Moody Food (20 page)

EVERY WINDOW AND vent was cranked open as wide as it would go; you could smell the hot asphalt underneath our tires as Thomas decelerated and pulled over to the side of the 401. I'd slapped out every tune I knew on my leg with my drumsticks to distract me until my thigh became sore, but I knew if I didn't say something soon my head was surely going to explode. So I said it: What should have been said days before, as soon as Kelorn had told me to. What none of us, least of all Thomas, wanted to hear.

Everyone sat quietly for a couple of minutes as the cars and trucks whizzed past, but it felt like the whole hearse-load of them were an inch from my face and giving it to me as loud as they could. But there was only the tick-tocking sound of the hazard lights to let everybody else on the highway know we weren't going anywhere. I picked up one of Christine's books and slouched down against the interior panel. At Thomas's insistence I hadn't said a word, not even to Christine, about what we'd been up to with
Moody Food
because, he explained, there was always the danger of talking a big project right out of existence. But this was a different kind of silence altogether.

“Hand me the map out of the glove compartment, will you, Mr. Bannister?” Thomas finally said.

Slippery unfolded the map and Heather lit Thomas a smoke without him asking for it. Thomas pulled deeply on the cigarette and considered the map carefully, traced a finger up and then back down a section of it.

“What time is it, sir?” he said to Slippery.

“Eleven.”

“Straight up?”

Slippery looked at his watch again. “Straight up.”

Thomas nodded and fingered the map again. Took another drag from his smoke.

“What's going on, Thomas?” Christine said. She and Heather were on their knees with their chins resting on their hands on the back of the front seat.

“Planning our alternate route, Miss Christine.”

“There's another border crossing?”

“Yes, ma'am, there is.”

I looked up from my book. “A safer one, you mean?”

“By all accounts, a much safer one.”

“How do you know?”

“Some fellows I'm acquainted with in international sales back in Yorkville tell me that the authorities at this particular crossing are a fair bit more lenient than at any other point along the shared border of our two great nations.”

Heather kissed Thomas on the cheek and sat back down, picked up her needles and yarn.

“Cool,” Christine said. “Where is it?”

“Sault Ste. Marie.”

“Sault Ste. Marie? That's the other way. We'd have to go back to Toronto and start all over again. It'll take forever.”

“If we keep our rest breaks to a minimum, twelve hours, I figure. Which would mean we'd pull into customs around midnight. Which would stack things in our favour even more, I'd say.”

“Isn't there any other way?” Christine said. “What about Buffalo?”

“Buffalo is not an option.”

“But we'll miss our first gig,” I said.

Everybody turned around.

“Yeah, we are going to have to miss our first gig,” Thomas said.

I looked at Heather happily crocheting away and wondered what happened to all those sweaters and scarves and mittens she was always making for Thomas. I lifted Christine's book in front of my face. For about the tenth time I read about how 175 years
ago sixty million bison covered the Canadian plains and how now there were none. When would we ever learn?

Thomas clicked off the hazards and turned the key in the ignition.

“Next rest stop,” he said, “everyone go to the washroom and get something to eat and something for later, too. I'll call Colin and see if he can get them to reschedule tonight. But we're not going to miss tomorrow night. Or any other dates after that. Any questions?”

Christine sighed and removed the bookmark from her paperback. Slippery lit up another Marlboro. Heather carried on with the scarf she was making, softly humming away. And I slapped out the beat to what was going to be the opening track to
Moody Food,
“Flow Gently,” on my other thigh, the one that wasn't sore yet.

IT WAS A LITTLE AFTER midnight and foggy and cool, the windows having slowly inched their way up over the last couple hundred miles. Ours was the only car parked at the white line that a large yellow sign instructed us to stop behind. A tiny red brick building entirely nondescript except for a huge Government of the United States Customs logo stencilled on its side, it was like a little piece of
1984
in the middle of an untouched hinterland. It was also, according to the Vagabonds, the most lax border crossing in the entire country, ideal for both drug smugglers and draft dodgers. Thomas slowly pulled up beside the glass booth.

