Moody Food

by Ray Robertson

  “Bill, c’mon, sit down,” she shouted above the noise.

  She looked happy. I was glad she looked happy.

  “There’s no room,” I shouted back, taking in the sea of bodies that had swallowed me.

  “Sure there is,” she said, wiggling over a few inches on the street to let me in.

  “I can’t stay, I have to go.”

  She stopped moving. “Thomas is still threatening to play?”

  “He is going to play. He says if we all help him he’ll leave in the morning.”

  “If they don’t arrest him before then.”

  Someone started up a “CARS, NO! PEOPLE, YES!” chant and there wasn’t any use talking any more. I stood up, gave her an underhand wave, and pushed my way off the street. I went around back and climbed the stairs and stopped off at our studio, empty but for Scotty at the table working on a poem. He didn’t look up. I climbed to the fourth floor and the door that led to the roof.

  “Where is she?” Thomas yelled, looking up from adjusting his amplifier. Everything was set up near the edge of the roof, just like a regular show—Thomas’s and Christine’s mikes near the front, Slippery’s steel guitar off to the side, my drums at the back, even Heather in a chair at stage right. My sticks were waiting for me on the snare.

  “I couldn’t find her,” I shouted, heading for my stool.

  “That’s a lie,” he said, standing up. “I saw you talking to her.” He walked toward me, the black curly cord from his guitar trailing behind.

  “No, I wasn’t.”

  “Yes, you were. I saw you. What were you two talking about?”

  “Christ, don’t be so fucking paranoid. All right, so I talked to her. I told you she wouldn’t play. This is her thing, man, this is her Moody Food.” I’d never thought of it that way before, but now that I had it made me feel good to say it. “Let’s just play.”

  “Without a bass player? Without half our vocals?”

  I pounded my snare, then my tom-tom. Slippery took my cue and ran a run on his steel guitar. You could barely hear either of us over the crowd. “Let’s go, man,” I yelled.

  “Did you use every means possible?” Thomas said.

  “What?”

  “Did you use every means possible?”

  “What are you talking about?” The wind was blowing my hair in my eyes and I brushed it away; was his, too, and he didn’t.

  “And now because you didn’t, I have to.”

  “You have to what?” I said.

  “Do what I have to do.”

  I stood up. “Let it go, man.”

  “I’ll do what I have to do.”

  “I said let it go, man.”

  The door to the roof opened and Christine had one boot off and was working on her other as she hopped toward her bass. Heather jumped up and took it off its stand and put it around her neck.

  “If we’re going to play, let’s play,” Christine barked. Turning to Thomas, “And if I see your face in the village tomorrow I’m going to pay the Vagabonds to ship you off to Vancouver COD.”

  Thomas strummed his guitar.

  “All right,” he screamed, “‘Some Good Destruction,’ on four.”

  “Ain’t we going to warm up first?” Slippery called out.

  But Thomas was already counting off.

  We played as hard as we could as loud as we could, but no one heard us. Everyone turned up their amps and Thomas and Christine sang at each other eyeball to eyeball so fiercely I saw blue veins in their necks bulge and threaten to burst. But what the wind didn’t carry away high above the protesters’ heads, the noise below suffocated like a heavy blanket of December snow. After every song Thomas kept moving us closer and closer to the lip of the roof. But if anybody did manage to hear anything, they probably thought it was just a radio left on playing in one of the cafés or maybe a record player in an apartment someone forgot to turn off in the excitement of getting down to the street.

  “Till My Wet Fur Froze” ended the same way it began, with the chanting of the crowd the only thing any of us could really hear.

  “Forget it,” I screamed from behind my drums.

  “‘Isn’t It Pretty to Think So,’” Thomas yelled out. Now we could hear police sirens wailing in the distance.

  “It’s no use,” I shouted. The wind had picked up. Christine and Slippery and Heather were shielding their eyes and straining to understand what we were saying.

  “On four,” he yelled.

  Maybe he thought that if he played even closer to the edge, right on the edge, more people might see him and listen harder and hear what he was singing. Or maybe he believed that the nearer he was to the people the louder his voice would be. I crashed my cymbal at the end of the chorus just like he’d taught me to, and when I looked up he was gone. We all dropped our instruments and ran to the edge. I watched Heather scream, but all I could hear were sirens.

  As many dreams as there are reasons none of them ever come true. Everybody’s got one and Thomas is no different. It’s always the same and it happens a lot.

  Thomas’s is simple. He has to make a phone call—why, he never finds out, only knows he’s got to make the connection—and every time he dials, over and over again all night, something goes wrong. Sometimes it’s not the right number. Sometimes his fingers get jammed in the dial. Sometimes he forgets the number entirely. This last is the worst. Who forgets their own phone number? It’s like forgetting your name. Who forgets their own name?

  When he wakes up, Thomas sits up on his elbows and opens and shuts his eyes a couple of quick times just to make sure he’s not still dreaming and swears that next time he’ll remember. That next time he’ll finally get through.

