Moody Food

by Ray Robertson

  Thomas staggered our respective recording times so that none of us saw each other any more, but I was ten minutes early showing up one day and Slippery twenty minutes late leaving and I ran into him coming out of the front door of the studio. I was glad I knew him. If I hadn’t, a clearly smashed, unshaven man with a black patch over one eye wearing a whisky-stained and cigarette-burned seersucker suit the first week of August might have given me pause. Heather was sitting on the top step in a tie-dyed halter top and blue-jean cut-offs alternately smoking and biting her nails. Unlike the Park Plaza, the studio was one place she was always welcome. When she saw me coming up the sidewalk she stood up.

  “Thomas says that the trees where he’s from are really different than from around here and where I’m from. If you want to know where I’m from just head for the northern tip of Lake Superior and before you get to Nipigon hang a right. There’s one paved road and a Hudson’s Bay Company and not much else, but the trees and lakes are nice. I love lakes and trees and animals and the sky and everything that’s natural. There really aren’t any trees or lakes or anything like that in Toronto. Thomas says that someday he’s going to take me home with him to see the lakes and trees where he was born. After everything gets settled with his music. You know. The new music.”

  So now Heather really did know what we did at night. I didn’t know what to say, so I used a couple of reassuring pats on her bare shoulder to sit her back down and nodded at Slippery fumbling for a smoke out of his pack. He gave me that gently baffled look wet-brained drunks do when you say their names and they can’t quite place the face or voice but know that they should. I let him have a few seconds to make the connection.

  “Bill.” Pause. “Mornin’.”

  It was ten to four in the afternoon, but I wasn’t real big on keeping regular hours at the moment either.

  “How’d it go?” I said, nodding toward the studio.

  Over the last two weeks Thomas and I had completely torn apart and put back together “Holiday Drive,” the object of today’s session, at least three times.

  “I’ve got forty-eight dollars,” he said. A cigarette dangled from his mouth, his lighter from one of his hands. “Fifty-two more and I’ll have a hundred.” The Marlboro and lighter stayed where they were. Slippery, too. His one exposed pink eye looked like a hungover rabbit’s and kept blinking in hopeless defence against the gushing summer light.

  I took off my Ray Bans and squinted against the sun. “Try these on,” I said.

  He lowered his head a couple of inches toward my hand, as if on a winch.

  “I ain’t in the market for no spectacles,” he said.

  “No charge,” I said. “I’ve got an extra pair at home. A better pair.”

  He kept looking at the shades.

  I slid the glasses over his ears. He slowly raised his head to meet the sun.

  “That’s ... that’s all right,” he said.

  Heather took her fingernails out of her mouth and popped back up.

  “I want a pair, too,” she said. “Thomas and you and now Slippery have got a pair and I want a pair, too.”

  I looked at her swollen pupils and the nail she’d chewed down to the flesh on her middle finger and wished I had another pair to give her. God, I wished I did. I put an arm around her shoulder.

  “C’mon,” I said, “let’s get inside. Thomas is probably starting to wonder where we are.”

  105.

  THE ROYAL CANADIAN MOUNTED POLICE managed to do what nothing else had been able to for weeks: get us all in the same room together. Fortunately, Thomas and I had been at the studio when they’d crashed his place at the Park Plaza. Unfortunately, we’d left enough drugs lying around to start our very own cartel. Thomas was now certifiably on the lam from two governments.

  Everyone was gathered around the table in the practice studio trying to figure out the best strategy for getting him out of town. Thomas was smoking a cigarette and sitting on a chair pulled up to the opened balcony doors with his back to everyone, a rumpled paper sack resting on top of the white Fender on his lap. He could never go back to the hotel and get the rest of his things now. The Moody Food tapes were safe, though, had been rescued from RCA and were in the bag. Except for his guitar, they were all he had left.

  “I talked to my friend Emily,” Christine said, “and she says the L.A. scene is really well organized and would have no problem keeping him underground for as long as necessary.”

