Moody Food (22 page)

Fred returned with an old wooden shoeshine box and placed it on the floor between us. He pulled out a small plastic pouch of white powder from inside, closed the lid, and poured a tiny pile on its top. With a razor blade he inched out two lines.

“What's this?” I said.

“Vitamin C, brother,” Fred said.

“What?”

“White Lightning from the coca, man, all the way from the beautiful fields of some of our South American brothers.”

“Cocaine?”

“Cocaine,” Nancy said, smiling.

“We don't want it,” Thomas said.

I was shocked. Thomas's chemical consumption policy was pretty simple: When in doubt, do it.

“No problem,” Fred said. “I just thought you and your partner here looked like you might need a little pick-me-up.” He lowered his face to the box, inhaled a line, and rubbed his nose. Nancy leaned over and did the same.

The change was immediate and incredible. Their eyes shone like lit windows on a freezing dark night, their faces pulsed with an electric healthy glow.

“Can I try some?” I said.

“Be my guest, man. No charge to sample the merchandise.”

Thomas put four fingers on my chest. “This isn't what we came for.”

“It may not be what you came for,” Fred said, “but it's all you're going to get in the way of the stimulant family. Now, if you're looking for downers, that's a whole other story. I've got—”

“For the work we're doing we don't need any fucking downers,” Thomas snapped.

“Then I suggest that if this here work of yours is so fucking important you'll fucking take what you can fucking get.” I
noticed Fred's shotgun leaning against the wall by the door. I wondered if it was still cocked.

“Of course,” he said, “you're free to look around elsewhere. But this isn't San Francisco, brother. And the suits and ties down at city hall haven't got around to putting together a hippie yellow pages yet.”

The record player's needle edged into the next song. A wash of sitars flooded the room.

“We've got a lot of work to do before we get to L.A., Thomas,” I said. “We've got to have something.”

Lyndon had rejoined us and was lying on the floor beside Fred with his head between his paws. Thomas looked over at the animal without visible fear for the first time.

“If we do this,” he said, “it's just for work. It's just for
Moody Food
.”

“Sure,” I said.

“For only when we're working, Buckskin.”

“All right, all right.”

He paused for a moment and then wet his finger, dabbed up some coke and ran it along his upper gums. He cut a long line with the razor and snorted it up; closed his eyes and tilted back his head. What sounded like a cat whining to get in a back door could be heard from somewhere in the house. Nancy got up to let it in.

Thomas opened his eyes. “How much for a gram?” he said.

“Depends on how much you're looking to buy. I can give you a good deal if you're not looking to score again soon.”

“We're not. I'm going to have to come back, though. I haven't got that kind of cash with me.”

“We're not going anywhere, brother.”

I took the opportunity of the deal going down to get my own taste of inner radiance. Which I got, but with an unexpected bonus. I felt like ditching Christopher and jogging the twenty
miles back to the motel and fucking Christine for a few hours or at least until she'd orgasmed seventeen times. Just for starters.

Nancy came back into the room cradling something in a wrapped blanket. And there was that whining again. I expected to see the cat all gussied up in a bonnet and baby clothes.

Except that it wasn't a cat but a baby, an actual buck-naked bona fide baby boy with the tinniest little pink willie hanging right out there for all the world to see.

“There's my little man,” Fred said, getting up and going to the kid.

“Yellow Submarine” filled the room and Fred and Nancy took turns coochy-cooing and making funny faces at the gurgling infant. The music was kid's music, bright and colourful, and the baby had Fred's brown eyes and Nancy's blonde hair, and Thomas and I weren't going to suffer the shakes any more, and with the help of the coke
Moody Food
was going to get done. I felt so happy I thought I was going to cry. I asked if I could hold the baby.

“Sure, brother,” Fred said, and Nancy handed him over.

“Brother, meet Leonard. That's short for Leonardo. You know, like the artist, the Renaissance Man.”

I held the baby like my aunt Lori had shown me how with her kid, under the butt and supporting the head. He looked like a little angry old man wondering what the hell he was doing here. He looked perfect. The kid caught a load of one of his toes way down there at the other end of his body and moved all ten as best he could and watched the show with mesmerized eyes.

“Hey, brother, watch this,” Fred said.

After he'd handed me Leonard, he must have sparked up another joint. He took a deep toke, came in close like he was going to kiss his son, and then gently blew a cloud of smoke in the baby's face, some of it lingering in white curls around Leonard's nose and mouth, some of it slowly lifting above his head like a dirty halo. The
baby blinked a few times, sneezed once, then stared expressionless at his now no-longer-moving toes. His face looked as frozen as the plastic head on Lyndon's doll.

“Eleven months old and he's stoned, man,” Fred said, taking his own deep toke. “Isn't that beautiful?” Nancy caressed the baby's cheek and wiped a line of spittle from the corner of his mouth.

I looked to Thomas. He tapped out another line of coke and snorted the top of the shoeshine box clean.

I stood there holding the baby in my arms.

