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“Second off,” he said, smoke pouring out of both nostrils, “either of you boys know where a man can get some barbecue in this town?”

  26.

  STARTING UP A BAND or plotting a revolution is always so much easier in the planning stages over a tableful of beer. Little things like your steel-guitar player staying drunk his entire first week in town and no one wanting to book you into their club because country and western music isn’t real popular with the counterculture these days tend not to get discussed over those first few ecstatic brews, only the really important stuff, like whether the group’s first record should be a single or double album and who you’re going to acknowledge on the jacket sleeve.

  “But it’s none of our business,” I said. “And if Heather’s cool with it, why are you getting so worked up?”

  “Don’t insult my intelligence,” Christine said. “Either that or don’t be so naïve. How could she possibly be cool with it? This guy, this Bannister guy, he sleeps until noon every day, only leaves her place long enough to walk to the liquor store and go out looking for barbecue, whatever that is, and then spends the rest of the day and half the night sitting at her kitchen table in his long underwear spitting chewing tobacco into a plastic cup and drinking whisky until he passes out on the floor.”

  “At least he’s not loud.”

  “I hope that’s you trying to be funny.”

  I was leaning up against the cash counter at Sam’s waiting for Christine to finish her shift. “But if Heather says it’s all right with her, then—”

  “Oh, come on, Bill. I like Heather, you know that, I think she’s sweet. But if Thomas told her to jump into Lake Ontario the only question she’d ask would be what time.”

  A short, skinny, acned, black horn-rimmed kid no more than fifteen—the entire dripping ball of teenage angst wax—slouched up to the counter and tentatively nudged across a copy of Rubber Soul. The way he couldn’t meet Christine’s eyes when he handed over his cash and the sweaty palm he stuck out to collect his change screamed out his heart-fluttering infatuation a thousand times louder than any words ever could. He cleared his throat for the umpteenth time and managed a surprisingly deep, if under-his-breath “Thanks” before practically running out the door. Christine went back to sticking price labels on a fat stack of albums, oblivious to the act of trembling worship she’d just inspired.

  And how come my hands never got sweaty any more when I looked at Christine? I wondered. How was it that sometimes I could look right into her eyes but all I’d see was Christine, Christine Jones, you know, Christine, my girlfriend? How come once in a while we’d be walking around Yorkville together and I’d spot some girl I knew wasn’t even half as attractive as her—I mean, I knew she wasn’t—but who would get my motor running harder and hotter than Christine had done in ages? How was it that they were talking about putting a man on the moon but nobody had made a pill yet that allowed a guy to look at his girlfriend’s ass the same way he looked at it the very first time? For some reason I didn’t feel so sorry for the kid any more.

  “Look, it’s real simple, Bill,” Christine said. “It was wrong of Thomas to put Heather up to what he’s putting her through, and it’s wrong for her friends to sit around and let him get away with it.” With every word she spoke the stickers got slapped down that much harder. “I mean, if Thomas wants this guy in the band so badly, why doesn’t he let him drink all day at his place?”

  “Because Thomas’s place is—”

  “—too small, yeah, so I’ve heard. Smaller than that broom closet Heather lives in? Smaller than yours?”

  “He says it is.”

  She looked up. “You mean to tell me you’ve never been to Thomas’?”

  “He lives in Cabbagetown. Why would I want to go all the way out there if I didn’t have to?”

  “No reason, I guess. Still, it’s a little weird, don’t you think?”

  “Not really. He’s always hanging around Yorkville. And like I said, what do I want to be doing in the east end?”

  “I guess.”

  Christine stuck a few more labels on a few more records. Man, how many Sonny & Cher albums did the world really need?

  “So basically we don’t even know if Thomas’s place is too small for him to bunk down with Stinky.”

  “Slippery,” I said. “The guy’s name is Slippery, Slippery Bannister.”

  “Whatever. For all we know, Thomas could be living in a penthouse while poor Heather is getting chased out of her own kitchen.”