  “I liked L.A.,” Heather said. “L.A. was nice. We could go back to L.A.”

  Somewhere along the line Heather had traded in her Tarot cards and knitting needles for her fingernails. She gnawed away at one of her thumbs as she followed the conversation ping-ponging back and forth between Christine and Kelorn, who’d insisted on coming over as soon as she’d heard there was trouble.

  “Los Angeles would be fine, dear,” Kelorn said, “except that crossing the border at this point is simply out of the question. The fact that you all made it across twice is two miracles too many already.”

  Christine nodded. Heather went back to her thumb.

  Scotty was poring over the piece of paper in front of him on the table and Slippery was pouring himself another shot from his bottle of Old Crow, each apparently oblivious to the power powwow going on around them. But there was only room enough for five chairs around the table and I was standing behind Heather and watched Scotty slowly tracing over the same word again and again, at Slippery look over at Thomas before his every sip.

  Looking up, “We could go home,” Heather said. “I mean my home. Where I’m from. We could get on a bus and go north just like I came south. They’d never find us up there. I could get my waitressing job back and Thomas could keep working on his music and everyone could come visit.”

  “It’s not a bad idea,” Christine said.

  “No,” Kelorn said, “it’s not. But anywhere that isolated is also going to be underpopulated. If they ever managed to find out where he was they’d have no problem whatsoever plucking him up. He’d be a fish in a barrel up there.”

  “I wish you’d both stop saying him,” Heather said. “Thomas isn’t going anywhere without me. Wherever he goes I’m going too. We’re going wherever we go.”

  Kelorn patted the hand not at Heather’s mouth. “Of course, dear. It’s just that Thomas is the fugitive here, so naturally we’re focusing on his situation.” She turned back to Christine.

  “What about Montreal? You have friends there, don’t you?”

  “Just my brother and his family.”

  “Might he be able to help?”

  “He’s an accountant.”

  “I see.”

  Outside, Yorkville was gearing up for another hot August evening. Crowd buzz, honking cars, and the faint strains of the Byrds’ “My Back Pages” floated through the opened patio doors. But no sirens or fists pounding at the studio door. Not yet. The cops—Toronto cops—were out there, though; under the direction of city hall every weekend now parked a paddy wagon at the corner of Hazelton and Yorkville and strictly enforced an under-eighteen 10 p.m. curfew as a way of letting everybody know who was in charge.

  “Let me talk to some people I know in Vancouver,” Kelorn said. “There’s a very active peace movement out there and a lot of American kids from the west coast are coming up and settling. It might be a good cover.”

  “But what about in the meantime?” Christine said. “He can’t stay here.”

  “He can stay with me for now, but it’s imperative that we get him out of town as soon as possible.” Kelorn and Christine both stood up. Heather, too.

  “I’m coming,” she said.

  “You’re coming where, dear?”

  “With you. To your place. With Thomas.”

  “If all goes well, it’ll likely only be for tonight.”

  “I don’t care, I’m coming.”

  “The sleeping arrangements at my house are quite limited, dear. I’m afraid there’s only—”

  “I
don’t care, I’m coming.”

  Kelorn smiled. “Of course. Not to worry. We’ll find room.”

  Kelorn and Heather and Christine were nearly at the door before they realized they’d forgotten something.

  “Thomas?” Kelorn said. “Coming?”

  The entire time they’d been talking about him Thomas had been blowing smoke rings in the direction of the coming twilight, sitting there silent all by himself in the corner like a very bad boy waiting to find out whether he was going to bed without dinner.

  “Let’s go, Thomas,” Christine said. “You’ll be safer at Kelorn’s.”

  Heather came over and took his hand. Thomas put his other hand around her waist.

  “You go with Kelorn and Miss Christine, darlin’,” he said. “Thomas is going to wait for it to get dark.”

  “That’s actually not a bad idea,” Kelorn said.

  “It’s not,” Christine seconded.

  “Then I’ll wait here with you,” Heather said.

  “I can move quicker and quieter on my own. You get along and help get things ready. I’ll be there soon enough.”

