The Love Song of Jonny Valentine (20 page)

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.