The Love Song of Jonny Valentine

CHAPTER 9. Memphis (First Day)

We had to wait for some bus maintenance before we could take off for Memphis, so I stretched in the cold air. The Latchkeys were outside their bus, smoking and talking with each other. Zack waved at me to come over. “Sir,” he said, and he shook my hand. He always did when he saw me.

Zack looked good in photos, but he was more handsome in person, even at nine in the morning. His hair was a little spiky but soft and long, like black ferns, and he hadn’t shaved yet so he had stubble on his face like the rough top of a mike. “How was the prodigal son’s return?” he asked. I took a few seconds trying to figure out what prodigal meant from the context, like Nadine tells me, so he said, “How was it playing your hometown?”

If he hadn’t heard about the crazy guy, which it sounded like he hadn’t, I didn’t really feel like telling him there was a child predator who nearly got onstage and kept shouting that he was going to fuck me in my ass. “It was okay. I’m glad we’re leaving.”

“Tell me about it. Thank God Memphis is next. Before this we were touring the sticks.” He turned to his bandmates and said, “We’ve got to do Europe next time. I’m through with this Walmart bullshit. No offense to your fans, Jonny.”

“I might tour Europe next time,” I said.

“That right?”

“And Asia. Maybe you guys could come along.” I was going to add, “To tap their markets,” but that wasn’t how Zack and the Latchkeys spoke.

He put the cigarette in his mouth and held it there while he clapped my shoulders with both hands and said out of the corner of his mouth, “That’s why I like this man right here. Spreads the wealth through globalization. Like a young Bill Clinton.” I wasn’t sure what any of that meant except for “That’s why I like this man right here,” but I tried to play it cool and not smile too big. Zack added, “We’re partying tonight in Memphis. You in?”

I looked behind me. Jane was still on the bus. “I’m kind of supposed to stay in the hotel at night.”

“We can party in the hotel, too. I’ll come get you late, okay?”

I didn’t exactly know what Zack meant by partying in the hotel, or what late was to him, but it would be lame to ask. “Okay,” I said.

The driver of his bus said they were ready. “Looks like this bus is bound for glory. See you tonight, Jonny,” Zack said. He ground his cigarette beneath his boot and shook my hand again, and him and the other guys piled into the bus and I went back to mine and sat behind Jane near the back.

She was on the phone. I could hear the voice a little on the other end, because Jane’s hearing isn’t great and she has to turn the volume way up. It sounded like Stacy. “I simply want your assurance that this won’t happen again,” Jane said. I thought she was talking about the security breach, but she continued. “I didn’t want to do this in the first place — he’s just a kid. And we certainly didn’t sign on for tabloid coverage.”

I knew what Jane meant, we always want to have as much control as possible over my image, but the Lisa Pinto exposure made sense from a packaging-strategy perspective, since even if it was driving off some of the fat girls, it would bring in more of the pretty girls, and if they liked me then the fat girls would like me more to try to be like the pretty girls, plus the pretty girls would bring their boyfriends to my concerts, which effectively doubled gate receipts and they also had to buy them crap merch to make them happy, but the fat girls didn’t have boyfriends. They had to buy the crap merch for themselves to feel happier. But Jane says we’re in the business of making fat girls feel like they’re pretty for a few hours and that most pretty girls are afraid other people think they’re fat anyway, so maybe it’s all the same.

If the media kept covering me and Lisa, I wondered if we’d get a combo name like Jonnisa, and I imagined the tour bus was the school bus on her album cover, and put an issue of Rolling Stone from the back of Jane’s seat over my lap to hide my boner, and since no one was behind me and Jane was in front of me, I rubbed myself under the magazine but over my jeans.

Stacy talked but I couldn’t hear, and in my mind me and Lisa were wrestling in the back of the school bus, with me pinning her down so she couldn’t get up, and then Jane said loudly, “With Tyler?”

I popped open my eyes and stopped rubbing and leaned forward to listen. “A joint appearance on the show, February 13,” I heard Stacy say. “Terrific exposure for Jonny’s concert.”

“And his people suggested this?” Jane asked.

“No, I did, but they were on board from the start.”

I couldn’t see Jane’s face, but I could tell from the way she paused that she was pissed she hadn’t come up with the idea. “All right,” she said. “That’s a scheduled free day, so we can do it, as long as our crew doesn’t have to work.”

Stacy said something about the house band backing us and they hung up. I pretended to be trying to sleep when Jane turned around and told me what I already knew, that I’d be meeting Tyler Beats for the first time and performing with him the night before my Valentine’s Day concert on one of the big late-night shows.

A week ago I would’ve been super-excited and nervous to be bundled with Tyler Beats. But I didn’t think he was all that cool anymore. The Latchkeys were cooler.

“Copacetic,” I said, and I faked going back to sleep.

I did fall asleep soon. When you fake something, a lot of times you end up doing it for real. When I woke up, Jane was in the seat next to me and petting my hair lightly. “Did I oversleep?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “I’ve just been sitting here, watching you.”

“Why? Did I do something wrong?”

She smiled, but with her Botox it almost looked like she was close to crying sometimes. “Not at all, baby. It’s time for tutoring now.”

I went into my room where Nadine was waiting for me. Walter was in there, too. It looked like they’d just stopped talking once they’d heard me come in. He said he’d get out of our hair.