  “But—”

  “No buts. You be a good girl, now, and do what Thomas tells you.” He kissed her bare stomach, just below where her halter top stopped.

  Heather wanted to cry but put on a shaky smile instead.

  “That’s my girl,” Thomas said. He pulled a baggy out of his pocket and stuffed it into hers. “Be careful with this like I told you, all right? Just a little at a time.”

  Heather nodded.

  “All right, then. Now give Thomas a kiss and off you go.”

  She did and was, and with Kelorn and Christine along with her. Slippery picked up his bottle off the table and got to his feet as steady as he could.

  “I’m going for a lay-down,” he announced.

  Thomas and I watched him sway in place.

  “But before I do I’m gonna tell you this,” he said, pointing his bottle at Thomas. “I’m not saying I think what you’re doing is right or not. That ain’t for me to decide, and it ain’t for you either.” He uncapped the bottle and took a pull. “But if you’re gonna run, Hoss, run. And wherever you go, always keep your back to the wall.”

  Slippery shut the door after him, and Scotty didn’t look up when I grabbed one of the chairs from the table and sat down beside Thomas to wait for the night.

  106.

  I FIXED BECAUSE HE WANTED ME TO. When he took out his kit from the bag that the tapes were in and pulled up his sleeve, he didn’t say a word. But I offered him my arm when he was done with his and he tied me off and slapped my forearm to raise a vein and slid the needle in slowly but expertly. By the time I’d barely made it to the bathroom at the end of the hall and vomited and come back, Scotty was gone. Before he left he’d watched us shoot up from his spot at the table. I nodded out on the floor and when I woke up Thomas was gone, too.

  But that was all right. He’d be back. In the meantime I’d just keep having this continuous warm jet-stream body-and-soul orgasm I was having and wonder why Thomas hadn’t let me in on the wonders of mainlining heroin until now. If acid solved the mind-body problem, heroin eliminated the question. How could something that made you feel truly comfortable in your skin for the first time in your life get such a bad rap, I wondered. I felt good for me but sad for the rest of my fellow human beings struggling day after day to achieve only a fraction of what I was feeling right now every tenderly pulsing second.

  I’d nodded off again when Thomas returned, and when I woke up he was tossing slices of liver off the balcony. He had a white plastic bag full of it at his feet and was determined to deposit each and every piece onto the empty street. I joined him outside.

  It was the middle of that hour that is the middle of the night and the beginning of day both, still thickly dark but ready to dissolve into slowly blooming light at any minute. Thomas plopped a bloody piece of meat on the windshield of a brown Ford Fairlane parked underneath us a few feet down. He picked up a fresh slice out of the bag.

  “Do you know what I’m holding in my hand right now, Buckskin?”

  I looked at the piece of meat for a second like I actually needed time to identify it. “Liver?”

  “From what animal?”

  “A cow?”

  “That’s right, from a cow. I have here in my right hand the liver from a cow.” He pulled back his arm and flung the thing as hard as he could, shooting, I think, for the sidewalk across the street. It landed with a sticky slap a couple feet short of its target.

  “And do you know what the purpose of a liver is?” he said. “Not just a cow’s liver, any liver?”

  I’d never really thought about it before. And now—a big beautiful butterfly delicately unfolding its elegantly embroidered wings and readying itself for takeoff in the pit of my stomach—definitely wasn’t the time to start. “Um ...”

  “That’s all right, don’t be embarrassed. You’d be surprised at how many people don’t.” He seemed undecided about where to direct his next missile; kept tossing it up and down in his hand like a pizza pie while scouting the street. A yellow Volvo went by and tooted its horn. He let it pass.

  “The liver performs many essential functions. It regulates blood volume. It stores up all sorts of important things a body needs like copper and iron and vitamin B12. It metabolizes proteins and carbohydrates and fats and destroys old red blood cells. And”—he reached back and pitched the subject of his anatomy lesson side-armed, farther than the last but still not far enough to make it to the other side—“it also detoxifies foreign substances in the blood stream.” He wiped his bloody hand on his jeans and looked at me for the first time.

