Moody Food (34 page)

THOMAS WOKE UP from his most recent holiday out on the mainline, found out what was up with Slippery splitting town, and within twenty-four hours the old man had been bushwhacked in his sleep and all his money was gone and he was back on the bottle and feeding from Thomas's benevolent hand all over again with a black patch over his right eye covering up a scratched retina. His hands were fine, though; he could still work and record. They'd never touched his hands.

I put two and two together and told myself it was five. Told myself that Thomas was the motherfucker of all motherfuckers and told myself that two and two was five.

“CAN YOU BELIEVE THIS?”

“C'mon, Thomas, let me out.”

“Did you hear that? Did you just hear that?”

“Unlock the door, man.”

“I'm asking you, Buckskin, can you believe this?”

“Unlock the fucking door, man.”

He hadn't moved from his cross-legged vigil in front of the
record player's speakers since he'd plunked himself down there five hours before, when he'd blown through the hotel room door with the cellophane wrapper already torn off a brand new copy of the Beatles' latest,
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
He'd only gone out to score more coke, but had stopped off at the Grab Bag to get some smokes on the way back and somebody had been playing “Good Morning Good Morning,” the album's second-to-last track. Bad move. When he heard those cats and dogs and chickens whooping it up in the background, he stormed around the corner to Record World to get his very own copy. The cow sounds on his own “Struggling for Purchase” were supposed to be rock and roll's first recorded livestock.

“What's wrong, Buckskin? If you've got to check in with anybody, why don't you use the phone in the room?”

The curtains were closed as usual, but it felt more like midafternoon than early evening. Because a single, final guitar overdub might be debuted, debated, and ultimately discarded over the course of two or three days' work at the hotel, we rarely left the room now, were only going into the studio about once a week. Thomas went to our dealer's three times that. Christine didn't care. That she only had to put up with Thomas for a couple of hours a week was good enough for her. Slippery was once again drunk most of the time, was beyond the point of caring.

“Who said I need to use the phone?” I answered. “It's just that I've heard this album six times in a row and I want to get some fresh air. Christ.”

He stood up and picked up the receiver. “C'mon, use this phone. It'll save you a dime.”

I shook the door handle. “Open the door, man.”

He'd locked the deadbolt and pocketed the key when I'd said I was going out for a while after the fifth time the final crushing piano
note to “A Day in the Life” signalled the end of the album. Was I overwhelmed by the potpourri of hard and soft rock, blues, psychedelia, show tunes, and even classical? No question. Was I coked-up enough myself to obsess over it in a hermetically sealed hotel room during the first brilliant week of May? You bet. But there's crazy and then there's crazy. And this was crazy.

“I wonder how they knew, hey, Buckskin.”

I dropped my head and closed my eyes. It was obvious there was only one way out of the room, and that was by taking the same road Thomas was travelling. I buckled my seat belt and took a deep breath.

As calmly as I could, “Who are
they
, and you wonder how they know
what
?”

“Concentrate for a minute. I think if you do the answer might come to you.”

I took another breath.

“Are you talking about the Beatles?” I said.

“Hey, very good.”

I tried to think, but all I wanted to do was get outside on the street in the summer sun and start running until either I got somewhere or my heart exploded trying.

“Look, man,” I said, “I really don't know what you're—”

He ripped the disk off the turntable and hurled it against the wall. It didn't break, though. Just sort of sailed into it edgewise like a thin black Frisbee and fell straight to the ground.

“Somehow somebody who knows what
Moody Food
is all about talked to somebody they shouldn't have talked to about something they shouldn't have talked about and that means you or me and I know it wasn't Thomas so who do you think that leaves, Buckskin, who do you think that leaves?”

“You think I called up John, Paul, George, and Ringo and told them we were putting crowd noise and animal sounds on our
record and were layering on lots of different kinds of instruments and weren't using pauses between some of our songs. You think I discussed these things with the Beatles.”

He was going to yell something else but noticed the album cover sitting on top of one of the speakers. He picked it up. Stood there staring at the catalogue of famous wax figurines on the front for a long time; eventually sat down on the floor and kept on staring. Buried there somewhere amid Karl Marx and Mae West and Dylan Thomas and all the others, I think he was looking for himself.

WHEN THE LAST peace sign was flashed and the final joint passed, by the end of the day, May 22, nearly five thousand people, Christine among them, gathered in Queen's Park to listen to Buffy Sainte-Marie, Leonard Cohen, and several lesser-knowns officially inaugurate the Toronto Love-In and the Summer of '67 with an entire afternoon of music, open-air pot-smoking, barefoot dancing, and general out-and-out freak-power fun. The Summer of Love came too late for Thomas and me.

