The Love Song of Jonny Valentine

CHAPTER 5. Salt Lake City

Jane said that me and Lisa Pinto were going to do an exclusive photo op of a staged date for a glossy on our next stop in Denver. I didn’t ask her why she changed her mind. There were always two reasons: Ronald told her she should do it, or there was a lot of money. I didn’t care, though, since I’d get to see how cute Lisa Pinto was in person. You can’t always tell from photos. Sometimes girls are disappointed when they meet me. I’ve read a few blog posts.

Before I left in the morning, Rog knocked on my door. He seemed twitchy. “Good luck tonight,” he said. “You know the warm-up routine?”

“Rog, I’ve done it like a million times.”

“Just let me know how it goes later, okay?”

“Roger that, Rog,” I said, which he never finds funny.

“And try to remember the name of whoever works with you. Can you do that?”

“No, I’m a numbskull who can’t remember anyone’s name. Who are you, again? And who am I?”

“No kidding, Jonny, as a favor to me. Please.”

I promised him I would. “Thanks,” he said. “This is a really tough time in the industry. So… I appreciate it.” He beat it down the hall, because he must’ve been afraid Jane would catch him. It looked like he had a little limp when he walked fast. It wasn’t hard to see why he was worried about someone younger teaching me.

When we got to sound check at EnergySolutions Arena, Jane introduced me to this English woman named Patricia and said she’d be helping with my warm-ups. I couldn’t figure out a way to ask her last name for Rog without being obvious. She looked young enough to be one of my backup dancers. Her arms were like toned snakes in her tank top and she had a pretty smile like white piano keys even though she’s from England. The English musicians I’ve met have the worst teeth, except for the young ones who are pop singers. They’ve got American teeth. Jane stayed and worked on her computer while we did vocal exercises in the star/talent room but glanced up a bunch of times.

The Latchkeys sound checked next, and though I’m supposed to rest up in the star/talent room and drink Throat Coat and I wanted to play some Zenon, I watched them. It wasn’t a full performance, but they had a tight sound, with lots of ambient noise. Zack was what made them different. He was the lead singer and rhythm guitarist, and his musicianship was fine, but his voice was sonorous and had real range. Most male baritones can’t reach the high notes easily or give them any feeling. And he wore a dark green velvet suit. I couldn’t make out the lyrics, but each song had a different girl’s name in it and other words that began with that letter, like “Erica’s Elfin Ears.” I found a copy of their set list to read the names of the others, and one called “Vera’s Vulva” was crossed out and next to it someone had written, “R-rated! Oh, my!”

When I was back in my room playing, I found myself humming along to their song called “Jealous Julia.” I wanted to hear it again, but Jane was always busy before shows and wouldn’t be able to download it for me. So I asked Walter to escort me to the band/vocalist room. Outside their door I said, “Walter, you can wait out here if you want.”

He smiled and said, “No problem. Like dropping you off a block from school.” You didn’t have to explain anything to Walter, and his feelings never got hurt.

I knocked on the door and the bassist opened it, I forget his name, either Steve or Tim. He said hi and invited me in. It was the four of them, and they were sitting around eating food and reading books and magazines that weren’t glossies. Some up-tempo rock was playing with a male singer. Zack put down his book whose name I couldn’t see except for a huge letter U.

“Stately, plump Jonny Valentine,” he said.

I looked down at my stomach. The hotel scale that morning said I was maintaining at eighty-six. “It’s a joke, you’re not plump,” he said. “Your sound check rocked, by the way. I listened in.”

I smiled wide and said I’d heard theirs and wanted to download their songs but I didn’t have the Internet. “There’s no Wi-Fi in your room?” he asked.

“My mother doesn’t let me go on.” Two of the Latchkeys looked at each other like this was the funniest thing they ever heard.

Zack took my iPod and plugged it into his laptop. “Not letting children go on the Internet anymore.” He made a tsk-tsk sound. “What is the world coming to? I’ll give you not only our first album for free, but the rough cut of our next one. But don’t leak it to anyone, right?”

I said, “Right,” and he gave me a handshake and said, “All right, I trust you because you’re the man, and because I don’t have trust issues despite what my therapist says.” I stared at the laptop while it was transferring to my iPod. “If you want to hang out and surf the Net, like the kids say these days, feel free. I won’t tell your mom if you don’t.”

I said thanks and he went back to his book. There were like fifty emails, but it was all spam. That’s what my regular email account usually looked like, too. If you were an alien and looked at someone’s email, you’d think the only merch they sold domestically was prescription sex pills.

An email in the middle was from “Albert Valentino.” There was an attachment of a photo of a driver’s license with the name Albert Derrick Valentino. I almost said something out loud, and looked up. No one was paying attention.

