Moody Food (29 page)

“MOO”

“Didn't you hear what Paul just said, Thomas? Colin called and will be here any minute.”

“Miss Christine, I believe it's apparent I'm a little too busy right now to be worrying over when Colin is or isn't arriving.”

“Yeah, well, you might change your tune when he finds out you brought a—”

Over the talkback: “Hey, guys. What's all this ‘Colin could be here any minute?' stuff? Since when did I become the big bad wolf?”

Studio door opening, two bare feet padding, door closing.

“MOOOO”

“Where's Christine going? And what's that noise? It sounds like you've got half the L.A. Philharmonic horn section hidden back there.”

Thumpthumpthump thump.

“Oh ... .”

“Goddamn.”

Studio door opening, four more feet running, door closing.

“MOOOOOO”

“That can't be what I think it is.”

“MOOOOOOOO”

“Thomas, tell me what I think just happened out there didn't just happen.”

“MOOOOOOOOOO”

“Thomas!”

“Well, that's news to me, Buckskin.”

“What's that?”

“Thomas!”

“I would have sworn cows liked carrots.”

WHAT A DAY FOR the heat, more than a thousand hippies in the street, Christine Jones included.

But not me. I was blotto in the studio helping put the final vocal touches on “Lenny's Last Waltz #302” with Thomas, Heather, and Paul. And Dew. Because we needed another female voice to round out the mix and she was hanging around as usual and was always glad to pitch in in any way she could and Christine was busy waving around her sign and getting chased by the cops and we really did need another female voice. Really.

The cow in the studio wasn't the straw that broke Colin's back—Thomas was still his boy, the genius goose who was going to lay the country-rock golden egg—but from that point on Colin made sure to have a telltale bell tied firmly around his prize heifer's neck. Even if Thomas usually showed up late and tended to nod off from time to time, Colin made sure he was right there beside him in the studio from noon onward every day helping to mix what he was now officially calling
Dream of Pines
, each of us being brought in to do an overdub here and there as needed.

The original idea for “Lenny's Last Waltz #302” was to get a bunch of winos off skid row to sing “Amazing Grace” at the song's end in their best blitzed-out worst, after I'd finished narrating an old-timey talking country song done up typically Moody Foody
cryptic. The song was about a miserable, obese drunkard—“As mean as cat piss / As wrong as right as rain”—who ran a roadside honky-tonk and terrified everyone in the joint but also, when the place was empty at the end of the night and he was done cleaning up, danced around the bar with his mop for a partner to Patti Page's “Tennessee Waltz” on the jukebox until one morning he was found dead of a heart attack face-first on the dance floor. Before we'd laid down the instrumental cut a couple of days previous, Thomas had explained to us that it was a parable for the delicate indestructibility of that most disastrous of human miracles, the broken heart. Christine asked if he could be a little more specific. Thomas answered that he wished he could, he really did, but no, he could not.

Thomas insisted that I drink as much of a fifth of scotch as I could get down and narrate the tune in my everyday normal voice just like, he said, I was reading a letter to a blind friend. It was critically important, he maintained, that I be good and liquored up while I recited the words, so much so that when I stooped to take my sniffing turn in the washroom before the start of the session Thomas stepped in my way. “Uh uh, no snow for you, Buckskin. Think about what poor old Lenny would think.” We went downstairs and he poured me my first double.

After the line on the bottle went down about halfway and we got a sufficiently slurry but mistake-free take of me reading the ballad of Lenny and his mop, Thomas herded everybody upstairs to the kitchen and kicked back like in the old days with his cowboy boots up on the kitchen table and entertained us all with some honky-tonk numbers from the fifties and we killed the rest of the bottle, Dew included. She was happy to join the party but admitted she wasn't much of a drinker. While Paul called out one more obscure request after another, hoping to stump Thomas, and Heather nursed her drink and looked happy for the first time since
we hit L.A., I volunteered to show Dew how to drink scotch. If watching my old man sip the single Dewars he allowed himself every night after supper didn't make me an expert, the half a bottle or so sloshing around in my stomach did.

She coughed and put her little hand to her rosebud mouth. “You actually like this stuff?” she rasped, but smiling.

“You get used to it,” I said. “Give it a chance.”

“I trust you,” she said, lifting the glass to her lips with both hands, eyes wide and on me while she sipped.

Feeling my crotch tingle slightly, I gulped from my coffee cup full of booze.

Dew set down her glass and picked up the shirt she'd been working on. “It's not finished yet, but be honest.”

“I love it,” I said.

She pressed it against me. “Looks like a good fit to me.”

“It's not for me.”

Faking a little girl pout, “You don't like it,” she said, snatching it back. I wanted to reach out and touch her button nose. I took another swallow instead.

