Moody Food

by Ray Robertson

  “but I think the west coast is our best bet. Thomas would just seem like one more draft dodger out there.”

  “How long before he goes?”

  “Depending upon what Christine has to say, he can and has to go now.”

  “What, like this week?”

  “Like today.”

  “Today?”

  She turned to me again.

  “It’s just that we’re not done working on Moody Food yet,” I said.

  “Bill, do you know what the RCMP will do to Thomas if they get a hold of him?”

  “Put him in jail?”

  “Put him in jail. Correct. And not for the weekend, either.”

  I took another sip of my tea. “I can’t imagine Thomas in jail.”

  “Exactly,” she said. “Neither can I.”

  Heather poked her head out the door.

  “What kind of tea should I make?” she said.

  “Use the strong black tea, dear,” Kelorn said. “Bill is going to bring Thomas back to us safe and sound. And it looks like he needs all the help he can get.”

  109.

  ACTUALLY, WHAT BILL needed was to fire up a sizable piece of South American rock just to get his pulse pumping at a normal number of beats per second. But I resisted the desire to take some of Heather’s stash with me on the grounds that I’d have Thomas up and around and back at Making Waves and myself horizontal on my cot in my old room by noon. The idea of pulling back the sheets, flicking on my ancient fan, and taking a short vacation from reality seemed as exciting an idea as I could imagine.

  But it would be a long time before I got to have that sleep. And when I did, it wouldn’t be a short nap. When I finally delivered Thomas where I was supposed to, I’d sleep the sleep of the dead. And there wouldn’t be anything in the world of the living loud enough to wake me up again.

  110.

  “ALL RIGHT, think of it as my send-off into exile, then.”

  “I already know what I think of it,” I said. “Have you lost it? A concert? Now? You might as well turn yourself in.”

  “I told you, we’ll play under cover.”

  “Under what kind of cover?”

  “I don’t know. The International Donald Twayne String Band. Whatever. It’s not important. The thing is, we’ll tell everybody who’s cool what’s really going on and perform Moody Food from start to finish, the whole thing, exactly in the order it’s going to appear on the album.”

  “With just the four of us? What about all the outside instruments we’ve used? Not to mention the studio effects you’ve—God, I can’t believe I’m even talking about this.”

  I didn’t have to get Thomas up; thanks to the block of coke and handful of reds on the table, he’d never come down. Which had given him plenty of time to plan his very own farewell party. He had his guitar around his neck and was stalking around the room as he spoke. He went to the table and inhaled a line in each nostril standing up and swung an arm around my shoulder.

  “It’s not about how close we can come to approximating the studio sound of the record,” he said. “I know that’s impossible, and that’s what we’re making the record for. But Thomas realizes now that we’ve left something out of what we’ve been doing.”

  “Oh, yeah, what’s that?”

  “Love.”

  “And you think that by putting your ass in danger of being incarcerated by playing a two-hour concert we’re going to get that now?”

  “People have to see what this music means to us, Buckskin. They have to see it up close and personal, in our eyes.” He took hold of my shoulders so I couldn’t look away. “Just like I can see it in yours and you in mine.”

  I didn’t know what he was seeing, but all I saw was a road map of broken blood vessels and two ridiculously dilated pupils. Reasoning with him was useless, so I’d have to outsmart him.

  “Okay,” I said. “But this place is just too hot right now. Let’s go downstairs and get Slippery and I’ll call Christine and we’ll all meet up at Kelorn’s and work this thing out. But after that we’ve got to talk about where you and Heather are going to end up. How does Vancouver sound?”

  “Vancouver, sure, whatever y’all say.” He strummed his guitar. “But you gather up the girls and meet me back here. Thomas has got us a hiding place the devil himself would never find.”

  111.

