Moody Food

by Ray Robertson

  “Anybody wants anything, tell Buckskin what you need and he’ll scoot in and get it. Everybody else, go to the can if you’ve got to and then come right on back. Thomas wants to make Phoenix by supper.”

  The opportunity to stretch our legs was usually cause for hearse-wide celebration, but Heather and I were the only ones to hit the parking lot pavement. Christine had apparently succeeded in joining Slippery in turning the middle of the day into the middle of the night, head still buried underneath her pillow. I almost touched her on the shoulder to see if she really was sleeping, then decided that if she was, she was lucky to grab the winks and needed them, and that if she wasn’t, if she was only pretending to be unconscious, well, maybe she needed that, too.

  “No dilly-dallying, you two,” Thomas called out after Heather and me. Heather turned around and blew him a kiss and we went inside the restaurant.

  “Medium black, cream and two sugars, right?” I said, hand on the door of the men’s washroom. Heather smiled and nodded. “And no dilly-dallying,” I added in my best Thomas Graham. The smile dropped from her face.

  “I wouldn’t,” she said. “I told Thomas I wouldn’t.”

  “I know, I was just ... See you in a bit.”

  I found an empty stall with another empty stall on either side of it and snorted a line off the back of my hand and felt so much better when I stood up that I forgot to take a leak. An old man washing his hands looked at me funny in the mirror when I came out so I coughed and sniffled a couple of times to cover my tracks.

  I got in line to get the coffee, and the smell of a hamburger sizzling in sautéed onions for the guy ahead of me gave me a hard-on, I mean an honest-to-goodness pokaroo stiffy. Before I had time to feel guilty about even thinking about it, I was asking for extra onions and cheese please on my burger and wondering if I had time to order and inhale a second one before Thomas started to get antsy.

  I decided not to push my luck and got Heather’s coffee and my single burger and skipped out a back exit to a small grassy rest area. I sat down on top of a picnic table and was on the verge of tearing off the burger’s yellow tin-foil wrapper when Heather came out the same door and took a seat at the same table and peeled the lid off her coffee and blew on it without saying a word, just as if we’d agreed to meet there all along. Caught red-meat-handed, I couldn’t deny the steaming flesh and bun in my possession so I decided to play it cool, set it down casually on my knee like I was watching over it for a friend. I didn’t have to worry. I don’t think she even saw it.

  “Why is Thomas calling himself Thomas and talking about himself like he’s somebody else?” Heather said. She kept her head down and her eyes on her coffee, on the swirls of steam rising above it and disappearing into the air. The camera Thomas had bought her to give her something to do when she wasn’t knitting or reading Tarot cards or running errands hung from a thin black plastic strap around her wrist.

  “Is he? I hadn’t noticed,” I said.

  “And he makes me eat things I don’t like. My mother used to make us all eat pickled beets nearly every night for supper and it feels like that now. It feels like I’m eating pickled beets every night. I hate pickled beets.”

  “You know Thomas,” I said. “When he gets into something, he really gets into it. And he just wants you to eat healthier and feel better because he cares about you. All those hamburgers you were eating, you were going to have a heart attack on us before we got back home.” I gave a hearty laugh that sounded sickeningly false even to my ears and that jiggled the hamburger on my knee. I readjusted it and ran my hand through my hair.

  “What do you two do at night?” she said.

  I picked up the burger and set it down on my other knee.

  “Nothing. Thomas and I just haven’t gotten used to sleeping in motels like you and Christine.”

  Heather turned around on the seat. “Please don’t lie to me, Bill. I can’t stand it when people lie to me.”

  I couldn’t help but be back on Bloor Street catching Thomas coming out of the Park Plaza fresh from fucking somebody other than the one person he should have been fucking. I was angry at him, pitied Heather, and felt sorry for myself all over again.

  “Christine says you’re doing drugs you don’t do with the rest of us. She says it’s your right to do what you want to do and it’s none of anybody’s business if that’s what you want.”

