Moody Food (21 page)

THE SCHEDULE WAS SIMPLE. After the gig, when everybody but Thomas and me was asleep, when for the only time all day we didn't have to worry about reading the road map right and getting to the next club in time for a proper sound check or figuring out where we were going to stop and eat or where we were going to crash for the night—when we could finally forget about everything that didn't have anything to do with
Moody Food
—we wrote.

We wrote by moonlight on torn deck chairs out by deserted motel pools. We wrote in parking lots sitting on the bumper of whatever car was furthest away from our room and Christopher so that no one would be woken up, the high beams of the transport trucks rolling past on the dark highway momentarily illuminating Thomas's guitar and the notebook and pen in my hands. Whenever Christine or Heather would wake up and not find us there, we'd just say we couldn't sleep and felt like getting some air or having a smoke. They were both so exhausted most of the time we didn't have to lie that often.

For some reason I'd gotten into the habit of being the one to check in and pay for our motel room. But whenever the forecast turned gloomy, Thomas would jump out of his driver's side seat and accompany me inside the motel lobby, me signing in and paying for the band's room and him paying for another—our own private writing room located as far away from the first as possible—with a shiny white credit card with his name on it. He never offered to explain. I never asked.

COLIN HAD SET UP THE entire tour in advance, and at times it seemed as if his sole criterion had been booking us into any place that would have us, no backwoods bar too out of the way or its musical policy too Duckhead-inappropriate, no double bill too bizarre for us to share. But even when we were scheduled to be the headliner and it turned out we were the main attraction at the Polar Bluff, Missouri Critters and Crafts Annual Fall Festival and Tractor Pull and our opening act the Polar Bluff Auxiliary Firemen's Barbershop Quartet, no one hijacked Christopher and demanded we head home, not even Christine.

Everything was in a hurry, and it wasn't only the effect of the ration kit full of Desbys Thomas had taped to the bottom of Christopher in case a flashing red light showed up in the rear-view mirror. Getting up in the morning was in a hurry, our wake-up call of choice being the maid pounding on the motel room door and screaming that it was fifteen minutes past checkout time and that she had to clean the room
,
us scrambling to pry open our eyes and throw our stuff together and get to the nearest coffee shop so we could get started on the day's required amounts of sugar, fat, tobacco, and caffeine, the four essential food groups of a musician's life on the road
.
Getting to the next gig in time was in a hurry,
everybody taking their expert turn misreading the map and contributing to the babble of contradictory directions that usually meant missed turnpikes and dead ends and going the wrong way down one-way streets.

Most of all, America was in a hurry, so unlike our home and unhurried native land so many different faces and places and cars with different-coloured licence plates speeding off on their who-knows-what-where-why way. And Walter Cronkite delivered his nightly Vietnam body count to the nation, you could buy a six pack of beer from a corner store from an old lady with a cross hanging around her neck, and look at that, Chris, what the hell's that? We don't have Burger King McDonalds Kentucky Fried Chicken Dairy Queen Pizza Hut Baskin-Robbins Dunkin' Donuts 7 Eleven back home do we?

Christine might have started off every step of the trip with something like
The Letters of Sacco and Vanzetti
in front of her face, but it's amazing how a ten-foot-high red-and-yellow concrete clown by the name of Ronald can make even the most committed anti-capitalist turn her head and stare. Thomas drove and Slippery dozed most of the time, but the Maple Leaf contingent of the band had their noses firmly pressed to the windows of the hearse and their eyeballs glued to the American Dream giving Mother Nature the shiny facelift I'm sure she never asked for.

Everything was in a hurry except Christopher at night.

We didn't always spend the evening in the place where we played. Sometimes, if the next show was close enough and the weather was okay, we'd drive the two or three or four hours to the next town so as not to have to worry about showing up late the following day and scrambling around looking for Big John's Hanging Tavern out on I-17 and not getting a chance to at least try to civilize the more than likely primitive PA system. Thomas and I didn't mind; a night off from writing once in a while had its
advantages, gave us a fresh set of legs when we sat down again the next night ready to run.

We'd load up the equipment, grab something to eat on the way out of town, and talk about the show a little. Then Slippery would start snoring and somebody would start laughing and then everybody else would start laughing too which would wake up Slippey with a loud snort and cause everybody to laugh even louder and him to mutter something under his breath and turn on his side in his seat and go back to sleep for good. And before too long Heather would put down her needles and Christine her book and Thomas would click off the inside light and he and I would be the only ones awake at three o'clock in the morning as we rolled down Highway 70 on the lookout for something called Terre Haute, Indiana.

