The Love Song of Jonny Valentine

CHAPTER 3. Los Angeles (Second Day)

I let Jane sleep it off in the morning. In the kitchen, Walter sat at the table and nodded at me over his copy of the L.A. Times.

Peter put down his own copy of the Times and poured me a cup of coffee and separated three eggs for my omelet and got out the spinach. He’s got muscular forearms with blue veins popping out like worms under his skin, but he’s delicate when he cooks, and even though he used to work at a restaurant with buzz in L.A. until Jane poached him and now he makes food that’s beneath his talent level, he cares about every meal. That’s what professionals do.

“Morning, little sensei,” he said. I told him I liked karate movies one time.

“Morning, Peter.”

“How’s the cuisine been on the road?”

“Not like yours.”

He flipped the omelet and said, “Nothing like a home-cooked meal, eh, little sensei?”

“Nope.” I looked at the front page of Variety and took the sports section of the Times.

“Your Cardinals doing all right?” he asked.

Peter doesn’t follow sports and didn’t know the baseball season ended almost three months ago, which anyone who put a second of thought into it would realize they don’t play baseball in the middle of January. He thinks he has to make conversation with me as part of his job, but I’m happy just to eat and read the paper. Walter gets it. “They’ll be better next year.”

He served my omelet and went back to reading the living section. There wasn’t any sports news I cared about, so I looked at “Today’s Top Albums” in Variety. Tyler Beats still had his last two albums, Tylernol and Beats Me, in the top five for Amazon, and Tylernol was number two on iTunes. I knew I’d see them there, but I couldn’t help looking. It’s like picking a scab when you know it might leave a scar.

Jane came downstairs looking much better than last night. She rebounds quickly.

“Sound check time,” she said, all business, except it wasn’t because first we had to get my highlights touched up for the rest of the tour and maybe even a full dye job since my roots were showing and a touch-up trim now that my hair was dangling in my eyes, which my fans like, especially when I have to flip it away, but it screws with me when I’m dancing. Jane’s always like, The hierarchy is your voice, your eyes, and your hair. And when it gets long, it grows all curly at the ends, and that looks too ethnic. Jane also needed a trim, and she doesn’t trust anyone besides Christian.

Walter fist-bumped me and said, “Ready to kick some tail and take names tonight, brother?” and I never really know if he wants me to answer or if the question is what Nadine calls rhetorical and also what taking names actually means, like if you’d kick someone’s tail and ask them their name after to put on a list to help you remember whose tail you don’t have to kick anymore, plus I don’t think kicking tail and taking names includes getting a ride from your mother over to a gay guy’s hair salon on Beverly Drive to have your hair dyed blond, so I just said, “Yep.” Maybe it’s Southern-demo slang.

After the appointment, Jane drove the three of us to Staples Center, which is always exciting to play, even if L.A. isn’t my hometown. The main thing we had to make sure was fully operational was the metal swing in the shape of a heart that carried me around for the finale of “U R Kewt” and “Roses for Rosie” and the encore of “Guys vs. Girls.” We’d done rehearsals on it but we were waiting until L.A. to debut it in the show. It lifted me about fifty feet high over the crowd and projected a million stars on the roof, including a heart-shaped constellation. Jane didn’t want me to do it, and told Rog it was an unnecessary risk for a young boy to assume, but he convinced her it would make a huge impression on the crowd and I could throw rose petals on them during “Roses for Rosie” and it would really provide a midtour bump in Web chatter about the stagecraft. You have to come up with reasons why someone should pay to see you live instead of watching you on You-Tube, even if that’s how I got discovered in the first place. Everything went right in rehearsals, but I was still nervous about it.

Musicians are supposed to be bored during sound checks, except I like rehearsing with the band and the dancers and the tech guys checking sound levels and Rog making sure the choreography fits the stage and Jane organizing everyone. Sometimes it’s better than the actual show, because you’re not doing it for the audience, you’re only doing it for yourselves. It’s like you’re practicing on a team during sound check. When you perform, though, you’re the star and you’re on your own.