“I do, I do,” I said, “but ...”

“But what?”

Paul poured himself and Thomas another. “‘The Wild Side of Life,'” he said. It was the first time any of us had gotten a glimpse of how our mild-mannered engineer might have ended up in jail.

Thomas picked up his glass, took a sip, smacked his lips. “Imagine that, darlin',” he said, turning to Heather. “A city boy who knows his Hank Thompson.”

Paul, gracious in defeat, clinked Thomas's water glass. Heather leaned over and kissed Thomas on the cheek. Thomas began playing.

“But you've already made me one shirt,” I said. “I can't ask you to—”

“You didn't ask me to do anything,” Dew answered. “I made that first one for you because I wanted to. So you'd feel good on stage. Do you feel good when you wear my shirt?” She put her hand on my thigh and I didn't give a little embarrassed laugh and move my leg or send her a friendly but firm look and take away her hand.

“All right, man,” Paul said, “this is my last chance.” He held the bottle suspended over his empty glass but didn't pour. “‘Just Can't Live That Fast Any More.'”

Thomas squinted into space and strummed his guitar for a few thoughtful seconds; stopped, and adjusted his E string. Still tuning, “You know, Paul,” he said, “you're right, you're absolutely right. Lefty Frizell
was
one fine singer, wasn't he?”

Paul shook his head and poured the last of the scotch into Thomas's glass.

Heather kissed him again.

“He never misses,” she said.

IT'S NOT ALWAYS CALM before the storm. Sometimes the sky roars and the air crackles and the people in the audience stomping their feet and pounding on the tabletops know. Just like you know. Plug your ears and duck and cover all you want, but what's coming is coming, just like it always has. Always will.

Our final show at the Whisky was toe-jammed crammed and sold-out steaming hot. There were rumours Dylan was in town, had heard what we were up to and was intrigued enough to maybe make an appearance. Brian Jones of the Stones and a colourful coterie of acid-head toadies definitely were in attendance, skulking around a large table at the back sipping champagne and ignoring the hippie star-struck. Colin's buddy, the guy who managed the Byrds, was
also out there somewhere, apparently wanting to give us a final going-over before making a decision about us joining his boys on the road. And after the gig we were heading straight for the TV benefit and a possible full band interview with
San Francisco Chronicle
big-shot columnist Ralph Gleason. And we were half an hour late going on stage. Out of boredom or anticipation or both, the audience was making lots of noise to let us know it, too. But we didn't need the crowd. We had Colin.

“Is she done with him now? She's got to be done with him by now. Bill, go see again if she's done with him now.” He had to yell to be heard over the crowd. “I know he's doing this just to piss me off.”

Colin, Slippery, Dew, and I were standing in the corridor that led to the stage. I walked back to the bathroom.

Sometime after we'd left the studio for the gig Colin got a hold of the
Moody Food
tapes. When he finally roused Paul, passed out on the couch upstairs and still drunk, he got the whole story. Confronted with the tapes in our dressing room, Thomas seemed almost pleased. He placed a long staying forefinger on Heather's helpful hand gently dusting his face with a powder puff and turned in his chair toward Colin. Ever since Thomas's unfortunate turn toward the resplendent, Colin had insisted that Heather apply a thin but concealing foundation to his face and the backs of his hands before every show.

“Well, what do you think?” Thomas said, leaning back in his chair.

“I think you've lost your fucking mind.” None of us had ever heard Colin swear before, let alone raise his voice.

Thomas's face sank. Quiet for a second, “If you're worried about the cost of the sessions, I—”

“Fuck the cost of the sessions.
This
shit is why you couldn't be bothered to stay awake while we mixed
Dream of Pines
? Running around behind my back for
this
is the thanks I get for rescuing you
from freezing your ass off in Canada fronting a fucking bar band?” He was only looking at Thomas, knew only he could have been responsible for the music he'd heard. He waved one of the tapes in front of Thomas's nose.

“
This
is why you're so screwed up half the time I have to force you to go and see a doctor?” Colin pulled a bottle of pills from inside his suit jacket adorned, I noticed for the first time, with a shiny new black-and-white DUCKHEAD SECRET SOCIETY button. “Which reminds me,” he said. “Doctor Stevens called me. He said you hadn't picked up your refill yet. I'm sure it just slipped your mind.” He tossed the tape on the counter in front of Thomas as if he were topping off his trash can at home; dropped the bottle of Valium in his lap.

Thomas slowly got up from his chair and just as slowly walked right past Colin. I stuck my head out the door and saw him head for the crowded dance floor.

An hour later I was pounding on the bathroom door at Colin's request for the third time that night.

“One more minute,” Heather called out.

I walked back down the hall.

