Nine Volt Heart (6 page)

Yet I was still spending half of each day convincing myself
that I had more value than pond scum and the other half drowning my sorrow in
music. At least people trade our bootlegs again, instead of just plain giving
us the boot. Also, I can make jokes in front of a crowd again, though it is
still a little hard in front of a mirror.

It had been an amazing couple of years of self-discovery.
You just haven’t plumbed the possible depths of self-loathing until you’ve been
married to someone you can’t trust and who doesn’t like you.

“Why Dominique?” Cynthia wanted to know. “How could you fall
in love with someone like that?”

I began to stutter.

“How could you even believe anyone named Dominique was
sincere from the beginning?” she said.

I protested to Cynthia that she was being unfair to the many
worthy Dominiques of the world, because I’m still an optimist, and nothing she
did made me think less of other women. I could also have protested that she
wasn’t actually a Dominique; she was a Jennifer who thought the world had
enough Jennifer stars among millions of commonplace Jennifers. I guess in the
end that’s all we had in common—two of the most common first names of our
generation. However, I can live with my ordinary name, but hers didn’t sparkle
enough to suit her delusions of future grandeur.

Though at least temporarily, it isn’t delusional. Dominique
has spent the past year higher on the charts than any Jennifers or other
wannabes. She chose Dominique as her name because of that disgusting pop song
by the French singing nun—it was the singing one, right? Not the flying one? I
tried to tell her that the song was rotten, since it was about the Albigensian
Crusade, and light-hearted pop songs about holocausts and inquisitions aren’t
appealing. Why I didn’t see from the start that I was involved with the wrong
woman, I can’t tell you now.

“‘She said she loved me (but she lied).’”

That’s how I answered Cynthia’s question, but it left me
miserable, for truthfully, I wasn’t in love with Dominique, which makes me as
much of a charlatan as my never-lovin’ wife. I don’t believe I have ever been
in love, though I spent a great deal of time thinking about it, walking the
streets of cities like Oslo and Amsterdam late at night after a show. The
former viscount of the indie love song doesn’t know a blessed thing about love.
What a liar I am.

Went to bed with a poor little rich girl, just like my
father did. Dominique seemed to believe that, like in a romance novel,
outrageous sex would make me fall in love and marry her. I didn’t really fall
in love. For a moment, I thought
maybe
. Then
Dominique blinked and looked away.

What I fell for was having a far-too-beautiful woman sing
with me and sigh in the night that she loved me. Sure, she came on to me like
any of the sweet, lusting women at the edge of the stage, wanting to take a
guitarist home with them when the show is over. Yet Dominique didn’t have any
reason to want that. At first, I thought she was slumming. She chased after me,
begging to sing with me. She had a little scene going in L.A., singing Patsy
Cline torch songs. It was a cute act, but it was just that: an act. I’m from a
working-class neighborhood—hell, I spent half my boyhood in effing Ballard and
the other half in a rickety apartment in lower Wallingford, if you want to
know—but I learned enough in that
artiste
high school
they sent me to that I know the very rich are indeed not like you and me. So,
as Bruce said,
what was a woman like her doing with a guy
like me
?

She was looking in my eyes, whispering that I was everything
she dreamed of. After a short while, she was telling me I could be so much more
if I’d start making the business work for me instead of always working against
it. Stop being so self-destructive, she said.

 
You can go with a big label and take the money without letting them take your
soul. You have what it takes. The whole world should know you instead of just
your quirky, indie-loving fans in little towns where the sun never shines. Let
me help you be everything you can be.
 

I recognize this now, from literature. It’s called the
siren’s song. You stop your ears against it, to avoid being shipwrecked in the
straits. The next time I hear “be all you can be,” I’m joining the effing army.

Of all the bad-boy things my father did, he never spent a
night in jail while the police tried to figure out what the woman meant when
she said, “He has abused me awfully.” The cops realized that it was only drama
on her part, and I hope someday she will tell the world the truth. However, I
don’t think it’s possible for Dominique to speak the truth. Oh geez, I have to
stop obsessing about it or all that dramatic self-pity will come out in my
music, and I’ll sink to my father’s depths.

That is what my father did, made himself famous for
musically beautiful and grandiose self-pity, veering more to the Hank Williams
side of the Lost Highway than the Gram Parsons side. When Jesse Rufus recorded
that Neil Young cover, singing “‘Better to burn out than fade away,’” he must
have thought that meant “better to wrap your brother’s car around a telephone
pole than get sober and do what a man is supposed to.”

He never acknowledged me. If he had done so, he’d have had
to do it for God-alone-knows how many other bastards he left behind. Seems like
every town I played in America in the last year, a drunk has come up and
claimed he is my lost half-brother. Thanks to Dominique, that stupid bust with
my uncle left everyone in the world knowing whose son I was. Before then, I had
done as fine a job of covering it as my father ever did. I remember sitting on
one of those NPR talk shows—the one with the brilliant woman who always asks
the leading questions no one else thinks of—and of course she started probing
influences.

