Moody Food (4 page)

“UNDERSTAND, NOW, I wasn't born with the taste of ashes in my mouth or the sound of two-part harmony fuzz-tone honky-tonk never not echoing in my ears. I've only come to know and accept and even love these things as the necessary small suffering to be endured for being the self-appointed chronicler in song of all our lost days and nights after much contemplation on the life and times of our Lord Almighty, Jesus Christ, the original sweetheart of the rodeo himself, Amen.”

Let's get this straight right from the start. The guy got me with the way he talked.

And how he'd look up from the jukebox, his face red with excitement over the song coming up next or maybe just flushed from all the booze or maybe simply bathed in the light of the machine or maybe all of these things all at once, and say, “Buckskin, I want you to meet Mr. George Jones, the King of the Broken Hearts”—dusty old George Jones, the saddest man alive, moaning his ten-cent tale of loneliness and betrayal into every corner of the nearly deserted barroom—I knew I was being let in on something I never knew was there before, was being baptized into my new friend's world with a shot of bourbon on the side whether I wanted to be or not.

The guy got me with the way he worshipped.

But talking a nice line and getting somebody good and loaded and laying it on thick about a bunch of country and western tunes shouldn't be enough to make any rational person really believe that
what the world needs now is more steel guitars and that “When they pulled poor old long-gone Hank Williams out of that Cadillac Coup deVille on New Year's Day, 1953, that wasn't an overdose, friend, that was a sacrifice.” Even if in the beginning is the word, a miraculous deed now and then never hurt anybody's chances of being born again.

After I'd finally bumped into him again coming out of the Mynah Bird and the single beer we'd agreed upon led to another and then another—all bought by him in appreciation for me turning him on to the shop where he'd gotten his beat-up brown leather jacket—the slippery slope of one-too-many wobbly-pops put me, at Thomas's instigation and against my better judgement, in the back seat of a taxi headed for the Canada Tavern, one of Toronto's nastier east-end bars. We smoked pot and They—our parents and all the other ungroovy grown-up types—drank alcohol. Thomas did both. Lots and lots of both.

Once we got where we were going, Thomas rapid-ordered so many glasses of draft beer that the waiter started bringing them over every ten minutes without us even asking. He also never gave anyone else a chance to play the jukebox. Now I understood why we were in the kind of bar where brush cuts were the “in” thing and George Armstrong, the Maple Leafs' star centre, was a bigger deal than George Harrison. I might not have known that Hogtown had its very own Hank Williams–listening portion of the population, but Thomas sure did, and he was determined to give me a crash course in all things twangy.

After so many rounds of Labatt 50 I lost track, Thomas apparently decided he could trust me and pushed a dime across the beer-puddled table.

“Three chances at bliss for ten cents,” he said. “You find a better deal than that, I strongly suggest you take it.”

As soon as I slipped the coin into the jukebox the previous song wound up and another 45 did not immediately drop down to take its place. Great. The bar was now a church and I was at the organ, my people ready to worship. I speed-read the hand-printed label for each two-sided record, desperate for a familiar name, every second I stood there staring at the blinking machine the room's silence seeming to grow that much louder. Except for the bands and tunes Thomas had played, almost every title drew an absolute blank, the jukebox a multicoloured blinking phonebook for a town I'd never even heard of. I punched in the letters and numbers to the only songs I recognized. If the dime Thomas had given was some kind of test of my country soul, I'd flunked big time.

“Eight Days a Week” came blaring out of the speakers, the same tune that had been playing on the cabby's AM radio on the way over to the bar, then another Beatles' song, and then “Shakin' All Over” by Canada's own the Guess Who. Whether I'd let Thomas down or not, I'd done my CHUM Chart Top Ten best to keep the room humming. I leaned back in my seat and sipped at my beer without being able to help tapping my fingers on the tabletop. Then it was all over, my eight and a half minutes of fame all done, and one of the half-dozen or so soused seniors drinking by himself throughout the bar lurched to the juke and clanked in a dime and we were back to acoustic guitars and stand-up basses and no one was apparently worse for my rock and roll detour.