  It was hard to decide what unnerved me more: that Christine knew, or that I hadn’t known that she knew.

  “I want to do what you and Thomas are doing.”

  “We’re not doing anything,” I said, pulling down the brim of my baseball cap.

  “At night. I want to do what you two are doing at night.”

  I felt the heat of the hamburger still on my knee. I unwrapped the tin foil and carefully tore the thing in two, right down the middle. I handed Heather half.

  “Hurry,” I said.

  65.

  IT NEVER RAINS in California, my ass.

  And it’s not a good rain, either, the kind that pours down clear and hard and cold and sweeps the gutters clean and bleeds the heavy air and gives the earth the vigorous nose wipe it so desperately needs. L.A. rain is sideways-drizzly and stings the flesh warm and filthy; and when it finally fizzles out, the sky is still mucus yellow and the stale air maybe even more noxious mucky. We ran from Christopher to the front door of the Chateau Marmont with the pages from that day’s L.A. Times held low over our heads.

  The Chateau Marmont looked like a twelfth-century Danish castle on a small wood-covered hilltop right in the middle of downtown L.A., but with one- and two-bedroom bungalows and 24-hour room service. Hip movie stars and rock royalty made a point of staying there, and it definitely wasn’t in our price range. Once we hit town and got our bearings, Christine kept saying we couldn’t possibly afford it and that since Electric was picking up the bill at the Continental we’d be crazy not to take advantage. Thomas listened patiently to what she had to say then simply announced that this was the way it had to be as he double-parked Christopher out front of the hotel.

  In front of the entire group he paid in advance for three one-bedrooms for an entire month with his own credit card. When he tossed the plastic across the front desk Christine looked at me out of the corner of her eye like we used to do when there was Us and Them and we didn’t need ESP. I pretended like I didn’t notice. Thomas told the guy behind the counter to please make sure we got the quietest rooms they had because we were going to be working very hard recording our first album and needed our rest and that there were strict vegetarians in our party and would he be kind enough to ask the chef to prepare some appropriate dishes. He scrawled his name across a receipt and handed us our room keys.

  “Everyone get a good night’s sleep,” he said. “Tomorrow we start recording and I want everybody fresh as daisies.” He winked at me. “And don’t be surprised if Buckskin and Thomas have got a surprise or two for y’all.”

  66.

  WE’D ARRIVED SO far ahead of schedule Colin wasn’t even in town. We showed up at Electric Records’ small, storefront office and a guy with mutton-chop sideburns in a SEEDS T-shirt shuffled around some papers on his desk and told us Colin wasn’t expecting us for two more days, was somewhere in San Francisco at the moment scouting new talent. Thomas was polite but couldn’t have cared less; all he wanted to know was where the recording studio was located and if we were clear to start laying down tracks. The guy rustled through some more paper, said he couldn’t give us the okay until he spoke with Colin since it was usually Electric Records policy that bands be accompanied by a member of Electric management when recording on company time, and asked if we had a phone number where he could reach us. Thomas gave him a number and thanked him for his time.

  “Now what?” Christine said as we piled back into Christopher.

  Thomas flipped down his sunglasses and turned the key in the ignition. “You heard the man. 1567 Sunset, right at the corner of Sunset and Highland. We’re
fifteen minutes away.”

  “But he said we need someone from Electric with us,” she said.

  Thomas eased us into traffic. We’d been in town less than twenty-four hours but it seemed like all you ever did in L.A. was ease into traffic.

  “Fifteen minutes,” he repeated. “Twenty-five if we stop off at the supermarket and stock up on supplies.”

  Realizing he needed to be in the right lane to make the turn he wanted, Thomas hit the gas and cut off a shiny red Jaguar, narrowly avoiding whacking its front end with our rear. Thomas didn’t appear to notice the car’s insistent honking or its owner’s raised middle finger.

  “And I just can’t emphasize enough,” he said, “how fresh fruits and vegetables are the best get-up-and-go you can give yourself. Absolutely natural, too. I’m telling y’all, it’s the only way to go.”

