us up in an hour to take us to the party. I asked why we had to take the car service, since they always make us wait when we want to leave, and she said, “You know I hate driving at night.” It’s true that Jane’s a safe driver and she doesn’t like driving at night and I wasn’t even allowed in the front seat until this year, but I knew it was so she could drink, and she never drives with me in the car when she’s had any alcohol.

“Can Walter come and drive us?”

“It sends the wrong message.” She sighed like she was tired of talking about it and tired in general. I moved behind the couch and gave her a neck rub. She closed her eyes and made a few mmm sounds, and after a minute said, “You’re the best at that, baby,” and stood and kissed the top of my head and ran her hands through my hair. “I’m so happy when we get to hang out like this, just you and me. I miss this on tour, when we’re running around in a million directions with a million people around us.”

“Maybe we could find time to do it more on tour,” I said as she walked away. We hung out together a lot more on our first national tour. Jane’s been busier this one.

She paused, but her pauses are like pausing the game in Zenon, where the music keeps playing. Jane’s never not thinking. “Sure, that’d be nice,” she said and smiled at me. She left to shower and I watched TV on the couch but I really thought about Tyler. Like, did he work twice as hard as me, and is that what it took to get where he was, and would I want to do that? What if it meant sleeping two less hours a night and not playing Zenon but only practicing and extending my tours and reducing gaps between shows and never eating anything bad for me?

And though I wouldn’t say it to Jane, in my mind I was like, No, don’t make me. I don’t even know how I could do that. I’m already working the hardest I can without departing the realm.

Jane always takes a year getting ready. I knocked on her door and told her the car service was waiting outside, and she opened it and said, “They get paid for their time.” She was in her lingerie and had two dresses on her bed, a red one and a blue one, and asked me which I liked more, and I said the blue one, so she put it on and asked me to zip her up. “Do you think my stomach’s getting fat?” she asked.

It was a little fatter than pretour, with some wobbly jelly chub over her gut. We went through a women’s glossy a few months ago that ID’d problem zones. I didn’t say anything, but Jane’s were Belly Bulge, Bat Wings, and Muffin Top. She didn’t have Turkey Neck, Armpit Fat, Thighscrapers, Cankles, or Back Fat. She thought she had Mom Butt, but she doesn’t.

I went, “No, not at all.”

In the ride over she told me who she thought was going to be at the party. I didn’t know their names, but I knew who they worked for, and most of them were at top-shelf movie and TV companies and agencies. For a second I wondered if maybe my father had been waiting for me to return to L.A. and he might show up, but that was stupid for a million reasons.

Jane hadn’t stopped talking. “We still have to find the right vehicle for you,” she said.

“How about a Ferrari?” I said.

She smiled and pinched my cheek and said, “Maybe you could do comedy.” That kind of joke was like my Victor joke to Nadine, though. You smile, but you don’t laugh. Like a song you hum along with but don’t tap your feet to.

The party was in Calabasas, and we got lucky with traffic, so it took about forty-five minutes. The house was behind a security gate like ours, and when Jane had trouble with the guard and her name on the guest list, she pressed down the window all the way, and he let us in.

We drove around the half-circle driveway past all the parked cars of the guests and up to a typical Calabasas mansion, with stone columns in the front and a huge set of double doors like a castle, and the house was white and light pink the way Jane likes her salmon cooked. There were torches along the walkway to the door and balloons and banners saying HAPPY 12TH BIRTHDAY MATTHEW! Jane checked her makeup once more in her compact mirror and knocked.

A woman with the kind of long skinny arms Jane is always trying to get — she calls them flamingo arms even though they’re really like flamingo legs — and who didn’t spray-tan and had straightened black hair that was a definite dye job answered it with a glass of wine in her hand. She smiled at Jane and said, “Hello!” and then saw me and her smile became real. “Hi, welcome! I’m Matthew’s mother, Linda.”

