Moody Food

by Ray Robertson

  “Is that guy nuts?” I said, motioning toward the Iggster. “He won’t last past your first tune.”

  “Jim? Fuck, no. Jim knows what he’s doing. He trips before every show.”

  “My God,” I said. “You must have to cancel a lot of gigs.”

  “Nah, he’s okay for a good solid half-hour before we’ve got to drag him off stage.”

  Whackety whackety whack.

  The drummer pounded his sticks on the back of an exposed wooden beam. It sounded like a suicidal woodpecker trying to beat its brains out.

  “Besides,” he said, “we haven’t found an audience yet who could handle us for more than forty-five minutes.”

  Whackety whackety whack.

  The Duckhead Secret Society survived Iggy’s acid-assisted ravings and the proto-metal onslaught of the Stooges in Michigan, persevered through two nights of open-mouthed teenybopper staring opening up for fading British folk duo Chad & Jeremy in Toledo, was sandwiched between two Cleveland garage bands, the Tyrants and Buck and the Decoders, endured repeated requests for “Last Train to Clarksville” by prefabricated Fab Four heartthrobs the Monkees while playing a high-school dance in suburban Akron, and headlined for the first time on U.S. soil in Cleveland at a place called the Paddock that sounded like a country and western club and the promise of something like a musically sympathetic ear, but was actually an illegal betting operation that advertised live music and cold beer to help keep its cover.

  After the first set, during which not one person came in—I mean not one single person; our only audience the bored, blonde waitress idly filing her fingernails and holding up the untended bar—and we were ten minutes late for the second, Slippery off somewhere smoking and the rest of us sitting on Christopher’s hood watching the orange and yellow flames from the chimney of a factory in the distance mix with the smoggy downtown skyline to create the prettiest poisoned sunset you’ve ever seen, the guy in the black suit and open white collar we’d talked to when we’d first showed up stepped outside, cleared his throat, crushed out his cigarette on the brick wall of the bar, and motioned Thomas over with a single forefinger. He put his arm around Thomas’s shoulder and they went for a short walk around back.

  Thomas refused to talk about what the two of them had discussed, but we weren’t late starting another set again. Thomas made sure of that. We ended up playing five minutes into every break and starting back up five minutes early every time. At the end of the night Thomas was in such a hurry to pack up and get us out of there he forgot to collect our money and we literally had to push him out of the hearse to go back in and get it. A minute later he tossed me a paper sack with our fifty dollars in it, jumped behind the wheel, and peeled out of the parking lot. We drove through the night all the way to Pittsburgh.

  And then to Clarksburg and Columbus and Dayton and Cincinnati and lots and lots of other towns and cities I’ve long since forgotten. And then to St. Louis, Missouri, gateway to the West, for us the doorway to Dixie, where we began our slow descent into the mouth of the South.

  54.

  THE SCHEDULE WAS SIMPLE. After the gig, when everybody but Thomas and me was asleep, when for the only time all day we didn’t have to worry about reading the road map right and getting to the next club in time for a proper sound check or figuring out where we were going to stop and eat or where we were going to crash for the night—when we could finally forget about everything that didn’t have anything to do with Moody Food—we wrote.

  We wrote by moonlight on torn deck chairs out by deserted motel pools. We wrote in parking lots sitting on the bumper of whatever car was furthest away from our room and Christopher so that no one would be woken up, the high beams of the transport trucks rolling past on the dark highway momentarily illuminating Thomas’s guitar and the notebook and pen in my hands. Whenever Christine or Heather would wake up and not find us there, we’d just say we couldn’t sleep and felt like getting some air or having a smoke. They were both so exhausted most of the time we didn’t have to lie that often.

  For some reason I’d gotten into the habit of being the one to check in and pay for our motel room. But whenever the forecast turned gloomy, Thomas would jump out of his driver’s side seat and accompany me inside the motel lobby, me signing in and paying for the band’s room and him paying for another—our own private writing room located as far away from the first as possible—with a shiny white credit card with his name on it. He never offered to explain. I never asked.