  THOMAS LED US ALL downstairs to the building’s basement and stopped before a door marked FURNACE—KEEP OUT. He slipped in a skeleton key and, sure enough, there was the furnace. And, on the other side of the small cobwebby room, another door. He knocked—four times, slowly—and was answered by the door opening up on its own. He stepped aside and with a sweeping gesture bowed for Kelorn to enter first. She hadn’t been happy about Thomas insisting on staying here and not at the store, but knew better than to argue. She looked at him and then at me, shook her head, gathered up her dress at her knees, and disappeared down the dark stairs.

  “This is so cool,” Heather said, following Kelorn, kissing Thomas on the cheek.

  “I better wait upstairs for Christine,” I said. “I left a message for her with one of her roommates. As soon as she gets here we’ll come down.”

  “You sure you know the knock?”

  At first I thought he was kidding. Until my eyes started to adjust to the dull yellow light coming through the basement window and I saw he wasn’t smiling.

  “Four knocks, right?” I said.

  “Four knocks with one Mississippi steamboat between each knock.”

  “Gotcha.”

  He handed me the key. “Take this.”

  “Right.”

  “And this.” He reached inside his Nudie jacket and pulled out a pistol.

  “What the hell do you want me to do with that?” I said, staring at the gun.

  He slapped it into the palm of my hand. “I don’t want you to do anything with it. It’s only for using if you have to, you hear me? Only if you absolutely have to.”

  “Why would I have to use it?”

  Closing the cellar door behind him, “Get your head out of the ground, Buckskin. There’s a war on, in case you didn’t know.”

  112.

  I SAT AT THE CARD table with the pistol lying in front of me. The breeze from the balcony was warm, the gun cold and hard. I didn’t notice Scotty shuffle into the room until he pulled back a chair and sat down. He rested his violin case and bag of papers on his lap and joined me in staring at the gun.

  “I knew you weren’t bright, but I never took you for stupid,” he said.

  “It’s not mine.”

  “You think I’m just talking about that thing?”

  113.

  BY THE TIME CHRISTINE showed up I’d stashed the pistol underneath an overturned empty flowerpot out on the balcony and was relieved when Scotty unpacked his bag and set to work as usual.

  “Where is everybody?” she said.

  “It’ll probably be easier if I just take you there.”

  “Let’s just wait a minute, okay?” She sat down with her elbows on the table, rested her head in her hands.

  “If it’s about Montreal, don’t sweat it,” I said. “It looks real good for Vancouver. Kelorn’s just waiting for a call and then Thomas and Heather are all set.”

  She looked up. “Good. That’s good. I’m glad. At least something’s going right.”

  “What is it?” I said.

  Ever since I’d stalked her all the way home after the fracas at my place, Christine and I had barely spoken. I didn’t even know if we were still officially a We any more.

  “It’s about Yorkville,” she said. “You wouldn’t be interested.”

  “Try me.”

  She thought about that for a moment.

  “Okay,” she said. “So finally Lamport agrees to debase himself and see us and hear what we have to say. About the traffic. About the pollution. About kids living out on the street and getting sick. About the constant police harassment.”

  “Great,
” I said.

  “Yeah, great. And do you know what his response was?”

  I shrugged my shoulders.

  “That these sounded like pretty good reasons to him for us to leave.”

  “Geez.”

  “Yeah, geez.”

  Just then Scotty gave a little hoot and tossed aside his pen and took to his feet and brought out his violin and proceeded to lay down a poem-ending celebratory tune, a slow waltz.

  “Give the fiddler a dram or a dance, you two,” he said.

  Christine and I smiled.

  “What’s it going to be?” I said.

  “I don’t even know what a dram is.”

  “I guess we better dance then.”

  And we did.

  “Thomas wants us to perform Moody Food live before he leaves,” I said.

  “People are mad, Bill. When no one hears what you have to say, when no one even tries to hear what you have to say ...”

  “I told him he was crazy.”

  “People are angry, real angry. It’s not good.”

  “I’m going to try to talk him of out of it, but you know how he gets.”