People who know better never say my name when they first meet me, but they try not to act like they don’t know me, either. It’s the fans who slobber all over you, and sometimes other celebs pretend they don’t recognize you. It’s always the male movie stars or rock stars who act like they’re too cool, but I can tell when they’re faking it and are secretly excited to meet me, since they’re pretending not to be impressed. When someone actually doesn’t care, like politicians who meet me for photo ops and don’t hardly know who I am, they have to pretend to be impressed. That’s how you know who’s more famous, whichever one of you is more excited to meet the other. It helps that I don’t really know a lot of older actors, but they all know me, besides the ones who are seriously old and culturally irrelevant. Jane says most male movie stars have career peaks from about twenty-five to forty-five, but a male pop star can start earlier and also probably ends quicker unless he’s really savvy. Women’s careers in both are over by the time they’re thirty, which is why they all suddenly get interested in having kids then. Once you have a kid, you’re basically saying, Fuck you, career, except if you’re the type of parent who doesn’t really care about his kid anyway.

Jane introduced us and handed Linda a wrapped gift, which I’m sure was my debut album and a concert DVD. Our basement has a room that’s filled with like a thousand of each.

About eighty adults and kids were standing around eating hors d’oeuvres from waiters in the main living room after the entrance. I recognized a few of the adults from the glossies, but no one was nearly as famous as me, which sometimes is a rush and sometimes you want someone else to take the attention off you, since everyone either looked at me or pretended not to when me and Jane walked to the bar. Except when there is a bigger celeb, after you relax, you get pissed, like, Why is this guy more famous than me?

Jane whispered that Linda got small roles on a few TV shows but her career would be in the toilet without her husband. After she got her prosecco, Matthew’s father came over and kissed Jane on the cheek and thanked us for coming and shook my hand and said, “Big fan,” and I said, “Love your work.” You’re not supposed to say anything else except “Big fan” or “Love your work.” He wanted me to meet his son, so he called Matthew over.

Matthew was wearing a button-down and nice pants. His father said, “Matthew, thank Jonny for coming to your party. I’m sure he’s very busy.”

He stared down at his loafers and mumbled, “Thanks for coming.” For having such good-looking parents, Matthew was pretty funny-looking. He had buck teeth and he already had acne and his stomach was a little chubby. I felt bad for him. I wondered if my father was good-looking, and if he was, why him and Jane made a good-looking kid, but Matthew’s parents didn’t.

His father said, “Make eye contact when you’re speaking to someone, Matthew.”

Matthew made eye contact, and this time, when he said, “Thanks for coming,” his eyes turned into tiny hard stones and I could tell he hated me. I didn’t know if it was because I was famous or cuter or more talented, which are the usual reasons, or because his father was embarrassing him, but I can always tell when someone hates me right away. A lot of times it’s easier to tell than when someone loves you.

I said, “Jane, can we get Matthew and his parents VIP seats to the concert tomorrow night? If they’re available and want to come, I mean.”

Jane seemed surprised but said we could probably do that, and asked Matthew’s father if that was okay. He said they had plans but they could easily cancel them, and I looked at Matthew sort of like, Fuck you, Matthew, now you’ll have to make eye contact with me for a whole night and sit through an entire concert and your parents are gonna love me even more, and I don’t even care that when you open Jane’s gift you’ll probably try to break the discs with your friends from school.

Jane saw someone else she knew and introduced me, and we spent the next hour schmoozing different adults in the movie and TV entertainment industry. A few mentioned they had a project in mind that I was perfect for and we should call their offices to take a meeting, and Jane said we’d be making the rounds when the tour was over. I was still tired and wanted to go home, so instead of talking shop, I ate every spinach-and-cheese-pie triangle and mac-and-cheese cupcake and all the other weird hors d’oeuvres from the waiters, most of which had dairy. Each time I did, Jane shot me a look like, Enjoy it, kid, because that’s your last one, but I knew she wouldn’t say anything in front of the others, so I kept pigging out. She owed me for making me take basically two different meetings in one day.