  120.

  IT HAD TO BE ME.

  Sixty-one of Christine’s brothers and sisters were punched in the face and kicked in the stomach and dragged off to jail and she had to be there to help sort through the aftermath. Heather wanted to come—sobbing, demanded to come—but cocaine and deep grief do not mix. And I will not talk about what that looked and sounded like. Somehow Kelorn managed to get her checked into the hospital and all she could say before I left town was that once Heather started to detox she wasn’t as bad as before. Slippery, I thought, would want a ride at least part of the way home, but he turned me down flat.

  We were standing outside his room. His opened suitcase was on the cot, a cup of steaming coffee in his hand. His patch was gone and he looked at me with two clear eyes.

  “I can’t take a chance getting mixed up in that,” he said.

  I nodded and ran a hand through my freshly cut hair. No matter how many times I did, there was no getting used to it.

  “Take care,” he said.

  I shook his hand and remembered something and stuck my other hand in my pocket.

  “Here,” I said.

  He took the roll of bills and began to slowly count them.

  “It was in his bag,” I said. “I’m sure he owed you something.”

  “Not this much. There’s got to be more than five hundred dollars here.”

  “What am I going to do with it?” I said.

  He looked back down at the money.

  “I kept enough for gas and whatever else I’m going to need,” I said. “Use it for your house. Another house.”

  He looked up.

  “That haircut’s a start, but you can’t do what you’re fixin’ on doing in them clothes,” he said.

  I was wearing what I usually did—boots, jeans, a white T-shirt. He went inside and pulled his only other change of clothes, his other suit, out of the suitcase. It was identical to the one he was wearing, except blue, not brown. It also looked like the twenty thousand roads it had probably been down, but it made more sense than what I had on.

  “Are you sure?” I said.

  He stuck the money in his pocket.

  “Looks like you just bought yourself a suit, Hoss.”

  121.

  IT HAD TO BE ME. Because I’d promised him. The
re were credit cards and a birth certificate and ways of finding out who his closest relatives were and what they wanted done, but even if it took me several years to discover that “Uncle Pen” is a Bill Monroe song, I knew then that the Joshua Tree desert likely wouldn’t figure into the final plans of any remaining family members. But it figured in Thomas’s, so it had to be me. I changed the oil and filled up the tank and stuck a roll of toilet paper inside the glove compartment just in case my nose started to bleed. And got a haircut. I’d never actually seen one, but could only assume that hearse drivers delivering dead bodies across the U.S. border to grieving kin didn’t have long hair.

  I never went over the speed limit but only stopped for any length of time twice, once in Illinois to buy coke from one of our old connections, once in Wichita to sleep because I woke up in a cornfield to the whap whap whap of corn stalks pounding against the windshield. The guy at the border in Detroit had asked me what I had in the back and I’d told him. When he asked where I was going and I told him California he said he sure hoped I had air-conditioning back there. I told him I didn’t and he said he was sure glad he didn’t have my job.

  122.

  IT WAS AROUND midnight when I got to the desert. Although I’d had two days and nights to think something up, now that I was there I didn’t know what was next. I got back on the highway and found the nearest all-night diner and ordered coffee and apple pie. I was only using enough coke to keep me awake, and my appetite was coming back. I had a refill and another slice of pie, this time with vanilla ice cream, and by the time I got the bill I knew what I had to do. I asked the waitress for directions to the nearest gas station.

  “Regular or diesel?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said.

  123.

  THE ENTRANCE TO THE PARK wasn’t locked, or maybe there wasn’t any gate, I forget which. Either way, I was surprised and relieved and killed my headlights and let the stars show me the way. I drove for about fifteen minutes, until I thought I was far enough inside that no one could see me, and pulled up beside an enormous, twisting rock formation and cut the engine. The smell in the hearse was only tolerable with every window wide open and going sixty miles an hour, so I didn’t have time to sit there and think about what had to happen.

  To help with the stench I’d wrapped him up in three layers of blankets, and when I drenched him in gasoline it didn’t feel like I was doing it to him. So much so that I had to pull back the covers and make sure. It was him, all right. Grinning that goddamn grin. I dropped the match, and the heat and the explosion went straight up in the air and knocked me over on my back.

  I picked myself up and watched the flame return to earth and turn into several smaller fires. I got back in the hearse and headed for the highway.

  124.

  THE REST IS JUST THE FACTS.

  Thomas’s first posthumous taste of glory was an Associated Press story picked up by a thousand dreary dailies about the grisly ritualistic sacrifice in California’s Joshua Tree desert of an unknown rock and roll musician, Thomas Charles Graham, twenty-three, of Jackson, Mississippi, by one of his own band members, a Bill Ronald Hansen, Canadian, age twenty-one. Drugs, of course, were suspected, and the police were still investigating. The lawyer representing the deceased’s family reported that the Grahams were in shock but in the process of bringing the remains of the body back home for interment in the Graham family plot. I was in an L.A. jail when they stuck what was left of him in the ground beside his mother, but what went into that hole didn’t and doesn’t matter and I didn’t miss anything. Funerals are for the living and I’d already said goodbye.

