Moody Food (24 page)

AUSTIN TO SAN ANTONIO is only about an hour and a half, A to B blacktop, straight down I-35. But time doesn't mean anything. It might take half a second, it could take years, but once the bow has been drawn, eventually the arrow will fly. Call it hippie bullshit or common cosmic sense. Either way, by the time we were two songs into our first set at Bar l'America in San Antonio it was obvious there wasn't going to be any inspired repeat of the Memphis or Austin or even Dallas shows before we split for L.A. Because Thomas didn't care any more. What's more, he didn't care who knew that he didn't care any more.

He wasn't unprofessional. He just couldn't be bothered to sing with any emotion or play his instrument with any inventiveness or put any thought into the song selection. After a while, Christine got tired of waiting around for him to signal what was next and took over counting off the next tune. Thomas didn't mind. He was happy to play sideman. That's the thing. He wasn't spaced out or pissed off or surly with anyone. He just didn't care.

It was as if the last few days had been nothing more than him running into a long-ago ex and deciding to go for a week's worth of auld lang syne lovemaking. It wasn't until later that I realized he was saying goodbye for the last time, too.

 

 

His father was good about it. He gave Thomas his mother's third-generation family Bible, a $25,000 per year trust fund contingent upon him never setting foot in the state of Mississippi again, and a firm handshake. His father would make sure that Becky, away at school in Louisiana, got his letter. When Thomas came downstairs that morning with his bag, Selma had a big cry in the kitchen and gave him the silver cross from around her neck and told him to hurry along because he knew how much his father hated to be kept waiting.

Thomas shook his father's hand and climbed aboard his Harley and terrified the birds nesting in the treetops of Dream of Pines one last time.

His father watched the dust from the dirt road and the exhaust from the bike rise and whirl and become the same thing. He called out to Lee, his mongrel hunting dog who let only him come close without grrring, and the two of them walked off together back to the house.

Later, hitting the open road along the coast near Biloxi, finally going fast enough to slow down his mind, Thomas came to the conclusion what it wasn't.

It wasn't about refusing to get a haircut or playing guitar in his room all day or the girls at all hours. It wasn't about getting expelled from Harvard for missing an entire semester's worth of classes. It wasn't about being presented at his daddy's doorstep more than once at four in the morning after being picked up at Charlie's Place or the
Chicken Shack or Franklin's, the only white face in the entire joint (“And you from a good family, too, boy,” the officer in the squad car would say. “What would your momma think knowing her son was hanging around Niggertown?”). It wasn't about his father threatening him that if he was going to throw away an opportunity at an Ivy League education then he was damn well going to take the job that was waiting for him down at the front office if he didn't want to be looking at this house from the outside. It wasn't about the one time his father's name and money hadn't mattered—midnight downtown alleyway Jackson and a gram of coke in his pocket and Thomas too messed up to talk his way out of it for once. It wasn't about the article about the bust in the
Jackson Daily News
that mentioned not only Thomas's father by name but also every one of his business affiliations. It wasn't even about the emergency meeting of the company's stockholders in Memphis and the not-so-subtle suggestion that Mr. Graham learn to control his nigger-loving, dope-taking, long-haired hippie son or ... or, well, Mr. Graham damn well better.

Thomas knew what it was about. It was about “Money Honey.” “Money Honey” by Jesse Stone as recorded by Elvis Presley on his self-titled first album.

 

The coffin was in the ground and the Reverend Wilson had said his thing and someone put a single red rose in Thomas's hand and nudged him toward his mother's grave. He walked to the edge of the hole and looked down inside at the polished mahogany and shiny silver latches and looked and looked and kept on looking. And when Selma came forward and placed an arm around his shoulder and clasped his rose-holding hand and gently attempted to help him let go, Thomas tightened his fingers around the flower's stem until the thorns burst through his flesh and the blood began to flow and his brain was on fire and he finally felt awake again.

Because he was not yet as strong as his father Thomas went right to the song's last verse, the one about money, love, and which way the wind really blows, alternately singing as loud as he could and biting down hard on the hand trying to stop him, every bowed, embarrassed, graveside head hearing every single word he sang, a trail of dripping red on the cemetery green all the way to the back seat of the Cadillac.

