Moody Food

by Ray Robertson

  Somewhere near the Arizona–Utah border a white Cadillac with Texas plates and a bumper sticker that read I HAVE A DREAM . . . THAT ONE DAY THE CONFEDERATE FLAG WILL FLY OVER WASHINGTON pulled ahead of us. Christine put her paperback down on her knee long enough to see what I saw and we locked eyes for the first time since the night before I didn’t sleep at the Marmont. I took in the bumper sticker one more time then closed my eyes. It was time to go home.

  He wasn’t the fastest or the strongest or the most talented guy on the team, and he knew it. Just like he also knew that if it was fourth and goal, fourth quarter, and less than a minute to go and the good guys were down by six, there was only one play. The quarterback sneak. With the game on the line you can’t trust anyone else to get the job done so you take it over yourself. Strap your chin strap on tight, keep your head down low, and push the bodies ahead of you forward toward even the slightest sliver of pay dirt daylight like moth to flame. And don’t go down until you break that white line. For Chrissake, don’t go down.

  And if the coach calls for a play-action pass to the tight end, hoping to throw the other team off by unexpectedly putting the ball in the air, there’s still only one play. Doesn’t matter that the defence have pummelled the running back three straight times at the line of scrimmage. Doesn’t matter that they’re probably expecting another run. So much can go wrong when you float that ball up there. The blocking could collapse. The receivers could run the wrong routes. The tight end could drop the pass.

  Even if everyone in the huddle, on the sidelines, in the crowd, thinks you’re crazy. Even if they stick all eleven bodies right on the line. Straight up the middle, up and over that hill, on three.

  87.

  FIRST THOMAS GOT us a coke connection. Then he booked us time at the RCA recording studio near Church Street so we could get right back to work on Moody Food. It was nowhere near as high-tech as we were used to, but it was the best Toronto had to offer. Finding a satisfactory dealer was a whole lot easier. In the couple of months we’d been away it seemed as if the Vagabonds had tripled their leather-clad presence in the village. Suddenly you could score speed and coke anywhere you went, just the same as weed.

  Two straight days and nights of white line fever and we were back in T.O. in less than forty-eight hours, aided by us crossing at Detroit this time and not the safer Sault Ste. Marie. When I saw we weren’t taking the longer route and asked Thomas what was up, he just patted the cardboard box full of tapes still on his lap and said, “Got to strike while the iron’s hot, Buckskin.” Everybody else was asleep and he didn’t seem worried, so I wasn’t either. We stuffed what was left of the remaining coke up our noses in a truckstop bathroom outside Toledo and weren’t asked to pull over at the border for inspection. The guards probably reasoned that nobody could be stupid enough to try any funny business at an international border in a beat-up hearse at eight o’clock in the morning. Sometimes you need to be dumb to be lucky.

  We pulled into Yorkville around noon on a freezing cold but sunny day. Christine and Slippery got dropped off first and lugged their stuff out of Christopher and retreated to their beds like a couple of Napoleon’s most flaked-out almost-Muscovites. Every time I called Christine’s place over the next two days one of her roommates would say she was sleeping.

  They say infidelity is like potato chips—you can’t have just one. Not me. A couple thousand miles of silence goes a long way toward visualizing in full nightmare Technicolor a lifetime of not having the only person you’d ever been able to really talk to not there to talk to any more. I’d had my ounce of forbidden flesh and knew I’d never need to eat again.

  But I also knew that the Moody Food tapes Thomas brought back with us were still just iris-slashing brilliantly smashed diamonds that the master jeweller was still mulling over, still figuring out their worth and final placement amid all the glittering others. But he would. Drugs are great for looking on the bright side. The glass is half full, even when it’s empty.

  Thomas would do what he had to do and we’d help him do it, and when it happened, when the musical rainbow was complete and we all held hands and watched our work rise to the sky and bring everyone to their knees, Christine and I would once again sit at the Riverboat sipping espressos and laughing about nothing just like before.

  All of which was exactly what I was going to tell Christine. As soon as she returned my calls.

  88.

  ONCE CHRISTINE and I did get around to talking there was one topic we weren’t going to discuss. And not just because it fit my procrastinating profile perfectly not to. The thing was, I wanted to tell Christine about Dew, had been bursting to since the second I’d stood alone on the 6 a.m. sidewalk in front of Dew’s house with the smell of her skin baked into mine. I’d stumbled down the street and felt my dumb groin tighten at the whiff of a stranger’s scent on my wrist and thought that if I ran all the way to the Marmont and woke up Christine and vomited out everything I’d done the knot in my stomach would go away and in the future the sweet sound of dawn-bugling birds might not make me want to cry. But I was too hungover from all the scotch and the Marmont was too far away. By the time I pushed the elevator button for our floor I knew what I wasn’t going to do.

  Maybe it was coke-blown ego, maybe it was simple-minded simple vanity, but the more I walked off my hangover the more I became convinced that Christine wasn’t going to leave me for doing what I’d done. She wouldn’t be happy about it, but we had too much history behind us and too many things in our future to look forward to to tear the calendar from the wall just because I’d needed to find out what it felt like to be the cool guy for once. If I marched into our room and spewed out what had happened it would be for my benefit, not hers. Sparing her the pain and loading myself down with a lifetime of guilt was the first grown-up gold star I ever got.

