“And when exactly do we get to hear this sound of his?”
Thomas stood up, strummed some chord changes, but didn’t turn on his amp. “Soon.”
“Soon,” Christine said.
“Soon.”
Christine fired me a don’t-just-sit-there-say-something-why-don’t-you? glare, but I pretended there was something wrong with my foot pedal and slid down behind the kit to check things out. The official philosophy of Bill Hansen: When in doubt, turtle.
“Okay,” Christine said. “Let’s say that this guy eventually does rise from the dead and dazzle us all with his playing. What then? What’s the point? Nobody around here is going to book a band with a steel guitar in it. Maybe that’s not right, maybe that’s prejudiced, but if we want to get a gig we’ve got to face facts.”
“We’ve already got a gig,” Thomas said. “One week from Saturday night. Mark it in on your calendars, y’all.”
I peeked out from behind the bass drum. Christine looked at me, then back at Thomas. But before either of us could ask how he’d done it and where we were playing, all of us turned in the direction of the creaking steps at the top of the stairs.
Slippery paused at the studio door and stomped out his cigarette, the only time he’d ever done so to my knowledge without Thomas’s having to ask him to three times. He nodded at Thomas, ignored Christine and me, and sat down behind his pedal steel. He flipped on the power switch underneath and asked what we were working on.
No one said anything, just looked at him like we didn’t have a clue who this obviously sober, clean-shaven guy was. Sober, but by the snarly, slightly anemic look on his face, not all that happy about it. Clean-shaven, but with about half a dozen tiny pieces of blood-blotted white toilet paper plastered to his chin and neck. He ran a shaky hand through his Vaselined hair and reasserted the freshly combed part; wiped his hand on his suit pants and picked up the silver tension bar and put it to the strings of his instrument. Addressing Thomas, “Are we gonna play or aren’t we?”
Thomas smiled and plugged in.
“Sweet baby Jesus! Yes! Yes!”
And just like that we knew that Scotty had finally finished the poem he’d been wrestling with all winter. He dropped his pen to the table and drew Heather to her feet and waltzed her around the room, wee man him expertly leading tall woman her. When Scotty dipped her over by my drum kit, she threw back her head and laughed like she knew everything had been in the cards all along.
To Christine and me, “‘Dundas West’?” Thomas said.
“Dundas West” it was.
Thomas tapped his cowboy boot to the steady beat we were laying down for a few closed-eyed seconds before ripping into the song’s opening notes, something between a tart twang and a full metallic roar charging out of his amp. And when Slippery found his way into our groove, answering the fat slabs of Thomas’s guitar with run after run of mean little twists and turns of sharp pedal steel, something happened.
We blasted away, all four of us, until the inching shadows of evening swallowed up the room’s natural light and the red glow of the amplifiers was all that was left to guide us.
29.
“HOW DID YOU KNOW he’d end up doing what you wanted?” I asked.
Thomas and I were mopping up the remains of our breakfast and slurping down refills of coffee at Webster’s because we had a 10 a.m. appointment to look at a couple of new microphones we needed for our inaugural show that night.
“Who’s that?” Thomas said, managing to mop and slurp at the same time, fork-speared sausage link and coffee cup both suspended in the air.
“Slippery.”
“Afraid I don’t follow you, Buckskin. Hey, you gonna finish those potatoes?”
“Go ahead,” I said, pushing my plate across the table.
I was down about five pounds from all the speed I was taking, but the food on my plate and not in my stomach this particular morning was due more to the tumbly-tummy thought of that night’s gig.
“I mean,” I said, “you must have known this guy was a wreck right from the first time you talked to him on the phone. What made you so sure you could turn him around?”
The deal was that Thomas would pay Slippery twice what he was previously giving him for every week he managed to stay sober. One Slippery slip-up, though, just one performance compromised by a sloppy Bannister, one practice with even the faintest hint of hooch detected on his breath, and he got nothing, zilch, nada. Slippery’s only other choice was to collect the hundred-dollar bonus Thomas had promised him and ship off back to Detroit the same way he’d arrived, an alcoholic ex–auto worker with about as much chance of earning the money he needed to make the down payment on his Arkansas dream house as I did of staging a miraculous comeback and cracking the Leafs’ starting lineup.