I'd left him hunched over his Gibson and gone out for a bottle of Coke. As soon as I stepped foot onto the street I felt the throb of the crowd in the nearby park pounding in my ears. I ended up making it half a block down Bloor before turning around and retreating to the hotel without the pop. It sounded like an army was coming. I hurried back upstairs to our room.

THE NEW RULE was one at a time. There'd be Thomas and Heather and you in the recording studio putting down your part,
and that would be it. RCA had pretty strict rules about always having an employee in the booth, but Thomas must have laid some cash on somebody because every time it was my turn to record a percussion part Thomas and Heather were the only ones there. Thomas never explained why, but I knew it was an attempt to keep Ringo and everyone else on the outside from stealing the secret recipe to
Moody Food
.

Thomas staggered our respective recording times so that none of us saw each other any more, but I was ten minutes early showing up one day and Slippery twenty minutes late leaving and I ran into him coming out of the front door of the studio. I was glad I knew him. If I hadn't, a clearly smashed, unshaven man with a black patch over one eye wearing a whisky-stained and cigarette-burned seersucker suit the first week of August might have given me pause. Heather was sitting on the top step in a tie-dyed halter top and blue-jean cut-offs alternately smoking and biting her nails. Unlike the Park Plaza, the studio was one place she was always welcome. When she saw me coming up the sidewalk she stood up.

“Thomas says that the trees where he's from are really different than from around here and where I'm from. If you want to know where I'm from just head for the northern tip of Lake Superior and before you get to Nipigon hang a right. There's one paved road and a Hudson's Bay Company and not much else, but the trees and lakes are nice. I love lakes and trees and animals and the sky and everything that's natural. There really aren't any trees or lakes or anything like that in Toronto. Thomas says that someday he's going to take me home with him to see the lakes and trees where he was born. After everything gets settled with his music. You know. The new music.”

So now Heather really did know what we did at night. I didn't know what to say, so I used a couple of reassuring pats on her bare shoulder to sit her back down and nodded at Slippery
fumbling for a smoke out of his pack. He gave me that gently baffled look wet-brained drunks do when you say their names and they can't quite place the face or voice but know that they should. I let him have a few seconds to make the connection.

“Bill.” Pause. “Mornin'.”

It was ten to four in the afternoon, but I wasn't real big on keeping regular hours at the moment either.

“How'd it go?” I said, nodding toward the studio.

Over the last two weeks Thomas and I had completely torn apart and put back together “Holiday Drive,” the object of today's session, at least three times.

“I've got forty-eight dollars,” he said. A cigarette dangled from his mouth, his lighter from one of his hands. “Fifty-two more and I'll have a hundred.” The Marlboro and lighter stayed where they were. Slippery, too. His one exposed pink eye looked like a hungover rabbit's and kept blinking in hopeless defence against the gushing summer light.

I took off my Ray Bans and squinted against the sun. “Try these on,” I said.

He lowered his head a couple of inches toward my hand, as if on a winch.

“I ain't in the market for no spectacles,” he said.

“No charge,” I said. “I've got an extra pair at home. A better pair.”

He kept looking at the shades.

I slid the glasses over his ears. He slowly raised his head to meet the sun.

“That's ... that's all right,” he said.

Heather took her fingernails out of her mouth and popped back up.

“I want a pair, too,” she said. “Thomas and you and now Slippery have got a pair and I want a pair, too.”

I looked at her swollen pupils and the nail she'd chewed down
to the flesh on her middle finger and wished I had another pair to give her. God, I wished I did. I put an arm around her shoulder.

“C'mon,” I said, “let's get inside. Thomas is probably starting to wonder where we are.”

THE ROYAL CANADIAN MOUNTED POLICE managed to do what nothing else had been able to for weeks: get us all in the same room together. Fortunately, Thomas and I had been at the studio when they'd crashed his place at the Park Plaza. Unfortunately, we'd left enough drugs lying around to start our very own cartel. Thomas was now certifiably on the lam from two governments.

Everyone was gathered around the table in the practice studio trying to figure out the best strategy for getting him out of town. Thomas was smoking a cigarette and sitting on a chair pulled up to the opened balcony doors with his back to everyone, a rumpled paper sack resting on top of the white Fender on his lap. He could never go back to the hotel and get the rest of his things now. The
Moody Food
tapes were safe, though, had been rescued from RCA and were in the bag. Except for his guitar, they were all he had left.

“I talked to my friend Emily,” Christine said, “and she says the L.A. scene is really well organized and would have no problem keeping him underground for as long as necessary.”

“I liked L.A.,” Heather said. “L.A. was nice. We could go back to L.A.”

Somewhere along the line Heather had traded in her Tarot cards and knitting needles for her fingernails. She gnawed away at one of her thumbs as she followed the conversation ping-ponging back and forth between Christine and Kelorn, who'd insisted on coming over as soon as she'd heard there was trouble.