 

Thomas popped the clutch on his bike and pulled in front of a lagging transport. With any luck, he'd be in L.A. by Tuesday.

“IS THIS SOME KIND of guy thing, Thomas?”

“I'd just as soon finish what I start is all, Miss Christine.”

“This isn't a contest, you know. This isn't about you. This is about somebody fresh taking over for a while so we end up getting to Los Angeles in one piece.”

“Oh, don't you worry about that, Miss Christine, Thomas is going to get us all there nice and safe and sound. And before you know it, too. You just go on back to your book there and relax a spell. Here, have a carrot.”

Thomas kept one hand on the steering wheel and with the other offered his bag of carrots to the rear of the hearse; there were no immediate takers so he stuck it back between his legs with a shrug. “Y'all don't know what you're missing,” he said, crunching into a fresh carrot. “Plenty of beta carotene in just one of these little beauties to help your natural detoxifiers do their job.”

Christine slid her bookmark into her paperback and rolled over onto her side into a tight ball, placing her pillow squarely over her head. The disappearing act with the pillow was a recent development.

“Mind you, now, parsley, kale, and spinach are also good sources of beta carotene. Just because Thomas is partial to carrots doesn't mean everybody's got to like what he likes.”

Thanks to the coke, Thomas had plenty of time to memorize lots of interesting tidbits from Christine's
The Murder of Mother Nature
to generously share with us. At the moment, though, he was busy single-handedly pushing Christopher harder than was probably wise across Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California so we could score two whole bonus days worth of work in the studio. Except for filling up and the infrequent do-it-and-dash pit stops Christine had to practically petition him for, the speedometer rarely dipped below seventy-five, not the coolest road plan in the
world considering we were transporting several grams of cocaine across four state lines in a black hearse. The entire trip, the whole twenty-four hours, all twelve hundred miles, I never saw him once get out of his seat. I slept for a few hours here and there, so maybe I missed it. I must have. He had to go to the bathroom. And he had to blow his nose. We both had to.

I spotted a sign for an upcoming service station and poked my head into the front of the hearse. “We should probably stop here,” I said. “We've got less than a quarter-tank left and the sign says it's the last Esso for forty miles.” It was sometime in the afternoon, twelve or more hours since we'd left Texas and my last snort, and I'd been bugging Thomas to pull over ever since I'd started getting a little fidgety just outside El Paso. He seemed put out even to slow down long enough to get gas, but could see the nearly horizontal needle just as well as I could. He hit the blinker and pulled over into the right lane.

“Anybody wants anything, tell Buckskin what you need and he'll scoot in and get it. Everybody else, go to the can if you've got to and then come right on back. Thomas wants to make Phoenix by supper.”

The opportunity to stretch our legs was usually cause for hearse-wide celebration, but Heather and I were the only ones to hit the parking lot pavement. Christine had apparently succeeded in joining Slippery in turning the middle of the day into the middle of the night, head still buried underneath her pillow. I almost touched her on the shoulder to see if she really was sleeping, then decided that if she was, she was lucky to grab the winks and needed them, and that if she wasn't, if she was only pretending to be unconscious, well, maybe she needed that, too.

“No dilly-dallying, you two,” Thomas called out after Heather and me. Heather turned around and blew him a kiss and we went inside the restaurant.

“Medium black, cream and two sugars, right?” I said, hand on the door of the men's washroom. Heather smiled and nodded. “And no dilly-dallying,” I added in my best Thomas Graham. The smile dropped from her face.

“I wouldn't,” she said. “I told Thomas I wouldn't.”

“I know, I was just ... See you in a bit.”

I found an empty stall with another empty stall on either side of it and snorted a line off the back of my hand and felt so much better when I stood up that I forgot to take a leak. An old man washing his hands looked at me funny in the mirror when I came out so I coughed and sniffled a couple of times to cover my tracks.

I got in line to get the coffee, and the smell of a hamburger sizzling in sautéed onions for the guy ahead of me gave me a hard-on, I mean an honest-to-goodness pokaroo stiffy. Before I had time to feel guilty about even thinking about it, I was asking for extra onions and cheese please on my burger and wondering if I had time to order and inhale a second one before Thomas started to get antsy.