  Christine was asleep and still that way when I got out of the shower and into bed. I’d never been happier to be anywhere. I let go a deep, deep breath and rested my hand on her hip and she rolled over onto her side away from me. I deserved that, I thought. Just like I knew I’d earned the next day’s silence and the one after that. The Bill Hansen she’d fallen in love with had gone missing in action and I was the only one who could bring him back alive. Fine. We’d go home and get Moody Food done and I’d slowly cut back on the coke and burn off whatever craziness was left over with extra laps and there he’d be again.

  But there aren’t any swimming pools in Canada in December. Or in January, February, March, or even April and May.

  89.

  WHEN WE WEREN’T eating up hours of tape at RCA, Thomas and I were at his suite at the Park Plaza working the kinks out of what we wanted to record when we got back in the studio the next day. I’d checked in with Kelorn as soon as we’d returned, but neither of us brought up the idea of me starting back at Making Waves. She did ask me if I was eating enough and why I insisted on wearing my sunglasses inside. I told her I wasn’t used to life off the road yet and that I’d be sure to see her around.

  And yeah, the Park Plaza. The same swank hotel I’d caught Thomas sneaking out of after doing Heather wrong. But there’d never been any other woman. There’d never been anybody else at all. It’d always been just Thomas. When he gave me his room number and told me to come over later to discuss the recording schedule he’d worked out, I didn’t act surprised or ask if he’d been staying there all along while the rest of us had gotten by in underheated and shoebox-sized rooms and his own girlfriend had had to open up her shabby door to Slippery at his slimiest because Thomas’s place was, you know, too small.

  Because for a long, long time you believe in Santa Claus, never even question how he gets an entire planet’s worth of presents delivered in just one twelve-hour shift. And then one year you don’t. Nobody sits you down and tells you that Santa Claus doesn’t exist. The bad news just rolls across the plains of the schoolyard like a mist you can only see in the distance, never when you’re actually in it. And then you know just li
ke you’ve always known, like everybody’s always known, that the guy who knows who’s naughty and nice was just something made up by the grownups to keep the little ones happy.

  90.

  THE DOCTOR WANTED to know if I’d recently had syphilis, tuberculosis, diphtheria, or typhoid fever. Any L.A. physician, like the one who’d given Thomas the Valium, wouldn’t have had to ask. Once my nose had stopped bleeding I’d walked over to the emergency ward and the MD on duty started poking around inside with a cold steel instrument. When he started chipping out little pieces of bloody crust he couldn’t hide his excitement and invited another doctor in the white-sheeted cubicle next door to take a look. Together the two of them scraped out the goriest trayful of desecrated hemoglobin this side of a Vietnam triage.

  “It is,” the other one said.

  “It really is,” my doctor agreed.

  “It really is what?” I said. For the last half-hour I’d been sitting on the edge of an icy metal table naked except for a drafty hospital gown, trying to keep my nose stuck up in the air to provide the best possible point of nasal entry. And with watery eyes pinched tight from the pain of two strangers oohing and ahing over the world’s most intense nose-picking ever. I felt like a prize-winning science experiment.

  My doctor finally set down his tool on the goo-caked tray. “Mr. Hansen, you have a perforated septum.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning you’ve got a hole inside your nose.”

  “Oh.”

  “It’s not dangerous in and of itself, but it does indicate something’s most definitely wrong. We’re going to need to run some tests on you as soon as possible. In the meantime I want you to keep that nose elevated.”

  “Okay.”

  “Are you sure you’ve never had typhoid?”

  “No.”

  “What about syphilis?” the other docter chirped in. “We’re here to help you, not judge you.”

  Syphilis, I thought. I wish.

  91.

  ON THE RARE DAYS we couldn’t book studio time we’d rehearse at our old space in the village. Christine emerged from her post-tour recuperative coma not much more chatty toward her boyfriend, but determined to make Thomas and me understand that once the new songs we’d started in L.A. were wrapped up she was taking a lengthy musical sabbatical. She said she’d learned a lot about successful political organizing out there and wanted to help put together a more successful Yorkville version. When she wasn’t asking Thomas precisely what he meant by requesting that she play “an om-pah-pah sort of bass thing—you know, Barnum and Bailey meets 1930s Polish wedding hall music,” that’s what she usually talked about. I didn’t mind. At least she was talking to me.

  “I mean, enough is enough,” she said.

  We were taking a break from an hour and a half’s worth of practise on the four-part background chant to “He Do the Police in Different Voices.” Chanting was Thomas’s new big thing. Combined with a strictly vegan diet, there was just no end to the amount of spiritual purity a person could achieve. Chanting came easier to Thomas and me. Long, repeated nonsense syllables feel pretty good on a charred nervous system. Oral downers for the brain. The om that refreshes.

  “It’s really important that we don’t marginalize our efforts,” she said. “We can’t let the media portray what we’re doing as just some kind of freak-out for potheads. That’s why it’s so essential that we educate everyone and not just preach to the converted.”

