Nine Volt Heart
ONE: Allegro
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TWO: Adagio
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THREE: Scherzo
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FOUR: Rondo
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About the Author
About Nine Volt Heart
Acknowledgments
Copyright
From Jugum Press
He said, “I love you.” She said, “You don’t even know the
real me.” He said, “Great title for a song. Key of G? Can you sing the high
parts? Close harmony?”
Two musicians meet by accident in Seattle: Jason, the now infamous
singer-songwriter, and Susi, a music teacher whose previous life came off the
rails. Quickly their separate worlds and professional desires become entwined
in unexpected ways.
Nine Volt Heart
takes you on a
roller-coaster ride through the backstreets of Seattle, where tourists never
go. Where both karma and sunshine can be so unpredictable in April.
~
Reviewers say …
Get some sleep aids before you start reading
Nine Volt Heart
,
Annie Pearson’s riveting, rock music romance about unlikely lovers and a
cyber-stalker in Seattle's indie music scene.
— Emily Warn,
Shadow Architect
“Lonesome Whistle”
JASON
S
EATTLE LURKED JUST OUTSIDE
the doors of my perception, waiting to beat me with a stick.
In better times, flying into Seattle felt like stepping into
a safe haven to escape a storm. To start, to escape jet lag, I always run from Leschi
to Seward Park, taking the dirt path by the water. After that, my compadre Ian
drags me out to play music in that Fremont after-hours basement club, and then
we scarf down huevos rancheros at The 5 Point Cafe with wasted loners left from
the night before and baristas preparing for their morning shifts. Then I read
while rain pings the windows.
“Mr. Taylor?” The flight attendant had a London accent,
fluting two notes above Middle C. “I hate to wake you, but we’re about to land.”
I wasn’t sleeping, just listening to Hank Williams with my
eyes closed.
Gotta feelin’ called the blu-ues—
“Thanks, Shannon. I appreciate it.”
“How did you know my name?” Her head tilted in inquiry as I
opened my eyes.
“You were kind to me when I flew the other direction last
fall.”
She smiled, a genuine rather than professional smile. “I
remember that you had a frightful head cold then, and we were short of
vegetarian meals.” She gestured for me to return my seat to the fully upright
and locked position. “Do you require an escort at the gate?”
“No, I don’t need anything special. I’m meeting a driver at
baggage pickup. Thank you, though.”
“Of course, Mr. Taylor.” She hesitated. “We used to come
hear Stoneway play when I was an exchange student. It was the best of times.”
“Really? Nice.” I ran the math in my head. Seven years ago?
Nine? “It was the best of times for me, too.”
As I flipped open the window shade to see how close we were
to SeaTac, she blurted, “I don’t believe what they say,” and then covered her
mouth, embarrassed.
I whispered, “Thank you. It isn’t true.”
We swooped over the patchwork of cozy homes built for Boeing
engineers, Pony League ball fields, and miniature glacier-carved lakes littered
with rowboats and sailboards, the plane’s wing flaps unfolded. I felt my
stomach knot. Alder and cottonwood trees waved fingers of fresh green, either
beckoning or scolding. Puget Sound glittered in the west, reflecting the
afternoon April sun. When I’d left this town, big-leaf maples were shedding
dead leaves on muddied side-streets and the Sound sloshed like molten lead
between Elliott Bay and the Kitsap Peninsula. As BA0049 touched down, the air
whistled and screamed, resisting the plane’s entry. Gotta feelin’ called
trepidation, weighing down deep in my soul.
Seattle, karma lurking, waited to beat on me, body and mind.
Tail winds deposited us at SeaTac twenty minutes early and,
for what must be the first time in the twenty-first century, we taxied directly
to the gate, as if the plane couldn’t wait to toss me out.
Then I couldn’t raise anyone by phone to find my ride. I
loitered on the airfield side of the security gates.
Can’t find my own way back home
.
“Um, hi, do you mind signing this? My mom is a big fan.”
—buying peanuts to tide me till dinner—
“Are you Jason Taylor? I bet my buddy twenty bucks it’s
you.”
—brushing my teeth in the john—
“Asshole!”
—having aural hallucinations, perhaps.
Too bad coming back here won’t be like meeting that baritone
folkie in a Dublin pub, the one who played Celtic punk on a cittern. He
declared I was the very likeness of his lost brother and made his city home for
us during the week that Ian and I performed there. Or the luthier in London
with a shop near my Pimlico hotel, who let me watch him work for three days,
talking up a storm about tonewoods and fretboards, and who showed me how to do
abalone inlays and then invited me home to eat bangers-and-mash with his wife
(who went to a great deal of trouble with an apple-betty when she discovered I
couldn’t eat the sausages).
Here, in the town where I was born, if your friends don’t
like you anymore, they won’t pretend they do.