Moody Food

by Ray Robertson

  “Three of them?” I said.

  The Mynah Bird was a certified Yorkville hippie hangout, but with a strip club exterior for the entire street to see, the club’s owner one day deciding that what he really needed to separate his place from all the others jockeying for our coffee money along the avenue were several bikini-clad dancing girls shaking and shimmying in a second-storey glass booth out front.

  Christine stopped her pacing.

  “Feeling like you really missed out on something, Bill? Maybe if you had been there tonight you could have taken one of them off Mr. Shitkicker’s hands.”

  “No, no, I’m only saying I’m surprised that—”

  Christine resumed her pacing.

  “So then it starts all over,” she said. “‘Lovely, lovely, why that’s just lovely, but how about a little Miss Patsy Cline now, darlin’? I just know you could do the old girl justice.’”

  “Hey, this guy,” I said, “is he tall and about our age, maybe a little older? Brown hair, white cowboy boots? Like the guy I told you about I met at the bank?”

  Christine didn’t hear a word I said.

  “So by now I’ve about had it. I finish up the song I’m doing, put down my guitar, and walk off twenty minutes before the set’s supposed to be over. Go right to the very back of the club to sit by myself for a while and have a smoke and get my head together, you know?”

  I nodded.

  “And I’m almost starting to wind down when over walks one of the Mynah bunnies in her four-inch heels with a message and a cup of coffee that I didn’t order. ‘Thomas wants you to know he thinks you’ve got a lovely voice and wonders if he can borrow your guitar.’ I take a sip of the coffee and almost gag—the thing is half coffee and half whisky—and tell her he’s welcome to my guitar but that the owner doesn’t let audience members up on stage except during the Monday night hootenanny. ‘Groovy,’ she says, and hops off back to their table. In the time it takes me to light a new cigarette there he is on stage tuning my guitar.”

  Christine was at the window now sitting on the sill, trying to find the moon way up there somewhere between my building and the next.

  “And then what?” I said.

  Giving up on the moon, she came over and sat down beside me on the bed.

  “And then the funniest thing happened,” she said.

  “Did he finally get to do his country thing?”

  “Yeah, but ... no. I mean, that’s the weird part. I’m not quite sure what he did. I mean, it definitely sounded like country—you could definitely call it country, I guess. But also, I don’t know ... religious, like gospel music or something. But not in a churchy way, you know? I don’t know how to explain it.”

  “What was it called? Was it his own tune?”

  “After he was done he said it was a Hank Williams song. And I don’t know Hank Williams from Adam, but I don’t think any country singer ever sounded like that.”

  “Did he say what the name of it was?”

  “‘I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive.’”

  Christine got up from the bed and fished out of her purse the clear plastic overnight bag she carried with her whenever she was staying over.

  “And then what happened?” I said.

  “Just what I told Miss Universe would happen. Bernie came out from the kitchen and saw that somebody else besides me was up on stage and told him to get off, that open stage was Monday night, and not to do it again.”

  “What did this guy say? Did he get mad?”

  Christine had her hand on the door knob to my room. The shared bathroom was at the end of the hall. “No,” she said. “Not at all, actually. He just set down my guitar, shook Bernie’s hand, told him, ‘You’ve got one wonderful place here, sir,’ and asked the waitress for a round of coffee and tea and espresso, whatever anybody was having. For the entire house.”

  “Get out of here.”

  “For everybody in the place.”

  We both smiled.

  “And I got this.”

  Back to the dresser and out of her purse, a single red rose.

  “Where’d you get that?” I said.

  “After I’d finished my whisky and coffee—”

  I started laughing.

  “I had to!” she said, laughing along. “If Bernie had found out somebody’d smuggled in booze and that I—”

  “Okay, okay,” I said, holding up my hand.

  She looked down at the rose. “After I shot the shit with Bernie for a while and was halfway out the door, guess who comes running up the stairs after me?”

  “He gave you the rose?” I said.

  “Uh huh. ‘For a fine country lady, whether she knows it or not.’”

