Moody Food (9 page)

IT WASN'T CHRISTMAS any more, just 1966 and January and cold, the piney corpses of December 25 dumped out on every freezing curb. But in spite of the snow on all the rooftops and the slush in the streets and the razor-blade winds, everybody was back and the village was its shimmy-shaking old self again, a familiar feeling of Yorkville-imminent anticipation bubbling in the pit my stomach just like it did every time I came back.

Within three hours of my return to town I'd had a big greasy breakfast by myself at Webster's, bought the newest Byrds album,
Turn! Turn! Turn!
at Record World with a pocket full of Christmas money I was determined to get rid of as quickly as possible, dropped by next door at Mont Blanc and scored a nickel bag of weed and played a game of chess with one of the waitresses, worked my way down Yorkville Avenue and stopped in for a cup of coffee and hellos at the Purple Onion, Jacques' Place, and the Mynah Bird, and, finally, when I couldn't wait any longer, dropped a dime in a payphone and dialed Thomas's number.

“Hello?”

“Thomas!”

“Buckskin!”

“Hey.”

“Hey, yourself. Let's get together, buddy, let's get this show of ours on the road. These fingers of mine are practically falling off from uselessness. Meet you at the studio in an hour?”

“I'm here, I'm in the village.”

“Even better. See you in ten?”

“Christine called me this morning at my parents. Her train gets in at five. I'm supposed to meet her at her place.”

“So leave her a note and tell her where we'll be.”

“I'll see you soon.”

“Looking forward to it, Buckskin.”

And so was I. Right up through when I'd slapped a hurriedly scribbled see-you-at-the-rehearsal-space-love-Bill note onto Christine's door and rushed right over, icy breath like idling-car emission as I jogged the entire way. Right up until I literally had my key in the studio door.

Maybe it was the buzz of being back in the village. Maybe it was the three quick coffees. But hearing Thomas tuning up inside, the all-of-a-sudden roller-coaster ride in my stomach told my head that something wasn't right. But I'd already turned the key in the lock, and the old warped, wooden door slowly opened up on its own power.

“Buckskin,” Thomas said, looking up from his guitar, “good to see you again, brother. And, hey, I was thinking, this is great, this works out just fine. Finally we can get a bass in the hands of that woman of yours while we're all in the same room together. It looks like we're actually going to get the Duckhead Secret Society off the ground after all.”

Now I remembered.

 

Thomas and I shook hands and stepped out onto the icy balcony and I rolled us a joint and we got caught up. I tried to pay attention, but had a few other things on my mind.

Like never having so much as even hinted to Christine how I'd had the gall to commit her to being a bass-playing backup singer in the service of Interstellar North American Music. Like having fed Thomas a steady diet of outright lies for several weeks about Christine's bass-playing progress and her own excitement over getting down to the serious work of giving the world the jump-start to the spirit it needed. Like wondering whether hopping over the balcony and into the street might be a more effective getaway than simply running out the front door when Thomas or Christine or anybody other than stone-deaf
Scotty demanded an on-the-spot demonstration of my drumming abilities.

A half an hour later Christine showed up with a long, deep kiss for me for a greeting and I rolled us another fat one and we all got caught up all over again. The weed was good; I was almost persuaded by its wonderful reason-wrecking effect that everything was going to work out wonderfully and not to worry so much because everything was going to work out just fine and not to worry so much because everything was going to work out wonderfully and ... Then Thomas sucked a last toke from the joint and flicked the fluttering roach three storeys down onto Yorkville Avenue.

“You two about ready?” he said.

Christine returned Thomas's big smile and then some with her stoned own. “I'm already spaced, you guys go ahead. Besides, it's freezing out here.” On her way back inside she pulled me close by the front of my jacket and gave me another long kiss, this time with enough tongue that it felt as if she was looking for something she'd lost in there. She closed the rickety French doors behind her as tight as she could to the cold and near darkness, although it was only a little after six o'clock.

Thomas put a bare hand on my shoulder. He never wore gloves, no matter how cold it got. “It's time, Buckskin,” he said.

I tried to smile his smile back, but he could see it was only a try, not the easy real thing. He placed his other hand on my other shoulder and moved his face closer to mine.

“No BS, buddy,” he said. “Straight up, now, no humming or hawing, right on down the line. What's troubling you?”

I didn't know what else to say, so I told him the truth. When I was all done, had nothing else to apologize for, he dropped his arms to his sides and smiled.

How can he just smile? I thought. What the hell was there to
possibly smile about? Always a tight fit out on the balcony, Thomas was facing the studio, me the street, and I watched an enormous plough push a small mountain of dirty snow up onto the curb. I knew we were opposed to traffic in the village, but were we for or against snowploughs? I didn't know. Christine would have.