I decided not to push my luck and got Heather's coffee and my single burger and skipped out a back exit to a small grassy rest area. I sat down on top of a picnic table and was on the verge of tearing off the burger's yellow tin-foil wrapper when Heather came out the same door and took a seat at the same table and peeled the lid off her coffee and blew on it without saying a word, just as if we'd agreed to meet there all along. Caught red-meat-handed, I couldn't deny the steaming flesh and bun in my possession so I decided to play it cool, set it down casually on my knee like I was watching over it for a friend. I didn't have to worry. I don't think she even saw it.

“Why is Thomas calling himself Thomas and talking about himself like he's somebody else?” Heather said. She kept her head down and her eyes on her coffee, on the swirls of steam rising above it and disappearing into the air. The camera Thomas had bought her to give her something to do when she wasn't knitting or reading
Tarot cards or running errands hung from a thin black plastic strap around her wrist.

“Is he? I hadn't noticed,” I said.

“And he makes me eat things I don't like. My mother used to make us all eat pickled beets nearly every night for supper and it feels like that now. It feels like I'm eating pickled beets every night. I hate pickled beets.”

“You know Thomas,” I said. “When he gets into something, he really gets into it. And he just wants you to eat healthier and feel better because he cares about you. All those hamburgers you were eating, you were going to have a heart attack on us before we got back home.” I gave a hearty laugh that sounded sickeningly false even to my ears and that jiggled the hamburger on my knee. I readjusted it and ran my hand through my hair.

“What do you two do at night?” she said.

I picked up the burger and set it down on my other knee.

“Nothing. Thomas and I just haven't gotten used to sleeping in motels like you and Christine.”

Heather turned around on the seat. “Please don't lie to me, Bill. I can't stand it when people lie to me.”

I couldn't help but be back on Bloor Street catching Thomas coming out of the Park Plaza fresh from fucking somebody other than the one person he should have been fucking. I was angry at him, pitied Heather, and felt sorry for myself all over again.

“Christine says you're doing drugs you don't do with the rest of us. She says it's your right to do what you want to do and it's none of anybody's business if that's what you want.”

It was hard to decide what unnerved me more: that Christine knew, or that I hadn't known that she knew.

“I want to do what you and Thomas are doing.”

“We're not doing anything,” I said, pulling down the brim of my baseball cap.

“At night. I want to do what you two are doing at night.”

I felt the heat of the hamburger still on my knee. I unwrapped the tin foil and carefully tore the thing in two, right down the middle. I handed Heather half.

“Hurry,” I said.

IT NEVER RAINS in California, my ass.

And it's not a good rain, either, the kind that pours down clear and hard and cold and sweeps the gutters clean and bleeds the heavy air and gives the earth the vigorous nose wipe it so desperately needs. L.A. rain is sideways-drizzly and stings the flesh warm and filthy; and when it finally fizzles out, the sky is still mucus yellow and the stale air maybe even more noxious mucky. We ran from Christopher to the front door of the Chateau Marmont with the pages from that day's
L.A. Times
held low over our heads.

The Chateau Marmont looked like a twelfth-century Danish castle on a small wood-covered hilltop right in the middle of downtown L.A., but with one- and two-bedroom bungalows and 24-hour room service. Hip movie stars and rock royalty made a point of staying there, and it definitely wasn't in our price range. Once we hit town and got our bearings, Christine kept saying we couldn't possibly afford it and that since Electric was picking up the bill at the Continental we'd be crazy not to take advantage. Thomas listened patiently to what she had to say then simply announced that this was the way it had to be as he double-parked Christopher out front of the hotel.

In front of the entire group he paid in advance for three one-bedrooms for an entire month with his own credit card. When he tossed the plastic across the front desk Christine looked at me out of the corner of her eye like we used to do when there was Us and Them
and we didn't need ESP. I pretended like I didn't notice. Thomas told the guy behind the counter to please make sure we got the quietest rooms they had because we were going to be working very hard recording our first album and needed our rest and that there were strict vegetarians in our party and would he be kind enough to ask the chef to prepare some appropriate dishes. He scrawled his name across a receipt and handed us our room keys.

“Everyone get a good night's sleep,” he said. “Tomorrow we start recording and I want everybody fresh as daisies.” He winked at me. “And don't be surprised if Buckskin and Thomas have got a surprise or two for y'all.”