The kids were hanging out together on the other side of the room, playing with their iPhones and eating from the table that had Doritos and soda and gourmet caramel popcorn and sometimes glancing over at me. Most were around me and Matthew’s age, but some were younger or older. They all dressed about the same, in expensive jeans and T-shirts that were the in-store versions of what designers send me. When you squinted your eyes, it almost looked like a team uniform. But if I stood next to them, you could tell there was something just a little bit different, like the stitching and buttons on mine are higher quality and tailored with new measurements every two months even though I haven’t hit my growth spurt yet.

I was a few feet behind Jane and this woman who was a network exec, but they didn’t know I was there. After Jane listed the highlights on the tour, the exec said, “It must be tough on Jonny.”

Jane asked what was tough, and the woman was like, “You know. Not having a normal childhood.”

Jane said, “What’s abnormal about it?”

The woman said, “Sorry, poor choice of words. I just mean I… I wouldn’t put my son through it, that’s all.”

Jane was like, “Not everyone could handle it.”

“You’re right, he probably couldn’t,” she said. “I apologize if I misspoke.”

Jane’s voice iced over and she said, “Well, it was really nice meeting you.” She excused herself to the bathroom and wobbled off in her high heels, and the woman noticed me and fake-smiled and said she had to say hi to a friend, and I grabbed four more pigs in a blanket and stuffed them down while Jane was away. I didn’t know who the woman’s son was, but I looked around for the most normal-looking, average kid in the room. I found a boy with short brown hair, in a group of kids near the popcorn bowl. I tried to picture him growing up and staying normal-looking and average, going off to college, getting a job in an office, marrying a normal-looking woman, having a bunch of normal-looking kids who later went off to college and got office jobs, working another forty years, then departing the realm and having a funeral with just his family crying there because the public didn’t know who he was and everyone else forgot about him since he was so normal.

I went to the bathroom near the kitchen, but Jane was still inside. There was another room with the door open, a study, to one side, and Matthew’s father was inside at a desk with his back to me, on his laptop and making a phone call. I pushed the kitchen door a crack, and no one was there, so I walked inside to hide out.

All the extra food and drinks were on the tables, but I wasn’t even hungry anymore, I was eating out of boredom, and Jane always says that’s who the real chubs are, people who fill up their guts with food because they’re missing something else. I sat on a chair and listened to the voices muffled by the door. You could separate different voices out if you strained hard enough, like isolating music tracks. Everyone was trying to be the one who was heard, making their voices louder or saying the funniest or smartest line they could think of. The stupid thing is that people always listen to me, even though I’m just a kid and I wasn’t even that good in school when I went and the only people I make jokes to are Jane and our staff, and my jokes suck.

Then I heard some voices outside, in the back of the house. There was a door in the kitchen to the backyard. It was unlocked and I opened it to a big fenced backyard with patio chairs and tables and trimmed grass and a small pool without water. The noises were coming from right around the side of the house. It was numbskull of me to be out there in the first place, and even more numbskull to go see what the sounds were with Walter grabbing shut-eye forty-five minutes away in his bungalow. But Jane was getting drunk, so it’s not like she was doing an A-plus job of watching me.

I walked to the side of the house and knocked into a recycling can filled with glass. Nothing broke, but it made a rattling sound, and I could hear whoever was around the corner going, “Shit, shit.”

It was the older kids who’d snuck out. The two boys’ hands were behind their backs, and the two girls had guilty looks. They were around fifteen or sixteen. That was about the oldest my fan base got, and they were always harder to talk to. Tweens were easy, since they only squealed and didn’t have any real opinions, and adults try to be polite, but it’s hard to know what to say to the teen demo, who do have opinions but don’t feel like they have to act nice. “Hey,” I said.