It was empty. Thomas clicked off the ignition and it was so silent it was loud, like my ears were a pair of those shells you hold up to hear the sound of the ocean. Finally Thomas hit the horn—once—and we waited. The hearse's honk echoed through the mist and trees.

A few seconds later a short, balding, fat man struggling with his loosened tie emerged from somewhere in the back. He seemed apologetic for not being there when we'd showed up and asked us what our nationalities were and what the purpose of our trip was as if he didn't want to bother us but this was something he had to do so please bear with him. We told him a surprisingly close facsimile of the truth, that three of us were Canadians and two of us weren't, and that we were playing a week's worth of gigs in Detroit.

“What's the name of your band, folks?” he said.

Before anyone else could speak up, “The Schizophrenic Farm Boys,” Thomas answered.

The man smiled. “The Schizophrenic Farm Boys. Hey, that's a great name. Well, you folks have a safe trip and knock 'em dead, you hear?”

We promised him we would.

A few hundred feet past the checkpoint we parked for a minute to get our bearings and go over the map. It was still several hours until Detroit. Although the pines and the fog and the moon sure looked the same, apparently we were now in a different country. I was a little disappointed it didn't feel like it.

“Why didn't you tell him our real name?” I said.

The tidal wave of silence had ebbed, crickets and hoot owls dotting the thick quiet. Christine was already back to sleep. She dozed with her head on my lap and I waited in the darkness for Thomas to come up with an answer as to why he'd lied when he didn't have to. Heather leaned forward and put her cigarette to Thomas's lips.

Thomas leaned back in his seat, exhaled a billow of smoke. “I don't know,” he said.

THE NORTH WAS THE north and the south was the south, each in its own 100-proof USA way like nothing else at least one rubber-necking Canuck percussionist had ever seen before. First Michigan, then Ohio, then the Midwest, then Texas, then, finally, California. But first things first.

First, Michigan, a three-night opening-act gig at the student union on the University of Michigan's Ann Arbor campus, the country-rock stylings of the Duckhead Secret Society all the way down from Toronto, Canada, to get everybody good-and-rowdy ready for local favourites the Stooges, the latter headed up by nineteen-year-old hometown wild child Iggy Stooge. And notwithstanding the peanut butter and raw steaks he smeared all over his scrawny white chest and the pieces of broken glass he gouged into his arms during their encore performance of “No Fun,” Iggy wasn't even the most alarming item on that first day's itinerary.

Because none of us had had a clue that Ann Arbor wasn't in Detroit, was actually about a half-hour ride away, we'd checked into the first place that agreed to put us up for the night. In spite of getting only four hours of sleep on the musty blue shag rug of the motel room—Thomas and I at 4 a.m. flipping a coin and he correctly calling heads, so he and Heather getting the single bed, Slippery saying he'd be happy outside in Christopher in the parking lot by himself—I woke up with a sore back from the thinly disguised concrete floor and with a five-year-old's Christmas-morning excitement that simply wouldn't allow my body any more nighttime nourishment.

I kissed still-asleep Christine on the cheek, silently stepped into my jeans and boots in the dark, took the room key off the desk, and cracked open the door as little as possible so I wouldn't wake anyone up. Heather was on Thomas's side of the bed with
her arms wrapped around his waist, her face buried in his back. He was facing the other way with his arms dangling over the side of the mattress. I gently shut the door behind me and slipped on my sunglasses and hit the sidewalk.

It was early morning, early fall, but the street wasn't dappled in fresh daybreak dew and the only discernible new-day scent was car exhaust mixed up with the sharp stench of urine coming from the alleys and boarded-up storefronts. In more than a few of these, huge, refrigerator-sized cardboard boxes pushed onto their sides with human knees and feet sticking out of them. Black metal cages protected the shops still in business but not yet open for the day, like the stores had been busted and sentenced to a night of house arrest. Along the entire street it seemed like every third parked car had been abandoned by its owner and left to rot, tireless axles, cracked windshields, and stripped interiors typifying this year's model.