“Anyone listening to your music for the first time will
notice how much you sound like Jesse Rufus. And your guitar style reminds me of
the Lost Sons.”

Why in the hell that had to be the name of my father’s band,
I can’t say.

“There is a heavy Celtic influence in my work, though more
of the Waterboys than the Pogues,” I answered as I always used to, intending to
throw snoopers off the scent. “Otherwise, I listen to everything. Yes, Beau
Rufus plays bass in my band now, but he is so versatile, I don’t think he has
imported the Lost Sons into our music.”

My Uncle Beau was part of the Rufus family, one of the
original Lost Sons, the only one who acknowledged me. When my mother’s wealthy
family disowned her, Uncle Beau made sure she had what we needed, took care of
me on those frequent occasions when she was too ill to deal with a boy, and
then helped me on my way after she died. Uncle Beau gave me a guitar when I was
eight and an amp when I was twelve. Uncle Beau went back to my mother’s father
when I wanted to drop out of high school to play music, and he teamed with that
old man to get me into an arts-centered high school. The old man wrote letters
pleading for them to enroll me, wrote checks for my tuition, and then made a
monster-sized donation.

My dear grandfather didn’t believe he got his money’s worth,
and I never saw him again, after I got booted out two weeks before graduation.
I’d been playing in two bands for cash—my grandfather paid tuition and Uncle
Beau paid the rent, but neither was around often, and I had to bear the cost of
my recorded-music habit and instruments to feed the jones I had for music. One
of the two bands I played in got good enough that we had a chance to tour in
Europe. Yeah, it was like how Ian and I played over this winter, where you
commute on a EuroPass, serve as your own roadie, sleep on a promoter’s sofa,
wash your underwear in the sink of an Airbnb walkup when no one has a spare
room to volunteer. The roots music fans in Europe liked us. That was when Ian,
Toby, and I first played together, high just from playing music fifteen hours a
day. The slight downer was that I got kicked out of school for not showing up
for two months.

My grandfather didn’t get around to forgiving me for that
before he died. At least he isn’t around now to be asking me, like Cynthia and
Uncle Beau, “Why Dominique? Why fall in love with her?”

Rich girl pushes poor boy to the top. Rich girl takes the
poor boy’s guitar licks and his best friends’ sweat and desire, and escorts
them through, as Gram and Chris said,
the gold-plated door
on the thirty-first floor
. OK, yes, she can sing. But not like a red-dirt
girl. No, the rich girl can just sustain a note for a freakishly long time like
every other pop diva. She just can’t inject emotion into her voice, because
Dominique doesn’t have any emotions, other than a vacillating surge between
pleasure and irritation.

Then, after she sampled a few other opportunities for
getting farther than I might take her, the poor little rich girl took up with
Ephraim Vance, the knob-twiddling producer who is the son of the label’s
president and who made us all rich before the storm subsided. Rich, and hated
by our former friends.

JASON

A
LTHOUGH MY CELL CONNECTION
seemed pokey, I wanted to upload my notes to the various blogs I keep,
especially the notes about the books on Susi’s shelves that I wanted to find in
a library to read later. I looked at these other notes—the ones I’m writing
here—which would have been part of the blog except it’s the kind of personal
writing that only embarrasses other people when they read it. So I just emailed
this file to myself so I could determine later how much goes on the blog.

In the middle of the upload, I clicked a link I hadn’t meant
to and found myself staring at the new list of bootleg trades and guitar tabs
for Stoneway. Someone was offering the tabulations and lyrics from one of the
new songs that Ian and I had discarded. We played that song once, one night in
Bergen. Some Norse berserker had transcribed every word. My irrational,
perfectionist self wanted to reply with a correction to the guitar tabs and the
last revision we made to the chorus. My latent inner business manager went into
a frenzy, wondering if I had registered that song before performing it, or if
the words and music were now out on the Internet without me claiming prior art.
Of course I had. I always did. Even Karl trusted me to take care of business at
least that well.

As soon as I clicked through to read the message, I had
chills. That guy—Ian calls him my own creepy stalker fan—had either been in
Bergen or had a contact there. I looked for the alias he was using this time—JessesBoy.
It was him. If he didn’t use an alias like LostSon2 or BadBro, then he left one
of his favorite lines in every message. “This week my brother is in…” or “The
fortunate son has now…”

I could ignore the bizarre expression of fraternal rivalry. What
bugged me was that he delivered news to fan sites as if he were behind me,
looking at my plane ticket, listening from the next table, tapped into my
phone. I was at the Family Wash in Nashville, talking to the Pete at the bar. Pete said, “This is The Wash. This is the yin to the yang part of your life. And there’s no grey in yin/yang, right? There isn’t, is there?” Then the yang part of life returned when my stalker posted a minute-by-minute report on a woman I met at The Wash that night, including her name and phone number and what we talked about
(that night’s Carpetbaggers Local 615 show with Jamie, Pete, and Reeves). Most
of what he posted was fictitious, but Karl had to harass the Internet service
provider to remove all traces of her personal information, and then he had to
arrange for her to get a new phone and paid her expenses for all the bother
that dating an infamous bad boy had caused.

