The Love Song of Jonny Valentine (38 page)

“No, seriously, I am,” I said. “I’m looking for Albert Valentino. If your name is Al Valentino, please show your ID to security and come onstage.”

Everyone in the Garden started talking and looking around. Not everyone would know or piece together that Al Valentino was my
father’s name, so that was a smart move. Except Jane would be pissed. If my father was there, he could get onstage at least while I sang the medley.

I scanned for him, but it was too dark and the lights were all on me. The swing lifted me up and I had to focus. I got through “U R Kewt,” but I kept worrying that if my father was trying to get up onstage, Jane would intercept him. Or if he was there, I bet he was in the cheap seats and it would take him forever even to reach the floor.

So after “U R Kewt,” to buy some more time and to make sure the security people knew what to do, I forced an interlude, which I’m not supposed to do to keep the momentum going, and said again that security should let a guy named Al Valentino onstage. I sang “Roses for Rosie,” and I threw all the petals down. Some of them could have been falling on my father’s head as he walked toward the stage.

There was still no sign that he was coming when I finished it. I switched to “Guys vs. Girls,” and I was looking down the whole time to see if anyone was coming up onstage. No one was, not even any impostors pretending they were named Al Valentino, though there weren’t many guys at the show anyway, and the ones who were were probably child predators and the last thing they’d want to do is offer themselves up to security. I got annoyed, which constricts your vocal cords, that he’d made me all worked up for this and hadn’t figured out a way for us to meet. I was eleven years old, it shouldn’t have been up to me and I definitely shouldn’t have had to interrupt the biggest concert of my career, he should’ve just called Jane and worked it out with her instead of making me sneak around on computers.

The swing set me down with no sign of my father. The dancers and singers and I took our bows, but instead of going offstage with them before coming back for my encore, I stayed where I was and let them go, because I didn’t want to run into Jane. “I’m gonna sing an a cappella song to y’all,” I told the crowd, even though the set list called for me to do “Love Is Evol” and “Kali Kool” as encores, so that the band wasn’t with me and I could sing as long as I wanted in case he showed up. I launched the first verse of “Crushed”:

Like an empty can of pop

Like snow and sleet and slush

Girl, with you I can’t stop

From feeling like I’m crushed

And when I was about to switch to the chorus, four security guys walked as a group in the darkness of the stands toward the stage. They got closer, and I waited a few seconds as they came down an aisle, but I couldn’t make anything out. My breathing and heartbeat sped up, which was bad since this song had slow pacing and I could feel myself rushing the lyrics. I sang the chorus:

I got a crush on you, it ain’t funny

Got a crush on you, under your pinkie

You do what you want, girl, it’s plain to see

I’m not on your mind, but you’re crushing me

People think good singers are just born with strong pipes, but the best singers are creative interpreters, too. Like with the last line of the chorus, I emphasize the hard
c
in
crushing,
like
ka-
rushing, so it’s like the pain when you first get hurt, then I soften and draw out and deamplify the rest of the word,
ruuusssshing,
like, This is what’s left of me, this gooey inside that you’ve beaten up, and so I whisper
me
where you can’t hardly hear it, because you’ve destroyed me and you probably don’t even think about me anymore.

By the time I finished it, they were at the base of the floor, where all the other security guys were lined up, and one of the four new guys discussed something with one of the guards who was lined up. There was a person in the middle of them, and just enough light from the stage that I could make out the purple bags under his eyes. Our purple bags.

I stopped singing. “Let him come up,” I said into the mike.

My father’s face was still in the shadows. One of the guards put his hands on his back and walked him around the stage to the little stairs and past a set of security guys, over to my elevated stage and through
another line of security, up a last short flight of stairs, and finally over to me. The Garden has top-shelf security.

“I have to stay here between you,” the guard said to me. I nodded. I don’t think I could have spoken right then if I’d tried.

The crowd was talking now, and I was in danger of losing them if I didn’t sing again soon. But I couldn’t do it yet. I had to look at the guy standing four feet away on the other side of the security guard.