You don't stop using speed just because you don't need it; the body still demands that rush it's grown accustomed to even if you don't have any particular place you feel like rushing. Because Thomas insisted on doing all the driving, on the nights we weren't writing he still found something to do. I'd pull my knees up to my chest and look out the window at America rolling by behind us with my hand resting on sleeping Christine and let the gentle hissing of our tires on the blacktop and the sigh of passing cars and trucks lullaby me for hours.

The odometer turning over, the miles adding up, somebody else might have let their mind wander to wonder just exactly where they were going and why. Christine, for instance. But not me. And I was the one wide awake.

“I'M SENDING KELORN a postcard. Do you want me to say anything?”

Christine was taking advantage of the rare rush-free day doing
her best Scotty imitation, turning the desk at the Home Away from Home Inn or something just like it somewhere in Ohio or Indiana or Illinois or Missouri into her very own private workstation. Her little collection of paperbacks was stacked neatly at one end, the last three days' worth of the local newspaper had been fished out of the motel office garbage pail and reassembled to be pored over later, and she'd already mapped out on hotel stationery the quickest way for us to get to our gig that night. She even had her own version of an in box and out box going, a pile of postcards yet to be written on her left, those already done on the right. I'd forgotten what she was capable of given a decent night's sleep and a couple of hours to herself.

“Kelorn,” I said. “Sure. Tell her ... yeah, tell her ...”

“I'll just tell her you send your love.”

“Great,” I said. “Thanks. That's great.”

It'd been a long night. Our ration kit was running dangerously low, and for the last couple of days Thomas and I had been halving our normal dosage of uppers and doing a lousy job of writing. The connection Thomas had been given the name of the last city back had been busted the week before we got to town. Thomas had finally gotten a hold of a Vagabond back in T.O. who'd made some calls, but it would be noon before we could go over and score. After spending most of the night in the hearse sweating through my T-shirt (and telling concerned Christine not to worry, that I must have been coming down with something), Thomas had doled out some Diazepam for us both when we'd hit the motel before dawn. I'd finally slept, but downers, I discovered, definitely weren't my thing. My brain felt like it'd been pickled, and every time I went to speak it seemed like I needed five minutes to plan out what I was going to say. Thomas seemed all right, though. He and Slippery were waiting for me in Christopher. I could see them from the opened motel room door, Heather leaning
into the driver's side window talking to Thomas, Slippery calmly blowing smoke rings out of the passenger side.

“You should send your parents one, too,” Christine said, head down, still scribbling.

“That's a good idea. I will. As soon as we get back.”

“Where are you guys going again?”

“A cousin of Thomas's lives across town and he wants to go by and say hello.”

“A cousin? Here?”

“Yeah. Pretty weird, huh?”

I didn't get off on lying to Christine, but was all for painting the best possible deception I could. Browse through the history books and they all say the same thing: Every lasting society is founded on shared illusions. No nation lasts ten minutes without them.

“Plus, Slippery wants to go to the Red Cross,” I said.

Well, that part wasn't a lie, at least. Slippery got paid five dollars for each pint he let them drain from his arm, every blood-red cent he received going directly into his growing Arkansas retirement fund.

“Is that safe?” she said. “He gave blood just a couple of days ago, didn't he?”

“It must be, he's going to give again.”

She looked up from her postcard. “How are you feeling?”

“Fine. Better. It must have been one of those 24-hour things.”

“Good.”

“Yeah. Hey, I should get a move on,” I said.

“Okay.”

“We won't be long. Before two, anyway.”

“All right.”

I was already out the door when Christine called my name. I ducked my head back inside.

“What's up?”

She looked at me like she was waiting for me to say something, like I'd been the one who'd wanted to talk to her.

“Chris?” I could feel a line of sweat gathering above my lip. I licked it away. “What is it?” I said. “I've got to get going.”

Christine lowered her eyes and shuffled her finished postcards, rapped them four-square even on the desktop.

“Will you get me some stamps while you're out?” she said. She shuffled the other pile. “Ten should do it.”

“Ten stamps, sure.” I shut the door.

As soon as Thomas saw me coming down the sidewalk he started up the engine. I slid open the side door and climbed inside.

