On My First Run-in With John Mayer

"'You can get another job, Brian!' Kristine said."

Art: Austin Blake Mays

July 14, 2016

Boston, Massachusetts

I was 22 years old

This was a couple weeks ago at this point, my last shift at the hotel before I left for my weekend in New York. Worked with Eli from five to eleven. There was a guest who couldn’t open up her safe and I had the pleasure of starting off my shift by informing this woman that the two iPads she’d stowed inside had been sawed to shit after our maintenance guy used the jaws of life to get the thing open. The night improved. Surely in response to that shift a couple months ago when Molly asked the brutally-unwilling Brendan Fraser for a photo as he came out of Hojoko, the bar manager came over to Eli and I around six, saying a VIP guest would be coming to the restaurant tonight and that we should by no means ask for a photo, make a scene, etcetera. He gave us no idea who this VIP guest might be but we agreed. Obviously.

If Madonna Ciccone herself walked into Hojoko, I would never think of doing anything like that. I want to be the star, not the star fucker. So time goes by and, still, no sign of this guest. Around eight, a visibly wealthy couple (you can just smell it on them, I swear...always so slow-paced and barrel-gazed) walked through the lobby and into Hojoko and I heard them say the words, “John Mayer.” Dead & Company were in Boston, playing Fenway that weekend—mom and dad stayed at the hotel to see them, actually—so it all made perfect sense.

Immediately, I texted the family group saying that I was 99% sure John Mayer would be coming to (basically) my place of employment. Mom took some time to respond and, in the meantime, Jillian, Lindsay, and I joked that she’d either stroked or was currently hauling ass down I-93 en route to the Verb. She eventually responded, begging me to get a photo and tell him how much she loves him.

“You can get another job, Brian!” she said.

I figured John would go inside Hojoko through their front door, logically, so I had one eyeball permanently fixed on the host’s stand all night. But right around 9:00, walking through the front doors of the Verb and passing through my lobby, accompanied by two other people and mere feet away from me: John Mayer. And, of course, I’m dealing with a guest. Fully checking in a new guest, mid-”So, there’s no password for the wifi…”-spiel when I first saw his very tall figure coming through the lobby. Starstruck, I completely lost my train of thought, repeating myself God knows how many times as I tried to provide all the usual information as quickly as I possibly could. Hoping I’d send them on their way to room 217 before John made it inside Hojoko. “Not the starfucker,” my ass.

But with what I can only imagine to be the creepiest looking HUNGER in my eyes, I did make eye contact with John for a split second before he crossed the threshold into the restaurant. Needless to say, for the rest of my shift, I took advantage of every last opportunity to cut through Hojoko to go down to the office, sneaking a look at him every time. He was in that big corner booth, the yellow one.

And then that next day, mom and dad are at Fenway for the Dead show and dad’s on his way to the bathroom when he runs into Andy Cohen at the urinal. And what do you know...my father and Andy Cohen are wearing the same exact thing. A tee-shirt of the Grateful Dead skull with the state flag of New Hampshire inside of it. The exact shirt my mom personally gave to Andy Cohen when we saw him at that book signing in Newton a couple years ago. Dad and Andy apparently chatted for a bit and got a photo together. A whirlwind weekend for my mother, of course. And to think this happened after she got spotted by Kailee from Emmanuel who works security at Fenway and asked her, “Are you Brian Burns’s mom?” Mom said she squealed. I don’t doubt that. It was written in the stars for her to have a gay son, I swear to God.

May 19, 2021

Brooklyn, New York

I am 27 years old

Barricaded down in the computer room of my family’s suburban New Jersey home, I was five or six years old and giving Tina Brown a run for her money. I used to have these “Celebrity Files.” Each star got their own manila folder and, inside each file, I’d assemble clippings about said star from the only reading materials my household ever had to offer: US Weekly, TV Guide, and if I was very lucky, People. If Reese Witherspoon or Jennifer Love Hewitt or Sarah Michelle Gellar was at a Hard Rock Cafe opening, not only did I know about it, I archived it. The birthplace of my obsessive tendencies, yes, but even more to the point—the natural inheritance of Kristine Burns’s raison d’être. To know and to love the famous.

Seeing a celebrity was much more of a novelty in Boston than it is in New York. I almost checked Tegan and Sara into the hotel one night but they never showed. An altogether poetic summation of my time living in that city. But I’m in the Big Apple now! They’re everywhere! My first day living in New York, I’m hanging out with my future boyfriend for the first time ever and we’re talking about Arianna Huffington only for Arianna Huffington herself to quite literally cross our path as she steps out of her town car and walks into a restaurant for dinner. I’ve seen sitcom stars whose faces I recognized but names I didn’t know, a British film director who didn’t give me a tip at the end of my museum tour, a Turkish-American author who I spotted inside of a MOSCOT and decided I’d only approach if she exited the store on Orchard Street instead of Delancey (she exited on Orchard). And almost always, I text my family. “Just saw Michael Stipe lol,” for example. And almost always, my mother, feverish, will respond, “ASK FOR A PICTURE.”

It’s just not something I’m going to do. Me and Austin approached Blythe Danner outside the IFC Center one time but our generational gap and the homosexuality of it all made that feel okay somehow. I wish I could say I’ve let go of my “I want to be the star, not the star fucker” delusion but my skin continues to crawl each time I spot a celeb walking down the street and my mom urges me to go up and present myself as some lowly, lowly fan. A shameless self-presentation that, at last, after a cool 16 years, paid off for my mother.

While Kristine really does adore John Mayer, he’s not without precedent. She was grounded for weeks after pawning off her paper route to a neighborhood kid so she could attend a Jackson Browne concert and, in later years, she and my dad saw Bruce Hornsby enough times that he still recognizes their voices in the crowd. But nearly twenty years now since Room for Squares played on constant rotation in her Saturn Vue, Mayer is more or less cemented as my mother’s number one. And that was before he caught wind of my “happy birthday mom” photo I tweeted, a now-annual tradition of sharing the same Goyaesque photo of my mother begging John Mayer’s manager for a photo on the streets of New York in 2005. My mom is sporting an expression of anguish I’d laugh at if only I didn’t recognize it so keenly in myself. John Mayer, meanwhile, is visibly—rightfully!—scared. Feeling guilty, he apologized to my mother in the form of a song and posted it on TikTok. It currently has 3.2 million views.

“I know Lara Spencer on GMA who does the Pop News segment LOVES JM too. How do I get this to her? Gotta keep this going...lol,” texts my mom, days after her favorite musician of all time shared with the world a song written specifically about and for her. Cloud ten suddenly so alluring—and so, so near—once enough time’s been spent on number nine. And I understood that. It wasn’t like she was ungrateful. She was elated. This original song dedicated to a person who has a deeper reverence for celebrity than just about anyone else I know. And so I felt so strongly like I should protect her from chasing this high, insisting—as if I know what I’m talking about—that it’s one thing for a gift to fall into your lap but quite another to want for more of it. My mom never once made me feel like I was raining on her parade, appreciating what I had to say even if she didn’t agree with it. I just wanted her to enjoy it, to revel in this totally unexpected sequence of events. Hoping that something this pure, this sweet just might stay that way. And that every time Kristine heard John Mayer sing her name, she felt like a star.