The same stalker who had posted, “I would have hit her too,”
and spawned the last year’s nightmares.

The detailed news about my business started after I was
busted with Uncle Beau, when Dominique began outing me as the son of my famous
father. I accused her of leaking my life to the Internet, but then details
appeared that she couldn’t know, unless she paid someone to follow me. She
wasn’t interested in me enough to bother to do that. The morning after
Dominique called the police on me—which resulted in them threatening to charge
her if she ever lied again—I wasn’t out of jail long enough to log on before my
stalker reported to the world what she screamed at me when the police showed
up. Therefore, technically I can’t blame her for how the rumor started, aside
from the fact that she created the foundation circumstance. Still, she hasn’t
done anything to counter the stories from my cyber stalker. When the tabloids
picked up the so-called news from fan sites, Dominique should have denied it.
Between my wife and my stalker, they couldn’t have done a better job if they
had worked together to invent the story of Jesse Rufus’s son, the wife beater.

 
JessesBoy: The new songs show how much happier my brother Jason is now that
he’s free of the Dragon Woman. When Jason is doing well, I’m happy too. We were
pretty miserable for a while. But when you hear the new boots, you will hear
how much better we are doing.

This time, I did what I shouldn’t have done. I replied while
logged on under my lurker alias.

 
Sebastian: I was in Bergen, too, and this song isn’t one of Jason Taylor’s
better efforts. It’s not in the set list for other shows for good reason.

Right then I vowed to myself that I’d revise the song, change
the words, and take a different tack on the music, just to prove my stalker
wrong.

In my own email box—which only a handful of people use,
together with my special spam friends who want to help me get out of credit
card debt and also get a bigger penis—was a short note from one of my Americana
friends. I refer to the kind of Americana that needs disambiguation on
Wikipedia. I started a forum under my lurker alias on No Depression years ago.
Then I moved it to a blog, where the discussion threads have been a haven since
life went sour. My lurker-alias blog is obscure enough that it attracts only
the most serious about exploration of roots music, like people writing graduate
theses. Nothing gets posted without the site manager’s approval, which I know makes
me a censor of sorts, but I always post everything received that isn’t spam or
ads. The etiquette of the blog is that we just freeze out obnoxious posters by
not responding. Through the blog I met a few old musicology codgers who had
been batting around issues since John Lomax first published and who liked
preserving their arguments on the Internet. A few of them have become personal
friends of mine. This morning, it was [email protected], whom I consider a
good friend, though we’ve never met in person. I learn something interesting
whenever he writes to me.

 
Chas1933: Your help with more recent influences has been invaluable. I’ve about
chased that Gram Parsons thread to its end. Call me an old fart, but it seems
most of his influence centered on who he spent time drinking with.

Sebastian: That’s too cynical. The real influence was his
insistence on going back to roots and being true to that, instead of listening
to the derivative sound that got radio play in those days.

Chas1933: I can hear that in his music. I confess I just wanted
to yank your chain since you always insist on going back to roots. Want to help
me with the next thread I’m following? Got time to waste on an old man?

Sebastian: It’s never a waste. I owe you far more from what
you’ve sent my way in the last couple of years. What’s your next project?

Chas1933: The Lost Sons. No one has done much research into the
work those boys did. I see it called Hillbilly Bebop, and one guy calls Jesse
Rufus the son of Charlie Mingus and Hank Williams. But I don’t think old Hank
was AC/DC.

Sebastian: The traditional list of influences starts with the Delmore
Brothers, because of the close harmony. Though I believe for Jesse it was the Sons
of the Pioneers. The Bakersfield country-western work from the Fifties and
Sixties. Gram Parson and Neil Young. And the Beatles.

Chas1933: I can hear all that. You have an opinion on
everything. What do you hear in Jesse Rufus? You must have given his work a
listen.
 

I had listened to every line and every note Jesse Rufus
recorded, over and over, hoping for hidden messages, the way kids in the
Sixties listened to
Sergeant Pepper
and
Sympathy for the Devil
. I spent the eighth, ninth, and
tenth grades trying to learn every chord, imitating how Jesse Rufus bent notes
with his voice, transcribing chords and words, looking for acrostics or coded
clues, any indication that he knew I existed. I have never longed for a lover
the way I longed to find out that he knew I was in lower Wallingford, wishing
he would come be my real father.

 
Sebastian: Too much tequila, coke, and speed. I can’t hear anything else in the
music. It’s a crying shame.