  55.

  COLIN HAD SET UP THE entire tour in advance, and at times it seemed as if his sole criterion had been booking us into any place that would have us, no backwoods bar too out of the way or its musical policy too Duckhead-inappropriate, no double bill too bizarre for us to share. But even when we were scheduled to be the headliner and it turned out we were the main attraction at the Polar Bluff, Missouri Critters and Crafts Annual Fall Festival and Tractor Pull and our opening act the Polar Bluff Auxiliary Firemen’s Barbershop Quartet, no one hijacked Christopher and demanded we head home, not even Christine.

  Everything was in a hurry, and it wasn’t only the effect of the ration kit full of Desbys Thomas had taped to the bottom of Christopher in case a flashing red light showed up in the rear-view mirror. Getting up in the morning was in a hurry, our wake-up call of choice being the maid pounding on the motel room door and screaming that it was fifteen minutes past checkout time and that she had to clean the room, us scrambling to pry open our eyes and throw our stuff together and get to the nearest coffee shop so we could get started on the day’s required amounts of sugar, fat, tobacco, and caffeine, the four essential food groups of a musician’s life on the road. Getting to the next gig in time was in a hurry, everybody taking their expert turn misreading the map and contributing to the babble of contradictory directions that usually meant missed turnpikes and dead ends and going the wrong way down one-way streets.

  Most of all, America was in a hurry, so unlike our home and unhurried native land so many different faces and places and cars with different-coloured licence plates speeding off on their who-knows-what-where-why way. And Walter Cronkite delivered his nightly Vietnam body count to the nation, you could buy a six pack of beer from a corner store from an old lady with a cross hanging around her neck, and look at that, Chris, what the hell’s that? We don’t have Burger King McDonalds Kentucky Fried Chicken Dairy Queen Pizza Hut Baskin-Robbins Dunkin’ Donuts 7 Eleven back home do we?

  Christine might have started off every step of the trip with something like The Letters of Sacco and Vanzetti in front of her face, but it’s amazing how a ten-foot-high red-and-yellow concrete clown by the name of Ronald can make even the most committed anti-capitalist turn her head and stare. Thomas drove and Slippery dozed most of the time, but the Maple Leaf contingent of the band had their noses firmly pressed to the windows of the hearse and their eyeballs glued to the American Dream giving Mother Nature the shiny facelift I’m sure she never asked for.

  Everything was in a hurry except Christopher at night.

  We didn’t always spend the evening in the place where we played. Sometimes, if the next show was close enough and the weather was okay, we’d drive the two or three or four hours to the next town so as not to have to worry about showing up late the following day and scrambling around looking for Big John’s Hanging Tavern out on I-17 and not getting a chance to at least try to civilize the more than likely primitive PA system. Thomas and I didn’t mind; a night off from writing once in a while had its advantages, gave us a fresh set of legs when we sat down again the next night ready to run.

  We’d load up the equipment, grab something to eat on the way out of town, and talk about the show a little. Then Slippery would start snoring and somebody would start laughing and then everybody else would start laughing too which would wake up Slippey with a loud snort and cause everybody to laugh even louder and him to mutter something under his breath and turn on his side in his seat and go back to sleep for good. And before too lo
ng Heather would put down her needles and Christine her book and Thomas would click off the inside light and he and I would be the only ones awake at three o’clock in the morning as we rolled down Highway 70 on the lookout for something called Terre Haute, Indiana.

  You don’t stop using speed just because you don’t need it; the body still demands that rush it’s grown accustomed to even if you don’t have any particular place you feel like rushing. Because Thomas insisted on doing all the driving, on the nights we weren’t writing he still found something to do. I’d pull my knees up to my chest and look out the window at America rolling by behind us with my hand resting on sleeping Christine and let the gentle hissing of our tires on the blacktop and the sigh of passing cars and trucks lullaby me for hours.