This was our last show with Mi$ter $mith as our opener before we got that rock band the rest of the tour. He was a nice enough guy backstage, and did his own thing when we were on tour, but he has middling talent. His repertoire is standard slow jams mixed with a little rap that he cleaned up for my audience. I overheard him one time in his dressing room complaining to his entourage how he couldn’t believe he was opening for an eleven-year-old white boy. I’m like, Go triple platinum with your debut, and I’ll open for you. His real name is Marvin Hilliard. Pop stars don’t like people knowing who they were before they were famous, since part of their appeal is that they are famous. Rock and rap stars can get away with it more, because if you came from the streets, it gives you more cred, but only rock stars usually go by their real names. All we had to do was change my name from Jonathan to Jonny, and me and Jane both changed Valentino to Valentine. He calls me Jonny-Jon, but I don’t know if I should call him Mi$ter $mith or Marvin or M.S., the way his entourage calls him. It’s like with Michael Carns’s parents. I just said hi and never used their names.

After sound check, I hung out in the star/talent room and drank warm Throat Coat and ate some of the filet mignon and other low-carb food because I was starving and had my hair and makeup done by this Asian woman who’s new for this tour. She was coiffing and gelling my hair, but it takes a light touch, since you need to gel it enough so it mostly stays in The Jonny, but not too much that it loses its floppiness. Girls historically love singers with sort of floppy hair. Besides the Beatles, there’s Elvis, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain, even MJ once he got whiter. When she was doing my foundation, though, she went, “Your mom’s gonna hate this,” and I asked what, and she said, “I think you may have your first zit.”

“Really?” I asked, more excited than anything else. I definitely didn’t want zits, but it would mean I was hitting puberty soon.

She looked closer and said, “You’re lucky, it’s a whitehead. They’re easier to cover up. This might hurt a little.”

She pinched my skin and said, “Never do this to yourself, you might get a scar and then we’re fucked.” She showed me some white liquidy junk on her finger before she wiped it off on a tissue. It was gross, but cool to know my body was making something I’d never seen before. Maybe it was making sperm, too.

It’s funny how half my songs are about liking girls who don’t wear makeup, and I’m a boy who wears makeup. I once told Jane I should do a song about only liking girls who wear tons of makeup and expensive clothes, and she was like, That’s basically what most songs are about.

Later on, while I played Zenon, I could hear the vibrations of Mi$ter $mith taking the stage and kicking into his first song, which was supposed to be “I Loves Me Dat Ho, Don’t You Know” but he had to change for our tour to “I Loves Dat Girl-O, Don’t You Know,” and I took some liquid Pepto for my preshow butterflies, which were worse than normal because it was L.A. I couldn’t get past Level 64’s minion, and when he damaged me to zero percent the third time in a row from my saved game, I yelled at the screen, “You fucking motherfucker!” and Walter ran in quickly from outside and asked what was wrong, and I said, “Sorry, I was just screaming at the minion,” and he said, “Whatever the hell you’re talking about, let’s save the screaming for the show, brother, or Rog is gonna get pissed about you wasting your voice.”

I invited Walter to sit inside with me and I showed him what I meant about the minion. Walter still didn’t know what the hell I meant, since the last time he played video games was when he was a teenager and he spends his free time either watching sports or reading mystery books, but when I was describing the way the minion kept deflecting my side attacks and how I couldn’t figure out his Major Vulnerability, I accidentally attacked him straight at the middle of his body with a sword-punch-kick combo. Usually a Major Vulnerability is an attack from an angle that’s hard to reach, but with this guy, he was vulnerable to an attack right in front of him, where you’d think he’d be most protected. I damaged him and advanced to Level 65 and explained to Walter how it was like when soccer goalies jump to one side on penalty shots, so sometimes the smart move is to kick it straight ahead. He understood it, and I said, “Make sure Nadine gives me credit for doing my first Teachable Moment this month,” and he said, “I don’t think video games count.” She gives credit for stuff that’s not always about school subjects, though.

I got paged right before intermission, as Mi$ter $mith was closing out with his one hit, “Call Me $ir,” and I got into what Walter calls the Jonny Zone, when I tune everything out and deep-focus. He escorted me backstage to meet Jane. “How you feeling, baby?” she asked.

