Moody Food (17 page)

“Me? What'd he want with me?”

“When I told him I'd never heard of anyone by the name of Thomas Graham, he said he was interested in talking to one of my employees, a Bill Hansen, because he'd heard that you and Thomas were friends.”

I ran my hand through my hair. “Jesus, why didn't you tell him you'd never heard of me either?”

“Bill, you don't have anything to worry about from an RCMP officer; Thomas does. The FBI sometimes asks Mounties to enquire after dodgers, and obviously this person knows you work at Making Waves or he wouldn't have asked, so telling him you didn't would have meant zero chance of him believing me about not knowing Thomas. Not that I think he did.”

I looked to the opened doorway Christine and all the rest of them had just paraded through in search of a safe place in the night; smelled the cooling damp of late evening drifting into the steamy room.

“Thomas is a draft dodger?” I said.

“I don't know. When I asked the Mountie if I could help him with anything he just thanked me for my time and said he'd be back tomorrow to talk to you.”

Running both hands though my hair now, “What are we going to do?”

“The first thing you're going to do is ask Thomas what's going on. If he's just a dodger, as long as he stays in Canada the worst thing that can happen to him is being classed an international fugitive and that will be that because our government doesn't send deserters back. But we need to know the truth. The complete truth.”

“But what about tomorrow?” I said. “This guy, this RCMP guy, he's coming to Making Waves tomorrow. What am I supposed to tell him? If he knows that I work at the store then he knows for sure that I know Thomas. Maybe I shouldn't go in. Maybe you can tell him I quit, that I split and you don't know where I live or where I was headed.” I felt like the first rat to hit the water as the ship goes down but that didn't stop my furry little feet from paddling just as fast they could go.

“Listen to me, Bill,” Kelorn said. “This is very serious business and Thomas is going to need all the help he can get from his friends. Which means that, as his friend, he needs you to show up at work tomorrow with a big smile on your face and tell Mr. Mountie that, yes, you knew Thomas, you'd hung around Yorkville with him, but that you haven't seen him for a long, long time and that you have no idea where he is.”

“But—”

“No buts, Bill,” Kelorn said, pushing herself up from the stage. “That's how it has to be.” Words like
but
didn't exist in Kelorn's vocabulary.

“I've got to get going,” she said. “I promised Gretchen I'd help her with her German grammar tonight. Silly girl, a mid-term tomorrow morning at nine and now she decides to let me know she's having problems conjugating her verbs.”

She hugged me again, whispered “I'm proud of you” in my ear, and squeezed my hand goodbye. “And talk to Thomas tonight, Bill.
Tonight
.”

 

 

Dying isn't the problem. That's the part nobody gets. It's not about not dying.

What makes Thomas go thirteen days straight without a shower and makes sure he shows up at the downtown L.A. Induction Center in the same reeking, rotting rags he's been wearing around town for a week while gobbling down so much Methedrine he's got the metabolism of a lab rat and the sunken cheeks and bulging eyes of a death-camp survivor isn't about being afraid of simply not existing. If it was, how come sometimes, out of his gourd out in the middle of the desert, a bird flies high over the San Andreas Fault and Thomas turns to this weekend's special friend and says, “That's me, darlin'. Way up there, over there, there, that's me. That's what I want to be.”

Any way you perform the mystical math, dying's not the problem, that's not the scary part.

The scary part also isn't some doctor in white plastic gloves up to his elbows telling you to drop your drawers and cough as he yawns and covers his mouth with one hand while squeezing his ten-thousandth pair of testicles of the day with the other; isn't some bozo in a brush cut you haven't known for thirty seconds screaming at you to get your head out of your ass and keep that line moving, mister, and have your medical records out and ready for inspection by Corporal Smith; isn't telling the shrink “no” when he asks you if you want to serve your country and seeing him check
the YES box anyway, saying, as he shuts your file, “That's all right, son, I'm sure you'll feel different once you have a chance to fit in.”

None of that and more isn't the scary part.

The scary part—the really, really scary part—is being lactose intolerant and getting killed in a head-on collision with a milk truck. Is having an orange-lacquered transmission fall on your head on your honeymoon. Is blocking the other team's last-second field goal attempt to win the game and picking up the ball and running faster than you've ever run before right into your own end zone.

