Moody Food Page 9

  “Yeah, well, she also probably weighs about forty pounds less than you and you’ve also probably taken more trips than she’s had hot baths. You better go and make sure she’s all right, man. You’re responsible for her. If anything goes wrong with her out there tonight, you’re accountable.”

  “Get behind the drums, Bill,” Christine said. She was sitting on the Fender amp with the bass strapped over her shoulder, pick in hand.

  It took me a couple of seconds to register what I was seeing. “What are you doing?” I said.

  “What does it look like I’m doing?” she said. Thomas picked up his twelve-string Gretsch and took his place beside his own amplifier.

  “Are we plugging in, Miss Christine?”

  “Not yet. It’s been a while since I’ve played one of these. It’s not brain surgery, but let’s see how it goes.”

  “You say when,” he said.

  I felt like I was the one who’d dropped the acid. I decided to go and make sure Jupiter and her friend weren’t lying in a snowdrift somewhere. It seemed like the only thing to do that made any sense.

  “Where are you going?” Christine said.

  “Somebody’s got to check up on those two.” I cut my eyes Thomas’s way but he had his head down, busy trying to get his guitar in tune.

  “You go out that door, don’t bother coming back,” she said.

  I hesitated a second.

  “I think you smoked too much grass,” I said.

  “I mean it, Bill.” She bowed her head to her instrument and studied the placement of her fingers up and down its long neck, slowly moving them back and forth across the four thick strings like a cautious spider. “Hey, here’s one our music teacher in high school taught us that you should know, Thomas.”

  Thomas listened to her play. Nodding his head to the emerging beat, watching her fingers coax out the song’s hesitant rhythm, he began strumming his guitar. In less than a minute the two of them weren’t two any more but one, filling the air with something that just a moment before hadn’t existed. So pleasantly lost they looked there in their playing, it felt like they’d forgotten about me. They had forgotten about me.

  I sat down behind the drums, decided brushes were the better choice, and joined in.

  Christ, it’s just like fucking, I thought. You wonder when and how it’ll ever happen and how you’ll pull it off, and then one day, without warning, you’re doing it, you’re fucking, you’re actually fucking. We found a comfortable rhythm and kept it. Eventually the chorus came and, after a little fumbling around, we got that down too, then went right back to the beginning and started all over again.

  After a while, over top of the tune, comfortable enough now in keeping the beat to speak, “Hey, what’s this thing called, anyway?” I said.

  Christine kept concentrating, kept her eyes on her instrument. Thomas came over beside my drum kit.

  Still playing, “‘Wild Mountain Thyme,’” he said. “Just an old, old song every musician knows. And now you know it too, Buckskin.”

  two

  17.

  WHY ME?

  Christine, okay, maybe. Thomas’s voice was a medium tenor but in a wavering, aching sort of way, hers womanly high but strong and throaty, and he must have heard that right from the get-go when he’d listened to her sing at the Riverboat. He always claimed that two- and three-part harmonies were a big part of the sound he was after, so there you go, there was that. And he also knew that she was talented and would be able to pick up the bass easily enough, and that that would kill two birds right there.

  But I couldn’t sing, had to work hard just to be adequate on my assigned instrument, and had never even wanted to be up on stage before. And forget about us being friends; friendship doesn’t even enter into it. He said he could trust me and could count on me to cover his ass when the going got rough and all the bosom-buddy rest of it, but Thomas didn’t need my flesh. What Thomas was after was something else entirely.

  I say this now, of course, claim to know this now, but even then I think I knew it. Thirty years on, getting saved and being seduced still really aren’t all that much different. An unsaved soul is still a virgin of the heart. Either way, it’s just as good for the seducer as it is for the seduced. Maybe better, when you really think about it.

  Like I said, I think I knew this then. But even if I did, I didn’t care. Who wanted to be a virgin in 1966? Who wants to be one now?

  18.