“Hey,” said one of the boys, who had a haircut that was influenced by The Jonny, even if he didn’t know it, with an asymmetrical sweep down almost covering the eyes. Everyone wants to think their look is their own, but it’s always coming from someone way higher up on the style food chain. The boy brought his arm out. He was holding an open bottle of wine. “Want some?”

All the kids were staring at me like, Is he gonna drink with us or rat us out? “That’s okay,” I said. “But you guys can do it.”

He smiled, mostly to himself, and said, “Cool, thanks for giving us permission.” The others laughed, and he took a swig and passed it to one of the girls.

“I’m seeing your concert tomorrow with three friends,” one of the girls said.

“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll give you a shout-out.”

“Except it’ll be like a joke,” she said. “Like, pretending we’re the kind of girls who are excited about a Jonny Valentine concert. No offense. It’s just, we would never go to it, for real.”

“Oh.” There’s nothing else you can really say to that, unless I said something like, “It’s just, you’re an idiot, spending your parents’ money and putting it in my bank account for a joke. No offense.”

“Don’t be such a bitch, you’re hurting his feelings,” said the first boy. He grabbed the bottle back and held it up to me. “Sure you don’t want some?”

“I better not tonight,” I said.

“Right,” he said. “Save it for tomorrow, before your concert. Like a fucking rock star.”

“Yeah, maybe,” I said. The boy smiled to himself again like he’d won. The air was a little chilly, but looking at that kid’s smile, this heat rose up in my body, and I felt like if I didn’t say something, I’d set myself on fire.

“Or like a fucking no-talent nobody whose father pays for him to go to private school,” I said.

I didn’t wait for him to answer, but when I got back around the corner I heard him call me a douche bag midget and they all laughed. I nearly yelled another insult back, but you can’t control other people, Walter says. You can only control yourself, so it’s not how they act that matters, it’s how you react. The most successful celebs never lose control.

I found Jane inside the party talking to a handsome guy in his early thirties. He had on a standard young-but-not-too-young-actor’s outfit, dark jeans with a slim gray blazer and a collared pink gingham shirt under. Jane introduced me and said he was a detective on some network crime show. He said, “But don’t hold it against me,” and Jane laughed and grabbed his arm at the elbow and said I should totally do a cameo on the show, and the actor was like, “That’s such a bad idea it might actually be good. Imagine the ratings: Jonny Valentine, murder victim.”

Jane stopped laughing and said, “I was picturing more like a witness or something.”

Matthew’s father came by, and Jane grabbed him by the elbow, too. She’s always grabbing people by the elbows at parties, like if she doesn’t, they’ll all float away. “When are you bringing out the birthday cake?” she asked, and he said in a few minutes, and Jane said, “I thought — never mind,” and he said, “No, what?” and she said, “Well, I was thinking Jonny could sing ‘Happy Birthday’ a cappella, but if it doesn’t make sense…”

Matthew’s father was like, “Seriously? That’d be amazing. Jonny, would you be up for that?” I couldn’t tell if his father had no idea Matthew hated my guts, or if he picked up on it but knew that if I sang at his son’s birthday party, all the kids at school would be talking about it and Matthew would seem cooler to them.

Jane was telling me with her eyes to do it. It was supposedly a birthday gift for Matthew, but it was really a gift to Jane, for business opportunities down the road.

“If you think he’d like it, then sure.”

He smiled and said he’d tell his wife, and I should come in the kitchen soon so I could walk out with the cake. When he left and the actor went to get a refill, Jane leaned down and whispered, “This will make a huge impression on all the brain-dead execs here.” Jane says an exec is a businessman who’s convinced he has the soul of an artist.

“Fine,” I said. “But I want to leave right after.”

“Deal.”

“Like, call the car service now.”

“Okay,” she said. “One more prosecco first before they run out.”