Thomas hadn't said anything the entire time my tunes had played and didn't say anything later when we pulled up the collars on our coats and hit Queen Street. It must have rained while we'd been inside the bar. The 1 a.m. deserted street gleamed that post-storm shine that, aided by a few streetlights, can make even big-city blacktop look clean. Outside a boarded-up coin laundry, Thomas wordlessly pulled me by the jacket inside the door front. Crunchy brown leaves and old newspapers swirled around at our feet. He let
go of my coat, closed his eyes, tapped a simple mid-tempo beat with his foot, and tested the entranceway's echo with a long hum.

Then Thomas sang; wrapped images and words I'd never heard used in a song before around a melody that had me seeing colours, I mean literal fucking colours: early morning, morning-after grey; deep, dark browns; sharp, midnight blacks. Later on I realized that the tune he'd sung was one of his own, “A Quality of Loss,” but right then and there all I cared about was the light show.

He gave me his coat to wear and I gave him mine and we started walking again.

I FORCED OPEN MY eyes and blinked several times and looked up from my third refill of coffee and wondered how I was going to get through a full day of work at the bookstore. Again. A few weeks after our first, another long night travelling the Thomas Graham Direct Express to Country Soul Enlightment had me wishing the conductor looked half as bad as his only passenger felt.

“Don't you ever get tired?” I said.

Thomas smiled, picked up the glass container of sugar off the tabletop, and started pouring it into my cup. “Say when,” he said.

My reflexes weren't quite what they'd been sixteen sleepless hours before. I
saw
too much white powder going into my cup, but it took a few seconds for brain to tell mouth to tell him to stop.

“Stop!” I said.

He beamed wide again and stopped pouring. “Ole Buckskin,” he said.

I'd never met anyone who smiled so much. Even as hippies we weren't supposed to be this happy. There was a war on in Vietnam, after all, and people somewhere I couldn't find on a map if their next meal depended on it were starving.

Thomas brushed aside some of the long hair hanging in front of his face and threw both arms behind him on the back of the red plastic booth we'd been trying to come down in for the last hour; took in the Wednesday morning breakfast crowd with ear-to-ear satisfaction like it was anything but what it was.

The Niagara was just the sort of meatloaf-special-with-your-choice-of-rice-pudding-or-green-Jell-O-for-dessert greasy spoon I would've walked by a thousand times without ever once going in. I wasn't a vegetarian yet like Christine, but she was working on it and had me down to an occasional tuna fish sandwich for lunch and whatever my mother happened to be serving whenever I'd go home (refusing to get a haircut and having a bald girlfriend were one thing, not eating my mum's roast beef dinner a whole other level of rebellion all together). But it wasn't only the low-end surf and turf the place specialized in that made me nervous.

There were cops here. The fuzz. The Man.
Pigs
. And lots of them, too. The way they kept pouring through the door and greeting each other, the place might have been some kind of police hangout. And aside from the obvious principle of the matter, here was Thomas with a pocket full of very illegal goodies and him set upon greeting every pot-bellied pair of Toronto's finest with a loud and clear, “Good morning, officers, fine day, isn't it?” This, in spite of my repeated knocking against his shins with the end of my black Beatle boots and several useless throat clearings that only succeeded in making me sound like an operatic asthmatic. Throw in his suspiciously slippery Southern delivery and you might as well put the cuffs on us right here and now and let us make our one phone call from the restaurant payphone. “Hello, Christine? You know the money you've been saving up for that new Gibson you've had your eye on? Well ...”

But nothing happened. The cops just said good morning right back at Thomas and ordered up their coffee and ham and eggs and
sucked deep at the long night's last cigarette and joked and laughed and argued about the Maple Leafs over greasy-fingered shared sports pages and one at a time eventually left the same way they came to return to wives and children relieved to see husbands and fathers safe and sound and at home again from another night of protecting our fair city.

A little after 10 a.m. and the last cop gone, the restaurant basically ours now and the breakfast specials already thinking about turning into lunch specials, and me already ten minutes late opening up Making Waves, “Are you crazy, man?” I said. “I don't know what the deal is where you're from, but up here you don't mess around with the Man because the Man will mess around with you. Got it?”

Thomas kept smiling into his empty coffee cup with a heavy-lidded gaze that said he just now might be ready to finally come down and cash it in for the night. Or was it for the day? Anyway, lucky Thomas, I thought.