  After being reassured by Thomas for about the tenth time since we’d gotten back that the second half of our Dream of Pines advance money would be in his pocket soon, Slippery went downstairs to the hall payphone to make a call. Heather rubbed Thomas’s shoulders while he sucked on a cigarette hanging out the side of his mouth and used both hands to rip tape after tape off the reel-to-reel, listening for whatever it was he was searching for in his headphones. Scotty sat absorbed in front of his latest opus at the card table like we’d never even left. I was the only one paying attention to Christine. If I ignored the fact that the last time we’d had a meaningful conversation I’d violently accused her of conducting not one but two lesbian affairs behind my back and then gone on later that same night to betray her with what turned out to be a seventeen-year-old groupie, it almost felt like old times. I nodded a little more empathetically.

  “That’s why I’m bringing a bunch of these home with me for Christmas,” she said. She pulled several mimeographed pamphlets out of her of bag. “This isn’t just our fight. What these developers and their political cronies represent is a threat to all generations, not just ours.”

  Christine and Thomas were the only two people I’d ever met who, when they got worked up about something, made certain words sound like they were underlined in the air. I needed to have that talk with her soon. The one about how I didn’t want to go through life without her beside me underlining all the really important words.

  “Do you want to take some back to Etobicoke?” she said. “You don’t have to.”

  “Yeah, that’d be great,” I said.

  “Here we go!” Thomas yelled. He ripped off the headphones and stamped out his cigarette underfoot. Somehow smoking in the studio wasn’t taboo any more and the floor was as good an ashtray as any. “Check this out, y’all,” he said.

  Tape hiss, and then the slowly escalating sound of human screams, incoherent yelling, car horns honking, and cop sirens wailing. Urban Armageddon with its very own soundtrack.

  “What is that?” Christine said.

  “Do you like it?” Thomas said.

  Christine didn’t answer, continued to listen.

  “Buckskin?”

  I scratched my head. “Yeah, but ...”

  He grinned and picked up his leanest, meanest Telecaster and ripped right into the opening discordant howlings of “Till My Wet Fur Froze.” The chaos of the tape bubbled away in the background, every second threatening to boil over and scorch the song.

  I got it, smiled. “We can splice them together tomorrow at RCA,” I said.

  “Exactly,” he said.

  Heather smiled because I’d smiled and because all was well in Duckheadville.

  “What is this?” Christine said. “I know this.”

  “This?” I said.

  “I know this,” she said.

  “I doubt it,” I laughed. “For your sake, I seriously doubt it.”

  The tape ran down to how it’d hissingly begun. “Miss Christine does know this,” Thomas said. He turned around and lit up a fresh smoke. “It’s the riot on the Strip.”

  “The L.A. riot?” Christine said.

  “The very same. I had a feeling things were going to get heavy so I gave the sound guy at the Whisky five bucks to tape some of it for us on his portable.” Thomas took a long drag from his cigarette, flicked the ash on the floor.

  Christine yanked her opened bag off the card table and all of the pamphlets inside fluttered to the floor like crippled white doves. I got down on my knees beside her and handed her what she didn’t quickly manage to gather. She didn’t say thanks and stomped out of the room.

  “You’ve got to have a talk with that woman of yours about her mood swings, Buckskin.”

  I looked at the silent tape machine.

  “I mean, how are we going to work on the middle section of the chant now that she’s gone?”

  92.

  OUR SINGLE CAME out and died a quiet death, too rock and roll for country radio, too country-sounding for rock stations. But Colin wasn’t surprised or even upset and reassured us over the phone that if ever there was an album group, it was us. The 45 was just for getting our name out there some more, he said. Dream of Pines the LP was where we were going to make our reputation. Only problem was, Electric Records didn’t have it.

  Thomas, it seemed, had taken the master tapes of the finished album along with our Moody Food material before we split town. Naturally, Colin understood the mix-up, but wanted the album back. Three weeks later he was a lot less
understanding and still wanted the album back. Not so naturally, I was the one forced to deal with his growing long-distance frustration. Thomas didn’t believe in telephones any more—something about electronic wire signals breeding brain cancer cells.

  “Thomas says he’s dropping it in the mail this week,” I said. I was sitting at the desk in Thomas’s room watching a sky full of nervous snow flurries white-out the tenth-floor view.

  “Bill, that’s what you said last week. And the week before that.”

  “We’ve been busy with the new stuff. Really busy.”

  “Look, I don’t think you guys recognize the severity of the situation down here. The release date has already been pushed back a month. The people who can help make or break this thing are in danger of forgetting who we are. The media in this town have a very short attention span.”

  I tried to change the topic. As Thomas’s new official mouthpiece to the outside world, it was something I was getting pretty good at.

  “Thomas told me to tell you not to worry because Moody Food is going to make you forget all about Dream of Pines,” I said. “Thomas says—”

  “‘Thomas says, Thomas says.’ Why can’t I talk to Thomas myself? He hasn’t been messing around with you-know-what again, has he?”

  You-know-what was heroin. When a single joint could net you five years in prison on either side of the border, there was no such thing as being too careful.