I said I was fine. My crew moved everything into position and Bill handed me my mike while he adjusted sound levels on this little machine, so I did the usual line, “Microphone check one-two-one-two,” over and over. They still want me to hold a wireless mike instead of wearing a headset so I look more like an old-school crooner.

“We’re all cool here, Jane?” he asked.

“We’re all cool, Bill,” she said.

He left, and the butterflies flapped their wings harder. It’s always the same backstage. You get worried you’ll forget the words even though they’re like the alphabet song by now. You’re afraid your voice will crack when it strains for the high notes. You’ll slip in a spin move. Your jeans will split and everyone will see your underwear. You’ll say something in a banter interlude that offends people and viralizes. Or something you haven’t even thought of will go wrong, and not only is your career hurt, but so are the careers of the 136 people who work on your tour, plus Jane’s. And no matter what, for the first few seconds you get onstage, you’ll look around and realize twenty thousand people are all watching every move you make, and you’ll be like, Why am I up here and not one of those people? Rog says that’s natural for musical artists to ask, and you’ve got to block it out right away and remind yourself that very few people in the world are born with the consummate performer’s gene, and that’s why everyone else is paying premium prices to see you, because they need entertainment and escape almost as much as they need food and water.

On top of all that, I was getting more worried about the heart-shaped swing. If you were the kind of person who had a fear of heights and of being trapped, it would be your nightmare.

I said to Jane, “I think I might throw up,” and she was prepared for it and had a big bucket nearby like usual and got it in front of me just in time, and she rubbed my back and pushed my hair out of my eyes and said, “Get it all out, baby, all the crap you ate in the star room.”

Once it was out I felt better, and Jane handed me a special Japanese-green-tea-and-honey drink she always requests for my rider, and I took a swig to flush out the phlegm. Jane did my psych-up routine, where she’s like, You’re the most talented singer and dancer in the world, everyone loves you, but not as much as me because you’re my beautiful baby boy, and the page tapped her and I nodded and she kissed me on both cheeks and my lips, and I felt less nervous, and the house lights went down and the countdown timer on the big screen and on the small backstage monitor ticked down from one hundred to zero as the audience chanted “Jon-ny! Jon-ny! Jon-ny!” and the opening piano riff of “Guys vs. Girls” played and the crowd went crazy, and Jane patted me on the butt to send me through the talent passage and out onstage into the bright red smoke, and I could tell I was close to the Jonny Zone again. When I’m in there, I can do whatever I want and the crowd will follow me. But if you snap out of the Zone onstage, it’s scary. It’s like when you’re in an airplane or a car and you think, If the guy driving this wanted to, he could kill us all in a second.

Normally people say you should focus on one person in the crowd, but all that works for is small-scale performances. With arena shows, there are too many people, and if you think about focusing on one audience member, there’s a chance you’ll think about the entire audience watching you. The trick, I learned from the house guitarist on my first tour, is to focus on a vendor, since the vendors never care about you, they’re the only ones who don’t want anything from you, they just want something from the crowd, so in that way you’re on the same team, both moving product.

And once I sang, “Girls and guys, burgers and fries, all gets ruined with a coupla lies,” I forgot about the nervousness, it was just singing and dancing in the Zone. The crowd got even louder and the stage shook a little. It was probably ninety percent girls and their mothers and just ten percent their boyfriends. Jane wants a better balance, like seventy/thirty female/male, what Tyler has, for career longevity, but girls are way more loyal so it’s a good problem to have. I counted eight signs in the front rows that said something like JONNY, I WILL BE YOUR GIRL TODAY while I sang the first verse:

In junior high, we’re going at it

Boys throwing spitballs, pulling on twirls

Fussing and fighting, tearing apart

This is how it starts with guys versus girls

When I hit the first chorus, they all sang with me and did the backup singers’ echoes on guys! and girls!:

Guys (GUYS!) versus girls (GIRLS!)

Why’s it gotta be that way?

Guys (GUYS!) versus girls (GIRLS!)

Will you be my girl today?

I was on the second verse, which is probably my favorite of the four verses, because of the lyrical repetition of broke and the way it goes from gal to boy to guys versus girls, singing

I once got my heart broke, broke so bad

By the kinda gal who wore diamonds and pearls

She said, See you later, said, Don’t you know, boy?