 

 

Because when Thomas was nine his father took him to Shiloh and he cried on the walking tour of the battlefield just like his daddy had done when his own father had taken him there thirty years before, Thomas was allowed to choose from the dusty shelves of the gift shop one expensive hardcover book on the Civil War. His father offered to buy him a T-shirt and mug commemorating the bravery of the doomed Confederate troops as well, but Thomas politely declined.

The book was thick and heavy and full of footnotes and complicated maps and wasn't intended for children, so mostly Thomas looked at the pictures—artists' recreations of battlefield scenes and burning cities and grainy photographs of cocksure, bearded generals and the proud, grey-clad soldiers. Somehow the actual pictures never looked as real as the drawings and paintings.

But there was one short section Thomas read all the way through and eventually didn't need to read any more because he knew it by heart. It was the story of Stonewall Jackson and his last battle.

Jackson got his nickname, “Stonewall,” at the First Battle at Bull Run when, early on in the war, a courageous defensive run by his undermatched Confederate troops allowed the South to route the Federals and send them in retreat all the way back to Washington. But that wasn't the part Thomas liked. Thomas liked to read about Jackson's final fight.

The book said that when Stonewall Jackson was a young man and took his first taste of whisky, he ever after refused to allow another drop of alcohol to pass his lips because, it was rumoured, he realized he liked it too much. During the battle at Chancellorsville on April 27, 1863, Jackson led an unexpected and crushing movement against an exposed Union flank and sucked on a fresh lemon all day long. Throughout the afternoon of April 27, as Jackson's boys pounded the Yankees' 11th Corps, Jackson sat on his horse and sucked at his piece of bitter fruit. When one lemon was sucked dry he'd drop it to the ground and bite into another. The bright flash and dull roar of battle, and Jackson biting and sucking.

After the collapse of the 11th Corps Jackson got greedy and continued the advance. Later that same day he was accidentally killed by the fire of his own men, an untouched lemon on the ground not far from his fallen body.

As a boy lying on his bedroom floor Thomas would wonder what it meant to like something so much you couldn't allow yourself to have it. Later on, as a young man riding off into important battles of his own, he no longer wondered about the answer to that question. Now he wondered about the best way to surprise the enemy and attack its exposed flank. About getting greedy and pushing on through the trees. About the risk of friendly fire. About Stonewall Jackson sucking on that lemon.

“YOU BOYS been to a cathouse?”

Slippery toed out a Marlboro on the sidewalk and took my spot in the front seat while I climbed in the back. He'd been waiting for us out front of the Red Cross just like he'd said he would, even if we'd shown up nearly an hour late. His shirt sleeves were rolled up and there was a clean white bandage taped to one of his forearms.

“What are you talking about?” I said.

“None of my business, but it don't take no rocket scientist to figure out that one way or another you two been fucked somehow.”

“I think you might want to slow down on the blood drive,” I said. “Remember to save some for your brain.”

Slippery lit a fresh cigarette. “Like I said, none of my business.”

“Hey, pull in here,” I said. We were getting close to the motel.

Thomas steered Christopher into a White Castle parking lot. Suddenly I was hungry. Very hungry. For meat. For red meat, the bloodier the better. Seagulls circled the grey steel trash bin out back of the restaurant.

“You guys want anything?” I said.

“This is a hamburger place, Buckskin,” Thomas said, keeping the engine running.

“So?” I said, sliding open the door.

“Since when do you and Miss Christine eat hamburgers?”

“If you don't want anything, just say so,” I said.

A brown Chevy cruised by on its way out of the parking lot, but not before its driver could toss a couple of White Castle paper sacks out the window. The seagulls were on them in a second. They screamed and squawked and tore open the bags and pecked at each other over the ketchup-bleeding French fries and bits of leftover hamburger bun scattered over the blacktop.

It was my first time since the very first time in Detroit. I had my money ready and devoured the ten tiny hamburgers in the rear
of Christopher by the time we got back to the motel. I didn't even offer Thomas or Slippery any. When we were almost there I made Thomas drive around the block while I smoked one of Slippery's Marlboros to get rid of the smell of meat on my breath.

Heather, lying by herself out by the pool, waved at us from underneath her yellow sun hat as we drove up.

I walked back to the room. Christine was asleep on the bed with something called
The Social and Economic Basis of Anarchism
on her lap. It was still hours until we had to be at the club and we didn't usually have a free afternoon to ourselves, so I thought about maybe going for a long walk together or the two of us taking off somewhere close by for coffee. Then I saw the pile of completed postcards on the end of the desk and realized I'd forgotten to get her stamps. I shut the motel room door as quietly as possible behind me.

I joined everybody else out by the pool.

Although Heather said it was too cold, I stripped down to my underwear and swam laps while everyone watched until my lungs hurt and my arms felt like they were tied down by invisible ropes attached to weights at the bottom of the pool. When I finally climbed out of the deep end everyone applauded and said how impressed they were. I rubbed myself dry with the rough white motel towel Heather handed me and thought about how it had been years, since early on in high school, that being happy had been as simple as going as fast as you could.

LACKING CEREMONY, it isn't a vision, it's a scheme. We had more than just some plan. We had a ritual.