  “Yeah, right. Now Thomas is some eccentric millionaire who’s decided to slum it in Yorkville for a while and who’s keeping a butler and maid in his mansion in Cabbagetown.”

  “He is always flush,” Christine said, “you’ve got to admit that. Look at all the instruments he’s bought, the studio he’s rented, the new recording equipment.”

  “But that’s all from the patron.”

  “Oh, Bill, please.”

  She didn’t need to elaborate. The story of Thomas’s golden handshake with the mysterious Mississippi benefactor in the beautiful white suit just wasn’t something Christine and I talked about. Hadn’t from that first night Thomas told us about him.

  As eager to change the subject as I was, “I still don’t know why we need this guy playing with us, anyway,” Christine said.

  “Thomas says he hears a steel guitar in our songs and supposedly Slippery is one of the best.”

  “Supposedly’s the right word,” she said.

  It probably was. The first night of rehearsal he fell asleep at his instrument, hands still on the strings, head straight back, open-mouthed and snoring. Another time he tumbled off his stool while playing a solo. Most of the time, though, he spent unsuccessfully trying to get the beautiful Sho-Bud pedal-steel guitar Thomas had got for him in tune, taking fifteen-minute cigarette breaks out on the balcony, and bumming shots of scotch from Scotty’s flask. Scotty eventually packed up his poetry and quit coming to our practices. Thomas asked us to be patient and give our newest fellow Duckhead time to adjust to his surroundings and assured us that we hadn’t heard the real Slippery Bannister yet. Christine and I weren’t so sure we wanted to.

  “Let’s wait and see what happens,” I said. “Thomas is getting nowhere with any of the clubs once they find out we’ve got a steel guitar in the band. Maybe he’ll send Slippery packing and it’ll just be us three again. If it were just us three we could get gigs. We were great that night at the Riverboat.” I looked down at the pile of records. “Weren’t we?”

  Christine smiled. “Yeah.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah,” she said.

  “Really? I mean ...”

  “Yeah. We were. We were great.”

  Instantly, heavy duty lovey-dovey eyeing of each other for a good long while.

  “But in the meantime, what about Heather?” Christine said.

  My palms were almost moist for the first time in a long time, so out of my mouth the first thing that was all peaches-and-cream appeasement. “Slippery can stay at my place,” I said.

  “But your place is even smaller than Heather’s.”

  “Between work and practice I’m hardly ever there.”

  “But what about us? I mean—”

  “We can always crash in your bedroom when we feel like it,” I said.

  “But the cats.” Christine shared an old house just outside Yorkville with two cats, four full-time anarchists, and various couch-crashing friends of the Movement. The house’s number-one rule of iron-clad communalism didn’t bother me all that much, but the cats did manage to mess around with my allergies some.

  “That’s what antihistamines are for. And co-op life hasn’t extended as far as your bedroom yet, has it?”

  Christine smiled. Goddamn, I thought, how could I have ever forgotten what a great smile she has?

  “It’s good of you to do this, Bill,” she said. “Although Thomas should be the one making the offer, not you.”

  “Thomas is Thomas.
Besides, I want to do it. No woman should have to share her kitchen with a man named Slippery.”

  More and more and then still some more of that brand new beautiful old smile of hers.

  “Sometimes I forget how lucky I am to have gotten a guy like you, you know that?”

  I leaned across the counter and gently wrapped my hand around the back of her head, pulled her lips to mine.

  “Not half as lucky that I’ve got you, babe.”

  27.

  TECHNICALLY SPEAKING, we were a quartet. But by the end of Slippery’s second week in town what we really were were a guitar player, a bass player, a drummer, and a guy who occasionally honoured us with his presence at practice, always managed to show up mute drunk when he did make it, and who found rehearsal as good a time as any to grab a few winks before resuming his solitary whisky-drinking back at my place. To his credit, as his former roommate I can verify that he wasn’t going out of his way to make trouble just for the band.

