Nine Volt Heart (5 page)

SUSI

I
CLOSED THE DOOR on my new
friend, hoping to escape into sleep myself, but I made the foolish mistake of
playing my telephone messages.

 
“Susi, it’s me. We have to talk. I want to spend time with you. We need to get
closure over what happened.”
 

My ex. Logan Childs. Importuning on my time and attention.
He’s been leaving messages lately, though it’s two years past the time that I would
ever consider returning his call. Or allowing him in the same room with me.
Just twenty seconds of phone messages was enough to destroy any possibility of
sleep. Trapped in my bedroom, too anxious to either sleep or read, I felt
desperate for diversion. Yet it was far too late to call my dad to chat, and
both Angelia and my brother Steven had left town.

When I had to spend that ridiculous amount of time and money
on counseling, one therapist had me keep a diary. It is trendy these days, as I
understand it, to keep a journal to process life experiences, but I undertook
the assignment like every other prescription at the time. Pain pills every four
hours, not to exceed. Stretching exercises to tone what would never look
natural again. Antidepressants together with morning meditations, until the
brain-fogging was no longer pleasant. Sixty minutes of vigorous exercise,
minimum. I could fill the diary with just a record of what I had been sentenced
to endure in time-released tonics, plus physical therapy every Tuesday and
Thursday at eleven.

I sound bitter, but I no longer want any remnants of that
unhappiness around me. Anyway, with both insomnia and Jason in my house, I
pulled the diary from the nightstand. There is no one I can tell about what I’m
thinking. Angelia would want to be titillated, but it feels too perverse to
share; my brother Steven would worry or judge; Dad would listen and say wise
words, but I could give him even fewer details than I could Steven.

My guest is funny, bright, and intriguing, but disturbing,
because I had found myself comparing Jason to Logan all evening. Comparing a near-stranger
to my ex-husband felt as if I were rating Jason as a potential partner, which
would be a ridiculous way to think.

In these notes I’m writing, I want to avoid thinking about
Logan—though I seldom think of Logan anymore except as a symbol of my faulty
judgment and poor powers of observation.

So in this diary, I intend to assess my new acquaintance in
a rational way, without dredging up the unpleasant past.

First, Jason is too good looking, which must be at the heart
of what Angelia describes as his fatal flaw in relation to women. I’ve known other
absurdly good-looking men before—at university; when I performed; in everyday
life. Their sense of entitlement is oppressive. If I don’t want to think
about Logan, then Randolph serves as a prime example. However, this is to be a
rational assessment, and therefore my logic appears to be this: extremely
handsome men I’ve known turned out to be self-absorbed jerks; Jason is
handsome; ergo, Jason is a self-absorbed jerk. He just hasn’t yet demonstrated
what kind of a jerk he is. This judgment, however, may be open to criticism and
re-examination, for the logic may be faulty.

This assessment is also incomplete in that I haven’t
performed an inventory of what makes Jason handsome—another part of this
analysis that I can’t share with Angelia, Steven, or my dad. He is tall and
dark. I would think black Irish if I didn’t know that Angelia’s family came
from Barcelona. He has a narrow jaw and high cheekbones. Long lashes and dark
eyes, perhaps indicating a propensity for brooding, even if he is quick-witted.
A flashing smile and even teeth. Of course, he makes enough money at what he
does that he can buy a perfect smile. Given that, it is kind of him to share
that smile so often. I don’t want to focus too much on it, as a simple act of
self-preservation.

Second in this rational assessment, he is immaculately
dressed, even after fifteen hours of travel, with his shirt starched and
bleached to shimmering whiteness, tucked into pressed jeans. His hands are
manicured—so few men bother, except musicians and vain rich men. Because most
men under forty in Seattle wear shirts hanging over jeans or khakis, I can’t
say there’s anything overtly sexual about how he dresses. However, there’s a
fringe of dark hair that extends beyond the cuff of his shirt along his wrist,
and another fringe that appears where he has left the top two buttons of his
shirt undone. When I found him, he hadn’t shaved since early morning. A dark
shadow traced his jaw line, emphasizing his cheekbones. The shadow of a
mustache framed and drew unwanted attention to his lips.

Third, his hips are narrow and he has muscles. It is trite
of me to have noticed, but I know what he does for a living, and it doesn’t
promote the kind of runner’s build he has. In addition to being well-formed,
everything about him is too long. It creates an unfair advantage, so that I
have to look up to him when we stand close. He has a long torso (he must
struggle to keep his shirts tucked unless, as I suspect, he has them tailor
made) and also has long legs (whose shape shows through denim too well).