  67.

  WELL, not the only way.

  Once Thomas bluffed us through the door—hauling out our Electric Records contract and dropping Colin’s name several times to the receptionist on duty at the front desk—we went back out to Christopher and unloaded all our equipment, two brown paper bags full of oranges and apples and carrots, and a gram of coke. The engineer, a guy our age named Paul with short hair who’d just gotten out of jail on a marijuana bust, said he didn’t have anyone booked for several hours in Studio B and if we didn’t mind sharing him with the other band who’d also be recording that afternoon he’d just chalk up our time to Electric’s account and try to help us out as best he could. He said he knew Colin and was sure it would be cool. “He digs motivated people,” he said.

  While Slippery and Christine and Heather got started setting up, Thomas and I split for the washroom. Normally we would have headed off one at a time to quash any sniffing suspicion, but by now, especially after what Heather had told me at the picnic stop, neither of us was too concerned with keeping up appearances. Probably the only reason we didn’t take our whiffs right then and there in the studio was because Paul was on probation and he’d asked us not to smoke any pot in the building because if he got caught even talking to somebody with dope on them he was looking at five years of hard time. Thomas and I climbed the single flight of stairs to the upstairs john.

  “Maybe we should go outside to Christopher,” I said.

  “I don’t know about you, Buckskin, but that’s one saint I could definitely use a holiday from.”

  “But Paul. He asked us not to do any dope inside.”

  “Inside, outside, outside, inside—we don’t have time for that kind of running around.” Thomas pushed open the door to the washroom and stooped to look for any shoes underneath the stalls. The coast clear, he cut off two fat lines directly on the sink counter.

  “Besides,” he said, bending over and snorting, “if you recall, I believe what he said was that he’d prefer if we didn’t smoke any marijuana on the premises.”

  He stood up straight, rubbed his nose, then did the other line.

  “And this,” he said, “surely is not marijuana.”

  I razored off my own line and snorted. I couldn’t disagree.

  68.

  “WHAT WE WANT HERE, y’all, is a little more yellow, I think. Wouldn’t you say, Buckskin?”

  “More like flaxen, actually, but sure, yeah, yellow, let’s go with that.”

  “All right, then, everybody, the tape’s rolling, let’s try one more time. One, two, three—”

  “Hold on, hold on. Flaxen?”

  “You know, that’s the third time I’ve started counting off and you’ve interrupted me, Miss Christine.”

  “And that’s the tenth time in the last forty-five minutes no one but you two has known what you’re talking about.”

  “I don’t believe I know what you mean.”

  “Oh, I don’t know, how about these lyrics you expect me to sing?”

  “What’s wrong with these lyrics?”

  “Nothing, I’m sure. If I could understand them.”

  “Exactly what part don’t you understand? Maybe I can assist.”

  “How about where I come in and sing ‘Under and under / Star-spangled tapioca fish eyes / Complete’ with you four times until—let me check my sheet here—oh, yeah, until on the next break we sing the same thing all over again except this time we substitute ‘Over’ for ‘Under’ and in every other line change ‘Complete’ to ‘Incomplete.’”

  “Every new song sets its own rules, Miss Christine. Don’t worry, you’ll come around.”

  “This thing isn’t a song, Thomas, it’s ...”

  “It’s what?”

  “Look, I’m sorry, but no one has satisfactorily explained to me yet why we’re not working on the songs Colin signed us to record. What about ‘Dundas West’ or ‘Lilies by the Side of the Highway’? What about ‘Dream of Pines’?”

  “If Colin liked what we were doing before, then he’s going to love what Buckskin and Thomas have been working so hard on.”

  “I think what you and Buckskin here have been working so hard on every night might just be the reason no one but you two understands these new songs.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t follow you, Miss Christine.”

  “I’m going outside for a cigarette.”

  Door opens, closes.

