The Love Song of Jonny Valentine (24 page)

Paraphrasing the old public service announcement: It’s 10 p.m.: do you know where your parents are?

To be sure, we live in an age of over-parenting, where babies are trained from the womb for the Ivy League and every precious exhalation from junior is deemed worthy
of a picture and status update. Ms. Valentine, who has a reputation in the music industry for meddling too heavily in her son’s affairs, might be accused of a Hollywood strain of this practice. Yet a far more egregious fault is the blithe under-parenting she practiced the other night when indulging in behavior befitting someone half her age, desperately seeking attention and stimuli while neglecting the stewardship of her child.

Although we may have not yet fully regressed into an infantile nation of Jane Valentines, disseminating photos of our vacations so that we can feel famous and glamorous for 15 seconds to 15 online acquaintances—but not paying any real attention with our own eyes to our surroundings—we are not far from the tipping point. As a mother of three toddlers juggling a career in law, I feel traitorous in passing judgment on the hardworking and single Ms. Valentine, although I—

I heard the door opening and Jane’s voice with the PR rep, so I turned the paper over. The rest of it, I could tell, was slamming Jane for not paying enough attention to me. I wished I could tell them how she stayed in bed with me two nights ago when I was sick. Newspapers always get only half the story. They’re even sloppier than glossies, because their deadlines are tighter. Internet media doesn’t even try to fact-check.

And this writer made it sound like she was above it all, better than Jane and better than celebrity news, but she was using us for content the same as a gossip blogger to advance her career, and gulping it down just like the public. The people reading it weren’t above celebrity news, either.

But now I knew why Jane had to be in the photos and why she was acting so strange today.

The PR rep told me she’d lead me on a tour of a few wings with the photographers trailing behind. The first hallway was all slick and shiny and fluorescent, with nurses and doctors and regular-looking
people who were probably parents of the sick kids. The rep opened a door and said this was a playroom for children with leukemia, and several of them were fans of mine, and would I mind singing a song to them?

Jane never likes for me to sing for free, but she jerked her head up and down a few inches, so I said sure. Some of the kids wore masks, and a bunch didn’t have hair. There was a TV and some toys and games, with a few parents and staff hanging out, but not much else. It was a pretty depressing place to have to play in.

They clapped a little when they saw me. The PR rep said, “This is Jonny Valentine, and he’s a very special guest. He’s going to say a few words and sing you a song.”

I didn’t know anything about saying a few words. Jane was staring at the kids, and one kid in particular. He had no hair, like all the others, and was even skinnier than the rest, almost a skeleton with skin pasted on top, and his cheeks were sunk into his mouth so deep it was like a skull.

“Hi,” I said. I was quiet for like five seconds. All I could think of saying was something like, “The one reason I’m here is because we’re doing a PR scramble to save my career and you guys have such crap lives it’ll make people forget I drank alcohol with the Latchkeys, even though if I saw a photo spread of a pop star doing this I’d see through it in a second, but people only remember the last thing about you.”

“It’s awesome to be here with you guys,” I said.

I sang “You Hurt Me,” which sounds good a cappella. It was going fine until I got to the chorus:

Oh, yeah, girl, you hurt me

You always make me cry

Oh, yeah, girl, you hurt me

You make me wanna die

As I was singing the last line I was like, This is a bad choice for kids who might
actually
die. The PR rep stiffened, and I wondered if she knew I was supposed to sing the chorus like six times in a row at the end. And
this fucked-up part of me
wanted
to sing it, and get super-falsetto on the word
die,
and sing it in the PR rep’s face.

Jane was still staring at the kid with the skull. Every other part of him was all shriveled up but his eyes seemed huge. When I got to the chorus again I replaced
die
with
cry,
even if rhyming with the same word is a hack move. I bet the kids didn’t notice, though.

I signed some autographs and posed for photos with them and Jane, and we moved to another wing. This time, I thought I heard the PR rep say, “Now, Jonny, this is the playroom for the bird unit. Do you feel comfortable going in?”