Fourth, and the worst of it, he has the long fingers of an
artist. He wrapped them around a mug of tea when I fed him, and I worried he’d notice
that I couldn’t quit staring. I came close to grabbing his hand, to trace the
sinews and webbing of the most beautiful hands I had ever seen. He touched me
at one point and—well, it startled me, though the details about how I felt
about being touched aren’t relevant to a rational discussion.

Fifth, he wears a silver buckle, like rodeo riders do. His
long torso directs attention to the belt buckle above his narrow hips, and the
gathered effect is to make one want to unbuckle it, proving what Angelia has
said about him: he is a bad boy. I swore after wasting those years with Logan
not to ever again glance a second time at handsome Peter Pans who want to be
bad boys when they grow up.

Another distracting attribute is Jason’s voice. Mr. Eckhart,
my first voice teacher, would love to have gotten his hooks into him. Of
course, Mr. Eckhart would proceed to wipe out that smoky quality, to make Jason
more of a pure tenor.

Why should I think about any of this? All I want from Jason
is advice about our grant proposal and a not-too-unpleasant time while I have
to entertain him. I want him to save my professional life, but I do not want
anything else from him. The rational mind turns away in disgrace from any other
consideration.

JASON

T
HE SUN SHONE FULL on my face
when I woke, making me sneeze. I thought the airplane seat had grown strangely
comfortable, until I realized it was Mission leather and sunshine that seemed
strange. After spending the winter in Europe, I hadn’t seen much of the sun.

I sneezed myself into clear-witted awareness. First, I was
sleeping in a strange woman’s house. Second, I had to pee. Third, I was naked
under the sheet, though I couldn’t remember taking off my clothes. The
instructions the previous evening had been to pee off the deck, but she meant
that for the dead of night. The door that led to the bathroom was open, so I
considered making a run for it, but just as I launched myself, I stubbed my toe
in the devil’s worst way and then barked my shin on the coffee table.

Where I found my clothes, laundered, pressed, and folded. I
grabbed them and lurched for the bathroom.

The house was tiny, so by the time I made it safely to the
bathroom, it seemed clear that I was alone. A razor, wash cloth, and towel were
laid out, and I lost myself in the bliss of a shower. I found everything as
generic and sparse as her car: fragrance-free shampoo, soap, and deodorant.

To be straightforward about it: I did not snoop in her desk
and bedroom. The one time I read a woman’s diary, I was nineteen (my excuse for
moral lapse). I learned that I snore when I have a cold and I scream like a
girl when someone puts icy feet on my balls. I also found out that the person I
had been sleeping with didn’t know how to spell and couldn’t wait to tell her
freinds [sic] how many times she came the night before. So I learned my lesson
about that sin. The one time I snooped in a woman’s bedroom—I mastered that
lesson quite young and have never needed a refresher.

In the kitchen, a plate with a croissant and a slice of
Welsh cheddar sat on the counter beside a note promising her return shortly,
when we could talk about her proposal.

Being both quick-minded and prudent, I determined the best
strategy was to call a cab and be gone. In the cold light of day, I knew Karl
would consider it imprudent to marry her for her music collection. However, in
spite of thinking myself an intelligent man, I’m also a weak man. I caved to
temptation, taking the croissant and cheese with me to the music cabinet, just
for one more look. Then I pulled my laptop out of the pack, plugged it in to
recharge the battery, and took quick notes on the titles. I could prowl used-CD
shops for ten years—in fact, I had been—without discovering the gold in this
woman’s oak cabinets.

When I plugged in my phone to recharge it, it rang, which
meant it was Ian or Karl, since no one else has my number.

“Jason Taylor’s answer service.”

“It’s Ephraim. We need to talk.”

“How the hell did you get this number?”

“Your phone bill still comes to the condo. I tried to get
the address changed, but gave up and just forward it to Karl every month. You
should watch your business more closely. The details matter.”

“What do you want?”

“I want to make sure you don’t cause trouble for yourself.
Or anything close to trouble for Dominique.”

“Ephraim, I have never said one bad word about her in
public. If you feel you have to warn me about anything, talk to my attorney.”