  It had to be the same guy I’d run into at the bank the week before, I thought. It just had to be.

  Christine stuck the rose between her teeth and fluttered her eyes her hick-glamorous best.

  I took the rose back out.

  “Hurry up and brush, you fine country lady. Your country boyfriend’s got another ten hours of inventory to do tomorrow.”

  After we’d surprised ourselves with the first really raunchy, eye-to-eye, good-and-grinding screw we’d managed in a while, I got up to light a candle and brought back to bed with me the gift Thomas had slipped me at the bank.

  “Do you think it’s the real thing?” Christine said. She was up on one elbow holding the covers to her neck with one hand and the two tabs of acid in the palm of the other. Fall had finally fell. Although a sauna in the summer, my room was like a morgue even on the earliest of autumn nights. Christine pulled the blankets higher and tighter.

  “I don’t know,” I said, “but this guy strikes me as the sort to be pretty serious about his drugs.”

  “And it doesn’t look like he’s hurting for bread,” she said.

  We both looked down at the acid.

  In spite of our fairly regular toking habits we were both, all things considered, pretty tame users. Heroin, coke, and speed were as yet mostly just ugly gossip around Yorkville, and LSD only a little less so because you never heard of anybody getting hooked. But you’d hear stories. Bad trips, flashbacks, permanent brain damage... .

  Christine and I kept looking at the acid.

  “What do you want to do?” she said.

  “I don’t know. What do you want to do?”

  We were both naked, and the sweet stink of sex was still in the air. And this was the real deal, after all, authentic Owsley LSD. But even if I didn’t know why, all I really wanted to do at that moment was take Christine ice-skating and hold hands and buy her a hot chocolate when she got cold and go around and around until we both got tired. I think she must have been thinking something like the same thing.

  “I’m not saying it wouldn’t be fun,” she said. “But you do have to go to work tomorrow. You’ve got a long day.”

  “And you were going to get an early start looking for that new guitar.”

  “And I’m not saying no as in never, just not right now, you know?”

  “I know,” I said. “I know exactly what you mean.”

  I jumped out of bed and put the acid back in the bottom of the silver sugar canister I used for my stash, blew out the candle, and slid back in; wrapped myself around Christine like a hungry python around its next unsuspecting meal.

  “Oh, God, your feet are like ice!”

  “C’mon, baby, keep your man warm.”

  “Get those feet off of—”

  “C’mon, baby, give your man a little—”

  Leg-kicking and giggling and wrestling under the sheets, laughing and squealing filling up the tiny room. Soon, all calm there, all cuddling and quiet, just me and my girl.

  4.

  “UNDERSTAND, NOW, I wasn’t born with the taste of ashes in my mouth or the sound of two-part harmony fuzz-tone honky-tonk never not echoing in my ears. I’ve only come to know and accept and even love these things as the necessary small suffering to be endured for being the self-appointed chronicler
in song of all our lost days and nights after much contemplation on the life and times of our Lord Almighty, Jesus Christ, the original sweetheart of the rodeo himself, Amen.”

  Let’s get this straight right from the start. The guy got me with the way he talked.

  And how he’d look up from the jukebox, his face red with excitement over the song coming up next or maybe just flushed from all the booze or maybe simply bathed in the light of the machine or maybe all of these things all at once, and say, “Buckskin, I want you to meet Mr. George Jones, the King of the Broken Hearts”—dusty old George Jones, the saddest man alive, moaning his ten-cent tale of loneliness and betrayal into every corner of the nearly deserted barroom—I knew I was being let in on something I never knew was there before, was being baptized into my new friend’s world with a shot of bourbon on the side whether I wanted to be or not.

  The guy got me with the way he worshipped.

  But talking a nice line and getting somebody good and loaded and laying it on thick about a bunch of country and western tunes shouldn’t be enough to make any rational person really believe that what the world needs now is more steel guitars and that “When they pulled poor old long-gone Hank Williams out of that Cadillac Coup deVille on New Year’s Day, 1953, that wasn’t an overdose, friend, that was a sacrifice.” Even if in the beginning is the word, a miraculous deed now and then never hurt anybody’s chances of being born again.