Everything in life is guys versus girls

when I did a trademark spin move and one of the backup dancers, Roberto, was off his mark by at least a foot, and I got distracted so it made me go off-rhythm and I launched the next verse a beat late. I sped up my tempo to catch up and stumbled over the words. It sounded sloppy. I did a half-spin later in the song and gave Roberto a scowl, but I don’t think he saw. It’s annoying when you’re pissed at someone and they don’t even know.

When I finished, it was one of the three designated spots for crowd banter. Jane had someone at the label write me up new banter interludes for each show so no one would put it on YouTube or whatever and catch me making the same jokes and riffs each time, but what they wrote was always so stupid, especially that day’s sheet I’d glanced at in the star/talent room, so I was allowed to improvise a little.

I shouted, “What up, L.A.! I love you!” and they all said that they loved me, and I turned down the volume and said, “You guys ready to… party?” They were like, “Yeah!” and I said, “You know what you need to do for a party to be polite,” and they said, “RSVP!” and I gave Ronnie the signal and he strummed the first G chord of “RSVP (To My Heart).”

I picked one girl in the front row to make eye contact with, about a year older than me, sort of pretty but the kind of round face where she might get chubby when she was older. At the edge of the stage, behind one of the security guys, I kneeled down and sang to her. Jane tells me to pick a girl older than me so it can never come off as creepy and it makes them want to still be my fan when they’re older so they have a shot with me. Everyone around the girl was trying to touch me and the security guys were probably thinking, Thanks a ton for making us tackle a bunch of rabid ten-year-old girls, it makes us look like child predators.

I waved for her to come onstage, so a security guy picked her up and put her next to me. She kept saying to herself, “OMG OMG OMG.” She was actually saying “OMG,” not “Oh, my God.” I circled around her as I sang, and half the time she wasn’t even looking at me but was checking out the crowd. So I took her hand and sang right up in her face, like, You’re gonna have to pay attention to me, and tears dribbled out of her eyes and down her cheeks in two curved lines.

It’s always weird when girls cry at shows. It’s not like it is when Jane cries, because you’re sad, or once in a while because you’re happy. It’s that they think they love me. But you can only love someone for real who loves you back. They’re in love with me. You can do that for someone who doesn’t even know your name.

At the end of the song I gave her a kiss on her cheek, and the tears dumped out faster and the crowd went wilder, and I covered the mike with my hand and whispered into her ear, “I love you, do you love me?” and she nodded and wiped away her tears and one of the roadies gave her a bouquet and walked her backstage. And the messed-up part is, when I said it, I believed it, too, even if she was only okay-looking since you don’t want to pick someone who makes the fat girls feel bad about themselves.

The rest of the show was what Nadine calls B-plus work, good enough to get by though not great, and we should never be satisfied with a B-plus, except I am with tutoring but not with music. My texture was muddier than I’d like, and my lungs didn’t have much behind them on “Breathtaking,” when I have to suck in my breath over and over after I sing the word breathtaking. Maybe being nervous about the heart-shaped swing affected me. Just a little stress can really hurt a singer. And Roberto made one other screwup by lifting his left leg when it should’ve been his right that I bet no one noticed but me. Probably no one noticed I was B-plus, either, because when a pro is below average, he’s still performing at a caliber no one in the crowd can come close to. Sometimes I think it’s not that I’m so talented, it’s that everyone else in the world is so untalented.

It was time for “U R Kewt” and the closing medley. The swing coasted down to the stage and I climbed in and a tech guy secured the latch. It hummed and lifted me up-up-up and flew over the audience as I sang. You’re already higher than the audience onstage, but the swing makes you feel like you’re above them and better than them, like you’re God watching over everyone from the sky with all the projected stars swirling around. The swing’s vibrations trick you into thinking you’ve had an accident in your pants, and the first few times at rehearsals I even checked my underwear after to make sure, but it’s safe, with metal bars all around you, and the only way I could fall out is if I climbed over the side and jumped out. When you make the mistake of looking straight down through the grate, though, you’re like, Whoa, now I really might have an accident in my pants. If I jumped, my fans would probably let themselves depart the realm by breaking my fall anyway.