  “Heather, darlin’, maybe you should go and keep an eye on Miss Christine. I could be wrong, but I do believe it might be that time of month when she might be experiencing some woman problems, if you understand what I’m getting at.”

  Door opens, closes.

  “You know, fellas, too often we take for granted the great burdens God has given the fairer sex to endure. That’s why it is so important to remember that it’s not enough for men to simply love their women—they’ve got to learn to understand them, too.”

  Someone clears his throat.

  “Hey, Buckskin.”

  “Yeah?”

  “’Bout time for a washroom break, wouldn’t you say?”

  69.

  IT WAS A GOOD THING PAUL didn’t have much time to spare. He might have turned himself into the cops just to get away from us.

  He’d miked all the instruments and brought everybody into the control booth to let us help decide how much treble and bass and echo we wanted to add to our sound, and within half an hour Thomas was twirling knobs on the recording board and running the show. He’d known all along the noises in his head he wanted to end up hearing on record, so it was just a matter of figuring out how to work the technology well enough to get them. It didn’t take long.

  Not that we had any business being in a recording studio. Not recording Moody Food, anyway. Thomas and I were the only ones who’d even heard the songs before the tape started turning, and all we had were song titles, lyrics, and a skeleton to the music as worked out by Thomas on his guitar in a million motel rooms. The rest of us might have been able to plead ignorant, but he and Slippery knew that you went into the studio after—and not before—you’ve pretty much perfected the songs you’re attempting to lay down. But it wasn’t his money we were wasting so Slippery didn’t care. And Thomas insisted that it was important that we get absolutely everything down on tape because, unlike our old stuff, these new songs were in 3-D and needed to be built up note by note, layer by layer, and you never knew when you might need to go back and pull out something from the archives to fit in with where you’re at now. It’s the way everybody records today, with 64-track studios and computer-generated mixing, but we were working with only eight tracks and a very limited budget. Actually, we weren’t working with any budget at all, at least not until Colin got back.

  And until then the tunes got taught and fleshed out on Electric’s nickel, the reel-to-reel rolled, and Christine took a lot of cigarette breaks.

  70.

  THE WHISKY A GO GO. Whew. It made the Mynah Bird seem like the Etobicoke Legion Hall where my dad drank draft beer on Saturday afternoons. The first time I walked though the door, with Christine, the night before we were supposed to take over c
entre stage ourselves, and saw the gyrating go-go dancers in the elevated steel cages, I thought, These people don’t need drugs—they’re freaks enough as it is. Actually, that’s what the Whisky’s star patrons were called, Vito and his Freaks.

  Headed up by Vito himself, a fifty-something seasoned scene-maker with a long, pointy black beard, every night about twenty of L.A.’s most beautiful young hippie girls got decked out in white face paint, boa feathers, and antique see-through nighties and danced in wild, free-form fashion to whomever they deemed the most happening band in L.A. Management never charged them a cover. If Vito and his Freaks started coming to your shows, you and the club you were playing at had it made, the word immediately went out and you were undeniably it.

  The guy at the door of the Whisky had no problem taking our money even though there weren’t any tables left and we had to stand wherever we could find a few inches of free floor space. It was between sets, but by the buzz in the crowd and the way people kept watching the empty stage waiting for the band to come back, you just knew something special had been going on up there. The Doors hadn’t even released their first record yet but were already local legends. They were recording their debut album at the same studio we were, and Paul was sure it was going to break big time. Christine had jumped at the idea of seeing L.A.’s newest hottest thing. She also said it’d be a good idea for us to get a sense of what kind of club it was we’d be playing. I suspected that her real motive was simply to get away from Thomas for a while. I was still a little overwhelmed that we’d be scuffing up the same stage less than twenty-four hours later.

  Ordinarily, unknowns like us never would have even gotten an audition to play the Whisky. But the guy who owned the place had loved every other band Colin had sold him on so far, so we got a guaranteed week’s worth of gigs at $495.50, plus a house option for one more. No one in town might have heard of us yet, but we were recording our first album by day and playing the Whisky A Go Go by night.