“Now, if you decide to sit out in the sun, I want you wearing sunscreen and your new hat, darlin',” he said to Heather. “We don't want that fair skin of yours burning up on us now, do we?”

Heather smiled and held up the enormous floppy yellow sun hat Thomas had picked out for her at some truckstop. She leaned through the window even further to give him a kiss and then watched us pull away.

We were down the street when I realized I hadn't kissed Christine goodbye. I flipped on the radio. “Be My Baby” by the Ronettes poured out of the speakers and I clicked it back off. Only when your heart hurts does AM radio finally make sense.

Thomas handed me a map.

“See if you can find Violet Street somewhere on there, Buckskin. What we're looking for is 265 Violet. Rick says it's a yellow house with a bunch of old mattresses out front. And a '52 Chevy. On blocks.”

SHACKS, LITERAL fucking shacks, with a white beat-up Cadillac parked out front and three black kids in bare feet standing out on the front porch sucking on Mr. Freezies and all that
suspicion and hate and fear already there searing in their eyes as they watched us cruise by and me hanging my head out the window watching them watch me. Twenty-five minutes later and lost, actual white picket fences and flapping American flags and the suburban perfume of freshly cut lawns and fathers and sons tossing footballs back and forth in the autumn air. Back on track and fifteen minutes east, the first sad scene all over again, but this time the dirty faces and skinny bodies on the front porches white although the hard stares and stench of human hopelessness hanging in my nostrils the same.

“It's an odd number so it's got to be on your side,” Thomas said. We'd already dropped Slippery off at the Red Cross building not far from our motel.

“Two-forty-one, 243—slow down,” I said, “it's coming up.”

Just as promised, a square cinder block house painted violent canary yellow with a couple of stained mattresses with the stuffing spilling out of them like they'd been stabbed to death shared the front yard with a stripped Chevy up on wooden blocks. Thomas pulled up the steep gravel driveway, killed the engine, and put it in park; you could feel Christopher roll backward before the brakes locked and we jerked to a standstill.

We shut our doors with a careful, gentle click, but I was too busy watching a woman in hair curlers, housecoat, and white running shoes beating the hell out of a carpet with a baseball bat to see the Rottweiler tearing toward us down the sloping lawn. Even when I did get him in my sight it was Thomas's scream and not the gleaming fangs and bucket of saliva pouring from the dog's mouth that first registered. But before either of us could unfreeze and scramble back inside Christopher, the dog came to the end of his silver chain and snapped backward a good couple of feet in the air, without missing a bark landing
right back on his four feet, just as intent as before on ripping our faces off.

“Who are you, man?”

The guy standing in the front door of the house had hair down to his ass and a stringy, knotted goatee and was in bare feet and blue jeans, but wore mirrored sunglasses and had a can of Budweiser in one hand and a shotgun hanging from the other. I didn't know whether to flash a peace sign or give a Klansman salute. The Rottweiler, seeing his master not giving him some kind of doggy sign that we were okay, went into full-out watchdog alert, eyes rolling back in their sockets and foam cascading down his chin.

“I said, ‘Who
are
you, man?'”

The guy pumped the shotgun and took a sip of his beer at the same time. I turned to Thomas, but he kept staring at the dog like if he stopped watching him for an instant all those white teeth would be at his throat.

“Thomas?” I said.

Sorry, no one home.

“Thomas, say something.” By now he and the dog were locked in some kind of weird trance, the animal's loud snarling replaced by a spooky low motor roar.

Giving up, “A friend of yours said to come by,” I yelled out.

“Everybody's your friend when you're on the good side of a gun, man. You're gonna have to do better than that.”

“A friend from Toronto, a biker, a Vagabond.”

An instant of concentration flickered in the guy's eyes. He ran his fingers through his goatee with his Bud-holding hand. I kept my eye on the shotgun.

“Toronto, huh? Got a few brothers up that way.”

Loud enough for the guy with the gun to hear, “Thomas, what's your friend's name again? Our friend.”

Thomas appeared as if he'd completely fallen under the
dog's spell, his eyes almost as glazed over as its were. I punched him in the arm, hard.

“Rick,” he blurted out.

“Rick,” I echoed.

“Rick from Toronto?” the guy said.

“Rick, right,” I said.

“Vagabond Rick?”

“Right.”

“Vagabond Rick from Toronto?”

“That's right.”

He lowered his chin and peered at us over his shades.

