Moody Food (3 page)

I inhaled, held, swallowed, breathed out. “In terms of what?” I said.

“In terms of ... I don't know. Like, where do you think you'll be twenty years from now?”

“Geez, Chris, I have a hard enough time trying to imagine what I'm going to wear to work tomorrow.”

“Does that bother you?” she said.

“No.”

“Really?”

“I don't know.”

She came back from the window and sat down on the edge of the bed, took the joint and toked. Her beautiful pear-shaped breasts hung down dipping away from each other left and right, slightly defeated and depressed looking drooping there like two ends of a fleshy frown.

“They say Dylan's gone electric for good,” she said.

“Yeah.”

“Maybe I should go electric,” she said, passing me back the joint. “What do you think?”

“Well, that depends, I guess.”

“On what.”

“On whether you want to. I mean, do you want to start playing electric guitar with a band?”

She took back the spliff before I'd had a chance to put it to my lips, inhaled deeply and didn't pass it back. After a while, “I guess that's the problem, then, isn't it?” she said.

“What is?”

“I guess I don't know what I want.”

Naked arm around naked shoulder, I pulled her gently to me, eased us both down on the bed and under the thin white sheet, all the covers the sweltering room would allow.

“Wait until the fall,” I said. “Nobody knows what to do or think in this damn heat.” I crushed out the roach and kissed her on top of her bristly head goodnight.

But it was too hot to sleep lying there so close together so we separated and clung to opposite sides of the bed. And even then neither of us could seem to drop off, even with my little rotating General Electric fan going full blast. So we sparked up another joint and sat cross-legged on the bed with our backs to the cool white plaster wall listening to Dylan's latest,
Highway 61 Revisited
.

And Dylan, it seemed, sure had gone electric. That thin, wild mercury sound right through until morning, the September sun blazing back up and creeping down the alley between my house and the next, the light and the heat and the fierce music charging out of the speakers for just a moment almost one.

 

 

He woke up with money all around him, nickels, dimes, quarters, and even a few crumpled dollar bills, all of it surrounding him on the warm morning mattress, a few of the smaller coins sticking to his arms, the imprint of their designs only now beginning to fade as he sat up at last, allowing them all to slowly fall away.

Open-stage Saturday nights at The Steer mean Sunday morning hangovers so intense that blinking equals wincing and not all that much you can do about it but gently close your eyes and try not to breathe too hard and lie there silent and still until extreme thirst, hunger, or the need to urinate absolutely necessitates getting up.

But worth it, though.

Easing himself back down on the mattress, rolling over out of the line of direct sunlight pouring through the window, Thomas manages a sliver of a smile.

Oh yes, worth it.

 

The toughest, shit-kickingist country and western bar in the state of California circa 1965 is the Steer, located in the city of Industry, California. The sign on the highway states that Industry is twenty-four miles east of Hollywood, but it's actually approximately 100 million miles away. This is Redneck Country. Work, death, and then, the Good Lord willing, heaven.

Sitting by himself at the back of the club drinking his own pitcher of Budweiser with only his guitar on the chair next to
him for company, Thomas Graham waits for his turn at the microphone. Thomas Graham in blue satin bell-bottoms, white rattlesnake-skin cowboy boots, and a genuine Nudie jacket from Nudie's Rodeo Tailors decorated with hand-sewn sequins in the shape of acid cubes, a woman's ripe bosom, a green marijuana leaf climbing up each arm, and a flaming red cross emblazoned across the back.

Finally, after the guy in the wheelchair singing “I Walk the Line” and the trio of grandmothers doing an a cappella version of “Ruby, Don't Take Your Love to Town,” the bored MC in the white Stetson chewing away at his Redman with a clipboard in one hand and the mike in the other announces, “Okay, next up, Thomas Graham. Are you out there, Thomas?”

The long walk from the back of the bar to centre stage gets the hooting and wolf-whistling and calls to “Get a haircut!” started. By the time he's settled himself on the wooden stool and tuned his instrument and adjusted the microphone, it's hard to hear the guitar introduction to his first song over the noise from the crowd.

Not waiting for the audience to quiet down, Thomas sings the opening verse, then another, then goes into the chorus, but with about as much luck at being heard as before. A couple of people think they might actually recognize the song this faggy long-haired hippie is playing, though, and slow down their ruckus long enough to place what it is.

It's all the opening Thomas needs.