My corrected essay on Harriet Tubman was on Nadine’s lap. She cleans it up enough for me to learn from without changing it to her style. I like that about her, it’s like she wants to help you but is really doing it for you and not so she can feel better about herself, even though I know she gets paid well by Jane.

She said she read about my morning show performance on the Internet. “What about it?” I asked.

“I heard about the… incident.”

I was sure it hadn’t been picked up by the mikes or the cameras. “It was a hater. Whatever.”

“Yeah, but… a knife. It’s scary to think what might have happened.”

“What knife?”

“You don’t know?”

“Know what?”

“Jane didn’t say anything?”

“No.”

“Oh, Christ,” Nadine whispered to herself.

“What happened?” I asked.

“I don’t know much else about it.”

“Yes, you do.”

“All he said—” I could tell she didn’t know if she should keep going or stop. “It’s just that when they took him in they found a knife on him, and the police said he’d written all these…” She flattened out my essay. “You should talk to Jane. I’m being paid to tutor you.”

Nadine probably thought she was scaring me by talking about a crazy guy with a knife who was also a child predator. It’d be easier when I was an adult, because they aren’t interested in you anymore. It must have been strange for MJ to go from worrying about child predators to people saying he was a child predator. I don’t know if he did it or not, but if he went through half the stuff as a kid that I deal with, I can’t believe he’d ever do anything like it to someone else. Unless it’s done to you so then you feel like you’re allowed to do it to someone else, like how rookies have to carry the veterans’ bags, then when they’re veterans they make the rookies carry their bags.

I was getting pissed more than scared at the crazy guy, and at security for not doing their job, and at the TV show for not caring about my safety, just about ratings. I pictured the guy working his way up to the stage during “Guys vs. Girls,” all calm, then in the chorus jumping up and stabbing me through the heart a bunch of times with a huge knife. I’d die singing the song that made me famous, and I’d splatter the girls in the front rows with blood instead of rose petals, and this time they’d be screaming because they really were scared, and all of America would be watching it on live TV and it’d viralize. That was something people would spend $19.95 on for Internet live-stream.

We did our work, and she gave my essay an A-minus and said my vocab was improving. I said, “You mean it’s ameliorating,” and she laughed since it was the one word I’d gotten wrong on the vocab test two weeks ago, and she said that’s not quite the correct usage but close enough.

When she was packing up she said, “Jane told me you might tour again next fall.”

“Yeah.” I didn’t know if Jane had told her the other option.

“Or that you might enroll in school.”

I nodded. Doing that was also being like, Uh, sorry, Nadine, you’re fired.

“I just want to tell you, if you want to go to school, you should do it.”

“I don’t want you to lose your job.”

“That’s really nice, Jonny, and you know I love doing this with you, but don’t worry about me. Besides, I can’t do this forever. I’m not building a real teaching career.”

“You’re teaching me.”

“I know, but it’s not the same as being in a classroom. And I turn twenty-seven in a few months, and I sometimes go weeks without seeing my boyfriend. Someday I’d like to start a family, and you’ll need a tutor for another four years at least, and I can’t do both.”

My chest felt like someone had pulled the lungs out of it. “So are you saying you want to quit?”

“No! I mean, not now, at least. But at some point I’d like to go back to teaching in a regular school. The point is, don’t factor me into your decision. In fact, don’t factor anyone else in. Even your mom.”

“Why shouldn’t I factor in Jane?”

“Because it’s about you. What you want to do with your life. You don’t have to do something just because other people say you should.”

When the conversation started, I was scared Nadine would think we were firing her. Now it sounded like she was firing us.

“When you’re a celebrity, it’s not just about you,” I said. “When I give a concert, the jobs of a hundred and thirty-six people on this tour are standing on my shoulders, plus hundreds of people in that city.”

“You don’t have to be defensive,” Nadine said. “I’m just trying to let you know that I’ll respect whatever decision you make.”

I didn’t say anything, and two of her books fell out of her bag when she stood up so it took her longer to get out. It felt quiet in there. That was the first time we’d had a real fight, because the other fights were about stuff like me forgetting to do an assignment.

I avoided Nadine the rest of the drive to Memphis, which wasn’t hard since she was usually reading a book with her iPod on but the music off, which only I knew about, so no one would bother her. She didn’t bring her laptop on the bus because she says we’re becoming increasingly dependent on the sensory stimuli of technology to fill our interior lives. Jane’s the opposite, she usually has her computer and her iPhone and if we’re at home the TV on. She doesn’t listen to music besides for work, though.

A few hours in, I was in my room and heard her and Jane talking. They don’t discuss much except about scheduling and other business, but I could tell from their voices that it wasn’t about that. I wasn’t playing Zenon, but I turned it on for the background music and opened my door a crack to listen.

I heard Nadine go, “I believe he has a right to know,” and Jane went, “Frankly, I don’t think any eleven-year-old needs to know about something like this, let alone the one it’s happening to,” and Nadine said, “If you’re putting him in that position, and everyone else in the world knows, then he does have a right,” and Jane said, “Nadine, you’re an excellent tutor and Jonny likes you, so I’m not going to say any more except that you haven’t raised a child.” Nadine said, “Well, I’ve said my piece, and I hope you’re putting Jonny first here,” and went back to her seat.