  “It keeps a body clean, Buckskin. Without it, there’s nothing stopping something—anything—from stealing inside and spreading its poison and putting you down for good.” He dipped his hand back in the bag and retrieved the final piece of liver.

  This time I thought it was going over to the other side. He screamed and hurled the hunk of meat, and another six inches and it would have made it. It didn’t echo, but you could feel Thomas’s voice carrying on somewhere in the damp night air. He took in the carnage he’d created below, the thin slices of brown flesh splattered on the street, sidewalk, and dew-topped cars. He lit a cigarette.

  “One more thing about the liver?” he said. “About the human liver?”

  I nodded.

  “The liver is the largest single organ in the human body. Most people, if you ask them, would say it’s the heart, but it’s not. The heart gets all the songs written about it and it’s what everybody talks about, but the liver is the biggest thing in you. So how come you never hear anybody talking about the liver? Where are all the songs written about it?”

  107.

  THOMAS SENT ME OFF to Kelorn’s to let her know that the cops hanging around near the studio that he’d made up and called her about when I’d passed out had gone, but that just to be on the safe side he was staying put for the rest of the night. By the time I was out of Yorkville and on Spadina the night was beginning to do its Houdini thing, and once I hit Harbord, yesterday was just a rumour. I was still high but felt like doing nothing so much as crying. When I couldn’t put my finger on why, I wanted to cry even more. After I tried to and couldn’t, I decided to sing.

  Which was exactly as far as I got. I opened my mouth but something blocked the signal from my brain to my lips and plugged my vocal cords shut and nothing came out. I felt like I’d stubbed my toe, hard, on the sharp corner of a couch and couldn’t scream.

  I lowered my head and walked and walked and didn’t stop until I found myself an hour and a half later in Etobicoke. When I heard a kid—a paper boy with an empty grey bag slung over his shoulder—kicking a can down the street, the sound of tin grating across concrete scraped my nerves and made me feel like yelling at him to cut it out and I knew I was going to be all right. I sang the first thing that came to mind, the chorus to Merle Haggard’s “Sing Me Back Hom
e,” and wanted to run over and tell the kid how much I loved him.

  I didn’t, though. This was Etobicoke, not Yorkville. I started the long walk back instead and listened to him going his way still kicking his can, me going mine singing my song.

  108.

  THE NEXT DAY, that day, was hot. I think it was hot. Real warm, anyway. It had to be, it was August. August 20. The day Yorkville decided to strike its blow against the empire and the empire struck back.

  Kelorn and Heather were taking tea on the front step when I finally made it to Making Waves. Heather must have stayed up half the night making a sizable dent in the bag of coke Thomas had given her, because it was all I could do to convince her that Thomas was fine and that we’d been up late talking and that he was probably sleeping and that for her to go by and wake him up wouldn’t do anybody any good.

  “Is he really okay, Bill?” she asked, pulling at the arm of my sweaty T-shirt.

  “Sure he is. The poor guy just needs some sleep. You both do.” I tried to give her my best I-know-of-what-you-sniff look of disapproval, but to no avail. She just kept holding onto my shirt until Kelorn gently put a cup of tea in her hand.

  “You look like you could use some sleep yourself,” Kelorn said, handing me another cup.

  “I’m okay,” I said, waving away the concern and the offer.

  “Take it,” she said.

  I took both it and the space she made for me on the step after she sent Heather inside to make another pot. I sipped the hot tea. Chamomile. I immediately felt like curling up on the step like an old cat in the sun.

  Looking straight ahead, “Vancouver looks promising,” she said.

  “Vancouver?” Maybe I already was asleep.

  Kelorn turned to me. “You do remember what we were talking about last night?”

  “Yeah, I just ...”

  “Yes, I know. There seems to be a lot of that going around.” She returned her gaze to the empty sidewalk.

  “I want to hear if Christine came up with anything,” she said,