I almost turned right back around to let the others in on the war zone we'd walked into and enlist their help in pushing all the furniture up against the motel room door, but it was like not being able to stop yourself from gawking at a three-car smash-up on the interstate. I kept moving down Brush Street.

Where, at eight-thirty in the morning, every corner store flashed neon red advertising what brands of beer they sold, and a teenage girl with dead eyes and a tight mouth in a pink housecoat and dirty pink fuzzy slippers and a crumpled five-dollar bill in her fist screamed at her three small swarming children to get away from the chocolate bars if they didn't want to
get it
and grabbed her change off the counter then her package of Pall Malls out of her paper sack and tore off the cellophane wrapper and tossed it to the ground before she was out of the store.

Where a sign in the window of the liquor store down the avenue declared THIS STORE INSURED BY SMITH AND WESSON, and
who the hell needs a pint of Old Crow before breakfast? Someone, apparently, a COME IN WE'RE OPEN sign hanging in the door shining red-and-black bright in the sunlight, a guy in a camouflage jacket and hunting cap and smoking a pipe sitting behind the cash register armed and loaded and ready for business. Empty bourbon bottles and vodka bottles and whisky bottles squatted on top of overflowing garbage pails or lay smashed on the sidewalk.

Unless you walked far enough east.

Where the liquor bottles turned into either crushed cans of Colt 45 or broken wine bottles, Thunderbird wine bottles mostly, and the black men in camel-hair coats and feathered fedoras hanging out on the sidewalk in front of the pool halls and bars and rib joints already pumping out the delicious burning message of hot barbecued beef made you think how you only see black people with black people here. Which, come to think of it, means that before you only saw white people with white people. But if you're white you didn't notice that you didn't notice that. But the eyes of the black people with black people in front of the pool halls and bars and rib joints sure notice you. And even if nobody says it with actual words, it's time to go west, white boy, back to your own part of town.
Now.

Waiting for the light to change on the other side of the crosswalk from the motel a couple of hours after I'd started out, I paused in front of a White Castle restaurant. It looked part Anne of Green Gables cottage and part drive-in hamburger joint. I'd never seen anything like it. My light turned green but I didn't walk. I pushed open the glass door of the White Castle and went inside.

The first thing I saw was a fat man and his fat wife and their fat son and fat daughter sitting on the edges of their white plastic chairs, gorging themselves at a white plastic table. It was hard to see what they were eating—their hands moved so fast and their mouths never stopped chewing—but every few seconds one of them would tear the white paper wrapping off one of what must have been fifty of the
world's tiniest hamburgers and stick it in their mouth whole. I walked up to the shiny white counter.

“Those people,” I said, pointing at the family, “what are they eating?” The woman wore a white polyester uniform and cap but was elderly and black, the only instance I'd seen all morning of the two races mixing together. She smiled, a little embarrassed at my ignorance.

“Hamburgers, sir,” she said.

“But they're so small.”

The woman smiled again. “Those are White Castle hamburgers, sir.” She pointed to the price list on the wall behind her. “Just ten cents each or ten for a dollar.”

“Ten cents each?”

“That's right, ten cents each.”

I put my hand in my pocket.

“Do you take Canadian?” I said.

“Sure we do,” she said. “We get Canadians in here all the time. I thought you sounded different.”

“I think I'll have ten,” I said. “It's ten for a dollar, right?”

“It sure is,” she said, taking my money and ringing it in, handing me back the difference. “Now let me get your order for you, sir.”

I scooped up my American change and waited for my ten hamburgers. On our nickel there was a picture of a beaver. On theirs was the profile of a guy I didn't recognize. In God We Trust, it said.