“Shit, you must be the guys Rick said would be coming over today.”

“That's us,” I said, “we're them.”

“But he said you'd be driving a hearse.”

I wasn't sure what to do. I turned around and gestured at the big black thing on four wheels parked in the driveway.

“And hey, there it is,” the guy said. “A hearse. Hard to mistake one of those things, isn't it?”

“Yeah, well—”

“Lyndon!” he screamed. The frothing dog didn't seem to hear him. “Goddamn it, Lyndon, it's all right, these are friends, it's all right.” In an even louder, but clear, calm voice, “Lyndon. It's all right. Lyndon. It's alllll righttttt.”

Something finally clicked inside the dog's brain and his steel muscles melted, uncoiled, his growling gradually ceased. He lay down on the grass and tried to catch his breath, his pink lollipop tongue hanging down to the ground.

“Come on inside and have a beer, man,” he said. “You guys hungry? Nancy'll fix you up something if you're hungry.”

Thomas and I kept staring at the dog.

“Shit, don't worry about Lyndon, man, he knows you're all
right now. I let him know you're part of the pack. See, I'm the alpha male and he listens to what I say. It's totally cool, man. It's scientific. I've got a book all about it.”

Scientific proof to the contrary, Thomas and I didn't move an inch.

The guy laughed, pulled from his beer. “Where's your baby, Lyndon? Go get your baby and bring it to momma. Go get your baby, boy. Bring it to momma.”

The dog jumped up on the cement porch and picked up a dirty stuffed doll. The guy unhooked the dog's chain and patted him on the head. We all watched Lyndon trot inside with his baby.

“Come on, man,” he said, waving us inside with the shotgun. “You guys are a long way from home. Take a load off. Any friend of, uh ...”

“Rick's,” I said.

“Rick's, right. Any friend of Rick's is a friend of mine.”

 

Inside was like a hippie bomb shelter. Every window was covered with aluminum foil and sealed tight with black masking tape, the tens of candles burning throughout every room supplying the only light in the house. Having nowhere else to go, the smoke from the sticks of incense poking out of a bunch of empty Budweiser cans hung in the air like a thick fog, slightly watering one's eyes. “Eleanor Rigby” played from a record player on the floor. Everything was on the floor. An overflowing ashtray, a black telephone, a couple of dirty dishes, several paperback books. The walls were covered with half-finished, wildly surreal murals, each sporting a mad swirl of different designs and bright colours, giving the impression that the artist had either gotten bored, tired, or went insane. The guy, Fred, offered us each a dirty cushion covered in dog hair to sit on and went to get us some beer.

I leaned over to Thomas. “I don't like this. Let's get the speed and go. I don't like this.”

Thomas didn't have a chance to answer. Lyndon ambled into the living room with his doll hanging from his mouth, ready to greet two of his newest fellow pack members. He dropped the thing at Thomas's feet. Sat and wagged his tail.

Careful not to look at me, only the dog, “That beast is fixing to jump me, Buckskin.”

I almost had to laugh. Almost. The girl who came in the room with our beers did.

“Lyndon, you leave those boys alone. They don't want to play with you, they're tired.” She handed each of us a beer and introduced herself.

“If he's bothering you fellas, just give him a smack on the behind and tell him to shoo. I swear, that dog will play with that thing with you until one of you drops dead.”

Fred came into the room carrying a fresh can of Bud and a joint the size of a small cigar on a roach clip. He winked at us.

“Now, don't you be bad-mouthing my little buddy, Nance, I know you're just jealous.” He joined us on the floor, sucked from the joint, and passed it on to his girlfriend. He saw Thomas staring at the dog.

“I don't have to tell you that these are some strange times we're living in, brothers. There are forces at work out there”—he pointed at one of the tin-foiled windows—“that the average man on the street not tuned into the proper channels of consciousness isn't aware of, doesn't even know exist. Those not as cosmically advanced as we are are in danger of being psychic victims of these enemy forces and don't even know it. These are days when a man needs to take care of his family by whatever means necessary.” He leaned over and scratched the dog, who was still intent on getting something going with Thomas, between the ears.

“I call him Lyndon because when I got him I was trying to come up with the meanest name I could think of, the name of the nastiest SOB alive. But then I figured, who was a badder ass than LBJ fire-bombing an entire country and killing all them babies? Of course, strictly speaking, LBJ, he takes his orders from his old lady. It's all scientific, man. See, the female aura, that's what runs the universe. It's a fact, you can read up on it yourself.”