Because even if I'd only forfeited another night's sleep in return for another lesson in all things country soulful—tonight's class conducted cross-legged on the floor of my room, cross-eyed drunk on a bottle of Old Grandad, listening to the collected works of Buck Owens and his Buckaroos—once again Thomas was off to bed and I was off to work and the onset of morning-after crankiness said this just didn't seem particularly fair. Also, maybe I had long hair and my very own roach clip, but I was also my parents' son whether I wanted anybody to know it or not and had never been late for a day of work in my life. Until I met Thomas, that was.

Slowly raising his eyes from the table, “Everyone says all we need is love, Buckskin,” he said. “All incense and peppermints and hugs for all the one-eyed teddy bears and your momma and daddy holding hands as they tuck you into bed every night and you safe at home forever. But what we need, what we really need ...”

His voice trailed off and he wrapped his hand tight around his cup, squeezed it hard like he wanted to make sure it was really there. “What we really need is more
give
. Because love, that's hard. That's real hard.”

 

 

Sometimes it was like this. Sometimes this was all there was, all he could see, hear, think, breathe; every nerve end in his body encoded right down to the bone with it, every cell inside stuffed straight through until it felt like it was all he'd ever been, would be. Drink smoke snort shoot swallow and still, there it is. Play guitar and sing every song you know until your fingers bleed at the tips and it hurts your throat to swallow and at the end of it, staring right back at you, there it is.

 

The screen door slams shut with a hard, wood-to-wood summer whack and Becky screams across the lawn and through the small forest of trees everyone has always called Dream of Pines, “Thomas, come here now, Thomas, please, come here now!”

Thomas knows the only thing his sister hates more than being around him and all his dumb twelve-year-old friends is asking her little brother for anything, so he drops the football and tells his friends to go home and tears off toward the house. The Grahams have the biggest lawn in Jackson—it takes two coloured men all day to cut every green inch—but Thomas is up on the front porch before his sister has to call out a second time.

Panting, dry-mouthed, “What?” he says.

Graham family flesh clamped tight to Graham family flesh, her little brother's hand in hers seems to calm Becky, to give her resolve. “Let's go and see Momma,” she says.

Their father, as usual, is away on business in Memphis. Selma, the elderly Negro woman who'd served as nanny for both Becky and Thomas, is at her sister's house in town. It's only a little after three on a cloudless July afternoon, but Selma has drawn all the curtains just like Mrs. Graham asks her to do whenever Mr. Graham isn't at home to shout, “Open up those goddamn windows, Selma, and let some fresh air and light into this godforsaken tomb!” and the entire antebellum house is foggy with dark except for here and there the yellow glow of a floor lamp and an occasional slice of dusty sunlight somehow managing to sneak in past the heavy drapes.

Thomas and his sister slowly climb the twisting stairs to the third floor. At the end of the dark hallway, at the closed door of his mother's room, Thomas pulls back, hesitates. But his sister, saying nothing, but with tears in her eyes, turns the crystal door handle and tugs him hard inside.

Blink (eyes adjusting to the unlit room), and inside no different than it ever is. A gallery of framed ghost photographs of long-gone Gibsons, Thomas's mother's people. The well-stocked liquor cabinet on wheels parked in the corner. His mother's leather-bound Bible on top of the bureau beside two brass buttons, a single piece of green silk, and her ever-present silver comb. Her bedside pharmacy, pills and capsules every colour of the rainbow. And, of course, Thomas's mother herself, lovely pale lovely Mrs. Caroline Graham. Almost fifteen years to the day of her coming-out party and still any debutante's dream with her small slim feet, light summer dress of crimson, and all that combed-a-hundred-times-a-night brown hair splashed all over the pillow under her gently resting head.

Blink again (eyes seeing everything now), and not the smell of gin or freshly cut lilacs (all so ordinary, all so familiar) but something else, something different, something ...

See: An empty pill bottle on the bedspread and the discarded white cap and piece of cotton beside it.

See: A creeping black stain soaking through the blanket and red dress below the folded white hands.

See: A blood-smudged razor blade lying by itself on the wooden floor.

See blink stare blink scream and break free of sister Becky's hand and through the doorway and down the stairs and out the front door and back outside again toward Dream of Pines and into the bright light of saving daylight and run run run, Thomas, run until the green green grass of home is gone daddy gone. You run, Thomas. You keep on running, boy.