For “Roses for Rosie” it lifted me straight up, and I tossed the rose petals down to them. They all scrambled to catch them like I was throwing money. It was sort of pathetic watching them do it, and I started throwing the petals super-hard, like I was trying to hit them, even though they just fluttered down. On the moon me and the petals would fall at the same speed because there’d be no air resistance, Nadine told me. I told her I’d jump out with them when I play the moon in the year 2060 on my oldies tour with Tyler Beats, if I don’t have early onset dementia yet.

At the song’s bridge, as I was a few words into the line that lifts the melody from “Amazing Grace”—“You called me the angel to your eyes, yet your heart was full of lies”—I heard a clanking sound from somewhere in the swing, and all of a sudden, whoosh, it dropped.

People say your life flashes before your eyes when you think you’re going to die, but that’s stupid, because you can’t think about your whole life in just a few seconds. So when the swing dropped, all I thought of was Walter jumping on the crowd, spreading his body out to provide buffer, like a soldier taking a bullet for his commander. He was backstage, so it wasn’t possible, but I bet he would’ve.

It didn’t matter, though, because after about five feet the swing stopped again like a car braking hard.

Once everyone in the arena figured out what had happened, they gasped like they were the ones singing “Breathtaking,” and half the band stopped playing, and my chest felt like it was thirty feet above me.

I could stop and ask to be let down. But I got my balance and said, “It’s all part of the show, folks,” which is what you say for any major technical malfunction, and continued singing and the band started up after me. The guy operating the swing did slowly move me down to the stage right away, though.

At the end I gave one of my “This was the best show ever!” lines, but with Roberto’s mistakes and no one being on point and the swing especially, it was one of my worst ever.

Backstage, Jane hugged me. “I’m going to sue someone,” she said. “So help me God, I’m going to sue the shit out of someone.”

She was stroking and kissing my head and squeezing me tight against her implants, which are kind of hard, so it hurt a little, and I also couldn’t breathe too good, so I said, “Jane, I’m fine, okay? I’m not hurt or anything.”

She let go and breathed out and crouched in front of me. “We’re not using that swing again. You hear me?”

“No, I went deaf from the swing, I can’t hear anything.”

“Stop messing around. Are you upset?”

“I’m more upset at Roberto.”

“Roberto?” She pushed some hair out of my eyes that had gotten sweaty and lost its stiffness from the gel. “Why?”

“He fucked up his moves twice. It distracted me.”

“Don’t curse, baby. Do you want me to fire him?”

He never even noticed when I gave him that scowl, and either didn’t think he’d done anything wrong or figured I didn’t catch him and he’d gotten away with it or that I just didn’t care much. I didn’t know which was worse.

“Yeah,” I said. “Fire him.”

She kissed my forehead and wiped the sweat away and said, “You do your encores and then play games in the star room. I’ll deal with all this and meet you there later.”

I did my encores with the instrumentalists, not the dancers. We always do two separate encores, with a minute in between each. When you come back the first time, the crowd gets so amped up, and it sounds like they can’t possibly get crazier, but you do it the second time and they’re even happier because they really thought you’d left. Jane and Rog say three encores would be too much, since they’d never believe you’re going away and it doesn’t mean as much when you come back.

I went to the room and filled up on desserts to make up for what I’d vomited, and also because Jane wouldn’t get pissed this time since she was upset about the swing. I took a slice of Eureka lemon cheesecake and an espresso crème brûlée from Spago that the salad bar had kept cold and warm, and took bites while playing Level 65 of Zenon. No one came in after shows, not even Walter, who stayed outside and said, “Good show, brother,” like he always did. I think he thinks I want to be by myself postshow, which I mostly do, but around him, I don’t have to be on, the way I do with other people.

As my character was coming up on a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere, I heard Walter and another voice outside my door, and Walter did his two knocks and a pause and a knock. He stepped in and said, “Roberto wants to talk to you.”

I said okay. Roberto slumped in and closed the door and sat down on one of the beanbag chairs. I kept playing Zenon.

“Hey, Jonny,” he said. “I’m real sorry about tonight. I was off, and I know it fucked with your rhythm. That’s on me.”