“Rog, Walter, I suppose you have something to add, too, or are you just watching the show?” Jane asked, and Rog said, “I’m just the voice coach,” and Walter said, “Bodyguard.” I closed the door quietly.

I wondered what the guy wrote. It couldn’t be much worse than some of the things I’d seen on the Internet. People write whatever on the Internet and don’t even remember anything, but if you write it on paper, you really mean it.

When we got to Memphis, Jane made me rest at the hotel until dinner because she’s been on my case about that ever since I fainted. I had Zenon to keep me company, so I didn’t mind. When Jane came to my room, I asked if we were ordering room service or going out. “Actually, it turns out I have to go to dinner with a regional promoter,” she said.

I got that weird feeling in my stomach that came when Jane said she had to go after she’d made it sound like we’d be hanging out. It wasn’t like preshow nervousness. I never vomited, but it was almost like I was losing part of my guts.

“I could come along.”

“You’d be bored. All shop talk. So you should order room service.”

At least I’d get to play Zenon all night long without her around, plus I didn’t know when Zack was getting me so this made it easier. “Can I order whatever I want?” I asked as she was leaving.

I could see she wanted to say no, but I also knew what she’d answer now that she’d blown me off. “Go easy on the barbecue,” she said. “That’s why everyone here’s a tub of chub.”

She stopped again before leaving, and looked at me, and scampered back in, even in her heels, and I knew what was coming. She tickled me on the couch and squeezed my stomach, and I squealed, and she sang our song and I joined in on the second verse through my squealing:

Oh, we don’t like our chub

We put it in a little jar

We hide it very, very far

No, we don’t like our chub

She kissed my forehead and said, “Don’t play games all night long, baby.” After she closed the door I heard her check it was locked a couple times.

I was more interested in the corn bread Walter had been talking about anyway since my stomach prioritizes carbs over meat even though they’re the enemy, so after she left I ordered three pieces of it and some fried chicken and mashed potatoes. If I lived here full-time I’d gain twenty pounds of chub.

I played Zenon the rest of the night as I got more excited to hang out with Zack, plus this would be my one chance to check my email, since there hadn’t been any computer terminals around at any of our venues and the ones in our hotels you either had to pay for with a credit card or get someone over eighteen to authorize you. I could email asking if he saw me mention Pittsburgh and Australia and peanut butter on the morning show for him and if he heard about the child predator, and maybe he’d be like, Yeah, I wanted to fly to St. Louis right away and kill that guy when I heard about it.

By nine o’clock he hadn’t come, and I was supposed to go to bed by 9:30 the night before a concert if I didn’t have a show that night, and maybe he didn’t know which room I was in or he’d forgotten or he’d changed his mind or the other guys vetoed me.

I didn’t want to get in my pajamas in case he did come, and I definitely didn’t want to take a zolpidem, but I was getting tired, so what I did was, at 9:30 I stayed in my regular clothes and got in bed and left the bedroom door open so if he came I could pretend I was still up.

For a little while I stayed up since I thought every sound outside was Zack knocking on my door, but I must have fallen asleep because then I heard this loud banging from out of nowhere. I scrambled out of bed dizzily and turned on the light in the living room and opened the door, and there was Zack.

“Oh, fuck,” he said. “Were you asleep? It’s only, like, ten-fifteen. I figured you’d still be awake.”

Maybe he thought I was older than eleven. “No, I was up.” I could feel my hair going all directions like I’d been electrocuted. That’s the main problem with The Jonny, it looks messed up when you wake up. Plus after rides in convertibles. Ronald has one.

“Can I see your room?” he asked, and he came inside before I could say anything. He smelled like alcohol and cigarettes more than his cologne. “Goddamn. So this is the real rock star room. We should be partying in here instead of our hovel.”

I got nervous that he was going to move the party here and Jane would catch us, so I said, “It’s all right. Usually they’re nicer than this.”

He smiled. “Tough crowd, little man. You want to come over?”

“Yeah. Except I’m not really supposed to be out now.” That was lame, so I added, “On a night before a concert. The doctor said I had too many late nights.”

“Then we’ll have to evade the authorities,” he said. “Come on.”

I got my sneakers on and took my key-card, and he turned off the lights and cracked the door a few inches and poked his head out in the hall both directions and whispered, “Let’s go!” and walked-ran out and I did the same behind him down the hall, and my body felt tingly and light all over, because I was afraid Jane might catch me or a fan would see me but also because it was the most fun I’d had not in Zenon since probably Phoenix, when they’d opened an amusement park at night just for me and Walter and we go-karted and played laser tag. Zack probably weighed about half what Walter did, but I felt safe with him, too, in a different way, like he could talk us out of any trouble we got into.

At the end of the hall Zack opened the door to a stairwell, and he raced and jumped down three flights of stairs before stopping at another stairwell door. Two escaped slaves in the Underground Railroad, hiding at safe houses until we reached freedom.

Zack crouched down, breathing all heavy like he’d finished a marathon, and put his arm around my shoulders and said, “We got one more sprint and we’re safe. Ready?”

I said ready, and wasn’t hardly breathing, because I was in better shape from being a dancer and all-around entertainer, and rock stars smoke cigarettes and stand in one place all night besides the ones like Mick Jagger who add a few dance moves to their stage repertoire, but my heart was still beating like the drum and bass in a techno song, and we dashed through the door and down another hallway and he put his key-card in a door and it made that click sound and he pushed it open and got us inside to the free states. It’s funny how in real life, though, we were still in Tennessee.