  “It’s not good at all.”

  114.

  ALL AFTERNOON WE planned Thomas’s exodus and waited on the call Kelorn was expecting on the pay phone down the hall that Heather was dispatched to wait beside. And when the phone call finally came and the west coast was officially clear, spent the rest of the afternoon arguing with Thomas once he revealed to not just me but everyone how he was more than happy to skip town, but only after Moody Food got its moment in the setting sun.

  “Thomas,” Kelorn said, “listen to me, listen to me very carefully one last time. You cannot do this. You simply cannot do this.” She’d started off shocked, moved on to patient frustration, and had now arrived at angry insistence.

  All along, Thomas had remained the same. He smiled and reached over and squeezed her hand. “Everything’s going to be fine,” he said. “No one’s efforts will have been in vain.”

  The room was minuscule enough to make Slippery’s quarters seem like a suite at the Park Plaza. To top it off, the ceiling was so low we all had to sit on the dirty floor around an upside-down wooden crate that supported the room’s only light, a single candle sticking out of one of Slippery’s old bourbon bottles. Slippery himself, the phantom doorman of before, squatted on guard, filling the room with eyeball-watering smoke from his Marlboros and sipping from a fresh pint of Old Crow. His own pistol was stuck underneath his belt front and centre, behind the buckle, the same place Thomas wore his.

  Kelorn looked at me across the flickering candlelight, but I’d already done my best and she knew it, had given Thomas my word that if he took the ride out of town she’d arranged for him and Heather the next morning, as soon as he got settled in B.C. we’d get the group back together out there and not only perform a live run-through of Moody Food but also finish up what needed to be done with the record. That was about an hour and a half before, around the time Christine bailed out to meet some friends at the Riverboat concerning the continuing fallout from the hippies’ failed meeting at city hall.

  Kelorn stood up, as much as she could, anyway.

  “You know how I feel,” she said. “I can’t understand why you don’t seem to care enough about your own future to do the only sensible thing, but I wish you’d think about the others around you who do.” She cut her eyes Heather’s way, but Thomas took Heather’s hand and she gave him a big kiss and neither said a word.

  Kelorn looked at me again. I lowered my eyes.

  “Good luck, Thomas,” she said.

  “Thanks for everything, Kelorn,” Heather said, Thomas’s hand still in hers.

  “Good luck to all of you.”

  115.

  THOMAS LIT A FRESH candle and we listened to him talk about how the Moody Food showcase was going to be structured in terms of song selection and how we could compensate for the bare-bones instrumentation and lack of studio wizardry and what would constitute optimum club conditions and even what colour the backdrop behind us on stage should be. I felt like I was ten years old and sick in bed with the flu in the middle of winter and half-daydreaming, half-hallucinating endless summer days of schoolyard baseball and touch football games and glorious suppers of three hot dogs and two whole bottles of Orange Crush. I fell asleep to the sound of snorting noses and Heather’s voice softly yesing Thomas’s every sentence, thinking that none of us would ever get out of this room alive.

  116.

  THE POUNDING of someone’s boots racing down the stairs ripped open my eyelids. Heather screaming and Thomas and Slippery whipping out their guns sent me scrambling on my stomach for the closest corner. I didn’t have far to go, but before I got there I recognized Christine’s voice.

  “Everybody’s in the street! You’ve got to see this! The hippies have taken over Yorkville.”

  Gun still at his side, “Miss Christine, I do believe I gave you precise instructions on how to gain access to the upstairs entrance.”

  “Everybody’s in the street,” she said, trying to catch her breath.

  “What do you mean everybody’s in the street?”

  “Come see for yourself. They’ve shut down the village. You’ve all got to see this.”

  Thomas stuck his pistol back in his belt.

  “Let’s move, people.”

  117.

  “PARK IT AROUND BACK. We can load up through the rear door.” I flicked on the turn signal and did what Thomas said.