I went inside the farmhouse, and there was a mother and father and daughter eating stew at a table lit with one large candle. The father said, “Greetings, noble warrior, we are honored by your presence and invite you to share in our supper, meager though it be.” I sat down with them.

“So,” Roberto said, “I wanted to man up in person.”

I nodded and ate the stew and took a bite of the Spago cheesecake.

“Your mom.” He ran a hand over the back of his buzz cut. My male dancers aren’t allowed to have longer hair than me. “Jonny, your mom wants to fire me. Just for what happened tonight.”

I stood up from the table and took the candle. “Yeah, she told me.” I brought the candle over to a curtain and put it against the material. It caught fire slowly before ripping into an orange rectangle. The father leaped up to fight me, but I drew my sword, and he ran out of the farmhouse with his wife and daughter behind him.

“It was a little mistake, Jonny. We all make mistakes.”

“I don’t,” I said. “That’s why I’m in the star/talent room and you’re in the band/vocalist room.”

The flames caught on the wooden walls and floor of the farmhouse and spread out on both sides. Out of the corner of my eye, Roberto was looking down and shaking.

“I know,” he said, like he was crying even though there weren’t any tears. “I’m real distracted lately. It’s my pops, man. He’s real sick.”

The fire blazed on the entire wall and the screen was turning reddish from the heat, like when you close your eyes after staring at a bright light. “What does he have?”

“I don’t know.” He was shaking more now but he still wasn’t crying. “Something’s fucked-up with his heart and he’s got all these doctor appointments and his insurance doesn’t cover shit. And I’m the only one in my family who makes any money.”

The fire was everywhere, and the screen got so red I couldn’t hardly see anything, way thicker than the red smoke onstage. The farmer probably thought I was crazy for staying inside so long, but I’d never seen it get so hot like that in the game before. I ran out of the farmhouse in the direction I remembered the door was, and knocked against something solid with a sound effect, but I found the door and the screen lost all the redness and I could see again in the cool blue night air with the white moon hanging like a fingernail clipping, and my body was all blackened but not burned or damaged, and I dropped to the ground and sucked in air like a fish in a boat.

I’d gained twenty-seven experience points.

I finally turned to Roberto. “I’ll talk to her.”

He took a long time getting up, breathing slow in and out of his nose. “Thank you,” he said. “I won’t fuck up again.”

He left and closed the door like he was trying not to wake up a baby, and I ran away from the farmhouse once I could breathe again, past the family who was beating their fists on the dirt and moaning at the smoky sky, and the level’s gem appeared on the ground before me.

Walter came in and told me we were ready to go, so he gave me an Angels hat I squashed down almost to my eyes because I forgot my sunglasses, and he escorted me through the personnel exit. Jane’s car was waiting right near the entrance. I jumped in the back and slid down into my usual postshow slouch even though the windows were tinted almost black.

We had a smooth venue exit since only a couple paparazzi were camped outside the personnel lot, and Jane just got the car pretour so they didn’t recognize it or the plates. Once we were on the freeway I told her I’d changed my mind about Roberto. She only nodded and said, “So I talked with Bill about the swing.”

I’d forgotten about the swing because I was so happy about getting the gem on Level 65. “What’d he say?”

Usually Jane looked at me in the rearview mirror when she talked to me about something serious, but she just faced straight ahead and her hands tightened around the wheel. “He said they figured out what the issue was and resolved it, but there are apparently three separate safety devices on it, so even if it happens next time, you’re protected by three levels of defense.”

Walter’s eyes shifted over to Jane before he turned his head out the window.

“It didn’t feel that safe,” I said.

“I know, baby. That’s what I told him. But he swears it is. And it really is the technical highlight of the show, and the fans are going to expect it now.”

I thought about climbing back into the swing. When something bad happens once, you always think about it after. It was like how I’d choked onstage one time on my bottle of water, in New Orleans, and now every time I took a sip I worried I’d do it again, mostly because choking on water would be such a crap way to depart the realm. At least crashing in the swing would be cool.

“If you say so.”

“Great,” she said. “We’re going to use it for a lot of visual promo content. And Bill knows what he’s talking about.”