His bandmates were on the sectional couch in the living room, which was smaller than mine but not at all a crap room, with an iPod stereo on the coffee table playing a gritty-textured punk-rock song with a British singer, and they were all drinking either bottles of beer or whiskey in the bathroom cups. There were four girls with them. The girls weren’t that hot, really. They were wearing tights and two of them had bangs and one even had glasses and was a little chubby. Maybe it’s because the guys in the band except for Zack weren’t that good-looking, but whenever Mi$ter $mith was with a girl, she always looked like a model or an actress, and they definitely never wore glasses. In a way I respected the Latchkeys more for not having model groupies. These girls probably had better personalities. Unless they wanted the model groupies but they couldn’t get them, since that was the whole point of becoming a rock star for a lot of guys. I didn’t know that when I started out, but once you see seriously ugly bassists backstage with models, you figure it out. For a normal guy, becoming a rock star is like Luann Phelps getting contacts and losing her lisp.

Mi$ter $mith had an entourage, too, like most black pop and rap stars, and they probably helped him get models. The Latchkeys didn’t have any friends with them on tour, but that was smart financial strategy. It’s hard to have career longevity when you’re controlling the purse strings for twenty people everywhere you go.

One of the girls looked better than the others, though. She was sitting by herself in the center, and was tall and thin, and her nose was long but it still fit her face good. But it was the way she sat, with the posture Jane wants me to have, that you knew she was their leader. Zack sat next to her and put his arm around her, and told me to sit next to him. He said, “Jonny, this is Vanessa, and these are Clara and Samantha and Jane.”

I almost said that that was my mother’s name but I stopped myself in time, and I also knew that if I asked to check email one of the Latchkeys might tell them that Jane doesn’t let me go on the Internet. Zack wouldn’t do it, but I didn’t trust the other guys not to.

The singer on the stereo kept singing “1977” at the start of each verse, and the bassist of the Latchkeys was like, “If we wrote a song named after this year, and someone was listening to it in three or four decades, what would it be about?” and the drummer said, “Like, fucking Facebook,” and the lead guitarist said, “No, articles about Facebook,” and Zack picked up an acoustic guitar from the floor and paused the music and played a pretty riff that was like the textural opposite of the song we’d been listening to, and one of the Latchkeys cupped his hands over his mouth and said, “He’s playing acoustic! Judas!” and Zack said, “Except for acoustic it would be, ‘Jesus!’ and he’d whisper to his band of disciples, ‘Play fuckin’ quiet!’ ” Then he cleared his throat and said the name of the year all serious in a way that made everyone laugh, and made up these lyrics on the spot and sang them soprano:

Status updates and Internet dates

I’d rather eat out a Middle East date

Get your filthy minds outta the gutter

I’m referring to consuming the biblical delicacy

Not cunnilingus on a woman

From a historically war-torn and oil-rich region

Whom I’ve been set up with by our mutual friend, John

Who thinks we have a lot in common

Everyone laughed throughout the song and especially at the end, and so did I to play along but I didn’t get most of the jokes. Zack turned the music back on to a new song and said, “You like the Clash, Jonny?”

I didn’t want to admit I’d heard of them but didn’t know their music. Punk was a genre Rog and Jane didn’t allow on my iPod since the singers were almost all low-caliber, but I’d seen on the iPod that they were the band playing, so I said I liked that song before, and he said, “This song is criminally underrated.”

“Oh, God, not ‘Complete Control,’ ” said the bassist. “You worship that song. It’s so banal.”

“It’s the greatest meta-critique of the music industry in a rock song,” Zack said.

I tried to listen to the lyrics, which were hard to make out, but I liked how it was part singing, part shouting. Normally this music, it’s all shouting because the singer’s got zero vocal chops. I could tell it was about how bad their label was, which is a major no-no. When singers play antimedia songs, they think they’re getting the fans on their side, but the fans don’t actually care and all you’re doing is alienating your ally and mouthpiece. But the fans really don’t care about a song slamming your label, even if most people hate their boss. They don’t even understand what the label does. They just know what’s put out in front of them, like a roast beef sandwich on an airplane, and have no idea anyone else had to feed and kill and cook and package the cow before serving it on their tray. And the funny thing is, they all wish they could be the packaged cow.

It wasn’t MJ, which pumps straight into my veins, and I don’t know how you could listen to him and not dance, but when Zack saw I was tapping my foot to it and turned the volume up, it didn’t make me want to dance. It made me want to throw or break something. When it was over he said, “I’ll put it on your iPod next time. Because fuck the major labels, right?”

“Right.”

The Latchkeys weren’t guys who’d leak something you said to the media.

He ruffled my hair and said, “We’re gonna convert you to a punk before this tour is over, right here in one of our three-star suites.” He looked at the bassist. “Also, you pronounce it buh-nahl?”

“Yeah,” the bassist said. “What do you say, bay-nul?”

“Buh-nahl sounds so pretentious. What do you guys say?”

He asked the room, but it was obvious he was only asking the guys in the band. They both pronounced it the way the bassist did, and the lead guitarist, Steve, said, “Zack, you lose the pronunciation battle once again, you working-class Jersey boy.”