Thomas speared the last home fry off my plate, twirled it around in a glob of ketchup and popped it into his mouth. Waiting until he was done chewing and had swallowed, “You gotta have faith, Buckskin.”
“Sure,” I said. “But I get the feeling you knew right from the start that you could get Slippery under your thumb as soon as you got him up here.”
“I still don’t get where you’re coming from, buddy.”
“Where I’m coming from is that within two weeks you managed to blackmail a quart-of-whisky-a-day alcoholic hillbilly into quitting drinking cold turkey and committing to playing in a long-haired rock and roll band.”
Thomas leaned back in the booth, picked at a piece of something stuck between his teeth with the forefinger of his strumming hand. “‘Blackmail,’” he repeated. “Hey, that’s a little heavy, don’t you think?”
“What would you call it, then?”
Picking up his napkin, wiping his lips clean, “Sometimes the Good Lord, Buckskin, sometimes He works in very mysterious ways.”
“And let me guess. The Good Lord, He also helps those who help themselves.”
“You said it, not me,” he answered, balling up his napkin and dropping it onto his empty plate. “Wouldn’t catch me disagreeing with you, though. No, sir, that you would not.”
30.
“GEEZ, THOMAS.”
“Where did you ... ?”
“Geez,” Christine repeated.
“Yeah, I mean, how did you ... ?”
“Isn’t it great, y’all?” Thomas said. “Got it from a guy at the Cellar. Overheard him telling the fellow he was playing chess with that he wanted to unload it and I made him an offer right on the spot. I got a great deal.”
“This here’s a hearse,” Slippery said.
“Yes, sir, that it is, a ’58 Buick hearse, in fact. And from what I understand, a vintage year and make, too.” We were on the sidewalk in front of our studio. Thomas spotted a freshly plopped blotch of bird shit on the vehicle’s black trunk and used a fallen leaf to wipe it off.
“But why?” I said.
“Take a peek inside,” Thomas answered.
I looked at Christine.
“Go on,” Thomas said, sliding open the side door. “Nothing in there’s going to get up from the dead and bite you.”
I stuck my head in and looked around.
“I don’t see anything but a whole lot of nothing,” I said.
“Exactly,” Thomas said. “Which means a whole lot of room for all our equipment.”
Getting it now, “For gigs,” I said.
All four of us looked at the long black hearse anew now, the occasional hippie type even slowing down to stare from the other side of the street. It took a lot to get somebody to stop and stare in Yorkville.
Slippery fired up a fresh Marlboro. “I ain’t ridin’ around in no hearse,” he said.
“Don’t you worry, Mr. Bannister,” Thomas said, “there’s plenty of room for all of us as well as our stuff. And depending on how Buckskin and Miss Christine feel, I was thinking it was only fair—musically, seniority-wise—for you to ride up front with me.” Thomas looked at us.
“I’ve got no problem with that,
” I said.
“Sure,” Christine said.
“Got nothin’ to do with not having enough room for ridin’,” Slippery said. “It just ain’t proper to be blaspheming the Lord in such a way. Funerals is serious business.”
“Mr. Bannister, you misunderstand my intentions,” Thomas said. “It wasn’t only for pragmatic purposes that I procured for us this fine specimen of an automobile.”
“One more time?” Slippery said.
“Hear me out, sir. Just as Mr. Johnny Cash has taken to wearing black garments during his recent performances to illustrate his sympathy with all the earth’s distressed and downtrodden, so, I hope, will the Duckhead Secret Society be able to pay their respects to all those who share in the sorrow that is manifest in the necessary leave-taking of family and friends to that other shore each and every time we’re out on the road.”
Slippery sucked on his cigarette and squinted at the hearse. “You’re sayin’ this”—he pointed with his Marlboro—“ain’t no sacrilege?”