“You worry too much, Buckskin. You leave the worrying to me.”

“But Christine isn't going to play with us, she just isn't. Although why it has to be her and why we can't get someone else who—”

He raised his hand for me to stop. “Miss Christine is essential. This is how it has to be.”

He peeked over my shoulder. The harsh fluorescent light inside the studio bathed his face in spite of itself almost tender, a false moonlight soft. He put an arm around my shoulder, turned me around, and creaked open the French doors.

Sitting beside Scotty at the card table, Christine welcomed me inside with crossed arms and a look of feigned amusement. The two girls on the other side of the room giggled away like toe-tickled five-year-olds and were clearly seriously baked, not to mention unseasonably miniskirted with knee-high brown suede boots and matching belly button–cropped black turtlenecks so tight to their long skinny bodies you could almost see ribs poking through the thin, dark cotton. One of them was sloppily playing around with the bass while the other unsuccessfully tried to stop her hiccuping with three fingers to her lips.

“You didn't mention in the note you left me that I was supposed to bring a date tonight, Bill,” Christine said.

I frowned and looked to Thomas for an explanation, but he was busy showing the taller girl some chord changes on the bass.

“You know as much about this as I do,” I said, sitting down at the table.

“Oh, well, in that case, let me fill you in, then,” she said. “Jupiter—that's Jupiter right over there in the black miniskirt, you might have noticed her already—she's one of the go-go dancers from the Mynah Bird I was telling you about that were with Thomas the night I met him at the Riverboat, remember? Well, Jupiter is now not only a go-go dancer, she's also the bass player in your band. In fact, considering that you two are going to be working together pretty closely over the next several months, it might be a good idea for you to go over there and get acquainted.”

“Chris—”

“No, really, the bass and drums are the backbone of any successful group, anybody can tell you that. And I bet you two are going to make one tight little rhythm section.”

“Chris—”

“Really, you should at least say hello. Jupiter,” she called out, voice all high-pitched ten-year-old false girlie, “oh, Jupiter, sweetheart, this is Bill. Bill, Jupiter.”

Jupiter slowly raised her eyes from the psychedelic miracle of all these really far-out sounds floating up from her fingertips and tried to focus. Eventually finding me in her sightlines, “Bill,” she said, her voice a 45 record playing at 33
. “Heeeyyy Biillll.”

Christine turned to me in her chair and smiled. When Scotty joined in on the grinning grilling, I'd had enough.

“Thomas,” I said, standing up, “we need to talk.”

“Just a second, Buckskin. I think Jupiter here's almost got a handle on ‘Tiger by the Tail.'”

“
Now
, Thomas. Outside.” I didn't wait around to hear his answer, went out on the balcony and waited. Before I had time to roll the doobie I was telling myself I shouldn't, he was standing there beside me.

“What is this shit?” I said.

Hurt, offended, confused; he managed to convey all three.

“Buckskin, I don't—”

“Oh, fuck that, man.”

Just like I never used the word
God
unless I was almost on the point of cumming, I reserved the word
man
for when I was righteously pissed off.

“I know what you're trying to do,” I said. “And not only is it not going to work, it's screwing with my woman's head, which means that it's screwing with mine. If you think strapping a bass guitar onto some stoned chick—”

“You mean Jupiter?”

“Yeah, Thomas, I mean Jupiter. If you think you can make my girlfriend jealous enough to do what you want her to do and get her to join your fucking band then you're deluded.”

“Buckskin ...”

“Don't Buckskin me, man. And not only that, but how dare you try to come between Christine and me? There are certain things you don't fuck around with, certain things—”

Three quick raps on the glass balcony door spun us both around. The other miniskirted girl opened up the door far enough to be heard over the wind.

“Thomas, Jupiter's crying,” she said. “That other girl, she ... Jupiter's crying, Thomas.”

And, sure enough, Jupiter
was
crying—more like shrieking, actually—as well as being slumped over the card table. She stopped sobbing long enough to look up at Thomas and me—a rainbow of dark makeup running down her face—and then began bawling all over again, burying those lovely cheekbones and lips in her folded arms on the table. Scotty stuffed his papers into his sack and grabbed his violin case.

“Peace and love, my ass,” he said.

He slammed the door shut behind him and was soon followed by the still-weeping and unsteady Jupiter, aided by her friend. Near the door Jupiter once again stopped crying and looked at Thomas. Thomas gave her the biggest grin I'd seen him deliver yet, and at this she ran out of the room howling. Her friend hesitated on the doorstep like she wanted to say something, but the sound of Jupiter clickety-clacketying down the stairs sent her running after her.

“What did you give that girl?” I said.

“Nothing I haven't taken twenty times myself,” Thomas answered.

“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.