The guy’s hair was almost the same chestnut color as mine is naturally, except it was thinner and he didn’t have it in The Jonny, obviously, but more slicked back. His skin was much paler than mine but that’s also from living in L.A. and spray-tanning once a week with Jane at this salon where they serve you sugarless pink lemonade, and his eyes were also blue like mine. He was a pretty good-looking guy, better bone structure than Jane. I got my pug nose from him, and Jane’s right, it’s cuter on a kid than it will be when I’m an adult, but it still worked for him. He was six feet tall. Jane is only five-two, so if it was really my father, I might not be so short, but shorter pop stars are more successful because they’re better dancers and your head is oversized for your body, which plays better on TV, and plus it helps since people love seeing a huge voice coming out of someone tiny. If I was bigger it wouldn’t be so impressive to them.

He’d turned forty-four years old in November, so he’d had me when he was thirty-two. The license showed an address in Pittsburgh, and it expired over a year ago.

When you’ve seen a million pictures of yourself, you start to see yourself in other people’s features sometimes. I guess part of it’s because you almost forget it’s you in pictures. Instead it’s the glossy magazine version of you, so you compare that person with other people. And depending on what the picture’s in, like a glossy or tabloid or newspaper or website or teen glossy or whatever, it feels like a different version of you, even if it’s the same exact picture. Most people don’t see themselves so much besides in the mirror, which is the opposite of how you look in real life to others, so when they see pictures of themselves something always feels off. But I see so many photos of myself that I can picture myself in them better than I can picture my own reflection. Except everyone takes a ton of photos of themselves, so they probably react a little more like celebs.

Anyway, I could see myself not in his eyes themselves but more around the eyes, since he had deep purple bags there, and when I didn’t sleep enough I got them, too, only not as purple. It really was my father. All those times I’d imagined what he looked like, and now I knew. Or knew from a driver’s license. If he’d sent a thousand pictures, I would’ve studied each one in close-up.

He might have a whole new family in Pittsburgh. I played it on my last tour. Maybe he came, or even took them. The oldest any of his kids could be was around five, which was just outside my base’s age range, but some were that young. Or he could have a boy, one he played catch and watched Pirates games on TV with or took to games, and taught him how to swing and the proper fielding position and how managers do a double switch, which is the hardest thing to understand, and I had to watch a million games before I figured out how it worked. I don’t know why, but that last part about the double switch made my stomach feel like it does preshow, all knotted up and swirly at the same time and like I had to throw up. Except preshow you do throw up and you feel better. This sat there like a huge bag of Doritos you wished you hadn’t eaten but you couldn’t stop yourself.

My face must have moved a lot because I heard Zack say, “Everything working okay?” and I said, “Yeah,” without moving my eyes. I read the email:

Please send this to Jonathan. Jane still calls him that right? Here’s my license but I don’t live in Pittsburgh anymore. I live in New York, just moved here last year after a few years in Australia mostly working in construction. Now you have to hold up your end of the bargain. Send me a regular picture of Jonathan to prove you know him and tell me something about Jane only he would know.

So he wasn’t taking some other kid to Pirates games, unless he’d had one there before he went to Australia. I could easily see the guy in the driver’s license bouncing around Australia, living with different women who took him in, seeming all exotic to them since he had an American accent and knew how to operate forklifts and cement mixers. Jane thought about adding an Australia/New Zealand segment on the first tour, and to work in an appearance at a big Sydney music festival, but the label didn’t think we had enough of a foothold there yet. I wonder if he would’ve come to the concert.

I’d passed by a million guys doing construction on the street in my life, but I never thought that that’s what my father did. Jane just said he didn’t do hardly any work.

Jane was always worried about child predators getting ahold of candids of me, even though I didn’t see any difference between those and published shots. And I couldn’t tell him anything too personal about Jane in case he was still just pretending to be my father or was going to go to the media. The more we limit awareness of Jane, the more freedom she has to operate behind the scenes.

I checked again to make sure the Latchkeys weren’t watching me. They weren’t. One of them was on his iPhone, and Zack said, “Please tell me you’re not on Twitter again.”

He said, “We’ve already gotten a thousand more followers since our profile in Vice.”

Zack was like, “Because our fans definitely aren’t sheepish hipsters. I mean, sheeplike hipsters. Sheepish hipsters would be, what, bashful practitioners of countercultural lifestyles.”

One of the guys said, “And neither are we.”

A second one said, “So we’re all in agreement that we’re not sheeplike, right? Guys? Yes?”

The third one said, “And neither is the guy at our Austin show who wore the ringer T-shirt that said I HATE IRONIC T-SHIRTS.”

The first guy said, “Doing anything meta is a hipster thing. So is saying that anything meta is a hipster thing.”

The second one said, “And disavowing your hipsterness is the surest sign that you are a hipster.”

Zack said, “Some of my best friends are black hipsters.”

They hadn’t laughed until that last one, and then they returned to doing what they were doing. The Latchkeys were like the Harlem Globetrotters with words. I’d pay $19.95 to watch them talk on Internet live-stream. They must’ve known each other for a long time, the way they talked so fast and all sounded like each other. I didn’t sound anything like Jane or even Walter.