It was the first time I’d seen them make fun of him at all. Zack smiled but his eyes dropped when he did, not a real smile, and he said, “You’re so banal-retentive, Steve.” They laughed, and he said to Vanessa, “So you know, I’m only doing this if you’re into banal sex.” She thought it was funny, and he said, “I’m into doing it hard-core banal. Banal sex, all night long, while watching interracial banal porn. Double-banal penetration, where it’s twice as banal as normal.” He did a fake bite of her neck, and said, “Jonny, you want a drink? Beer, whiskey?”

Everyone was waiting to see if I’d drink with them. If I said no the wrong way, like I did with the kids at Matthew’s birthday party, they’d know I’d never had alcohol before. Before I could answer, Steve said, “Milk?” like it was the funniest line anyone had ever come up with, the asshole, and the girls all giggled.

“I’m good,” I said to Zack. Then I looked straight at Steve. “But I’ll take some of your mom’s milk.”

There was silence for a few seconds. Everyone looked around at each other trying to figure out if what I said was funny or not, until Zack said, “Oh, snap, Jonny schooled you, Steve-o, lactation-style.”

Everyone laughed again at what Zack said, but it was like they were really laughing at my line, and he put his arm around my shoulders again and pulled me into him, and while the others were talking he said to me, “You coming out tonight?”

I’d been planning on lying about a media interview early in the morning and how I couldn’t stay up late. “For sure,” I said.

We hung out in the room awhile longer. I didn’t talk much, but I picked up that they had all met at college at Harvard and formed there under the name the Archdukes of Hazzard, which Zack said was the most preposterous band name of all time, and graduated a few years ago, and they released The Latchkeys Open Up last year. It sounded like college was a lot of fun for them there, that they were celebrities at school but not real celebrities. Maybe that’s why they didn’t seem to let it get to their heads now, since they’d had it build up slowly, from nobodies in high school to sort of famous in college to not famous again after college to pretty famous now, not like some musicians I’ve met who go straight from nobodies to super-famous and act like they were never nobodies. Last year I asked Jane if she thought I should go to college. She’d said, “I didn’t go, and I was as smart as anyone at that marketing firm and would’ve been promoted soon if I hadn’t had you and lost my job.” That was all she said. I wouldn’t want to study for an extra four years anyway, or five, when you count the year I don’t have to get tutored for if I get my California GED when I’m seventeen. But Jane was smart in a different way from the Latchkeys.

The other Latchkeys, even Steve, were nicer to me than before. They almost seemed like they were relatives more than friends, the way they teased each other. All my dancers and vocalists and musicians are at least seven or eight years older than me, and Jane makes sure I don’t hang out with them too much because they might be bad influences or cannibalize my focus. Watching the Latchkeys mess around with each other was like when the Cardinals win a big game and they have a pile-on at home plate. It made you happy to see them do it, but part of you was jealous since you wanted to be in the pile-on, too. The only time I get close to that is when all my backup singers and the band sing a line with me, like in “Love Is Evol,” where they yell the last line of the chorus, “Love bleeds you dry, never leaves you full, love eats you up, love is evol!”

I went to the bathroom. Someone’s iPhone was charging on the sink. This was really dumb to do, but I went into the Web browser the way Jane does and checked my email. Still nothing from Albert, and it’d been over half a week. I Googled “Jonny Valentine St. Louis concert.” A million articles came up about the concert with headlines saying things like “Stalker Threatens Jonny Valentine at Concert.” I clicked on the first one, from a media blog:

Jonny Valentine Receives Violently Sexual Threats During Televised Performance from Old Man; NAMBLA to Produce Next Album?

So! As if we needed further confirmation that Jonny Valentine concerts are attended exclusively by lovelorn prepubescent girls and rapey old men, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch is reporting that a 57-year-old St. Louis man was arrested after hurling a slew of violently sexual epithets at the Angel of Poop Pap Smears Pop during his live televised performance (many of which the mikes picked up; listen to some genius’s sound edit in which only the slurs are audible and remixed over the insipid instrumentals of “Guys vs. Girls”). The would-be ass-ailant was found with both a knife and a journal on his person, which allegedly further detailed the actions he would perform upon Jonny’s nubile body (is it just us, or is he looking a little tubby in this clip?). As the sexual and musical deviant awaits legal judgment, let’s all listen to the Jonny Valentine sexual-epithet remix a few more times, shall we?

I didn’t feel like listening to the remix, plus they’d hear it out in the main room, but I did read the comments below:

Sick. And yet profoundly gratifying. I’m a horrible person.

Proposed title of remix: “(rapey old) Guys vs. (lovelorn prepubescent) Girls”?

Yes. Just… yes.

OK, don’t take this the wrong way, but give Jonny seven years and I’LL be writing the same things in my diary. Just sayin’.

Best. Heckler. Ever.

Once you start reading them it’s hard to stop when it’s about you, even though you know pretty much exactly what you’re going to find and they just get worse and worse the farther you go down. It’s like people are afraid to be the first one to be an asshole, but once some others clear the way, they get super-excited about it. Except with most blogs, the blogger himself is the biggest asshole, so all the commenters think it’s okay to write whatever they want from the start. They think they’re being clever, making fun of me, but it’s just a bunch of losers who’re angry they’re stuck in boring jobs at offices all day and this is their only way to be creative. If they were actually creative, they wouldn’t be reading the media blogs, they’d be the ones the media blogs are covering. Which is what they wish happened, and that’s why they were reading a media blog in the first place, just like how Jane used to read all the glossies when she worked at Schnucks. But even the guy who wrote the post wasn’t creating anything. He was only linking to other publications and writing a little filler, like a crap DJ who remixes other people’s songs so it seems like he’s done something new, but he’s really just spliced them together like anyone with half a brain could do.