I inhaled and nodded, couldn't help coughing. It was impossible, but I felt instantly, absolutely spaced.

“What is this stuff?” I asked, passing the roach clip to Thomas. He took it without taking his eyes off the dog.

Fred and Nancy looked at each other and smiled.

“It's my own very special brand, man,” Fred said. “I call it Wheelchair Weed.”

“Why do you call it that?”

“Because if you smoke enough of this shit, you're going need a fucking wheelchair, that's why.”

He exchanged another smile with his girlfriend and got up to turn over the record. I told myself I couldn't possibly be as high as I felt and, because I was, stared without embarrassment at Nancy. Her eyes were green and her hair long and blonde, her body thin but girly-curvy. She was also black-soled barefoot just like her boyfriend and wore the hippie chick uniform of the day, a bright tie-dyed skirt that looked like it'd been made out of an old flour sack and a white blouse tied above her belly button, no bra underneath. She took a long pull from the joint. With lips sealed tight to keep in the smoke, she smiled a long smile at me that said her half-exposed breast was all right and that my being mesmerized by it was all right and that everything—everything, everywhere, for all time everything—was forever and ever all right.

Fred sat back down. I thought he'd gotten up to turn over the
record. Instead, he'd put the needle back at the beginning of “Eleanor Rigby.”

Having grown tired waiting for Thomas to make the first move, Lyndon grabbed his baby and flopped it down at Fred's feet. He picked it up, shook it in the dog's face, and the tug-of-war was on. The dog resumed growling through toy-clenching teeth, but with a fiercely wagging friendly tail. Thomas managed to shake himself loose from himself, took a long chug from his beer and set the can down in front of him with a clank.

“You know, it's really fine of y'all to open up your home to us like you've done, but we should start thinking about getting to the club and setting up for tonight. Any chance we could talk some business?”

Fred was standing up on bent knees, see-sawing back and forth with Lyndon. It was hard to tell who was having a better time. “Talk away, brother,” he said.

“Well, I think 150 Desbutols should hold us okay until we get back home. Or maybe 200. Yeah, let's make it 200.”

Now Fred had both hands wrapped around the stuffed baby's plastic head and was swinging Lyndon by the mouth around him in a circle, the dog pumping its legs in the air, trying to get earthbound. “Like to help you boys out,” he said, “but I'm afraid no can do.”

“But Rick said—”

Fred let go of the doll and Lyndon flew halfway across the room, bouncing off one of the walls with a sharp yelp and scrambling to a frantic, clawing stop on the cracked linoleum floor.

“Rick who?” Fred said, standing straight up.

“Rick, you know—Rick,” Thomas said.

“Rick
who
?”

“Rick from Toronto.”

“Rick from Toronto?

“Rick from the Toronto Vagabonds.”

“Rick from the Toronto Vagabonds?”

“Right.”

“Oh, yeah. Rick. Hey, how's old Rick doing these days?”

“Great,” Thomas answered, “he's doing great. But what about the Desbys? I thought—”

Recovered, Lyndon shook his head a couple of times, picked up his baby, and trotted back across the room, ready for one more round. He and Fred picked up where they left off.

“Sorry to say you missed out by about twelve hours, boys. Guy who does some business out at the truckstop bought every one of my uppers last night.”

“What about Bennys?” Thomas asked. “Do you—”

“Desbutols, Bennys, meth—everything, man. Got to keep those big wheels of capitalism rolling, right?” He got down on his knees and began growling in tune with the dog. Thomas took the joint from Nancy and proceeded to smoke the rest of it like a cigarette without offering it to anyone else. “Eleanor Rigby” came to an end and Fred got up and restarted it.

“Hey, don't worry, brother,” he said. “I've got something better than speed. You guys are musicians, right? I've got what all the bands are using now. You just hold on a second.” He disappeared inside one of the candlelit rooms, Lyndon trailing right behind him. Thomas took a last toke and dropped the dead joint into his can of beer. When it hit the bottom it made a soft hiss.

“Thomas?” I said.

He looked up at me as if in slow motion, his eyes beet red, his skin chalky white.

“What are we going to do?” I said.

Thomas licked his lips. I ran my hands through my hair and scratched my scalp and decided that if I heard “Eleanor Rigby” one more time I'd have no choice but to snap the record in two.