I would close the curtains to the already-darkened room, Thomas would lock the motel room door, I'd light the candles, and
he'd lay out one line of coke each to start with. The rest of the band was long gone beddy-bye by the time we got going—usually no earlier than two or three in the morning—and that suited us fine. We didn't want to be disturbed. We had
Moody Food
to make.

Two whiffs, a little preliminary warm-up playing on Thomas's part, and the race was on. To wed melody and word. To fuse music to script. In particular tonight: a downright nasty piece of metallic-tasting, grating electric guitar work that Thomas heard a creepy organ line running through on the breaks and that I saw as copper and rust with dark brownish-red sneers every time I heard it. Thomas started banging out the tune on his unplugged electric and I closed my eyes to better see the song and let fate play its part in helping to select from the pile of library books on the bed.

Library books, yes. Every time we'd hit a new city Thomas and I would use the excuse of dropping Slippery off at the Red Cross to head straight for the local public library. Thomas would hand over his Mississippi driver's licence and get a brand new lending card all inky fresh and neatly typed up and walk beside me up and down the aisles while I filled up his arms with as many volumes as we were allowed. Sometimes it was impossible to get the books back to the library before we had to split for the next gig, and I'm not proud of the fact that the name Thomas Graham must still strike fear into the hearts of certain elderly librarians.

Of course, we could have just told everybody what we were up to. Once upon a time the idea was simply not to piss away our vision in chit-chat. Then at some point along the line Thomas and I became Masons worshipping at the altar of
Moody Food
and it was treason to talk about all matters Moody above a whisper. Cocaine is great for nurturing obsessions. And the best part is that all you really need to become obsessed is an obsession. Having something to actually be obsessed about is just an added bonus.

I could tell tonight's first choice had real potential right from the moment I scanned the book's table of contents. Sometimes Thomas had to keep playing the same tune over and over again, literally for hours, until I happened upon one sentence that even hinted at in words what I was seeing in colours. Sometimes there wasn't even that. Sometimes the sun would come sliding underneath the door like a dawn-delivered early edition and the only thing we'd have to show for an entire night's work would be blisters on Thomas's fingers, a floor covered in discarded library books, and two snoutfuls of toot that, in my case, necessitated doing laps in the motel pool to calm me down enough to be able to steal a couple of hours of sleep. But I felt lucky about
The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens.

“You ever heard of this guy before?” Thomas said.

“I don't know. Maybe. Maybe in school.”

Thomas fished out a new pick from his guitar case.

“Get this,” I said. “‘The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.'”

“That's all right.”

“Yeah,” I said, not looking up from the book. “It is.”

“It's not this song, though.”

“No. It's not.”

I turned the page.

“Okay?” he said.

“Let's go.”

Thomas would play and I would read, skim, recite aloud, and test out lines by scribbling them down in Thomas's red notebook. Occasionally we'd take a break and do another line of coke so Thomas could keep playing and I could keep reading, skimming, reciting aloud, and testing out lines by scribbling them down in Thomas's red notebook. The key was for Thomas to never stop strumming and for me to never stop seeing colours. With enough
persistence, patience, and cocaine, eventually, we knew, the job would get done.

Every decision had to be unanimous. Song title and tune only ended up getting hitched when we'd discovered a perfect match. You vote with your body and everything else is just blah blah blah. The shiver up the spine, goosebumps on both arms, the tingle of recognition in all ten toes. And when Thomas's eyes and mine would meet and both our bodies would light up like drunken Christmas trees, it was like the words we ended up using so completely captured what Thomas heard and I saw that until we hacked them free from the dead trunk of whatever poem or story or novel they'd been shackled to they hadn't really existed, were only incubating in the musty pages of some book waiting for us to set them free.

Around five in the morning, forty-two poems, two broken guitar strings, and a gram of coke later, “You Like It Under the Trees in Autumn (Because Everything Is Half Dead),” I said.

Thomas stopped playing. He closed his eyes. I could hear the sound of a passing transport truck on the highway a few hundred feet from our door. It was still too early for birds.

“One more time,” he said.

I repeated it. “From ‘Because' on should be in parentheses,” I said.

He spoke the line aloud himself, then slowly nodded and set his guitar down on his knees. I closed the book and put it on top of the others.

We both sat there trying to get used to the sudden quiet. That was always the hardest part. Shivers and goosebumps and tingling toes are a wonderful barometer of aesthetic purity, but they aren't the kind of nightcap you want to take with you to bed. My ears pounded with the room's silence.

I stood up. “I'm going for a swim,” I said.

Thomas picked his guitar back up. “I think Thomas is going to work for a while,” he said.

“Try to get some sleep.”

“I will,” he said. “Thomas just wants to get started on this.” I closed the door and headed out to the pool.

Once we had the title of a song in place, Thomas took over. He'd reclaim his notebook and use what I'd come up with as a sort of lyrical compass to set him in the right writing direction. Usually by the next week the tune would be done. I'd read over what he'd written to make sure the lyrics were the right colour. They always were.