The Love Song of Jonny Valentine (21 page)

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.