  After I’d finally bumped into him again coming out of the Mynah Bird and the single beer we’d agreed upon led to another and then another—all bought by him in appreciation for me turning him on to the shop where he’d gotten his beat-up brown leather jacket—the slippery slope of one-too-many wobbly-pops put me, at Thomas’s instigation and against my better judgement, in the back seat of a taxi headed for the Canada Tavern, one of Toronto’s nastier east-end bars. We smoked pot and They—our parents and all the other ungroovy grown-up types—drank alcohol. Thomas did both. Lots and lots of both.

  Once we got where we were going, Thomas rapid-ordered so many glasses of draft beer that the waiter started bringing them over every ten minutes without us even asking. He also never gave anyone else a chance to play the jukebox. Now I understood why we were in the kind of bar where brush cuts were the “in” thing and George Armstrong, the Maple Leafs’ star centre, was a bigger deal than George Harrison. I might not have known that Hogtown had its very own Hank Williams–listening portion of the population, but Thomas sure did, and he was determined to give me a crash course in all things twangy.

  After so many rounds of Labatt 50 I lost track, Thomas apparently decided he could trust me and pushed a dime across the beer-puddled table.

  “Three chances at bliss for ten cents,” he said. “You find a better deal than that, I strongly suggest you take it.”

  As soon as I slipped the coin into the jukebox the previous song wound up and another 45 did not immediately drop down to take its place. Great. The bar was now a church and I was at the organ, my people ready to worship. I speed-read the hand-printed label for each two-sided record, desperate for a familiar name, every second I stood there staring at the blinking machine the room’s silence seeming to grow that much louder. Except for the bands and tunes Thomas had played, almost every title drew an absolute blank, the jukebox a multicoloured blinking phonebook for a town I’d never even heard of. I punched in the letters and numbers to the only songs I recognized. If the dime Thomas had given was some kind of test of my country soul, I’d flunked big time.

  “Eight Days a Week” came blaring out of the speakers, the same tune that had been playing on the cabby’s AM radio on the way over to the bar, then another Beatles’ song, and then “Shakin’ All Over” by Canada’s own the Guess Who. Whether I’d let Thomas down or not, I’d done my CHUM Chart Top Ten best to keep the room humming. I leaned back in my seat and sipped at my beer without being able to help tapping my fingers on the tabletop. Then it was all over, my eight and a half minutes of fame all done, and one of the half-dozen or so soused seniors drinking by himself throughout the bar lurched to the juke and clanked in a dime and we were back to acoustic guitars and stand-up basses and no one was apparently worse for my rock and roll detour.

  Thomas hadn’t said anything the entire time my tunes had played and didn’t say anything later when we pulled up the collars on our coats and hit Queen Street. It must have rained while we’d been inside the bar. The 1 a.m. deserted street gleamed that post-storm shine that, aided by a few streetlights, can make even big-city blacktop look clean. Outside a boarded-up coin laundry, Thomas wordlessly pulled me by the jacket inside the door front. Crunchy brown leaves and old newspapers swirled around at our feet. He let go of my coat, closed his eyes, tapped a simple mid-tempo beat with his foot, and tested the entranceway’s echo with a long hum.

  Then Thomas sang; wrapped images and words I’d never heard used in a song before around a melody that had me seeing colours, I mean literal fucking colours: early morning, morning-after grey; deep, dark browns; sharp, midnight blacks. Later on I realized that the tune he’d sung was one of his own, “A Quality of Loss,” but right then and there all I cared about was the light show.

  He gave me his coat to wear and I gave him mine and we started walking again.

  5.

  I FORCED OPEN MY eyes and blinked several times and looked up from my third refill of coffee and wondered how I was going to get through a full day of work at the bookstore. Again. A few weeks after our first, another long night travelling the Thomas Graham Direct Express to Country Soul Enlightment had me wishing the conductor looked half as bad as his only passenger felt.