I didn’t see why she’d think I’d be uncomfortable around birds, as long as they were in cages, or why there’d even
be
birds at a children’s hospital, so I said, “Totally.”

I realized my mistake the second we walked in and saw a few kids who had parts of skin like the leftover cheese mixed with tomato sauce that gets stuck to the top of a pizza box. The PR rep explained that they were kids who had recovered enough from their burns to play, but a bunch of them still had to wear gloves and masks. I stared at my red Nikes, but I couldn’t help turning my head to look, like I was checking where Tyler Beats was on the charts. She whispered, “Sure you’re okay?” and I knew I couldn’t back out of it, so I mumbled yes and went on with her.

A nurse brought us over to one blond girl around my age who wasn’t burned that much, at least her face wasn’t at all, but you could see a big bandage like a tank top on her chest before it got covered by her blue hospital shirt.

She got excited and said she owned everything of mine and listened to it all the time. I thanked her and told her I needed the love of my true fans like her and sang “U R Kewt,” but as I was singing I had another fucked-up thought, which was that when she grew up she might have a beautiful face but if a guy ever got her shirt off he’d lose his boner, so she’d dream of meeting a guy who loved her even though her breasts were all burned, but she’d always try to hide it until she found that person, and the more she hid it the more she’d be embarrassed by it, until her being embarrassed by it would be
worse
than the actual burns, so
after a while if she finally found someone who
did
love her still, she’d think something was wrong with them for loving her and wouldn’t want them anymore, and everyone in this unit and in the whole hospital was like a character whose body was damaged bad in Zenon and couldn’t hardly walk anymore and what didn’t kill them did
not
make them stronger.

When I finished the song I told her to always follow her dreams, and that if you’re following your dreams no one can ever take anything away from you, which is even more of a crap idea for someone like her. I whispered to the PR rep that I had to use the bathroom, and she got the hint because she said we could move on somewhere else. Before I could go, though, the girl said, “You know why I love your songs?”

I said no. She said, “Your songs are always nice to listen to.” That was the most broad-spectrum compliment I ever heard, but I said thanks and walked away. “Most of the time they’re pretty,” the girl added, and I stopped. “But once in a while they’re not. That’s my favorite thing.”

“You mean the lyrics?” I asked.

“No, the words are,” she said. “But the way you sing them isn’t always. Even when the song is about having fun, sometimes it sounds like you aren’t having any at all. It’s like the song is happy, but you’re not. Like when someone’s smiling in a picture, but their eyes are sad. It’s really beautiful.”

I couldn’t believe a tween girl had this response to my song. This was the sort of thing a critic would write about a Latchkeys song, or even Vanessa would say to Zack about one of their songs. Or how someone might feel about an MJ song. It was way better than the usual stuff I heard from fans, about how they listened to me nonstop and followed all the news about me and I was their favorite singer. They only listened to me nonstop because we courted the radio stations, and they followed the news about me because our publicists fed material to the media each week, and I was their favorite because the label had marketed me to them. If none of that happened, they wouldn’t actually care about the music. This girl did. I wanted to ask her if she meant I sounded punk, but she wouldn’t know what punk was and Jane would wonder why I
was asking that and she was signaling with her eyebrows for me to hurry up, so I said, “Thank you.”

I found the bathroom down the hall and locked myself in a stall and tried to pee, but nothing came out. While I was pushing like crazy but nothing was happening, I wondered if I could get hard now if I tried, after everything I’d seen, like if it would still work properly. At first I couldn’t, even when I pictured Lisa Pinto and Vanessa’s legs and the time I walked in on one of my dancers changing in Houston.

I opened my eyes and looked down. A tiny black hair poked out of the skin around all the peach fuzz. I pulled on it and it didn’t come out.
Then
I got hard, and I even had to wait a little for it to go down before I left, since I didn’t want to be walking around dying kids with a super-hard boner and a grin on my face after finding my first pube.

I was going to turn left to join up with everyone outside the burn unit, but to my right there was a glass window with golden light coming from inside. All these rows of babies were inside, hooked up with wires inside clear rectangles. “What’s here?” I called to the PR rep, who was talking with the photographers and Jane.