  I STILL KEPT the shelves well stocked and swept the floor clean at Making Waves, and Christine still punched in the amount tendered at her day job, working cash at Sam the Record Man, but mostly we rehearsed. Nearly every night for almost two months, Christine and Thomas and I would trek our way through the cold and climb the three flights of stairs to the studio and wipe our feet at the door and say hello and tune up and get down to business.

  Sometimes we’d share a single joint out on the balcony after a couple of busy hours, and once in a while, if we felt particularly good about what we’d been doing, would go downstairs and knock on the door of one of the other studios and pass a doobie back and forth with some of the other musicians. But except for Scotty working away at the corner card table and faithfully ignoring us, for most of the winter we didn’t see much of anyone but ourselves.

  For Christine and me, not only our new instruments to master, but, more, having to get used to the shared pulse of group playing, learning how to dance to the delicate rhythms of collaborative strumming, plucking, drumming. The difference between playing by yourself and playing with even one other, I soon learned, was large enough that it was almost wrong to think of the two as even being separate parts of the same thing. Think of sex: even halfway through their initial go at it, everyone’s a genuis lover all by themselves. But it takes time, patience, and lots and lots of practise to learn how to make love.

  19.

  MAYBE IT WAS our growing confidence—I myself was particularly proud of the mock train-track brush strokes I was now laying down with ease on “Folsom Prison Blues”—but late one night, walking home to my place after rehearsal, Christine and I were both thinking the same thing. Love is like this, and if for nothing else, for this alone, is good.

  “I think things are going okay,” I said. “Overall, I mean.”

  “Oh, God, yes. I mean, if we listened to the tapes from that first week ...”

  “Thank God, no—”

  “No, no, I know, I know.”

  Christine carried the mandolin case in one hand and had one of my hands clamped tightly in the other. As usual when we came home from the studio so late, we owned Bloor Street. As thick with people as Yorkville was after midnight, even as the snow fell in sheets sideways and the February winds ricocheted up and down the avenue, most of the rest of Toronto after ten in the evening was abandoned sidewalks, deserted streets, six-o’clock-shut shops. Every street light stood at attention, dutifully burning away for our benefit only; every set of traffic lights kept its lonely vigil for our simple amusement, a bit of flashing diversion thoughtfully supplied just to break up the monotony of everywhere winter white.

  “But I’d say we’re pretty tight now,” I said.

  “Oh, yeah, we’re getting there, we’re definitely getting there.”

  A blast of snow and wind came barrelling down Bloor, and both of us instinctively lowered our heads.

  “It’s just ...”

  “Yeah?” Christine said.

  “It’s just, I don’t know, by this point, I kind of thought ...”

  “Yeah?”

  “I don’t know, I just kind of thought that by this point there’d be ...”

  “What, you mean you thought by this point there’d be ... ?”

  “You know, something ...”

  “Something more?”

  “Something more.”

  “That by this point we’d be doing something more than just trying to sound like Thomas’s record collection.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Ye
ah.”

  Although there weren’t any cars and we were close to being home and out of the cold and into the warm again, at least as warm as my room ever got in the wintertime, we stopped at a red light near our street, near Huron.

  “I mean, it’s not like I’m not having a good time,” I said.

  “I know, me too,” Christine said. “It’s fun. You know if it wasn’t I wouldn’t still be doing it.” She laughed, but she meant it. I laughed because I knew that she did.

  “It’s just that ...”

  “There’s got to be more.”

  “There’s got to be more. Because otherwise ...”

  “What’s the point?”

  “We should talk to Thomas,” I said.

  “Just to see what his plans are.”

  “Just to see what ...”

  “The point is.”

  Christine pulled the loose end of my scarf tight and tucked it into my coat and did up the top button. Hand in hand once again, we crossed the street without bothering to look both ways. There really wasn’t any need to—there never was at that time of night—but I remember how we crossed without even looking once. Funny how I remember that now.

  20.

  THOMAS WAS SITTING with his back to me in a metal chair by the card table, silently tuning his guitar. I tightened the head on the snare drum and cleared my throat.