  When a big party a bunch of hippies were holding at a warehouse downtown got raided, everybody headed over to Yorkville and decided that enough was enough and sat down in the street, effectively doing what the politicians wouldn’t, stopping any cars from coming into the village. By the time we gathered on the balcony to check things out the avenue was swarming sidewalk to sidewalk with hippies chanting “CLOSE OUR STREET, CLOSE OUR STREET.” There were so many people down there you couldn’t see concrete any more.

  “It’s like a little country,” Heather said.

  “That’s it,” Thomas said, eyes roving over the crowd. “That’s exactly what it is.”

  Of course I said no. No. No way. Forget it. Out of the question. Uh uh. I said it, but Christine was the one who walked away and into the street. I drove the hearse over to RCA to get our equipment while Thomas stayed out of sight by lying down in the back and rattling off instructions. Slippery rode up front with me, keeping his one good eye out for the bad guys.

  There was some sense to it. Thomas said that if we did as he said, set up our instruments on the roof of our building and dished out Moody Food loud and clear to the starving masses, he and Heather would make their getaway in the morning and wasn’t that just a fine plan.

  “No,” Christine said.

  But there was some sense to it. There had to be. Otherwise, why else had I been sprinting between studio and hearse with all of our equipment, piece by piece, Slippery watching my back from the front seat, Thomas shouting out, “Hurry, Buckskin, hurry!”?

  At a red light on the return trip to Yorkville I leaned my head back on the seat, could feel my wet hair sticking to the vinyl headrest. An arm loaded down with a fat line of cocaine snaked into my peripheral vision. I shook my head.

  “I’m all right,” I said.

  “Like hell you are,” the arm answered. “Pick yourself up.” I saw Slippery see it talking to me, too. He looked away.

  “No, I’m okay,” I said. “I’ll grab a Coke at the studio.”

  “Coca-Cola isn’t going to make the thirst you’ve got go away. Here.” The arm slithered closer to my nose.

  “No, it’s okay.” I could feel the hairs in my nose tentacling toward the white powder.

  The arm disappeared and I took a deep breath. And then Thomas’s face was beside mine, outstretched arm back again and sticking straight out and still coke-laden, Thomas’s pistol hanging from the other hand.

  “I don’t know what you’re thi
nking or plan on doing, but this is our moment and it will never come again and we’re going to embrace it. And a sleepy drummer who loses track of the beat is not something we can allow to happen.”

  I put my nose to his flesh and inhaled. The light turned green and I hit the gas.

  118.

  HEATHER WAS WAITING for us where Thomas had told her to be, and she helped Slippery start to haul everything by foot through a dark alley to the back door of our studio. We didn’t have to worry about the crowd thinning out; by the roar of it, it was even bigger than before. My job was to go into the belly of the beast and pluck out Christine so she could take her bass-playing place alongside the rest of us.

  “Let me help carry some of this stuff,” I said. “Even if I could find her, she won’t do it.”

  “You’ll find her. And she’ll do it.”

  “She won’t. I know her.”

  The intersection where I’d parked Christopher was deserted; the entire village was on Yorkville Avenue.

  “She will,” he said. “She has to.”

  I put my hands in my pockets and turned an ear toward the crowd. I’d walk around for a while and then tell him I couldn’t find her and that we’d have to make do without her. So our sound would be a little thin on the bottom end. Nothing was going to stop him now.

  “All right, we’ll meet you on the roof,” I said.

  “Have you got your revolver?”

  “My what?”

  “The pistol I gave you, the pistol.”

  “Yeah, I’ve got it.”

  “Let me see it.”

  “I better go now.”

  “But you’ve got it?”

  “I better go now,” I said.

  119.

  THROUGH A FOREST of blue jeans the first face I saw when I hit Yorkville Avenue was Christine’s. I cursed my good luck and squeezed my way through the crowd and squatted down beside her.