  The odometer turning over, the miles adding up, somebody else might have let their mind wander to wonder just exactly where they were going and why. Christine, for instance. But not me. And I was the one wide awake.

  56.

  “I’M SENDING KELORN a postcard. Do you want me to say anything?”

  Christine was taking advantage of the rare rush-free day doing her best Scotty imitation, turning the desk at the Home Away from Home Inn or something just like it somewhere in Ohio or Indiana or Illinois or Missouri into her very own private workstation. Her little collection of paperbacks was stacked neatly at one end, the last three days’ worth of the local newspaper had been fished out of the motel office garbage pail and reassembled to be pored over later, and she’d already mapped out on hotel stationery the quickest way for us to get to our gig that night. She even had her own version of an in box and out box going, a pile of postcards yet to be written on her left, those already done on the right. I’d forgotten what she was capable of given a decent night’s sleep and a couple of hours to herself.

  “Kelorn,” I said. “Sure. Tell her ... yeah, tell her ...”

  “I’ll just tell her you send your love.”

  “Great,” I said. “Thanks. That’s great.”

  It’d been a long night. Our ration kit was running dangerously low, and for the last couple of days Thomas and I had been halving our normal dosage of uppers and doing a lousy job of writing. The connection Thomas had been given the name of the last city back had been busted the week before we got to town. Thomas had finally gotten a hold of a Vagabond back in T.O. who’d made some calls, but it would be noon before we could go over and score. After spending most of the night in the hearse sweating through my T-shirt (and telling concerned Christine not to worry, that I must have been coming down with something), Thomas had doled out some Diazepam for us both when we’d hit the motel before dawn. I’d finally slept, but downers, I discovered, definitely weren’t my thing. My brain felt like it’d been pickled, and every time I went to speak it seemed like I needed five minutes to plan out what I was going to say. Thomas seemed all right, though. He and Slippery were waiting for me in Christopher. I could see them from the opened motel room door, Heather leaning into the driver’s side window talking to Thomas, Slippery calmly blowing smoke rings out of the passenger side.

  “You should send your parents one, too,” Christine said, head down, still scribbling.

  “That’s a good idea. I will. As soon as we get back.”

  “Where are you guys going again?”

  “A cousin of Thomas’s lives across town and he wants to go by and say hello.”

  “A cousin? Here?”

  “Yeah. Pretty weird, huh?”

  I didn’t get off on lying to Christine, but was all for painting the best possible deception I could. Browse through the history books and they all say the same thing: Every lasting society is founded on shared illusions. No nation lasts ten minutes without them.

  “Plus, Slippery wants to go to the Red Cross,” I said.

  Well, that part wasn’t a lie, at least. Slippery got paid five dollars for each pint he let them drain from his arm, every blood-red cent he received going directly into his growing Arkansas retirement fund.

  “Is that safe?” she said. “He gave blood just a couple of days ago, didn’t he?”

  “It must be, he’s going to give again.”

  She looked up from her postcard. “How are you feeling?”

  “Fine. Better. It must have been one of those 24-hour things.”

  “Good.”

  “Yeah. Hey, I should get a move on,” I said.

  “Okay.”

  “We won’t be long. Before two, anyway.”

  “All right.”

  I was already out the door when Christine called my name. I ducked my head back inside.

  “What’s up?”

  She looked at me like she was waiting for me to say something, like I’d been the one who’d wanted to talk to her.

  “Chris?” I could feel a line of sweat gathering above my lip. I licked it away. “What is it?” I said. “I’ve got to get going.”

  Christine lowered her eyes and shuffled her finished postcards, rapped them four-square even on the desktop.

  “Will you get me some stamps while you’re out?” she said. She shuffled the other pile. “Ten should do it.”

  “Ten stamps, sure.” I shut the door.

  As soon as Thomas saw me coming down the sidewalk he started up the engine. I slid open the side door and climbed inside.