  I lasted forty-eight hours with him on my floor and me in bed with a pillow over my head before packing up and moving in with the anarchists over at Christine’s place. Having to share my jar of peanut butter thirteen ways was a small price to pay for not having to try to fall asleep to a man in his filthy long underwear slumped over the nook of my economy kitchen drunkenly humming Roy Acuff tunes to himself until five o’clock in the morning. Or having to wake up to the stomach-curdling sight of a sink full of Marlboro butts and spat-out Red Man, and Slippery trying to get the last stubborn ball of mucus out of the bottom of his lungs. That, and having to watch him nostalgically fondle the little Aspirin bottle of genuine Arkansas homemade barbecue sauce he carried with him everywhere he went and be subjected to his daily tirade about “What kind of place is this Canada, anyway? If I don’t get me some real barbecue soon, I’m on the next Greyhound outta here. Even Detroit had barbecue.”

  But he wasn’t going anywhere. At least not until Thomas cut off the weekly allowance he was laying on him to sleepwalk through rehearsals. Slippery wasn’t much of a talker, but he wasn’t shy, at least not with me, about why he’d been manning a rivet gun at a Ford plant in Detroit and not a steel guitar in Nashville when Thomas had lured him even further north.

  “They fired Hank Williams from the Opry for liking his whisky,” he said. “And I ain’t no Hank Williams.”

  There was one thing Thomas wasn’t fibbing about, though. Slippery Bannister did have a pretty impressive list of session credits to his name, had guested on records by Acuff, Lefty Frizzell, Patsy Cline, and the young George Jones, among others. Thomas loaned me a few of them and, contrary to what we were hearing at the studio, the guy really could play, had a way of making his instrument run the gamut from funereal sad to downright joyous without ever sounding sentimental or cheesy like a lot of steel players.

  Near sun-up on the last night we’d played at being roommates, after I’d faked being asleep for as long as I could and finally asked him if he wouldn’t mind smoking his last cigarette and drinking his last drink, he’d just silently nodded, flicked his Marlboro into the sink, made sure it was dead with a blast of water from the tap, and swallowed the final inch of booze left in his glass. He lay right down on the floor and took a long, deep breath. When, the night before, I’d offered him a blanket to go along with the tiny pillow he’d produced from his suitcase, he’d said, “Floor’s fine as it is. I’m used to it this way.”

  Now that his smoke was out, the only light was what managed to make it down the alley from the street lamp on Huron and into my room. I doubled-checked to make sure he wasn’t thinking about sparking up a fresh cigarette and saw that his eyes were wide open and he was staring straight up at the ceiling.

  “If I didn’t get a chance to mention it already, I do appreciate you opening up your home to me like you done. Same as with that Heather woman. Although sooner or later that girl’s gonna have to get it through her head that it’s the devil’s work to be messing around with them cards of hers like she does.

  “But I don’t plan to be in this Canada for too much longer. Like I told your buddy Graham when he telephoned me up, soon as I put the bottle down for good I’m on the first bus back to Nashville. So many folks cutting records down there these days, a man can earn his fortune just making union scale. Mind you, the music’s not much. But if I play my cards right, two, three years, I’ll have enough to get my hands on a little piece of land back home I’ve had my eye on now for a while. My brother Tom, he’s watching it for me, making sure nobody else gets to it first.”

  It was the most I’d heard him say in the entire two weeks I’d known him.

  “I’m no boy any more,” he said. “This here ain’t no way for a grown man to be carrying on.”

  I struggled to think of something to say. He was asleep and snoring before I could come up with anything.

  28.

  THE POWERS-THAT-BE decided that if Christine and the seven others at the protest each paid a token fine and promised never to do anything naughty again like hold up traffic they could run along and play and hopefully someday soon see the light and get on with the serious business of understanding their responsibilities as citizens of a democratic community that expects—nay, assembled young sirs and madams, demands—that each member respect and uphold such basic community standards as blah blah blah. Our trust in the wisdom of the judicial system renewed, Christine only fifteen dollars poorer and immediately ready to resume wreaking havoc on the business interests preying upon poor little innocent lamb Yorkville, we ducked into a stall in the woman’s washroom on the second floor of city hall fresh from the acquittal for half a shared joint and one quickie, doggie style. Take that, your Honour.