  “Hey, Thomas.”

  “Uh huh.” He always had a tough time keeping his Gibson twelve-string in tune.

  “Christine and I were talking the other day and were kind of wondering when you were thinking about doing some, I don’t know, original stuff. You know, some of your own songs.”

  He stopped messing around with the acoustic and turned around in his seat. I waited for him to say something. He didn’t, so I said, “No big deal. We just thought it might be cool to try something new. You know, like some of the ones you were talking about when we first met. Some”—I gave a little drum roll and cymbal crash—“Interstellar North American Music.”

  He just sat there for a couple of seconds.

  “And Miss Christine,” he said, “she feels this way, too? You two are in agreement on this?”

  “Sure.”

  He stood up, walked over to the drum kit, and knelt down beside me. On one knee. Strumming something I’d never heard him play before but never looking down at his instrument, only up at me, “Buckskin,” he said, “you’ve made me a very happy man.”

  I took this as a yes and tried to concentrate on figuring out where this new tune of his was going. But really, all I could think was, Get up off your knee, Thomas. Anybody walks in here, they’re going to think you’re proposing to me or something.

  Christ, man, I thought, get up. Get up.

  21.

  THOMAS FOUND HIMSELF a permanent old lady, Christine got busted, and Kelorn—who never failed to remind me that “Love isn’t for hoarding, Bill” whenever I’d ask why I hadn’t seen last month’s sweet young thing around lately—was having girlfriend problems. And we really started practising, doubling, occasionally even tripling our usual rehearsal time of a couple hours a night so as not to drown under the deluge of original tunes Thomas had us swimming in.

  At the moment, though, most of my attention and concern was directed toward dealing with the fallout from Christine’s being charged with causing mischief and resisting arrest while attending a small, peaceful sit-in protesting the yahoo tourists clogging up Yorkville with their cars.

  “Did I tell you how much Christine’s fines could come to? If she gets off with just a fine?”

  “Yes, you did,” Kelorn said.

  We’d just gotten in a fresh batch of the Manual for Draft-Age Immigrants to Canada and I was taking them out of the box and clearing a place for them on the counter. We didn’t even bother to shelve them any more. Some weeks it wasn’t unusual to go through ten or fifteen copies.

  “If she gets probation and if they don’t manage to jerk her around and lay down a sentence. I mean, think about it. Jail time! For sitting around in a circle holding up some signs!”

  Kelorn unplugged the whistling tea kettle.

  “Bill, dear, I know, I know, you already—”

  “What’s the word, goddammit! What’s the goddamn word!”

  Hunched over the old desk at the rear of the shop, Scotty cursed the poem in front of him one more time—“One word, dammit! All I’m asking for is one goddamn word!”—and ran a bony white hand through his surprisingly thick mop of silver hair. I kept my mouth shut and placed a single finger to my lips to make sure Kelorn did the same.

  The first time I’d been witness to one of Scotty’s profanity-laced invocations to the poetry gods at the studio and innocently asked whether he needed some help, he’d spat back at me, “What makes you think I was talking to you, hippie boy?” We were the only two in the room at the time, but he’d made his point. The next time he screamed out demanding to know what rhymed with “epoch” and meant “love, dammit, the very root of the whole putrid lie,” I lowered my head and banged out the approximate rhythm to the Ferlin Husky song I was practising. Eventually he stopped yelling and I found the beat. There’s a lesson to be learned here, I thought, although I never did get around to figuring out what it was.

  I’d invited Scotty along with me to work that morning in an attempt to help him break free of the writer’s block he’d been suffering from for the last couple of weeks—and which, in turn, the band had been suffering from because of Scotty’s near-constant poetic pissing and moaning from his usual spot at the corner card table—but it looked like the change-of-pace tonic I’d suggested wasn’t going down so well.