Zack’s toiletry kit was on the counter. For a second I thought about opening it but I didn’t. Next to it was a bottle of cologne, except it wasn’t like a regular cologne you buy in a store or see an ad for, it was a specialty cologne with no name, just a handwritten label listing ingredients. I unscrewed the top and sniffed it. It was definitely his woods smell.

It was probably worse to do this than to peek inside his toiletry kit, but I dabbed a little on my finger and smeared it on my neck. Now I smelled like Zack. I sucked my gut in and joined the others.

After an hour or so the drummer called a cab company and requested three cars for nine people. Zack said, “Jonny, Vanessa, and I will take one, you all split the other two.”

One of the girls said, “How should we divide it up? Guys versus girls, Jonny?”

She said it sweetly, you could tell, so I quickly half sang, “Why’s it gotta be that way?” and this time everyone laughed and didn’t need Zack to make a follow-up joke. I was going to hang out with the Latchkeys every night on this tour, and I didn’t care if I was tired all day.

We took two elevators down to the lobby, and I went in Zack’s. It wasn’t that cold out, but Zack gave me his leather jacket so I didn’t have to go back to my room. It was big on me, like an overcoat, and it smelled like him mixed with cigarettes. He took a red wool hat out from the pocket. “Wear this,” he said, and he pulled it over my head and ears. “For warmth and cunning disguise.”

Two cars came first, and Zack told the others to take them, and him and Vanessa smoked cigarettes while we waited. “Don’t ever quit smoking these,” he said to me.

Vanessa hit his shoulder and said, “Don’t listen to him, Jonny. Don’t start smoking them. Seriously.”

“I won’t,” I said. “I don’t want to fuck up my voice.”

“You do have a pretty goddamn golden voice,” Zack said. “Not like me. I’ve got the bronze. But I can write a verse-chorus-verse to opiate the masses. Other than that, I’m basically useless as a member of society.” I don’t think he really thought that way about himself, but if he did even a tiny bit, he was wrong. His friends loved him and people wanted to be around him and he made people feel smarter and funnier. If I told him, though, it would sound gay.

Zack told the cab driver the Velvet Lounge and gave him the address. The guy looked in the rearview mirror once at me, but I didn’t know if it was because he recognized me or he was wondering why a kid was with two adults.

Would the nightclub let me in? Or did it not matter if you were with adults? But maybe they had to be your parent? Zack looked too young to pretend to be my father. Except he could’ve had me when he was very young, and we were more like friends who partied than a father and son. You see some father-son actors like that in L.A.

Vanessa sat in the middle, and Zack made out with her. She allowed it for a minute but kept whispering, “Not now,” and finally she said, “Heel, boy,” and straightened out her skirt and turned to me and asked, in a teacher-type voice, what I usually did at night on tour.

“I usually have dinner with my mother and do homework and play video games and watch TV,” I said.

That definitely sounded like I was a little kid, but Vanessa wouldn’t make fun of me. She said, “You must miss your friends at home.”

“I don’t really ha — I don’t really miss them. I only tour a few times a year, and I have a lot of fun.”

“Jonny falls into the proud tradition of the rogue wandering troubadour,” Zack said. “All’s he needs is his harmonica and guitar”—Zack pronounced it gee-tar—“and a warm place to rest his head and nothing else, no, sir.”

I knew he was joking around, but I kind of liked that idea, me as the traveler who only needed his instruments. Except I wasn’t that type of musician. I needed instrumentalists and vocalists and dancers and buses and eighteen-wheelers and a bodyguard and a manager and a PR liaison. Sometimes I look around at the people and equipment and promo materials put together and am like, No one would notice if I disappeared, even though it’s all there because of me. If I was never famous, the people whose lives would be attached to mine would be Jane plus Michael Carns.

Also Zack said sir in a much less annoying way than Lisa Pinto did.

Zack paid with a twenty-dollar bill when the cab stopped. There were lots of adults in their twenties in a red-velvet-rope line before a black bouncer who made Walter’s body look like mine. The other Latchkeys came over while Vanessa found her friends near the door. “We tried to skip the line,” Steve told Zack, “but no dice.”

“Sounds like we’re huge in Memphis,” Zack said. “Jonny, come with us?”

He put his hand on my back and walked us up to the bouncer with the other guys behind us. Halfway there, Zack took his hat off my head. “Hello,” he said all polite to the bouncer, who was letting in a couple women in short skirts and wasn’t looking at him. He stood between me and the other people in line so they couldn’t see, which made me less nervous, since I didn’t want people taking photos. This was getting more and more dangerous, but if I had to be doing this with anyone, I was glad it was Zack. “My name is Zack Ford, and I’m the lead singer of the rock group the Latchkeys. We’re opening for Jonny Valentine here tomorrow night, and we were hoping to enter your establishment.”

“Got to get to the end of the line, sir,” the bouncer said.

“Jonny has a curfew, unfortunately, so waiting in line isn’t a great option.”

