The Love Song of Jonny Valentine

CHAPTER 8. St. Louis (Second Day)

The morning after my concert, which was a straight A, me, Jane, and Walter hustled down to the Arch. I was worried the show had invited Michael to watch, but even if they’d been thinking about it at first, they’d have to be blind not to see how bad he played on camera.

They’d set up a circular outdoor stage underneath it, and the crowd was already surrounding it and hollering when the show’s security guys escorted me onstage. It was my usual audience, girls with their mothers or sometimes fathers, plus a few stragglers. When people see a crowd, they always feel like they’re missing out if they’re not part of it. Kevin reminded me they’d air the video from yesterday, Robin would do the ten-minute interview, and then I’d sing three songs over a musical track. They estimated a 3.2 and twenty-two share, with a 1.1 in the twelve-to-seventeen demo, solid numbers for morning TV.

They showed the video on a small screen near us. It was all the regular stuff, video and photo clips of me with voiceovers talking about my career, spliced with shots of St. Louis and me walking around the school. I could be a TV director. It’s pure formula.

They cut to me and Michael meeting, and they edited it as B-roll so it didn’t seem awkward. We walked to the park like a weirdo pair, with him in his Champion sweats and me in my sponsored wardrobe. But they cut it so it seemed like we were having fun, and with “Kali Kool” in the background instead of a love song, it didn’t look too gay, even though it didn’t make any sense to play a song about partying on a beach in California over shots of an empty park in St. Louis in the middle of winter. If you didn’t know, you’d think we were still best friends. I let my eyes get blurry like when I’ve been playing video games for a long time, so I had a sense of what was happening on the screen but didn’t have to watch.

After I could tell they were done with me and Michael, they ran a few shots of our old apartment before the segment wound down. They’d cut the whole Schnucks thing.

I wasn’t nervous for something like this, because I’ve done plenty of live TV, but when they were counting down, it was the last thing I wanted to be doing. I wasn’t tired, so I didn’t want to be sleeping, and I didn’t want to be playing Zenon, either, or hanging out with anyone in particular. What I suddenly wanted was, I wanted to be back at our old apartment, and I wanted to tell Jane to buy it back. We could afford it easily, and we could decorate it the same exact way it looked back then. We wouldn’t stay there or anything, because it was still a crap apartment, but when we came back to St. Louis for shows we could just pop in and remember that it was still around.

But she’d say it was a wasteful expenditure and these kinds of purchases were what bankrupted musicians with stupid business instincts.

Being a consummate professional means doing your job when you don’t want to, so I sucked it up and pasted on a huge smile when the camera light blinked and Robin introduced me as America’s Angel of Pop and the girls screamed like they were getting attacked and I got ready to give answers in Auto-Tune mode, where they sound right but have nothing behind them.

She asked me how I got my start, and I’d gone over this story so much I could recite it in my sleep. I talked about my music teacher in second grade and how I won second place in a local talent competition that year, and like every other interviewer in the history of the world, Robin asked what the kid who won first place was doing now, and I said what Jane coached me on, “I hope she’s still singing, because she was hella good.” You can say hella on TV, even at seven in the morning, Jane told me, but not hell. Networks are idiots.

I talked about how me and Jane decided I was old enough to busk on weekends in the Central West End, and a couple videos of me singing exploded on YouTube one week and my record label called, and a couple years later, with God’s help, here we are. I’m supposed to mention God once in a while, but after Jane’s lie the day before about us praying, it might have been too much Bible thumping.

“Everything happens for a reason,” Robin said.

Something about the TV-host smile on her face made me want to be like, No, it doesn’t, that’s the coastal way of believing in God without actually believing in him, and it’s a stupid thing morons like Mrs. Warfield tell themselves when bad things happen so they feel better about it, that’s why The Secret Land of Zenon is so good, things happen and no one’s keeping track of if it’s for a reason or not, experience points either come or they don’t and you can never totally predict why and sometimes it’s the opposite of what makes sense, like Jane can’t sing and my father probably can’t but I was born with a perfect voice from good luck, and if Jane had gotten an abortion then everyone here would be watching someone else get interviewed right now, or if YouTube hadn’t been invented I might never have been discovered and would be a normal kid in St. Louis who was the star of his school choir but nothing else and Luann Phelps wouldn’t have a crush on me, and there’s a girl in the audience in a wheelchair and if you think that happened for a reason, you have a fucked-up idea of why things happen.