The scary part is not being allowed to die for what you're living for. That's the problem. That's always been the problem.

So, tell you what, Sam. You fight your war, I'll fight mine. You can contact me c/o the Great White North and I'll see you in heaven sometime. And let's just see who gets there first.

THE SECOND HALF went just as well as the first, Thomas one minute pedal-to-the-metal driving us into whipping the crowd into a frothy frenzy, the next slowing everything down until the entire room was a soft, breathy hush, Thomas and Christine once again sharing the same microphone and hitting all the high notes and pushing all the right buttons, her voice getting where it was supposed to be every time, his cracking and breaking occasionally but always at the just-right emotional moment.

Then all the lights blazed on and Leone, brown plastic tray in hand, was racing around the room clearing away any unfinished drinks while people spilled out the doors and shouted out goodbyes, and before my knuckles could unclench from around my drumsticks it was all over. I looked over at Christine, bass still slung low around her neck, and she looked the same way she used to after we'd first started making love: all at once joyful, sad, and relieved. Thomas had his back to me, was still standing at attention in front of his microphone, but I knew he must have felt just as bone-marrow empty as we did. Ever the professional, Slippery was wiping down his tone bar with the white towel he kept underneath his seat while whistling the chorus to “Lilies by the Side of the Highway.” It was the first time I'd ever felt like I actually needed a drink. If there was a God, I reasoned, this must have been how He felt on the seventh day. What an all-powerful bummer of a comedown those twenty-four hours must have been, I thought. Maybe that's why Sundays are always so depressing.

Eventually we unfroze, slowly started moving again like those marionettes you see encased in glass machines at spring fairs that for twenty-five cents come to life for three or four minutes to bang time on their drums and saw away at their fiddles and prance in place until the quarter runs out and the power gets cut off. Except we weren't dancing or performing any more, just mopping down
our faces and peeling off our equipment and getting ready to go home. Out of the clatter of stoned bodies shuffling off into the night, a guy who looked like us, but didn't, stepped up to the edge of the stage.

“I just wanted to tell you guys I really dug your stuff tonight a lot,” he said. “A lot
.”

His hair was chopped sharply at the shoulder, longish rather than long, his clothes more funky conservative (paisley suit jacket and goofy, oversized tie) than all-out hippie cool, the cuffs of his trousers neatly tailored rather than rolled.

“Thanks,” Thomas said, reaching down, extending a weary hand. “We appreciate it.” Christine and I smiled and offered over our own tired thanks. Too pooped to be any politer, we all went back to turning off amps and wrapping up cords and packing away our instruments. By now Heather had joined us on stage and was carefully laying away Thomas's several guitars into their respective cases.

“You aren't all Canadian, are you?” the guy said. I double-taked on his tie and half-assed hippie haircut and did the logic. I jumped up from behind my kit and planted myself between him and Thomas.

“Yeah, all of us are,” I said. “All four of us are T.O. born and bred. And look, man, I'm glad you dug the show and everything, but the guy who owns this place doesn't like anybody hanging around after closing time and I wouldn't want him pissed off at me if I were you. He's not one of us, if you get my drift.”

“That's cool,” he said. “I've got to get back to my hotel to take a phone call from the coast anyway. If I'm not in my room when my old lady calls there'll be hell to pay.”

Continuing to wrap a black guitar cord around his elbow and fist, Thomas peered around me. “Y'all are from California?” he said.

“San Francisco. Marin County, actually. But I'm working in L.A. now.”

“How is old Lost Angels?” Thomas said. “Everybody still tripping out on the carbon monoxide down there?”

“You never told me you've been to Los Angeles, Thomas,” I said.

“I did some time down that way,” Thomas said, addressing his answer to the pig in sheep's clothing instead.

Christ, don't say that, I thought.

“I know you did,” the suit said.

“You do?” Thomas replied.

He went to move by me but I wasn't having any of it, executed that little stutter-step thing where you try to get around somebody on the street but every time you go your way, they go yours. We danced like this for a few rounds before Thomas finally gave up and looked over my shoulder to get a better a look at the guy, trying to place the face.

“Colin Fielder,” he said, sticking out his hand again. “We've never actually met, but if you talk to the right people around L.A., they all know who Thomas Graham is.”

Thomas ran a hand through his wet hair. “I'll be right honest with you, Colin, the name doesn't ring a bell.”