One or two, or maybe even a few, actually begin to really hear him now, but most quit their cackling and hollering just to identify “More and More,” the Webb Pierce song barely audible just below the clamour of the crowd. Webb is pure Nashville, one of the big boys, a fat white guy in a crewcut with eight Cadillacs and a guitar-shaped swimming pool. At least this Graham guy knows enough to know a good song.

But before the next number is even halfway over, no more hooting or hollering and all eyes and ears aimed at Thomas singing a Hank Williams song and letting everyone in the universe know he's so lonesome he could cry. And he could, too, any fool could hear that. Just listen to that boy sing.

Like a back rub on the brain.

Like drinking velvet out of a glass.

Like hearing God hum.

Thomas finishes up with a recent Bob Dylan tune, “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” a mile-a-minute bluesy thing with slightly surreal sputtered lyrics that no one in this dark, smelly bar would have ever thought they'd be nodding their heads along to even if you had sworn to them on their momma's tattered black Bible they would be twenty-five minutes before. And then a gentlemanly, “Thank you, everyone, for listening, and good-night,” and Thomas slinks across the beer-puddled floor back to his table by the washrooms.

Before he can refill his glass from what's left of his warm pitcher of beer, darkness at the edge of his table in the form of three very large men in overalls and scuffed, steel-toed workboots. The Trimar he'd gobbled down an hour before he'd arrived at the club is really starting to kick in now, and Thomas wonders whether he's seeing triple. Animal tranquilizers, after all, have been known to do so such things.

The one Thomas thinks is in the middle leans his baseball mitt–sized hands (car grease under every nail) on the edge of the table and slowly zooms his hairy face in close.

“Me and my buddies here, we were gonna take you out back and kick your ass,” he says. “But you sing real nice so we wanna buy you a beer instead.”

A white reptile-skinned cowboy boot scrapes a chair away from the table.

“Only if you boys will do me the honour,” Thomas says, making room so his three new friends can sit right down.

“I MEAN, I'M UP there trying to be cool about it, but it's my show, right? You've seen my set a hundred times, Bill, you know I always take requests and try to encourage everybody to get involved. But this guy just wouldn't stop. I mean, at the end of every song he's, like, ‘Merle Haggard! Wanda Jackson! Jimmie Rodgers!'”

I'd had to miss Christine's Tuesday night gig at the Riverboat because of inventory at Making Waves—believe me, taking inventory at a bookstore that rarely ever sells a book is no eight-hour day—and we'd made plans to rendezvous at my place after the show. Christine was striding up and down the length of my tiny room.

“And then, just when I thought I'd caught a break after he got up and split after the first set and I'm just starting back up again, just getting into ‘I Ain't Marching Any More,' the front door bursts open and here he comes again. But this time he's not alone, this time he's got three of those go-go dancing bimbos from the Mynah Bird with him. And of course he somehow manages to get them all settled in at the same table he had before, right in front.”

“
Three
of them?” I said.

The Mynah Bird was a certified Yorkville hippie hangout, but with a strip club exterior for the entire street to see, the club's owner one day deciding that what he really needed to separate his place from all the others jockeying for our coffee money along the avenue were several bikini-clad dancing girls shaking and shimmying in a second-storey glass booth out front.

Christine stopped her pacing.

“Feeling like you really missed out on something, Bill? Maybe if you had been there tonight you could have taken one of them off Mr. Shitkicker's hands.”

“No, no, I'm only saying I'm surprised that—”

Christine resumed her pacing.

“So then it starts all over,” she said. “‘Lovely, lovely, why that's just lovely, but how about a little Miss Patsy Cline now, darlin'? I just know you could do the old girl justice.'”

“Hey, this guy,” I said, “is he tall and about our age, maybe a little older? Brown hair, white cowboy boots? Like the guy I told you about I met at the bank?”

Christine didn't hear a word I said.

“So by now I've about had it. I finish up the song I'm doing, put down my guitar, and walk off twenty minutes before the set's supposed to be over. Go right to the very back of the club to sit by myself for a while and have a smoke and get my head together, you know?”

I nodded.

“And I'm almost starting to wind down when over walks one of the Mynah bunnies in her four-inch heels with a message and a cup of coffee that I didn't order. ‘Thomas wants you to know he thinks you've got a lovely voice and wonders if he can borrow your guitar.' I take a sip of the coffee and almost gag—the thing is half coffee and half whisky—and tell her he's welcome to my guitar but that the owner doesn't let audience members up on stage except during the Monday night hootenanny. ‘Groovy,' she says, and hops off back to their table. In the time it takes me to light a new cigarette there he is on stage tuning my guitar.”

Christine was at the window now sitting on the sill, trying to find the moon way up there somewhere between my building and the next.