“The farthest thing from it,” Thomas answered, sitting on the hood now. “I call her Saint Chrome Christopher, Christopher, for short.” Gesturing from back bumper to front tire, “A ton and a half of Christian metaphor everywhere we go is no inconsiderable fact to be denied, sir.”
Slippery took a last long drag and tossed his butt into the gutter. “As long as it ain’t no heresy.”
“C’mon, now, Mr. Bannister,” Thomas said, sliding off the car. “I’m from Mississippi. I was brought up right.”
Cracking what for him passed as a smile, “I suppose,” Slippery said.
“All right, then,” Thomas said, looking at his watch. “Almost two o’clock. That gives us six hours until sound check. Everybody meet back here at six-thirty to help pack up and we’re off for the club by seven.”
“Any club in particular?” I said. “Or are we just going to drive around until we find one that’ll take us in?”
“Yeah, c’mon, Thomas,” Christine chimed in. “Cut the suspense already.”
Thomas got inside Christopher and turned over the engine.
“Six-thirty, right here,” he said. “And let me remind everyone that six-thirty does not mean six-thirty-one.”
31.
“MAYBE I’LL HANG around here until you get off,” I said. I’d walked Christine to work and we’d already kissed and said goodbye about ten times. Five hours to kill so as not to think about five hours later and no one willing to help me play assassin.
“Everything’s going to be fine,” she said. “Once we start playing you won’t have a chance to think of anything but music.”
“Easy for you to say. This isn’t your first time on stage.”
“It’s not yours either. Remember how good the three of us were that night at my show?”
“The Riverboat doesn’t count. I was too shocked to be properly terrified. Now I’ve got all afternoon to get good and ready.”
“Go back to my place and smoke a joint and try to relax. Lay down for a while.”
Since I’d started carrying around my own bottle of uppers, naps weren’t much of an option any more. “I know what would make me relax,” I said, running my hand down her back, cupping a handful of blue-jeaned flesh.
She laughed and twisted around to see if anyone inside was looking and kissed me one final time. “It’s a drag, I know, but unfortunately Sam’s doesn’t pay me to get groped by my boyfriend.” Opening up the door, “Pick me up at five-thirty,” she said. “And try to stay out of trouble, okay?”
I said I’d do my best and let the Yonge Street tide roll me away.
Where, after taking half of Christine’s advice, the part about smoking a joint, I passed the afternoon sticking my head into nearly every club along the strip until somebody would invariably ask me what I wanted or who I was looking for or where my ID was. Blinding dark as only badass bars on afternoons of absolute sunshine can be, none of these places had ever played host to Pete Seeger or Joni Mitchell and definitely did not cater to the peace-and-love set. The bars that ran along Yonge from Gerrard to Queen like the Steele’s Tavern, the Colonial Tavern, and especially Le Coq d’Or, were the anti-Yorkville in every way, urban-burning neon bright on the outside, hot and heavy by way of the ballsy R&B sounds pounding against their walls within. I drifted down the street like some turned-on tourist and let the music play a bump and grind soundtrack to the same sexy flick I kept seeing everywhere I went.
Because even in their tight white sweaters and high black heels and blowing perfect rings of smoke with those candy-apple red lipsticked lips, what really got me were all those breasts. Actually, all those bras. Miles and miles of silky white cloth and thousands and thousands of shining silver hooks and eyelets aching to be undone. Brassieres, in other words. Lingerie. Bras.
No self-respecting woman of the revolution ever wore a bra in Yorkville. And politically, not to mention aesthetically, I couldn’t have agreed more. Nine times out of ten. But this was that one other time, when every Sears catalogue I ever pored over behind my parents’ locked bathroom door while ogling the lady’s underwear section burned back to mind just below my belt buckle, when every dumb male fantasy of garter belts and spiked heels that had owned my mind as a monkey-spanking preteen growing up in the fifties once again possessed it. Not an excuse, but the best explanation I could come up with for the few times I’d persuaded Christine to use her mother’s For Emergencies Only credit card to bring home with us for the night an expensive pair of strapped evening pumps or plain white five-inch heels before returning them the next day with receipt in hand and lowered eyes.