He was better-looking than he was in his driver’s license, which most people are. His chestnut hair was thin but he had all of it, which was good for me even though Jane says what matters most is what her father had, and he went bald young, so we’ll explore medication for me eventually. And he dressed kind of cool, with these beat-up black boots and a brown leather jacket that was sort of like Zack’s except more rugged and warmer and not as stylish. He looked like someone who could hitchhike anywhere and be fine.

I got nervous over how bad it’d be if Jane interrupted the show and how not only was my father watching me perform, but he was
in
the performance. I blocked it out the best I could and picked up the second verse of “Crushed” as if nothing major had happened and I hadn’t met my father for the first time in years and an entire stadium plus an Internet live-stream audience had watched it happen. It was almost like doing it in front of thousands of people was easier than if we’d met one-on-one in a room for face time by ourselves.

For a second, even with what had just gone down, I found myself wondering how many last-minute and in-progress Internet viewers we had. We needed about seventy-five thousand total to break even, after all the marketing and advertising expenses. Over ninety thousand would be considered a triumph.

And when I wrapped up the final chorus, I realized this would be the last song on the tour, and I wanted to draw it out. So I pulled out the melismatics on the words
you’re crushing me
so long, the audience kept cheering and clapping for me to go on, and my lungs felt like they were inhaling the applause and they could roll with it forever. Dr. Henson did a test on me once, and I have the lung capacity of a marathon runner. My father was smiling the same way he might if he was watching
me sing in a concert at school, like those dads who used to videotape our crap chorus.

The set list called for one more encore, but I’d already switched it up, and if I did another it might give Jane the chance to interfere, so I told the crowd I loved them and would see them again soon, but didn’t say we hadn’t figured out when or where my next tour would be, or if I’d even still do one.

“This way,” I said away from the mike while the crowd cheered. My father followed me. He was still smiling.

I didn’t go to the main entrance, though. I went to the side one that I’d found with Walter earlier, on the opposite side of the stage. There was one security guard behind the door there now, and I walked fast in case Jane had told security to grab me before I went off. He didn’t stop us, probably since I looked like I knew what I was doing. Support staff is always afraid of losing their jobs.

We were back in the tunnels again. There were so many, it would be a long time until Jane could find us.

Then I got really scared, because what if after all this time he was a child predator who looked enough like what I remembered my father looked like and had made a fake driver’s license? Or what if he was my father and was
also
a child predator? I couldn’t straight up ask him if he was one. Not many would be like, Yeah, I’m glad you asked, I actually
am
a child predator. Instead I said, “So, you’re Al.”

“I am,” he said. “Thanks for inviting me. You were incredible.”

He put out his hand for a high five. It didn’t feel dorky the way it did with Dr. Henson. It felt like the way a baseball player congratulates his teammate at home plate on a homer, like, I’m not surprised you did this, but it’s still cool.

His voice was baritone and gravelly. It sounded like the narrator in Zenon if you lowered the treble and some of the frequencies. I thought he might have a Kansas or St. Louis or even an Australian accent, but he didn’t have much of one. He sounded like he was from nowhere, really. Maybe he spent a lot of time in tunnels, too. “Let’s keep walking,” I said, though I didn’t mention it was so Jane wouldn’t find us.

I stayed a few feet ahead of him as we turned through the tunnels. A
few more Garden workers were moving around now, but I don’t think they knew who I was, because they were mostly Mexican guys. Mexican guys never know who I am. They’re too busy working to follow celebrities. And celebrities are too busy being celebrities to pay attention to Mexican guys. It’s like neither one knows the other exists.

“How did you get a ticket?” I asked.

“I bought one off the Internet,” he said. “They were hard to find. You’re a hot ticket.”

“I can pay you back.”

I pictured him going on the Internet and refreshing the site until a ticket was available and buying it right away. The tunnels were cold, but I felt warm inside, thinking of that.

