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.
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.
11 ~ “I Lost It”
JASON
ALTHOUGH 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 di
dn’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.
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