I asked the guy with the iPhone if he could take my photo and email it to me. “So I can make sure I’m able to download photos,” I said, since it was a strange thing to ask.

“Sure,” he said. “With all of us?”

“That’s okay, it can be just me.”

“As long as we’re not being narcissistic,” he said. Fuck him for making fun of me for asking for a photo with myself, when I was just trying to protect them in case I was emailing with an impostor.

Zack got up. “Can I get in there? I’ll be the envy of everyone back home who said I’d never amount to anything.” He winked at me. “Or I’ll sell it on eBay and we’ll split the profits.”

Maybe it was okay if only Zack got in there, and even if the guy was an impostor and was going to email the photo to a gossip site, it’d look cool that I was hanging out with Zack backstage in his green velvet suit. I told him yeah, and he said, “Copacetic,” and put his arm around my shoulders. He smelled like the woods and cigarettes again.

I gave the other guy my email and Zack said to send it to him, too. It showed up in my inbox. I had to figure out what to tell him about Jane. And I didn’t want to let him know it was me who was emailing him. I wrote

Jane is very allergic to peanuts.

That wasn’t too private, but I don’t think many other people know about it. Jane’s savvy about containing info in our circle.

I Googled “Albert Valentino Pittsburgh.” I didn’t find anything till a few pages in, a short article in a no-name Pittsburgh newspaper from four years ago.

CRIME BLOTTER

TWO MEN ARRESTED IN BARROOM BRAWL

Two men were arrested early Sunday in connection with a dispute in the parking lot of Schmidt’s Tavern in Southside Flats.

According to a police statement, Jefferson Smithfield, 35, and Albert Valentino, 40, turned to fisticuffs after a verbal dispute. The owner of Schmidt’s, John Schmidt, is suing the two men for damages to the exterior of the bar sustained during the altercation.

Smithfield has a prior conviction for unlawful possession and delivery of a controlled substance. Valentino has no prior record.

Both men were processed and released Sunday evening.

They didn’t have a picture of his mug shot or anything. But I thought of the guy in the driver’s license posing in the police station, which wasn’t hard because ID photos already look like mug shots without the height marker behind you. If you see a celeb who still looks good in a mug shot, then you know that person’s really good-looking and doesn’t need to rely on makeup and lighting and Photoshop.

Then I imagined him getting in a fight outside a bar. The other guy, Jefferson Smithfield, was drunk and insulting my father and telling him he sucked. He was like, “And I don’t believe Jonny Valentine is your son, like you always say.” Finally my father was like, “I am Jonny’s dad, and if you say one more thing to me, I’m gonna kick your ass,” and the other guy smiled like in the movies and said, “You’re a loser and a liar.” My father didn’t say anything. He just threw an uppercut and knocked him out cold through one of the bar windows, which is why he got sued for damages to the exterior of the bar sustained during the altercation. He waited there for the cops because he hadn’t done anything wrong. That wasn’t how it could’ve actually been, since I wasn’t famous four years ago, but maybe he’d gotten in fights like that outside bars in Australia and they didn’t have muscular enough media there to report it.

The newspaper didn’t have any more stories about him, and I couldn’t find anything else by Googling his name with Pittsburgh or Australia or New York. I told the Latchkeys I’d see them later and asked if they wanted anything from my food spread, but Zack said, “Thanks, we’re solid.”

Walter was waiting outside like he was picking me up from school. I don’t think he’s ever made me wait once. Back in the star/talent room, I didn’t listen to the Latchkeys yet. Jane made sure I rested before I went on, and she watched what I ate before, too, to try to prevent me from vomiting. She made me stick to cold soup and promised I could eat whatever I wanted after.

I didn’t vomit, but that could have been luck. The performance went fine, an A-minus, and Roberto didn’t make any mistakes. A couple times I thought about Albert, like when I saw some fathers with their daughters in the crowd, but mostly I didn’t. That’s the good thing about doing a show, you really block out everything else in your life when you’re onstage, because you’re not only selling the emotion of the songs to the audience, you’re selling them to yourself, and you can’t imagine feeling anything other than the way the songs are supposed to make you feel. If you’re going through the motions, the audience can tell. I’ve done it before, and those are my C-minus shows.

I was nervous when I first got in the heart-shaped swing, but then I was like, Well, if I die, everyone else will feel like shit for telling me it was safe, and the crowd will feel like shit for wanting me to do it just so I could be closer to them. So by going on it was sort of a fuck-you to them, and at one point when I was over the crowd and the keyboards were blaring on “Roses for Rosie,” I hummed and whispered, “Fuck you all, if the EVP of creative didn’t prioritize me and get me coverage in all your glossies, none of you would give a shit about me,” quiet enough so the mike couldn’t pick it up. When you’re acting angry it’s hard to also be scared.