“I see you’ve found our premature infants,” she said.

“Jonny, don’t wander off,” Jane called.

“What are they inside?” I asked the PR rep.

“Those are called incubators. They simulate the mother’s tummy for babies that are born too early, to help protect them.”

“Cool,” I said, which was stupid, but I was really thinking about how they were like the force-field spell in Zenon. “Can I see them?”

“Yes, but we have to be very quiet, and it’s best not to touch them,” she said. “They need some attention, but too much isn’t good for them.”

Jane was like, “You know, I think we’re running behind schedule.”

“I want to go in,” I said.

“We’re very late,” she said.

The PR rep said, “It’ll only take a minute.”

“Thank you, but we’re late to Jonny’s sound check,” she said, which was a lie. Sound check wasn’t until after I tutored with Nadine and we could always cut that short and make up the time later.

“I’m going in.” Jane wouldn’t stop me now.

“I’ll wait out here,” she said. Her face was icy, the most since she’d
been at the hospital, even more than in the burn unit. Her body was turned sideways, and she hadn’t looked inside the window once the whole time.

It was weird. When we walked into the room, I felt like I’d already been here, right in the room with all the premature babies, like at the start of the tour or something. That drawing of Jane as a baby in the
New York Times
had mixed me up. But I stopped thinking about it once I saw them. They were like half the size of regular babies and were sleeping in their little boxes, with bluish skin and pinched eyes and tiny arms and legs and scraps of hair. One of the nurses asked us not to go closer than a few feet and told the photographers not to snap any photos, so we stood and watched.

I wished I could hold one of them, since I’d never held a baby before and they were still pretty cute. It’s kind of hard not to find a cute baby. And it’s just as hard
to
find a cute adult. Jane says that’s a reason I’ll maintain my appeal, my naturally boyish looks. The second I develop facial hair I’ve got to learn how to shave.

The nurse talked about the challenges premature babies face, and it sounded bad, like a lot of them develop brain and vision problems, and unlike most of the other kids in the hospital who’d gotten bad luck later in life but at least they probably had some normal years first, these babies were damaged from the start all because they were born too soon. It could happen to anyone, but it happened to these babies. I could’ve been one of these babies, or the girl in the burn unit, or the kid with leukemia, or the girl in the wheelchair in St. Louis, or that fat woman Mary Ann in Schnucks, or Walter or Nadine or Rog, or the PR rep, or even Tyler Beats, which is the best of all those, but it wouldn’t be anything I chose, just something that happened to me, and maybe you choose a few things after that, but it’s mostly not up to you.

Right away I wanted to get out of the premature infants room and to leave the hospital completely, so I whispered to the PR rep that I was ready to go to my sound check, and she led us all out. Jane was typing on her phone a few feet away from the window with her back to us.

We went to the PR rep’s office, and she told me I could wait in there while her and Jane and everyone dealt with photo release forms in another room. Her computer was on, and the screen showed the hospital’s
website. I didn’t wait, I just went around to her side of the desk and opened a new window and got into my email account. As I waited to sign in, I noticed a framed candid photo next to the printer of the PR rep and this bald guy with a big smile and a bulky polo shirt and dorky jean shorts and their son, hiking somewhere.

My email had tons of spam again. One message said “How to become rich and famous in 30 days!” which sounds like something only idiots would fall for, but I
did
do it almost that fast, if you time it from when Jane uploaded my first YouTube videos to when we signed with the label. Most successful musicians take much longer to make it, Rog always tells me, and I’m the lucky exception, and he thinks that when stories like mine get so much press, it gives young musicians the wrong idea that they can hit it big overnight, so they don’t work as hard at their craft, they just hope someone will come along and discover them on the Internet.

I searched for Albert’s name, and my stomach jumped up to my chest because there was one new email from him, written a few days after I’d sent him the photo. I opened it but it was longer than his others and I was afraid of Jane coming back and catching me reading it.