“I talk to Karl every single day. I talk to him more than I
talk to my own mother. This isn’t about your bad publicity. You are supposed to
deliver a new album. June is just around the corner, and Albion Records needs
new CDs in brick stores and tracks in online stores. You and I have a
professional relationship. So let’s discuss your work.”

“Get your witch of a girlfriend to quit lying about me,
Ephraim. Then you can talk to me about work.”

“As you know, she doesn’t take direction well. She will do
whatever she wants. You and I, however, have business to attend to.”

“Karl does all my business.”

“That’s one thing we need to talk about. You need more than
Karl. You need a real manager again. I think I should do that for you. You
named me as a key man in your recording contract, and we had almost gotten to
the business manager stage when you split.”

“You sleep with my wife. How can I do business with you? Are
you on another planet?”

“The only co-respondent in your divorce is music. You
married her for music, and you left her for music. And music—not Dominique—is
where you and I have a common business interest.”

“I left her? That’s your concept of what happened? She left
because the grass was greener elsewhere.”

“Let’s save that conversation for Karl’s office. I want to
hear about what you’ve been doing and how you plan to meet your obligations.
When can we get together to talk business?”

“On the last day it rains in Seattle.”

I turned the damned cell phone off, fuming, and buried my
attention in the lower shelf of leather-bound graduate theses, trying to keep
my thoughts in check while I leafed through those volumes. That woman Susi must
have picked these up from some professor’s estate sale. She had more than a
dozen texts on the folk tradition in North America (and I do not mean the Chad
Mitchell Trio and Judy Collins), including a brilliant piece that mapped tonal
shifts between twentieth century Cajun music and Breton traditional music,
which I wish I had the good fortune to write. Determined to take advantage of
this opportunity, I began to type notes as though my brain was on fire.

How could Ephraim Vance have the gall to ask what I’ve been
doing?

~

I have been doing what a man could do in the situation I am
in: playing music. Everywhere I could. A couple of my friends in Nashville felt
sorry for me and invited me to do session work with them. That was good, but
former friends and fans, whether confused or pissed off, crossed the street to
avoid me. New fans who bought
Woman at the Well
because they liked Dominique’s voice, and who followed the entertainment
papers, wanted to spit on me. Or they were groupies who like to chase bad-boy
guitarists.

And the word on the Internet is that Jason Taylor is the bad
boy of indie music. Or indie singer-songwriters. No one can decide the appropriate
category for our music—the portmanteau of cowboy grunge, “Americana” (whatever
that is). That I ended up sorted into the bad-boy bin is the most ironic of the
year’s events, even more ironic than women asking for my autograph in airports.
Most choir boys dabble in greater evil than I do. Our band—Stoneway, named for
the street near where Ian has lived since we were skater boys in junior
high—may have torn up the clubs where we played, and our lyrics and aggressive
use of stomp pedal and kick drum may give the impression that we thrash
elsewhere. But Stoneway doesn’t tear up hotel rooms. We couldn’t even afford
hotel rooms until a couple of years ago. I haven’t ended the night with my head
in a toilet due to either drink or drugs since I was twenty-one. It is not that
I don’t know how; I just don’t see why. I have never awakened either beside the
road or beside a woman not knowing how I got there. It's not that I'm a
sanctimonious folkie. I don’t care, for example, what people in the band do as
long as they are sober in rehearsal and on stage.

Believe me, I have plenty of character faults, which
Dominique loved to point out, though I already knew that I’m judgmental and
self-absorbed. She wasn’t the first woman to say that I’m so fastidious in my
personal habits that it gives people the creeps. Karl complains that I’m both
compulsive and impulsive, but the only evidence I’ve seen of the latter was
finding myself at the gates of hell with Dominique.

Cynthia, Ian’s wife, says I’m just an ordinary everyday asshole.
She knows me well, and I find her simple assessment soothing.

Let’s be clear: I did
not
hit
Dominique. Or any other woman. Ever.

I cannot say aloud what the truth is: that she is a nut
case. She has never told the plain truth about why we broke up, because she
can’t tell the tabloids that while I mourned my Uncle Beau, she screwed our
producer while he screwed up our music, dampening the instruments to accentuate
her voice and, worst of all, using computerized vocal tuning after I had
refused to do that for her. It’s embarrassing to acknowledge that she laughed
when I found out she was sleeping around, trying to find a faster ride to fame.