Her face looked dried out and red from the alcohol, but she joined the actor at the bar and I went into the kitchen, where Matthew’s dad supervised one of the waiters lighting the candles on the cake. Before we walked out, he said, “Thank you so much for doing this for Matthew, Jonny. He may not… he may not be able to express it, but I know this means a lot to him.”

Sometimes parents know their kids better than anyone, and sometimes they don’t have a clue, even if they’re the kind of parents who throw their kids fancy birthday parties. Maybe my father would understand me because he hasn’t been around.

Matthew’s father turned off the lights in the living room and asked everyone to stay quiet for a special guest performance. He opened the door and the waiter carried out the cake, with me right behind, singing. Matthew stood by himself in the middle of the room, and the other kids were all taking my picture, because once I was performing the regular protocol didn’t apply.

When I got to “Happy birthday, dear Matthew,” I stared right at him again. He seemed like he was sort of pissed I was hogging the attention but also happy for the reason his father might have wanted, that it made his party the juicy gossip item at school. And even though he hated me for no good reason, I still felt sorry for him. He’d probably get even funnier-looking as he got older, and these kids might not really be his friends, maybe they only liked coming to his house for his pool and all the other cool amenities he had and because his father controls the purse strings, and not because they like him.

He blew out the candles and the adults applauded, but it was like they were mostly clapping for me, and I found Jane standing next to the actor and told her I wanted to leave, now, and she said, “I’ll call the car service.”

“You said you’d call it before,” I said.

“They were busy.”

The actor asked where we lived and Jane told him off Laurel Canyon, and he said, “Awesome, I’m in Los Feliz, I’ll give you a lift.”

I could see where this was going. Jane would invite him in for a nightcap and send me to bed. In the morning, I might see him on his way out, and he’d nod at me or act like he’d come back to take a business meeting at our house, which I’m not that stupid. And that’d almost definitely be the last time he came over.

We could all see where it was going, but no one could say anything, just like you can’t say anything besides “Big fan” when you meet a celeb.

Jane said, “Let me finish this drink and we’ll go. And that was nice of you to sing for Matthew.”

She still had most of her prosecco to go, but it was better not to argue now. Jane and the actor were flirting and he was teasing her about how high her heels were to make up for her being so short, so I slipped away to get some more of the mac-and-cheese cupcakes from the kitchen. But on the way over, Matthew’s father’s study was still open with his laptop on. No one was around. I closed the door behind me.

I was going to use a totally made-up name for a new email address, but then it might look like I was someone else. So I came up with valentinojonny@gmail.com, since a lot of times celebs use an email that’s just a little different from their real name. It took a couple minutes, and I had to keep glancing up to make sure no one was coming. Once I heard a loud creak on the floor right outside and got on my hands and knees and hid under the desk. When it didn’t sound like anyone was there, I got up again, but I was still nervous. In the movies, when the star hides and the enemy leaves, they come out of hiding and don’t worry about them ever coming back, like that was the only chance to get caught, but in real life, people can surprise you and come back again.

I took the paper with his email address out of my jeans and wrote

Can you prove you are really Jonny’s father? If you can, I can find a way to get you in touch with him.

I sent it and sat there for a minute in case he answered right away, but then I remembered where I was and closed the browser and snuck out. I made it seem like I was waiting for the bathroom, and went in and flushed Albert’s email address down the toilet.

I found Jane with the actor. She said she had to say good-bye to Matthew’s parents and go to the bathroom before we left.

When she was gone, the actor turned to me. “I’ve got an eight-year-old daughter,” he said. “She loves your music.”

I figured doing my “If it wasn’t for my fans I wouldn’t be here” line wouldn’t work on this guy, so I just said, “That’s cool. Is she here?”

“Yeah, I’m just gonna leave her here by herself, she can find her own ride home,” he said, and I thought he was serious, but then he went, “No, she’s with her mother this week.”