“Los Angeles would be fine, dear,” Kelorn said, “except that
crossing the border at this point is simply out of the question. The fact that you all made it across twice is two miracles too many already.”

Christine nodded. Heather went back to her thumb.

Scotty was poring over the piece of paper in front of him on the table and Slippery was pouring himself another shot from his bottle of Old Crow, each apparently oblivious to the power powwow going on around them. But there was only room enough for five chairs around the table and I was standing behind Heather and watched Scotty slowly tracing over the same word again and again, at Slippery look over at Thomas before his every sip.

Looking up, “We could go home,” Heather said. “I mean my home. Where I'm from. We could get on a bus and go north just like I came south. They'd never find us up there. I could get my waitressing job back and Thomas could keep working on his music and everyone could come visit.”

“It's not a bad idea,” Christine said.

“No,” Kelorn said, “it's not. But anywhere that isolated is also going to be underpopulated. If they ever managed to find out where he was they'd have no problem whatsoever plucking him up. He'd be a fish in a barrel up there.”

“I wish you'd both stop saying
him
,” Heather said. “Thomas isn't going anywhere without me. Wherever he goes I'm going too.
We're
going wherever we go.”

Kelorn patted the hand not at Heather's mouth. “Of course, dear. It's just that Thomas is the fugitive here, so naturally we're focusing on his situation.” She turned back to Christine.

“What about Montreal? You have friends there, don't you?”

“Just my brother and his family.”

“Might he be able to help?”

“He's an accountant.”

“I see.”

Outside, Yorkville was gearing up for another hot August evening. Crowd buzz, honking cars, and the faint strains of the Byrds' “My Back Pages” floated through the opened patio doors. But no sirens or fists pounding at the studio door. Not yet. The cops—Toronto cops—were out there, though; under the direction of city hall every weekend now parked a paddy wagon at the corner of Hazelton and Yorkville and strictly enforced an under-eighteen 10 p.m. curfew as a way of letting everybody know who was in charge.

“Let me talk to some people I know in Vancouver,” Kelorn said. “There's a very active peace movement out there and a lot of American kids from the west coast are coming up and settling. It might be a good cover.”

“But what about in the meantime?” Christine said. “He can't stay here.”

“He can stay with me for now, but it's imperative that we get him out of town as soon as possible.” Kelorn and Christine both stood up. Heather, too.

“I'm coming,” she said.

“You're coming where, dear?”

“With you. To your place. With Thomas.”

“If all goes well, it'll likely only be for tonight.”

“I don't care, I'm coming.”

“The sleeping arrangements at my house are quite limited, dear. I'm afraid there's only—”

“I don't care, I'm coming.”

Kelorn smiled. “Of course. Not to worry. We'll find room.”

Kelorn and Heather and Christine were nearly at the door before they realized they'd forgotten something.

“Thomas?” Kelorn said. “Coming?”

The entire time they'd been talking about him Thomas had been blowing smoke rings in the direction of the coming twilight,
sitting there silent all by himself in the corner like a very bad boy waiting to find out whether he was going to bed without dinner.

“Let's go, Thomas,” Christine said. “You'll be safer at Kelorn's.”

Heather came over and took his hand. Thomas put his other hand around her waist.

“You go with Kelorn and Miss Christine, darlin',” he said. “Thomas is going to wait for it to get dark.”

“That's actually not a bad idea,” Kelorn said.

“It's not,” Christine seconded.

“Then I'll wait here with you,” Heather said.

“I can move quicker and quieter on my own. You get along and help get things ready. I'll be there soon enough.”

“But—”

“No buts. You be a good girl, now, and do what Thomas tells you.” He kissed her bare stomach, just below where her halter top stopped.

Heather wanted to cry but put on a shaky smile instead.

“That's my girl,” Thomas said. He pulled a baggy out of his pocket and stuffed it into hers. “Be careful with this like I told you, all right? Just a little at a time.”

Heather nodded.

“All right, then. Now give Thomas a kiss and off you go.”

She did and was, and with Kelorn and Christine along with her. Slippery picked up his bottle off the table and got to his feet as steady as he could.

“I'm going for a lay-down,” he announced.

Thomas and I watched him sway in place.

“But before I do I'm gonna tell you this,” he said, pointing his bottle at Thomas. “I'm not saying I think what you're doing is right or not. That ain't for me to decide, and it ain't for you either.” He uncapped the bottle and took a pull. “But if you're gonna run, Hoss, run. And wherever you go, always keep your back to the wall.”

Slippery shut the door after him, and Scotty didn't look up when I grabbed one of the chairs from the table and sat down beside Thomas to wait for the night.