By the time I’d drifted clear down to King Street it was nearly five. Christine was waiting for me outside Sam’s when I got back.
“Am I late?” I said.
“You’re right on time,” she answered, kissing me on the cheek. “I actually finished about half an hour ago. Things were slow so I asked if I could split early.”
We started walking toward Bloor, toward Yorkville. “What’s in the bag?” I said.
“I decided to do a little shopping.”
Christine liked shopping about as much as she did hairspray. “What for?” I said. “For tonight?”
Still walking, she pulled a cardboard box from inside the large brown plastic bag. Opening its lid and watching my face for a reaction, she got the one she wanted. I took one last look, replaced the top, and put the shoebox under my arm. I grabbed her hand.
“What time did Thomas say we had to be at the studio?” I said.
“Six-thirty.”
I began to walk faster. “That doesn’t give us much time.”
Squeezing my hand, “How much time do you really think we’ll need?” she said.
32.
WE ALL PITCHED in and loaded up Christopher. And even with all our equipment and Heather and Scotty along for the ride, no one was seriously put out, Thomas and Slippery with lots of leg room riding together up front. Besides, we were only going down the street. Christine and I even had a bet going. I said the Boris’, she said the Purple Onion. The loser had to return the stilettos.
Across Yorkville, south on Bay to Bloor, thirty miles an hour east.
I crawled to the front and stuck my head between Thomas’s and Slippery’s. “This club, it’s not in Yorkville?” I said.
“It’s a little outside Yorkville,” Thomas answered, flipping on the turn signal. Slippery spit some chaw into a paper Dixie cup resting on his thigh. I crawled back to the others.
Down some side street to Carlton, down to Dundas, and then to Queen.
On my hands and knees, I made it through the maze of musical instruments to the front one more time. “Did you forget something?” I said. Thomas lived in the east end and by now we were only a few minutes away.
“Everything I need to conquer the world I got right here in this Buick, Buckskin,” he said, stopping for a red light.
“Then where are we going?” I said. I felt like some backseat-banis
hed ten-year-old desperate to be let in on the action, begging his parents to let him know when they’ll get there. A cymbal crashed on its side and Christine pushed her head in beside mine.
“Where are we?” she said.
“Nowhere,” I answered. We were idling in that part of Queen Street East where the pawnshops and Salvation Armys took over. I looked out the window and recognized the bar on the corner, the Canada Tavern, from my earliest Interstellar edification lesson with Thomas.
“We’re playing down here?” she said, looking at me.
“We’re not playing down here,” I said.
The light turned green and Thomas pulled left onto Sherbourne and then right into a parking place on the street beside the bar. We all sat there for a moment listening to the sound of the engine rattle and ping to a stop.
I squeezed forward even further. “What is this, Thomas?” I said.
Thomas slowly turned his head toward mine. “This,” he said, “is where it all begins.”
That look in his eyes. Goddammit. I knew there wasn’t anything left to do but unpack.
33.
THE CANADA TAVERN was the kind of place that didn’t have any windows. Spilt beer, urine, and the sound of a deep-fryer bubbling away in the tiny kitchen beside the bar informed all available senses that we weren’t in Yorkville any more.
No one played the jukebox. When, in between trips out to Christopher to unload our equipment, Thomas fished out a dime and punched in a few tunes, no one appeared to notice. Even the few scattered drinkers who weren’t actually old still managed to somehow seem it, on every face that hard, used-up look that only poverty, loneliness, and anger working together can carve. They watched us cart in our stuff with a distrust that went way beyond our long hair and goofy clothes. We didn’t have to be here but they did, and they wanted us to know they knew it.
While Thomas stayed behind to talk to Leone, the Canada Tavern’s owner, a balding behemoth in a grease-stained apron with a lip-dangling toothpick, Christine and I followed Slippery’s lead and started to set up. Whether because her Tarot cards told her to or because she knew we’d all have a much better chance of not getting knifed if we stayed huddled together, Heather sat close by on the edge of the stage waiting for Thomas’s return while working on her third nervous cigarette since we’d walked in the door.
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