How I got myself here: I was standing on the red carpet with
John Fredericks when he won an Emmy for Outstanding Music Direction for his HBO
miniseries (the live-action Monkey King story). John invited me along, since
three Stoneway songs had significant play in the show. We were sipping water,
getting ready for the next set of journalists and talking about a headline from
that day’s news. I said—quite rationally—that since Afghanistan was about the
same size as Texas, all hell would break loose if Texas had five hundred drone
bombings in one year.

A reporter from one of those Internet gawking sites
overheard, and when his story went live after the interview, the headline was,
“Want to Know Jason Taylor’s Real Politics?” It’s not like my politics are a
secret or that I said anything outrageous, but the Internet hate machine picked
it up as proof that all entertainers are Lefty-Communists who hate America. Then
the extreme haters dug around in the Internet way-back machine and found a blog
post from my favorite Internet stalker:

 
If it was me with that witch Dominique, I’d have hit her too.
 

I know how the Internet works, so I’m not claiming to be a
victim of perfidy. However.

Dominique could have told the truth right then and ended
half of the Internet catastrophe that my reputation quickly became.

I didn’t hit her, or even consider it. I do not believe I am
capable of it. However, one night I did stand on the street like a damned fool
and scream at her to unlock the door to my house until the cops came. The
second time in my life I got arrested.

I wasn’t the first man in the world to learn he was a fool,
so I shouldn’t have taken it all so hard, except the grief of losing Beau
distorted everything else. At the time, I was too miserable to notice what I
had done to the rest of the band. Then I woke up one morning in Amsterdam and
saw that I, too, had betrayed the band. I let Ephraim produce that album so
that I could slip out of the marriage without any more acrimony. But
Ephraim-the-cuckolder turned my music into the grandest mainstream pap as ever
won a Grammy nomination. I betrayed the band after years of working together,
playing ten and fifteen hours a day, touring, living so closely together in
that huffing van that we all smelled the same. All our money went into the van
and amps and strings. We ate bar food wherever we played to avoid the cost of
at least one meal a day, and we didn’t care because we were too busy becoming
the best in the world. No compromises.
No surrender
,
just like The Boss said.

Until I let this long-legged rich girl talk me into handing
her our nuts on a platter. Not our nuts exactly, just the digitized original
tracks, but it was the same thing.

While otherwise shelling out bongo bucks for a publicist to
stomp out forest fires on the Internet, I went to Europe. Emmylou let me open
for her the first month. By then I already knew what it was like to be booed on
a stage, since I’d done a couple of festival fundraisers in the U.S. after the
rumor wildfires began raging across the World Wide Web. So, for fun, Emmylou
introduced me as a Russian phenomenon she’d met in St. Petersburg, and I wore a
Yankees cap that a songwriter friend gave me because he pitied my poor ass. I
didn’t speak between numbers, just did acoustic versions of the sad songs I’d
been writing. At least I could hear whether those songs had any potential
(seven survived the cut).

Then Ian and Cynthia joined me—oh god, what a friend he is,
and Cynthia always hated Dominique, so she never believed the stories, which caused
her to get into a shouting match outside Barrowlands in Glasgow. By that time I
was looking for my lost sense of humor. (I misplaced it while waiting at the
bus stop in the rain at five-thirty in the morning, too stubborn to accept a
ride from my attorney after he bailed me out of jail.) We got Rocky from the
Hell Cats to play drums, plus Cynthia on tambourine—she looks like great
rock-and-roll even though she can’t sing a note. The four of us tore up every
little hall Cynthia could book us into between Galway and Barcelona. We called
ourselves the Lost Sonsabitches, said we were from Wisconsin, owed everything
we knew to the Blasters and the BoDeans, and never admitted it when we were
accused of being ourselves.

That felt good—the playing, I mean, not the lying or hiding
behind a full beard. Besides doing a host of loud, fuzzed-out covers of
Stoneway and Lost Sons rarities, we turned my seven acoustic songs into
scorchers, then added a half dozen more, with enough distortion to peel your
eyeballs. I mean, if I’m going to waste my life writing sad songs, we might as
well make everyone in the hall scream, too. We have recordings of those shows,
and last week I saw bootlegs of fans’ recordings being traded online and
posting video on YouTube, after that constable in Manchester outed us. Stopped
us on the street at three in the morning, demanding to see our passports, and
then revealed our real names to his best buddy, who worked at
The
Guardian
. By then parts of
Europe had decided we could be allowed to walk the earth upright, instead of
crawling on our bellies for selling out to the mainstream.