The bouncer turned to us, and the way he sized me up, I could tell he’d heard of my name but didn’t know what I looked like, and for all he knew I could’ve just been some kid pretending to be Jonny Valentine, the way the guy emailing me could be some perverted pedophile pretending to be my father. I don’t have much penetration into the urban-male demo.

Zack pulled out his iPod and shuffled through some albums before holding it up. “Look,” he said. “Jonny’s debut album. Triple-platinum smash. You still want to send us to the back of the line?”

The bouncer compared the iconic close-up of my face with The Jonny just brushing my eyebrows on the album cover and me in real life. I didn’t want to smile, or it might look like we were fooling him, but it was hard not to when I’d seen that Zack owned my album and he knew it’d gone triple platinum. “Hold on,” the bouncer said.

He went inside, and came out soon with a redheaded woman in her twenties, who looked at us and asked, “How many in your party, Mr. Valentine?”

I pointed to the other Latchkeys and the girls and told her nine. The bouncer unhooked the rope and let us in, and Zack let me go first but I could tell he was right behind me. The woman said her name was Irena and if we had any problems or wanted anything to ask her. She led us inside and through a door on the right, not the main entrance to the nightclub, and down two long hallways that must have been a special access for celebrities, and I could hear the girls behind me getting excited since they never did anything like this. I tried to pretend I’d done this before, but really I’d only been to industry events that were like nightclubs with Jane, not a real nightclub, and definitely not without Jane.

Finally we came out into the main room. It wasn’t decorated like a regular nightclub, it was more like a huge living room with wooden furniture and old couches and chairs like the kind Jane said she wants to decorate our living room with after she saw a spread of an Oscar-winning actress’s house in a glossy, and part of me thought about asking Zack to invite her over, but it would be super-lame to call my mother and also I’d be in serious trouble.

We were in a roped-off section that had another bouncer guarding it, with thirty or forty people in our area and a lot more in the rest of the room, either talking or dancing to the DJ, who was playing some bad hip-hop song, I forget the rapper’s name, but it was one of those where the guy tries to sing and he doesn’t have the range. I want to be like, Stay in your element. You don’t see me trying to rap. I’ve tried it on my own, and I know it’s out of my talent reach.

Irena brought us to a free area with two couches and two chairs around a chipped and beat-up coffee table. It was sort of like what they had in the hotel room, only we were paying to be here and have other people around us that we weren’t talking to. Zack grabbed one of the chairs and I sat on a couch right near him. Irena took everyone’s order, which was still whiskey or beer, and when she got to me, she looked at Zack to see what she should do. “Jonny, what soda do you like?” he asked.

“Ginger ale,” I told him. All soda is crap for the vocal cords, but ginger ale has a little less sugar and doesn’t cause as much mucus production. I couldn’t ask for diet in front of everyone, though.

“Ginger ale on the rocks,” Zack ordered, which is what I was going to say from now on. He whispered something else to Irena before she went off. When she came back with our drinks and was handing out the last one to Zack, the DJ kicked into the Latchkeys song “Frog-Legs Franny.” I caught Irena smiling at Zack, and I figured he’d requested it, to impress the girls, but they were already impressed, so maybe he just wanted it anyway. “Well, that’s embarrassing,” Zack said after Irena left. By now a bunch of people in our section were looking over at us, mostly at me and Zack.

The Latchkeys talked about books and movies and musicians I hadn’t heard of. They all had opinions on everything and used words like aesthetic and ideology and polemic. Maybe I knew more about slave autobiographies than them, but that was it. I thought about asking if they’d read The Confessions of Nat Turner, which was the best one I’d read so far, because it was short but also it has the most action and Nat Turner kills a bunch of white people just with a small sword, like he’s in Zenon, except he says he wants to slay his enemies with their own weapons, which in Zenon would mean stealing someone’s weapon and using it against them, and I don’t think the game actually lets you do that since you can’t inspect an enemy’s inventory until he’s dead.

They wouldn’t know about Zenon, though, so I stayed quiet. The girls didn’t say as much except for Vanessa, who used those kinds of words and argued with them all, especially Zack. Making smart music got you smart groupies who understood what you were doing with your sound, even if it meant a smaller overall base. I had fans who’d never even heard of MJ.

They were discussing the one movie I had seen, Back to the Future, and Zack was like, “It represents not merely a nostalgic desire to regress to the safety of adolescence, but to the conservative fifties, the notion that we only have to roll back the biological and temporal clocks and we’ll be happier. It’s a total by-product of the anxieties of the cold war…”

The song that was playing switched into something familiar, and after a few bars I picked up that it was “Summa Fling,” but a remixed club version I’d never heard before. It sounded decent, but it cut down my lyrics to the words “Summa fling, two-month thing, I wanna sing to my summa fling,” and overlaid a lot of other beats not in the original song. My producer for that album, Charles, had the philosophy that the music had to hook the listener but the vocals were what kept them there, and when you had someone with my vocal strength, you didn’t mess around with overproduced songs. We probably got a good royalty rate for the sampling. Jane watches that stuff like a hawk.