  “Now, if you decide to sit out in the sun, I want you wearing sunscreen and your new hat, darlin’,” he said to Heather. “We don’t want that fair skin of yours burning up on us now, do we?”

  Heather smiled and held up the enormous floppy yellow sun hat Thomas had picked out for her at some truckstop. She leaned through the window even further to give him a kiss and then watched us pull away.

  We were down the street when I realized I hadn’t kissed Christine goodbye. I flipped on the radio. “Be My Baby” by the Ronettes poured out of the speakers and I clicked it back off. Only when your heart hurts does AM radio finally make sense.

  Thomas handed me a map.

  “See if you can find Violet Street somewhere on there, Buckskin. What we’re looking for is 265 Violet. Rick says it’s a yellow house with a bunch of old mattresses out front. And a ’52 Chevy. On blocks.”

  57.

  SHACKS, LITERAL fucking shacks, with a white beat-up Cadillac parked out front and three black kids in bare feet standing out on the front porch sucking on Mr. Freezies and all that suspicion and hate and fear already there searing in their eyes as they watched us cruise by and me hanging my head out the window watching them watch me. Twenty-five minutes later and lost, actual white picket fences and flapping American flags and the suburban perfume of freshly cut lawns and fathers and sons tossing footballs back and forth in the autumn air. Back on track and fifteen minutes east, the first sad scene all over again, but this time the dirty faces and skinny bodies on the front porches white although the hard stares and stench of human hopelessness hanging in my nostrils the same.

  “It’s an odd number so it’s got to be on your side,” Thomas said. We’d already dropped Slippery off at the Red Cross building not far from our motel.

  “Two-forty-one, 243—slow down,” I said, “it’s coming up.”

  Just as promised, a square cinder block house painted violent canary yellow with a couple of stained mattresses with the stuffing spilling out of them like they’d been stabbed to death shared the front yard with a stripped Chevy up on wooden blocks. Thomas pulled up the steep gravel driveway, killed the engine, and put it in park; you could feel Christopher roll backward before the brakes locked and we jerked to a standstill.

  We shut our doors with a careful, gentle click, but I was too busy watching a woman in hair curlers, housecoat, and white running shoes beating the hell out of a carpet with a baseball bat to see the Rottweiler tearing toward us down the sloping lawn. Even when I did get him in my sight it was Thomas’s scream and not the gleaming fangs and bucket of saliva pouring from the dog’s mouth that first registered. But before either of us could unfreeze and s
cramble back inside Christopher, the dog came to the end of his silver chain and snapped backward a good couple of feet in the air, without missing a bark landing right back on his four feet, just as intent as before on ripping our faces off.

  “Who are you, man?”

  The guy standing in the front door of the house had hair down to his ass and a stringy, knotted goatee and was in bare feet and blue jeans, but wore mirrored sunglasses and had a can of Budweiser in one hand and a shotgun hanging from the other. I didn’t know whether to flash a peace sign or give a Klansman salute. The Rottweiler, seeing his master not giving him some kind of doggy sign that we were okay, went into full-out watchdog alert, eyes rolling back in their sockets and foam cascading down his chin.

  “I said, ‘Who are you, man?’”

  The guy pumped the shotgun and took a sip of his beer at the same time. I turned to Thomas, but he kept staring at the dog like if he stopped watching him for an instant all those white teeth would be at his throat.

  “Thomas?” I said.

  Sorry, no one home.

  “Thomas, say something.” By now he and the dog were locked in some kind of weird trance, the animal’s loud snarling replaced by a spooky low motor roar.

  Giving up, “A friend of yours said to come by,” I yelled out.

  “Everybody’s your friend when you’re on the good side of a gun, man. You’re gonna have to do better than that.”

  “A friend from Toronto, a biker, a Vagabond.”

  An instant of concentration flickered in the guy’s eyes. He ran his fingers through his goatee with his Bud-holding hand. I kept my eye on the shotgun.

  “Toronto, huh? Got a few brothers up that way.”