  The part the newspapers didn’t write about was what they probably should have. How when Thomas hit Yorkville Avenue the police were so busy bashing noses and clubbing heads and the hippies so intent on trying to fend them off that no one noticed his body falling from the sky. When we collected him off the street there was a girl a few feet away on her knees with blood pouring out of her nose like water from a broken fountain. Compared to her, Thomas didn’t look that bad.

  They got me at the bus station. I’d flushed what was left of the coke down the toilet and scored enough Nembutals to numb me out all the way home before ditching the hearse and buying my ticket. I wanted to go to sleep and the downers would help see to that. When the cops busted me in the departure lounge they had to get a wheelchair to haul me out to the squad car, I was so weak kneed. They took away the Nembutals but couldn’t make me stay awake.

  My parents mortgaged their house and I got out on bail a couple of weeks later and eventually money and the truth got me off with a $700 fine for, get this, degrading a human body. I also couldn’t apply to enter the United States for two years, the length of my American probation. They could have said I couldn’t leave my parents’ basement in Etobicoke for two years and I wouldn’t have cared. Not counting trips downtown to score pot and stop in to see Kelorn, that’s just about exactly what happened. My parents didn’t complain. At least they could keep an eye on me.

  I applied for readmission to U of T and when fall came around decided to wait for the spring semester and, with the arrival of it, the semester after that. I slept in and played solitaire in my room until dawn and took Snowball for walks late at night. I helped my mother do the housework and cut the grass and washed the car. I cleaned out the eavestroughs.

  I also wrote Christine several long letters I couldn’t figure out why I never mailed until I read one of them over the next day and realized I didn’t have anything to say. When Kelorn told me Christine was going to Nigeria to do some kind of peace work with CUSO I finally did send something, just a short note saying congrats, and she wrote back saying thanks and to write and including her new address. I never did.

  Except for what was playing on the radio in my mother’s kitchen, I didn’t listen to any music.

  One book in the middle of the 80s, Rock and Roll’s Missing in Action, and Thomas was on his way. I finally gave Electric Records Dream of Pines nearly twenty years late and it became a cult favourite, mostly among young musicians, and people started to call up once in a while wanting to know what this Graham guy who I’d torched in some desert was all about. They’d get about half of everything they wrote wrong, but I’d do my best.

  Kelorn ended up back in England after someone broke into Making Waves one night, shit on the floor, and dragged as many books as they could through the mess once they found out there wasn’t any money. Christine and Slippery and Heather, I don’t know. After twenty years of nothing much, after moving down to Tilbury in ’89 with the cash I got from selling my parents’ house after they died, I was the guy, the only apostle who was talking.

  Then I got drunk on some journalist’s tab and let the lid off Moody Food, and Electric—which by now was owned by some monster company that made toothpaste and video games and a million other things—started to smell money but couldn’t find the tapes and didn’t even know where to begin looking. Soon enough they got wise and some lawyer would threaten me over the phone from time to time as Thomas’s profile got bigger and bigger among the alternative music crowd, but I’d play dumb, which isn’t real hard for me to do. Eventually I figured that, incomplete as it was, I was the best person to stitch Moody Food together and went online with my own CD. Naturally, the company decided to sue until I got somebody to check the contract and find out that Thomas had made sure that, except for Dream of Pines, all rights to all of his songs stayed with the band until a new contract could be worked out. They made me an offer and then another one, but eventually quit trying. After all, it was only music.

  125.

  BUT THE LEAVES are still on the trees, still change colours, still fall to the ground. And sometimes, when the kitchen is quiet except for the fridge motor coming on and the sound of Monty’s soft snoring, I catch myself humming something I didn’t even know I was.

  I can still see it, but you can’t.

  So listen. Listen. Listen.

  Acknowledgem
ents

  For debts past and present: Mark Boyd, Richard Currey, Lesley Grant, Tom Grimes, Nicholas Jennings, Andrew Johnson, Albert Moritz, Tom Noyes, Brad Smith, Miles Wilson, Nicole Winstanley, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Toronto Arts Council. The music of Gram Parsons was an inspiration in the writing of this book.

  This is a work of fiction, and therefore of truth. Certain facts have been modified toward this end.

  About the Author

  Ray Robertson graduated from the University of Toronto with High Distinction with a B.A. in philosophy and later gained an M.F.A. in creative writing from Southwest Texas State University.

  He is the author of the novels Home Movies, Heroes, Moody Food, and Gently Down the Stream, and a collection of non-fiction, Mental Hygiene: Essays on Writers and Writing.

  He is a contributing book reviewer to the Toronto Globe and Mail, appears regularly on TVO’s Imprint and CBC’s Talking Books, and teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Toronto.