“Totally,” I said.

“Did you ever think you’d become this famous?” Robin asked.

“I don’t think of myself as famous. I’m just a normal kid who likes normal things, sports, video games, hanging out, and who’s getting the chance to live out his dream and share the music and the love. And that’s why I love coming back to St. Louis”—the crowd cheered—“because I never want to forget where I came from.”

Right when I finished, I heard a guy in the crowd shout, “Faggot!” There was some whispering and Robin pretended like she didn’t hear it, but I could tell from her eyes she did and hoped like hell the mikes hadn’t picked anything up, which they probably wouldn’t. I glanced around for Walter, but I didn’t see him and didn’t know where he was. This was the problem with letting someone else run your show. You don’t have full control over performance protocol.

She segued quickly to the next question. “We hear you’ve been dating the actress Lisa Pinto, who has a debut album out on February 14—which is, of course, Valentine’s Day. Can you confirm if you two are going to be celebrating her release together?”

The way she said it, slipping in the reference to the drop date, I knew Stacy in creative had planted it, even though Jane had told the label to lower the volume on it after the tabloid. But Stacy could always claim that the show people just saw the story and ran with it. So I repeated what Jane had told me to say if anyone brought it up.

“Me and Lisa are just good friends,” I said, which was almost less true than saying we were dating, since you could get ice cream once with someone and say you were dating, but to be good friends you’d have to spend a long time with each other, like I did with Michael. “I’m still looking for that special girl to share myself with in my personal life, but until then the best connection I get is when I’m onstage, with my fans.”

“And you have a lot of them,” she said. “Here are some Tweets from two of our viewers.” They showed the Tweets on-screen, and while she read it and the camera was off her, her eyes were scanning around, I think to see if they found the guy who’d shouted before.

i love 2 listen 2 Jonnys voice when everything is Bad it makes me feel like theres something Good in the world thank u Jonny

That NOT awkward moment last night when @TheRealJonny sings “Crushed” and makes eye contact with you in the front row #willyoubemyBOYtoday

“It must make you feel great to hear that,” Robin said.

“If it wasn’t for my fans I wouldn’t be here,” I said. “Everything I do belongs to them.”

She lobbed a couple softballs, like, “What’s your best feature?” and even though I really think it’s my arms because they’ve got zero chub, I always pretend to be a little embarrassed and say, “Well, I don’t know, but people tell me they like my eyes,” and she said, “Can we get a close-up on Jonny’s baby blues?” and the camera zoomed in on them and I batted them like I was shy and the girls went nuts like they always do, it’s like they know they’re supposed to from other times they’ve seen audiences react.

She asked how I’m so natural onstage, and I said I always felt at home performing, which is bullshit and it took me a long time to fake being comfortable and if I told her I usually vomit before shows she’d cut to commercial. She used it as a segue to the music, and I sang “Crushed” and “Chica” and ended with “Guys vs. Girls.”

When I got on “Guys vs. Girls,” though, I heard the same guy again. The music was too loud for the audio to pick him up, but he kept saying things like, “Fag! Sing your faggy love song, faggot!”

My first thought was, Wait, what if this is my father? Like, what if he’s out to get me, or is crazy, and the emails were just a decoy?

And my second thought was, Or one of the Latchkeys? Which didn’t make sense, because the label would drop them in a second for a prank like this, plus Zack wouldn’t let them.

I scanned the crowd, which I shouldn’t have, but I had to see who it was. It wasn’t my father, unless he’d gotten really fat since his driver’s license and had grown stringy hair like sound equipment cables all twisted up backstage. And now he was right next to the stage, and the only people around him were all these little girls and their mothers who were clearing away from him so they were actually making it easier for him, and security wasn’t nearby since the stage was high enough to prevent any girls from rushing it, like five feet tall, but if an adult really wanted, he could find a way to jump it.

We locked eyes for a second behind his thick glasses and sweaty face even though it was February. He smiled this gross smile, like he knew he’d gotten my attention, and he shouted, “You want me to fuck you in your little faggot ass?”

I knew the mikes wouldn’t pick it up because the music was so loud, but security was taking a decade to break through the crowd. If there ever was a time to stampede a bunch of tween girls, this was it, when the talent’s safety is compromised, which is the result of amateur event planning and operations.