  “Don’t you ever get tired?” I said.

  Thomas smiled, picked up the glass container of sugar off the tabletop, and started pouring it into my cup. “Say when,” he said.

  My reflexes weren’t quite what they’d been sixteen sleepless hours before. I saw too much white powder going into my cup, but it took a few seconds for brain to tell mouth to tell him to stop.

  “Stop!” I said.

  He beamed wide again and stopped pouring. “Ole Buckskin,” he said.

  I’d never met anyone who smiled so much. Even as hippies we weren’t supposed to be this happy. There was a war on in Vietnam, after all, and people somewhere I couldn’t find on a map if their next meal depended on it were starving.

  Thomas brushed aside some of the long hair hanging in front of his face and threw both arms behind him on the back of the red plastic booth we’d been trying to come down in for the last hour; took in the Wednesday morning breakfast crowd with ear-to-ear satisfaction like it was anything but what it was.

  The Niagara was just the sort of meatloaf-special-with-your-choice-of-rice-pudding-or-green-Jell-O-for-dessert greasy spoon I would’ve walked by a thousand times without ever once going in. I wasn’t a vegetarian yet like Christine, but she was working on it and had me down to an occasional tuna fish sandwich for lunch and whatever my mother happened to be serving whenever I’d go home (refusing to get a haircut and having a bald girlfriend were one thing, not eating my mum’s roast beef dinner a whole other level of rebellion all together). But it wasn’t only the low-end surf and turf the place specialized in that made me nervous.

  There were cops here. The fuzz. The Man. Pigs. And lots of them, too. The way they kept pouring through the door and greeting each other, the place might have been some kind of police hangout. And aside from the obvious principle of the matter, here was Thomas with a pocket full of very illegal goodies and him set upon greeting every pot-bellied pair of Toronto’s finest with a loud and clear, “Good morning, officers, fine day, isn’t it?” This, in spite of my repeated knocking against his shins with the end of my black Beatle boots and several useless throat clearings that only succeeded in making me sound like an operatic asthmatic. Throw in his suspiciously slippery Southern delivery and you might as well put the cuffs on us right here and now and let us make our one phone call from the restaurant payphone.
“Hello, Christine? You know the money you’ve been saving up for that new Gibson you’ve had your eye on? Well ...”

  But nothing happened. The cops just said good morning right back at Thomas and ordered up their coffee and ham and eggs and sucked deep at the long night’s last cigarette and joked and laughed and argued about the Maple Leafs over greasy-fingered shared sports pages and one at a time eventually left the same way they came to return to wives and children relieved to see husbands and fathers safe and sound and at home again from another night of protecting our fair city.

  A little after 10 a.m. and the last cop gone, the restaurant basically ours now and the breakfast specials already thinking about turning into lunch specials, and me already ten minutes late opening up Making Waves, “Are you crazy, man?” I said. “I don’t know what the deal is where you’re from, but up here you don’t mess around with the Man because the Man will mess around with you. Got it?”

  Thomas kept smiling into his empty coffee cup with a heavy-lidded gaze that said he just now might be ready to finally come down and cash it in for the night. Or was it for the day? Anyway, lucky Thomas, I thought.

  Because even if I’d only forfeited another night’s sleep in return for another lesson in all things country soulful—tonight’s class conducted cross-legged on the floor of my room, cross-eyed drunk on a bottle of Old Grandad, listening to the collected works of Buck Owens and his Buckaroos—once again Thomas was off to bed and I was off to work and the onset of morning-after crankiness said this just didn’t seem particularly fair. Also, maybe I had long hair and my very own roach clip, but I was also my parents’ son whether I wanted anybody to know it or not and had never been late for a day of work in my life. Until I met Thomas, that was.

  Slowly raising his eyes from the table, “Everyone says all we need is love, Buckskin,” he said. “All incense and peppermints and hugs for all the one-eyed teddy bears and your momma and daddy holding hands as they tuck you into bed every night and you safe at home forever. But what we need, what we really need ...”