  So, no, I wasn’t going to have to bake Christine any chocolate-chip convict cakes with files and hacksaws buried in them. I also decided that I wasn’t going to lose any sleep over Slippery’s pledge to clean up his act and get out of Toronto ASAP. I let Thomas in on all that Slippery had told me and left it at that. If Thomas wanted him in the band so badly, let him worry about it, I thought. I had other things on my mind. Or, rather, in my blood.

  Like all the shops, clubs, and apartments in the village with all their doors and windows bursting off their hinges wide, wide open once again, me greedily gulping in great big long-overdue springtime-fresh air breaths, all the lovely swirling sensations of music and happy café chatter and incense filling the streets and pushing out of mind if not out of sight the one too many cops on the beat frowning the happily derelict hippy-dippy smile of the neighbourhood. Even Scotty was in what for him passed for a good mood these days, had returned with the birds and bees and the warmer weather to his usual roosting spot at the corner card table, for a nice change doing a lot more silent reading than cutting-up of the poem in front of him.

  Sitting right across from him, Heather serenely flipped Tarot cards on the tabletop. And with the first fresh gust of spring Christine kicked aside her black combat boots and socks to better explore the sole-thumping, soul-soothing effect every plunk plunk plunk vibration of her bass guitar sent through the studio’s hardwood floor. It was a permanent experiment. I couldn’t really tell what this meant for her playing, but it did wonders for me. Women’s exposed toes, no matter what the occasion, always were one of my favourite things.

  And who ever heard of a musical revolution or any other for that matter on such a galloping green gorgeous day as this, anyway? I felt like having a picnic and drinking a gallon of Kool-Aid and playing Frisbee with somebody’s dog all afternoon long.

  But instead we were in the studio, waiting as usual for Slippery to show up so we could practise around him. On Sundays, when Christine and I weren’t working, we rehearsed in the afternoon. The idea was that a change was as good as a rest, but today nothing short of joining the laughter in the street down below and getting some of that good sunshine on my winter-white face and inhaling as many springtime scents as I could was going to do the trick. My nose was twitching like a nervous rabb
it’s in the direction of the open balcony doors.

  “Want to try ‘Dundas West’ again?” Christine said to Thomas, strapping on her bass. “I think I’ve got an idea of what you’re trying to do in the middle part now, that part that drops out.”

  Christine didn’t want to be stuck inside any more than I did, but, unlike me, was always for sensibly getting down to whatever had to get done. The well-organized political agitator in her, I guess.

  Thomas was casually tuning his unplugged electric. “Slippery’s not here yet,” he said.

  Christine looked at me behind my kit. I rat-tatted the snare and tightened its head.

  “Do you think anybody’ll notice?” she said.

  Thomas looked up from his Gretch and gave a little smile. “Hey, now, that’s not nice. That’s no way to talk about your fellow band member.”

  “Band members practise with the other members of their band,” Christine said. “All this guy does is occupy space for two hours.”

  She turned on her amp and immediately began plucking out the jaunty opening notes of our instrumental, “Dundas West.” I joined in, clod-hopping along on high hat and wood. After a couple minutes of waiting for Thomas’s guitar to come in, we stopped. The room went silent and we both looked at him. He was still happily tuning away.

  “Care to join us, Thomas?” Christine said.

  Thomas looked up from his guitar again, gave a cursory glance around the room. “Slippery’s not here yet.”

  Christine shook her head. “And?”

  Thomas smiled, then went back to his guitar.

  Christine looked at me again. I shrugged.

  “Tell me something, Thomas,” she said. “What’s the big fascination with this guy, anyway? I really want to know.”

  “I hear a steel guitar, Miss Christine.”

  “Great, you hear a steel guitar. Fantastic. But why does it have to be this guy’s steel guitar?”

  “Slippery’s got something we’re looking for. His sound and our sound belong together.”