  Scotty jammed the last scrap of paper into his shopping bag, bundled up his thick black overcoat, picked up his violin case, and hobbled toward the door, the nose-hair-bristling reek of the mothballs he kept in his coat pockets to combat the mildewy stink of his basement apartment overcoming the store’s aroma of mint tea. Turning to Kelorn and me behind the counter, he lifted his cane and pointed.

  “Homer never wrote a goddamn line hanging out in some hippie commune,” he said.

  I raised an open palm goodbye. “See you around, Scotty,” I said.

  “Nice to meet you, Mr. Robinson,” Kelorn added. “Please come and see us again any time you like.” Scotty slammed the door closed behind him, in the process ringing its bell loud enough that even he might have been able to hear it.

  I resumed my rant—Me: “So it’s a crime to sit in the street but it’s not a crime for some creep from the suburbs to race up and down that same street in a filthy, polluting automobile hassling half the women who live there and endangering the lives of everyone else?” Her: “I know, Bill, dear, I know”—until Kelorn’s own recent reason for worry moped into the shop, a nineteen-year-old French major by the name of Susan who wanted to quit the university, move in with Kelorn, and dedicate the rest of her life to working at Making Waves.

  Susan jingled the bell over the door just like Scotty had a couple of minutes before, but this time only the tiniest of tinkles. Scotty might have been nuts, okay, but the way he entered and left a room, you knew that he knew what he was doing, even if no one else did. Susan creaked open the door an inch at a time, as if she was entering a haunted house. Stood there wiping her boots on the carpet and brushing the snow off her coat for what seemed like an hour.

  Of course, Kelorn gave her a big hug, made her take off her coat and gloves and set them out over by the stove to dry, insisted that she have a cup of tea to warm up, and asked her all about her philosophy mid-term. But it was over. Whenever Susan wasn’t intensely studying the knotty patterns on the hardwood floor, her pleading attempts to make eye contact with Kelorn were politely but firmly undercut by Kelorn immediately shifting her eyes and the conversation my way.

  Eventually, into one of several swelling pockets of painful silence—painful for Susan and painful for me; Kelorn herself seemed quite comfortable with the idea of spending the rest of the afterno
on expertly avoiding Susan’s eyes and amiably chatting away about Cartesian duality and competing modern theories of the mind-body problem—“Kelorn?” Susan said. “Can we please talk?”

  “Why, of course, dear, what is it?”

  “I mean alone. Can we please go somewhere and ... be alone and talk?”

  Kelorn laughed. “My goodness, you’re going to give poor Bill here such a terrible complex, I’m sure.”

  “That’s okay,” I said, going for my coat on the peg behind the counter. “I feel like getting some fresh air anyway.” Sometimes the decision to walk directly into a snowstorm is easy.

  “Don’t be silly, Bill,” Kelorn said. “You’ve only gotten back from lunch less than an hour ago. Besides, I want us to get to work moving the poetry section like we’d discussed.”

  “Kelorn, please,” Susan said. “We need to talk.”

  “Well, by all means let’s talk, then,” Kelorn said. “Only, if you mean about what we’ve talked about several times already, there’s really not that much more to say, is there? We were friends when we met, then we were something else, and now we’re friends again. If you think of it that way, it’s all very simple, isn’t it?” She smiled directly into the storm of Susan’s face, but the bad weather of before began to really come down. A grown woman crying without making a sound, not a single, sobbing sound, this is grief. Even just to look at. I stared down at the floor, one arm still stuck in my coat.

  Kelorn rested her hand on top of one of Susan’s. “Now, dear. Wouldn’t it be silly for us to get needlessly all worked up and to sacrifice our friendship just because we’ve moved on to a different kind of friendship?” Kelorn smiled and gave the younger woman’s hand a squeeze.

  Susan couldn’t answer. Didn’t have to. Her silence and wet face answered for her. She tore her hand free from Kelorn’s and stalked to the rear of the shop and snapped up her coat and gloves and was banging the door closed behind her before she’d even bothered to put them on. I let the ringing of the bell die away before I said anything.