“And then what?” I said.

Giving up on the moon, she came over and sat down beside me on the bed.

“And then the funniest thing happened,” she said.

“Did he finally get to do his country thing?”

“Yeah, but ... no. I mean, that's the weird part. I'm not quite sure
what
he did. I mean, it definitely sounded like country—you could definitely call it country, I guess. But also, I don't know ... religious, like gospel music or something. But not in a churchy way, you know? I don't know how to explain it.”

“What was it called? Was it his own tune?”

“After he was done he said it was a Hank Williams song. And I don't know Hank Williams from Adam, but I don't think any country singer ever sounded like that.”

“Did he say what the name of it was?”

“‘I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive.'”

Christine got up from the bed and fished out of her purse the clear plastic overnight bag she carried with her whenever she was staying over.

“And then what happened?” I said.

“Just what I told Miss Universe would happen. Bernie came out from the kitchen and saw that somebody else besides me was up on stage and told him to get off, that open stage was Monday night, and not to do it again.”

“What did this guy say? Did he get mad?”

Christine had her hand on the door knob to my room. The shared bathroom was at the end of the hall. “No,” she said. “Not at all, actually. He just set down my guitar, shook Bernie's hand, told him, ‘You've got one wonderful place here, sir,' and asked the waitress for a round of coffee and tea and espresso, whatever anybody was having. For the entire house.”

“Get out of here.”

“For everybody in the place.”

We both smiled.

“And I got this.”

Back to the dresser and out of her purse, a single red rose.

“Where'd you get that?” I said.

“After I'd finished my whisky and coffee—”

I started laughing.

“I had to!” she said, laughing along. “If Bernie had found out somebody'd smuggled in booze and that I—”

“Okay, okay,” I said, holding up my hand.

She looked down at the rose. “After I shot the shit with Bernie for a while and was halfway out the door, guess who comes running up the stairs after me?”

“
He
gave you the rose?” I said.

“Uh huh. ‘For a fine country lady, whether she knows it or not.'”

It had to be the same guy I'd run into at the bank the week before, I thought. It just had to be.

Christine stuck the rose between her teeth and fluttered her eyes her hick-glamorous best.

I took the rose back out.

“Hurry up and brush, you fine country lady. Your country boyfriend's got another ten hours of inventory to do tomorrow.”

 

After we'd surprised ourselves with the first really raunchy, eye-to-eye, good-and-grinding screw we'd managed in a while, I got up to light a candle and brought back to bed with me the gift Thomas had slipped me at the bank.

“Do you think it's the real thing?” Christine said. She was up on one elbow holding the covers to her neck with one hand and the two tabs of acid in the palm of the other. Fall had finally fell. Although a sauna in the summer, my room was like a morgue even on the earliest of autumn nights. Christine pulled the blankets higher and tighter.

“I don't know,” I said, “but this guy strikes me as the sort to be pretty serious about his drugs.”

“And it doesn't look like he's hurting for bread,” she said.

We both looked down at the acid.

In spite of our fairly regular toking habits we were both, all things considered, pretty tame users. Heroin, coke, and speed were as yet mostly just ugly gossip around Yorkville, and LSD only a little less so because you never heard of anybody getting hooked. But you'd hear stories. Bad trips, flashbacks, permanent brain damage... .

Christine and I kept looking at the acid.

“What do you want to do?” she said.

“I don't know. What do you want to do?”

We were both naked, and the sweet stink of sex was still in the air. And this was the real deal, after all, authentic Owsley LSD. But even if I didn't know why, all I really wanted to do at that moment was take Christine ice-skating and hold hands and buy her a hot chocolate when she got cold and go around and around until we both got tired. I think she must have been thinking something like the same thing.

“I'm not saying it wouldn't be fun,” she said. “But you do have to go to work tomorrow. You've got a long day.”

“And you were going to get an early start looking for that new guitar.”

“And I'm not saying no as in never, just not right now, you know?”

“I know,” I said. “I know exactly what you mean.”

I jumped out of bed and put the acid back in the bottom of the silver sugar canister I used for my stash, blew out the candle, and slid back in; wrapped myself around Christine like a hungry python around its next unsuspecting meal.

“Oh, God, your feet are like ice!”

“C'mon, baby, keep your man warm.”

“Get those feet off of—”

“C'mon, baby, give your man a little—”

Leg-kicking and giggling and wrestling under the sheets, laughing and squealing filling up the tiny room. Soon, all calm there, all cuddling and quiet, just me and my girl.