“It wouldn't,” he said, reaching inside his suit jacket. He handed Thomas a business card. Here we go, I thought, this is it.

“But people still talk about you down at Snoopy's Opera House and The Steer.”

Thomas finished reading the card and handed it to me.

“What's an L.A. label rep doing down in the San Fernando Valley and Orange County?” Thomas said.

The card read Colin Fielder, ELECTRIC RECORDS, Los Angeles, California, and listed the company's address and phone number.

“We're a young label that's small enough that I've got the ear of the guy who runs things, and he digs that I'm more interested in artists who are doing something a little bit different.” Christine and Heather and even Slippery gathered around me, taking turns reading the card.

Thomas began unscrewing his microphone. “So you think Dick Clark's ready for longhairs playing country music, do you?”

“We're not the kind of label that particularly cares what Dick Clark thinks.”

“So you're not interested in selling records, then? Huh, record companies sure must have changed a lot since I was last down there.”

“Sure we want to sell records. But there are lots of other ways to get our bands the exposure they deserve other than the Top Forty. Like I said, we're a pretty new label with lots of fresh, new ideas. Underground radio, for example. We think it'll make the idea of releasing singles obsolete within two years.”

“Even country singles?”

“I love pure country, I grew up on it, but if I had to describe what the Duckhead Secret Society was all about to somebody, well, I couldn't—and that's what I love so much about your sound. You can't pigeonhole it. But if I had to, if somebody held a gun to my head, I guess it would be country-rock, a little on the heavier side of maybe what Hearts and Flowers or the Beau Brummels are up to these days.”

“Bubble-gum music,” Thomas said, folding up the mike in a towel.

“Fair enough,” Colin said.

The jukebox unplugged and darkened dead, the room was empty now but for us and Leone, the clink of him gathering together the last of the empty glasses its only sound.

“How does a guy growing up in Marin County get turned
onto
pure country
?” Thomas said. “That's ‘I-Ain't-Marchin'-No-More' land.”

“My dad was—actually, still is—a history prof at SFU. He did his thesis on the depression in California. The labour camps, the unions, the radical left, that sort of thing. Anyway, Woody Guthrie, Hank Williams, you name it, you heard it around my house as a kid.”

Thomas folded up the second mike and placed it on stage beside the other; stayed down on one knee and began wiping down the wooden body of the mandolin. And kept wiping.

“How did you know Thomas was playing with us here tonight?” I asked.

“I didn't,” Colin said. “I'm actually in town to check out the Paupers and a couple other bands. I just happened to be hanging out in Yorkville this afternoon talking to the fellow who runs the Riverboat when this elderly gentleman who must have gotten wind of who I was shoved one of the fliers for your gig in my face and said, ‘Do yourself a favour and listen to something besides noise for a change.'”

So Scotty had been with us tonight after all. When we'd asked him to come for about the tenth time the night before, he'd said that the muse had him by the balls and that a hot overcrowded room full of hippies wasn't what the doctor ordered to pry her loose.

Leone shouted, “Those lights are going off in five minutes,” and everyone looked to Thomas. He snapped shut the mandolin case and took back Colin's business card from me and read it again. Stood up and dropped the card in the pocket of his red sequined shirt.

“I'm writing some new songs now,” he said. “They're better than the ones you heard tonight.”

“I'd love to hear them,” Colin said.

“They're not finished yet. But they will be. Soon.”

“Whenever you're ready. But I'd like to talk to you”—he paused; made a point of looking at each of us—“I'd like to talk to all of you right now about the music you played tonight. I mean, you must be tired and I've got to wait for my call, but how about lunch tomorrow? Any place in particular you feel like spending some of Electric Records' money?”

“Café El Patio,” Christine said. “It's supposed to be beautiful tomorrow and we can sit outside. You've got to see Yorkville at street level in the day to really appreciate it.”

“Sounds great,” Colin said. “Around noon at Café El Patio then?” Looking only at Thomas now, “Is it a date?” He might have burned a few more brain cells than your average American businessman, but this guy knew what he was doing, he knew who really made the Duckhead Secret Society fly.

“One question,” Thomas said.

Colin waited. Us too.

“Who wrote ‘That's All Right Mama'?”

“Arthur Cradup,” Colin answered.

“See you at noon,” Thomas said.