He kept going. “Actually, my band has this one song, ‘Xanax is a Deified Palindrome,’ that some people say sounds a little like you. We’re called the Band-Its, but with a hyphen between ‘Band’ and ‘Its.’ ” Before I could say something pretending to know the song, he said, “You wouldn’t have heard of us. Our first album was on a no-name label, but it was before I was cast. We’re gonna shop our next one around soon to the majors, now that I’m better known. And the show plays a new song every week over the credits, so I’m working to get us some airplay.”

Airplay means radio rotation, not TV. Every celeb thinks he has a cross-promotional platform just because he’s famous. Being an all right actor playing a detective on some crap TV show might mean you can launch a career in crap movies. It doesn’t mean you can launch a music career. Acting is a talent that you’re born with or not. You can improve a little with practice, but there are some eight-year-olds who are better than sixty-year-olds who’ve been doing it their whole lives. Music is a talent that requires cultivation. This guy didn’t look like someone who’d put ten thousand hours into it.

“I’ll be sure to give it a listen when it comes out,” I said.

“Here, I’ll give you our demo, if you want to give your label a sneak peek,” he said, and he pulled a CD out from his inner jacket pocket. “Or do people do that constantly to you, so it’s really annoying?”

People hardly ever did it to me, since Walter or Jane was always providing buffer, but they pushed demos on Jane all the time.

“It’s not annoying,” I said. “I’ll show it to them.”

“Seriously? That’s really cool of you.”

I stuffed the CD in my track sweater’s pocket before Jane came back. “Ready, boys?” she asked, a little slurry.

“I’m so sorry to do this,” the actor said, “but I just found out I have to take care of my daughter tonight, and she’s up in Encino.” He looked at me real quick.

“Oh,” Jane said.

“I mean, I could drop you off after I get her, if you want.” So he’d gone after Jane at first, but once he realized he had me, he didn’t need her anymore. Or maybe he thought this was part of the deal, that he didn’t go home with her if I told the label about him.

“No, that’s fine,” Jane said, with a strong voice like everything was all right and she was totally sober, but I knew better. “We’ll be in touch, and have a good night.”

They kissed on the cheek, he left, and she called the car service and guzzled one more prosecco while we waited, but I didn’t say anything this time. She conked out pretty quick in the backseat on the ride home, so I played the actor’s CD on low volume. He was the lead singer, and had limited range and a reedy texture that he compensated for with some yells and a put-on scratchy growl. The only way that’s real is if you’ve been singing and smoking cigarettes for like thirty years, which this guy definitely hadn’t done. The musicianship was medium-caliber, nothing special. Bland arrangement. Sloppy production. No real hook. Zero nuance to the vocal/lyrical relationship. My lyrics may be simple, but Rog says I’m the most subtle pop vocalist around. You need to exert control over the lyrics, not the other way around.

Plus he’d have to be the next MJ for me to help him now.

Sharon goes to sleep at like nine o’clock unless I’m coming home from a show, so no one was up. Jane headed to the stairs, because she forgot they were being renovated. I steered her to the elevator. She leaned against the wall inside and didn’t budge when the door opened. I put her arm around my shoulder and escorted her to her bedroom.

She collapsed on the bed and I took off her heels. Then I got a plastic cup from my bathroom so she wouldn’t chip her teeth and filled it with water and dumped out two Tylenol PMs. I brought them back to her and made her sit up to swallow them, and while she was up I pushed her under the sheets. Before I left the room, she said, “You wanna sleep here tonight?”

I really needed a good night’s sleep, and Jane tosses and turns even when she’s on zolpidem or an over-the-counter pill. But I said, “Okay,” and stripped down to my underwear and sponsored energy-drink T-shirt. I closed the shades all the way so the sun wouldn’t wake her early and climbed in next to her, and she sort of murmured to herself, “You’re really a good kid.”

She started snoring soon and moved around a lot and took up more than half the bed, but I put up with it and eventually fell asleep.