BECAUSE IT WAS our first out-of-town gig and we were too excited to be otherwise, the student population of U of M's general indifference to our opening efforts on behalf of Iggy and the boys barely registered. We used the opportunity of hardly anyone showing up until the Stooges came on—and those that did
drinking beer and talking throughout the show—to get our shortened set list in order and adjust to playing through someone else's sound system. We all hung around backstage the first night to watch the Stooges do their thing. Almost as much as Iggy's psychotic performance—we never got to know the band well enough to call him Jim like everyone else—the band's ridiculously short forty-minute set startled me. Even as out-of-town understudies we'd been instructed by the promoter to play for an hour.

After we'd come off stage the second night and the headliners were milling around getting ready to go on, I watched the Stooges' shirtless main man wash back a dose of LSD with a can of Pepsi. I'd been rapping with the band's drummer. He looked like he'd been shooting smack at the bottom of an abandoned swimming pool for a few months before deciding on his life's real vocation as an acne-scarred human mole. He played his instrument with the same black towel draped over his head night after night and wore it now as we talked. If you buried a large chunk of Gorgonzola cheese inside an old tennis shoe underneath a chicken coop you might come close to imagining what he smelled like. Was one hell of a drummer, though. Just punished those skins.

“Is that guy nuts?” I said, motioning toward the Iggster. “He won't last past your first tune.”

“Jim? Fuck, no. Jim knows what he's doing. He trips before every show.”

“My God,” I said. “You must have to cancel a lot of gigs.”

“Nah, he's okay for a good solid half-hour before we've got to drag him off stage.”

Whackety whackety whack
.

The drummer pounded his sticks on the back of an exposed wooden beam. It sounded like a suicidal woodpecker trying to beat its brains out.

“Besides,” he said, “we haven't found an audience yet who could handle us for more than forty-five minutes.”

Whackety whackety whack
.

The Duckhead Secret Society survived Iggy's acid-assisted ravings and the proto-metal onslaught of the Stooges in Michigan, persevered through two nights of open-mouthed teenybopper staring opening up for fading British folk duo Chad & Jeremy in Toledo, was sandwiched between two Cleveland garage bands, the Tyrants and Buck and the Decoders, endured repeated requests for “Last Train to Clarksville” by prefabricated Fab Four heartthrobs the Monkees while playing a high-school dance in suburban Akron, and headlined for the first time on U.S. soil in Cleveland at a place called the Paddock that sounded like a country and western club and the promise of something like a musically sympathetic ear, but was actually an illegal betting operation that advertised live music and cold beer to help keep its cover.

After the first set, during which not one person came in—I mean not one single person; our only audience the bored, blonde waitress idly filing her fingernails and holding up the untended bar—and we were ten minutes late for the second, Slippery off somewhere smoking and the rest of us sitting on Christopher's hood watching the orange and yellow flames from the chimney of a factory in the distance mix with the smoggy downtown skyline to create the prettiest poisoned sunset you've ever seen, the guy in the black suit and open white collar we'd talked to when we'd first showed up stepped outside, cleared his throat, crushed out his cigarette on the brick wall of the bar, and motioned Thomas over with a single forefinger. He put his arm around Thomas's shoulder and they went for a short walk around back.

Thomas refused to talk about what the two of them had discussed, but we weren't late starting another set again. Thomas made sure of that. We ended up playing five minutes into every
break and starting back up five minutes early every time. At the end of the night Thomas was in such a hurry to pack up and get us out of there he forgot to collect our money and we literally had to push him out of the hearse to go back in and get it. A minute later he tossed me a paper sack with our fifty dollars in it, jumped behind the wheel, and peeled out of the parking lot. We drove through the night all the way to Pittsburgh.

And then to Clarksburg and Columbus and Dayton and Cincinnati and lots and lots of other towns and cities I've long since forgotten. And then to St. Louis, Missouri, gateway to the West, for us the doorway to Dixie, where we began our slow descent into the mouth of the South.