“Well?” Colin said.

“She says one more minute.”

“What?”

“One more minute!” I shouted.

“One more minute, shit. They've been in there for forty-five minutes. Thomas needs makeup, not a facelift. And why does Thomas still need makeup? I'll tell you why. Because he's not doing what the doctor I sent him to told him to do, that's why. Well, I know one thing. If I was turning orange and green I'd do what the doctor told me to do.”

I sat down backward on a metal folding chair and rat-tatted my sticks against its edge, regretted giving Colin a line of coke. To
counteract the scotch, I'd snorted twice as much as I usually did before a gig and ended up feeling like such a dope pig I offered everybody else in the dressing room some, too. I don't think Colin usually did hard drugs, but was pissed off enough that he didn't hesitate when I cut him a line. Dew, wearing a backstage visitor's pass around her neck, channelled her buzz into massaging my shoulders through the blue satin of my brand new shirt.

“One minute or ten minutes, it don't matter none,” Slippery said to no one in particular. “Can't go on without our bass player.” He took a long drag on his cigarette, pulled aside a thin curtain covering the end of the hallway, and stared out at the crowd.

“I told you, her friend called,” Colin said. “She'll be here.”

The call had come from the police station. We'd spent all day and the early part of the night recording, but everybody in the club was talking about traffic being backed up for miles on the Strip and people overturning cars and the cops cracking skulls and hauling away hippies. Christine had used her one phone call to get a hold of me at the studio, but Paul was with us upstairs finishing off the bottle of scotch and there was no one there to pick up. Emily or Lee ended up calling Colin at Electric to let us know that they and Christine had been busted but not to worry, no one was hurt, and that Christine would be at the Whisky in time for the show. That had been more than an hour ago.

“You tell that to those folks out there,” Slippery said, stamping out his Marlboro. He let the curtain drop.

“Look, traffic is still pretty messed up out on the Strip. She's probably—”

Probably wondering why some groupie had her hands all over her boyfriend, I thought, standing up and breaking free of Dew's magic fingers when I saw Christine and Emily and Lee being hurriedly escorted down the hallway by a security guy. Colin had assured me as soon as he'd finished bawling out Thomas that
Christine was fine, so I was surprised at how relieved I was when I saw her. And how relieved I was that I was so relieved. I hugged her tight and kissed her head and put my mouth to her ear. “Are you all right?” I said.

“What?” She hadn't gotten used to the thunder of the audience yet.

“Are you all right?” I yelled.

She covered her ear and pulled away from me. “It's bad enough I almost got maced today, Bill, don't make me deaf, too.”

I sat back down on the chair. Christine and the other two began jabbering at Colin and Dew and Slippery at the top of their lungs about what had happened, and after a while I ducked into the dressing room and did another line. When I came back out, nobody had noticed I'd been gone. Christine was still talking, but somehow Colin had gotten her bass around her neck. He gave her a big hug and said he wanted to hear more about it later, but that right now we owed it to that audience out there to give them a great show. “People need music at a time like this,” he said.

Christine's two partners in crime nodded reflectively.

“Where's Thomas?” Christine shouted.

From the other end of the hall, “Here he is!” Heather yelled back. “Thomas is right here!”

She led him out of the dressing room by the hand like that scene in the black-and-white Frankenstein movie where the good doctor encourages his creation along in his first clumsy baby steps. Thomas's face was caked thick with what must have been a triple or even quadruple dose of makeup, his head so thoroughly soaked with what looked to be Slippery's entire jar of Vaseline that his long hair glistened like a universe of stars under the florescent lights of the hallway. He sleepwalked to a stop directly in front of Colin.

Slowly, barely above the noise of the crowd, “Hey, boss man,” he said. “No time to jaw. Time to give the people what they want.”

He walked up the steps and right out on stage, the explosion of the audience our only cue to follow. Colin threw up his hands and split for his table out front. Lee and Emily gave Christine good-luck hugs and followed Colin's path, Christine and Slippery right after joining Thomas on stage. I grabbed Heather by the arm.

“He fixed, didn't he?”

She closed her eyes and shook her head.

“He scored some smack, didn't he?”

She kept shaking her head, so I shook her arm harder.

“Didn't he?” I yelled.

She threw her arms around my neck and cried so hard I could feel her entire body convulsing with every sob.

He made her watch him, I thought. That sonofabitch, he made her watch him fix.

“People don't understand him,” Heather managed. She lifted her head off my shoulder. “We understand him, though. You and I are the only ones.”

I felt a tug on my shirt and let go of Heather and turned around. Dew was holding open the curtain that led to the stairs and then the stage.

“It's time, Bill,” she said.

I heard Thomas's voice booming over every speaker in the club, and it was.