“This one of yours?” Zack asked me, and he gave me a little wink no one else could see so I knew he’d requested it from Irena. I said it was, and he said it was cool and told the other Latchkeys they should do their own remix about briefly dating the valedictorian of summer school called “Summa Cum Laude Fling,” and took Vanessa’s hand and danced with her. A ton of people in the crowd were dancing, too, and even if it was only like a quarter of my original, it somehow felt cooler to watch people here dancing to it while I drank ginger ale than it did when they danced at my concerts. Part of it was because the crowd was older and where we were, but the biggest reason was that Zack had requested the song, which meant he knew about the club remix already, and he was dancing to it.

The one thing I didn’t like about the remix was the original has a long fadeout, where I’m singing the chorus over and over for about thirty seconds, and what I like about fadeouts is how, after the song is over, it feels like it’s still playing somewhere, only you can’t hear it. It’s a nice idea, that just because you’re not listening to a song in front of you doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist somewhere else. It works even better for “Summa Fling,” since it’s like, Even this two-month relationship is going on in some way, that’s why I’m singing about it forever. The remix had a hard stop. You know a song is over then.

They ordered a second round of drinks from a new waitress, and Zack asked for a double rye. When it came, he said, “Jonny, let me get some of your ginger ale?” I handed it to him, and he brought it down below the coffee table with his rye and poured half his drink into mine. He passed it back to me without looking.

The drink smelled mostly like ginger ale, but also like Jane’s breath when she drank. I took a sip. It was sweet, but it stung my tongue like an arrow piercing your armor in Zenon and slid down my throat like a mage’s fireball that caused some damage. But it got easier with each sip, until when I was halfway through Zack reached for my glass again and dumped in the rest of his drink. The fireball fell inside my stomach, but it was a relaxing fireball, and it spread out like a smoke cloak in Zenon for hiding yourself, and then it was like the damage was healing. What doesn’t kill me only makes me stronger. Now I got why Jane does this. You don’t worry about anything anymore. I could say something dumb that everyone knew about Back to the Future and not care how the Latchkeys reacted, like that I thought the coolest part was how different everyone’s lives became in the future after one little thing changed in the past.

By the time I was almost done with my drink, Vanessa was sitting on Zack’s lap on his chair and making out with him like in a music video. My vision was getting blurry, and I didn’t have the energy to keep it straight, so I only saw their outline, and then I had this picture in my head of Zack sitting in an armchair like the one he was in, but it was in a home, in a real living room, and there was a fireplace behind him and he was reading the newspaper, and I went up to him as he patted his lap and I crawled onto it and sat there while he read the paper.

And the weirdest part was, I was getting hard. Probably it was because my eyes were sort of on Vanessa’s legs where her skirt was riding up on her thighs and I could almost see her underwear, so I focused my eyes on her there and got harder and shut my eyes totally and put my drink on the table and thought about what Vanessa looked like naked and humping her.

Next thing I knew, someone was shaking me awake. It was Vanessa. “Wake up, sleepy boy,” she said, almost like Jane singing, “Go to sleepy, little baby.”

I don’t know how long I was out for, but it was way worse than waking up early from zolpidem. The Latchkeys and the girls were all getting their stuff together and leaving. The nightclub was still pretty packed, though not as much as before. I swung my feet onto the ground and wobbled back to a sitting position on the couch before Vanessa broke my fall backward with her arms. “Easy there, fella,” she said. “Zack, help?”

Zack bent down right in front of me. His eyebrows looked concerned. A long lock of his hair touched my forehead. “You okay, little man?”

I made sure I wasn’t going to fall again before I stood up. “I’m solid.”

Zack gave me a fake punch on my cheek, lightly touching it with his knuckles, and said, “Cool. Walk out with me.” He put his jacket and hat on me and his hand on my back again, but this time I think it was to make sure I didn’t collapse or depart the realm.

We left through the secret passage from before and there was a long line for cabs, but Irena let us cut in front and told us to come back anytime. I went with Zack and Vanessa again. The cab ride seemed longer than the way there, since we were quieter and time always goes slower after you’ve left something than before you’ve arrived. Zack sat in the middle, and after a few minutes Vanessa leaned on his shoulder and fell asleep, and I got tired, too, and my head found its way onto his other shoulder, but I wasn’t falling asleep and I didn’t really want to be asleep, I just wanted to stay like that forever, smelling the cigarettes in his jacket I was wearing and his cologne me and him were both wearing and resting on his shoulder as we drove silently in the dark of a strange city.

We arrived at the hotel after the two other cabs. Zack and Vanessa took me up to my floor in the elevator. I was hoping we’d pretend to sneak around again, but I think they were too tired. They escorted me inside my room and took Zack’s jacket and hat off me. “Change into pajamas,” Zack said. “You don’t want your mom asking why you’re still in your clothes.”

While I changed in the bathroom, I was hoping Zack and Vanessa would say they were so tired, could they just crash on my couch? And I’d be like, “Yeah, I don’t really like my bed and I kind of want to sleep on the couch, too,” so I’d go on one of the couches and they’d take the other two, and we’d have a sleepover like I used to have with Michael and maybe even make a cushion fort. I changed my clothes super-fast so I could tell them they could crash there if they wanted, in case they were afraid to ask.

But when I came out, they weren’t in the living room. “Zack?” I called.

They weren’t in the bedroom, either. I guess they wanted a real bed. I got under the covers. It had that feeling of being too big, like it was an ocean and I was a stone someone skipped in it, where you watch it carefully at first to count how many times it skips, and then it sinks, and you pick up the next stone and forget about the last one.