“No way,” he said. “I would’ve paid a thousand bucks to see you. I bet scalpers can sell them for that much, too.”

The most I’d heard of anyone paying for a regular single ticket was around six hundred dollars, and there were some charity seats that went for more, but that didn’t count. “Not that much.”

“Well, they should. You’d be worth every penny.”

I wondered again if he had another family now, or at least a girlfriend. If he’d had a kid in Pittsburgh, maybe the kid and his mother moved to New York, which is why he came back. And I had the same thought about him playing catch with his kid, in Central Park, because you couldn’t do it anywhere else in New York. The strange thing is, I suddenly really hoped he did and that he brought them and I could meet them. I’d have a half-brother, or a half-sister. “Did you come with anyone?” I asked without looking back at him.

“Nope. Just me. Some of my friends wanted to come, but I didn’t want to ruin your concert with a group of rowdy construction workers.”

I was a little disappointed I wouldn’t meet this family I’d invented for him. Then I got happier that he might not have one, but I was even more disappointed he hadn’t brought his rowdy construction-worker friends. It would be much cooler to have them at my show than a crowd full of tween girls. “You want to play a video game?” I asked. “I have this game, The Secret Land of Zenon, and I’m close to finishing it. It’s in the star/talent room.”

He looked behind us and ahead of us, but there were only a few Mexican guys moving stuff around. “You sure that’s all right?”

“Yeah. They always put a game system in my room. It’s in my rider.”

I told him we had to use the wall maps. We studied the first one to figure out where we were, and I was about to head one way, but he said, “Hold on. It’s the other direction.” He walked ahead of me, and I followed behind. I liked how he figured it out so quickly and wasn’t like, “I
think
it’s the other direction,” but was just, “It’s the other direction.” Jane’s always getting lost, even in L.A. and with the GPS. Maybe I’d get his sense of direction. I don’t know how mine worked in cities yet, because when I was in St. Louis I was too young to go out on my own, and I can’t do it now.

“Do you have a good sense of direction?” I asked.

“Usually,” he said.

“When you went on that hiking trip, did you use a map?”

“Hiking trip?”

“In Australia. With your friend Dave.”

“Oh, sure,” he said. “You shouldn’t hike without a map.”

“When was that?”

“With Dave? I guess about a year ago. But I used to hike in Kansas growing up, and we never had maps.”

I imagined him hiking a year ago in Australia with the guy in that picture, being attacked by kangaroos and meeting a tribe of those Australian black guys who gave him and Dave food and water. A year ago, I was in L.A., gearing up to record
Valentine Days
, probably getting spray-tanned and drinking sugarless pink lemonade.

We turned into the next tunnel and looked at the new
YOU
ARE HERE
sign on the map. We were going in the right direction, and I let him lead us.

“Is it true that toilets flush in the opposite direction there?” I asked in one of the tunnels.

“Where?” he asked as he checked out another map.

“In Australia. I read that they flush opposite how they flush here.”

“I never really noticed. But summer and winter are reversed. When it’s hot here, it’s cold there.”

“That’s like in Zenon,” I said. “A lot of times, the opposite of what you think you should do works best.”

He asked me more about the game, and I told him how to play and what it was like as we got closer to the star/talent room. It felt like when you’re in a party of adventurers in Zenon, which happens a couple times on certain levels, and you each have a specific skill. My father would be the cartographer, even though he didn’t bring maps when he hiked in Kansas. I’d be the bard, I guess, which wasn’t really a skill, but sometimes you did meet bards in Zenon, only I didn’t play any instruments. It reminded me of that time we were in the car after Richard’s birthday party, when we drove on the highway, except this time we knew where we were going. And it also was like when me and Zack ran through the hallways in the Memphis hotel. But Zack was only using me to get into the nightclub, just like he used my Walmart fans to broaden his base. Me and my father were on a real adventure together. And hiding from Jane and venue security in the Garden tunnels was way more like the Underground Railroad than the Memphis hotel was.