Walter laughed quietly to himself. “Something funny, Walter?” Jane said.

“If he knew what he was talking about, it wouldn’t have gotten broke in the first place.”

Jane kept driving without talking, but it was the kind of not talking that said a lot. It wasn’t the smartest thing for Walter to say that to her, but I thought again of him jumping in front of me to catch a bullet. General Jonny and Private Walter.

“Don’t mind me,” Walter said. “It’s not my place. You going out tonight, or are we driving straight home?”

“Home,” Jane said. “And I’d appreciate it if you kept your mind on security issues, Walter.”

He kept looking out the window. “Sorry, Miss Valentine.”

Jane turned on the radio to a classic rock station. We didn’t talk the rest of the way. When we got home, Walter mumbled good night to us and went off to his bungalow, and Sharon was still up and asked us if we wanted anything. Jane said she was going to sleep and reminded me we had a six a.m. wakeup.

My body was tired but my mind was racing from the concert, so I asked Sharon to make me some decaf green tea with honey from the kettle, not the microwave or the hot-water faucet. It would take longer that way.

It was just me and Sharon awake in the house. She leaned over the island counter. “How was the concert, Mr. Jonny?”

“One of the dancers kept messing up and it threw me off, and then the swing that carries me over the crowd, it broke when I was inside.”

She put her hand over her mouth. “It broke?”

“But there are three safety devices. So I didn’t get hurt.”

“Oh, good.” She swept my hair to the side. “They’re not going to make you do it anymore?”

“No,” I said. “Jane said she wouldn’t let them put me in it again for a million dollars.”

Sharon said that she worried so much about me when I did tricks in my concerts, but now she could relax. I finished my tea while she read the front page of the L.A. Times on the counter. She’s taking an adult-education writing class and they have to read the front page every day. When I was done, she looked up from the paper and said, “I love watching you drink your tea. You’re so serious about it.”

She took my mug and opened the dishwasher and bent over to put the mug in the back of the bottom row. Her butt was like two huge boulders guarding the entrance to a cave in Zenon. And I felt like I wanted to disappear inside that cave and close out the world around me and hide in there. I imagined running around the island and grabbing the chub around her hips and under her purple sweatpants and humping her. Thinking about it got me hard, and in my mind I was holding on to her so tight, she was captured like an animal and could never escape. Sharon wasn’t just chubby, she was fat, but there was something about a fat body that was better than a chubby body. Like, either be skinny or be fat, but don’t be somewhere in the middle. It’s sort of like how it’s okay to be super-famous or not famous at all, but don’t be a D-list celeb.

She went to bed. I was still hard, so I tried in my bathroom, but couldn’t make it happen. At least a groupie could never accuse me of getting her pregnant, except I’d have to issue a public statement like, “It’s impossible, I can’t even do it on my own,” and a policeman would have to watch me in private to see if it was true, and they’d give me an adult glossy to help, and we’d also have to bring in Walter to make sure the policeman wasn’t a child predator. I was wired, and I figured Jane was asleep from her zolpidem by now. She probably hadn’t locked her door since she hadn’t been drinking, and I didn’t know when my next chance to go on the Internet was. At her door, I heard her breathing heavy, almost snoring, so I crept inside. Her computer was on top of a suitcase so she wouldn’t forget it. I took it into her bathroom and booted it up. If she caught me, I’d tell her I couldn’t sleep and was researching slave autobiographies for Nadine.

There were eight new emails, and my stomach jumped up like it did when the swing fell. But they were all spam. He hadn’t posted anything new that I could find in my fan forums, either. I looked at my Facebook page to see how many new likes and comments I had. Jane had posted a photo of my Phoenix show, and there were 31,158 likes and 5,385 comments.

I didn’t want Jane to catch me, even though browsing my Facebook page wasn’t that bad and showed I was interested in growing my social media platform, and I closed out. An over-the-counter pill wouldn’t cut it tonight, so I popped one and a half zolpidems from her medicine cabinet. It’s like the sleep command in Zenon, when you can select how many hours you want to sleep for, and you do it right away and wake up refreshed. Only it’s not as deep as regular sleep, and plus you have to be careful not to take it too much or it doesn’t work as good. That’s Jane’s problem.