He put both hands on top of the stage, like he was maybe going to climb it, and I’d been worried before, but now I was seriously scared, even if he was fat enough that he might not be able to get up. I turned away from the guy and danced quickly to the other side of the stage, to move away from him but also to make sure the camera didn’t catch him at all, and finally I heard some commotion, and when I had the guts to turn around, Walter was a few feet away from the stage, on top of the guy and wailing at him like it was a bare-fisted battle in Zenon, punching his face with a right-left-right combo. It would’ve been fun to jump in as Walter held him down and be like, “You think I like performing in front of child predators who want to fuck me in my ass? How about I kick you in the teeth first?” and bash away until he didn’t have any left. I wish I’d seen how Walter tackled the guy. He played defensive end in high school.

Then security peeled Walter off and led the guy away, but he kept trying to yell the whole time they dragged him away. It wasn’t the first time some asshole had yelled at me during a show or on the street, but usually it was a young guy who was doing it to impress his friends, not some scary-looking child predator. And plus this time it threw me off and I accidentally switched the second and third verses, which I hadn’t done since my first tour and probably no one noticed, but it got me pissed.

When we wrapped up I was supposed to do autographs, but Jane grabbed and hugged me and said, “Are you okay, baby?” I said yes, and she said, “You’re not doing autographs. They’re supposed to screen the crowd. You don’t let in a fifty-year-old man who looks like a crazy. And you always have security at the perimeter of the stage.”

I let her bitch Kevin out and went with Walter and additional security into the car service in a restricted area behind a building. I guess I was playing around with the buttons inside more than normal, because Walter asked, “Everything cool?”

“Yeah,” I said. “And thanks, for before.”

“It’s my job, brother,” he said. “Just wish you hadn’t been in that situation in the first place.”

“Unprofessional performance protocol,” I said. “But what do you expect, with a morning show plus a public event in a third-tier city?”

“I guess.” He scoped out the windows, in case any more crazies were thinking about breaking into the car. “Hey, when we get to Nashville, I saw we’ve got the night blocked off. You feel like visiting my daughters with me? If Jane clears it?”

“Like, at your house?”

“My ex-wife’s house.”

Some bodyguards might have been like, I just saved you from getting attacked or molested by a child predator, the least you could do is give my kids a story to tell their friends, but that wasn’t what Walter was about. Plus I was curious to see what his old house was like and to meet his daughters. “That’d be fun. I’ll ask Jane.”

“They’d like that,” Walter said. “Thank you.”

We were quiet for a minute or two while we heard Jane still yelling at Kevin outside. It was pretty loud and she was cursing a ton. Walter said, “Your mom doesn’t take shit from no one, huh?”

“She’s good at business.”

“There are always gonna be people who don’t like you just because, you know?” he said.

“The haters, who are insecure so they have to tear someone down to feel better themselves.”

“And there are gonna be people who love you.”

I’d gotten this speech from the label and Jane about fifty times before. “And those are the ones who count.”

But he shook his head. “They do, but that doesn’t matter.”

“I know. You have to love yourself and everything.”

“Nah,” he said. “That’s the kind of bullshit they say on TV shows like this. There’s a saying, ‘What doesn’t kill me only makes me stronger.’ ”

In Zenon, you can sometimes drink an invincibility potion that makes it so the world can’t hurt you, but it lasts just a minute, and after that you can get damaged like normal. It’s a little different from Walter’s saying, which would be like if your damage percentage got lowered, you somehow became healthier. The only way that was kind of true in Zenon is that when you’re at a hundred percent health, you’re always worried someone’s going to damage you and make it so you’re not perfect. When you’re already pretty damaged, you stop caring as much.

“Except when child predators are at my show,” I said.

He smiled. “That’s why you’ve got me around.”

Maybe having Walter nearby didn’t make me feel like I had an invincibility potion, but it was at least like being inside the fort me and Michael Carns used to make from his couch cushions, and he was the cushions providing buffer.

Jane finished up outside and got in the car and snapped at the driver to go and not let any fans stop the car if they spotted us. She typed angrily on her phone, and me and Walter were both afraid to make any sounds. When we arrived at the buses, though, she seemed calmer.

“Jane,” I said, “I don’t think I want to come back to St. Louis on my next tour.” Even if it meant never seeing our old apartment again. Or Michael.

She gave a tired smile, where you could see all the cracks and wrinkles around her mouth and eyes that the makeup couldn’t cover, and pulled her sunglasses off the top of her head and over her eyes. “Me neither, baby,” she said.