Moody Food (36 page)

BY THE TIME CHRISTINE showed up I'd stashed the pistol underneath an overturned empty flowerpot out on the balcony and was relieved when Scotty unpacked his bag and set to work as usual.

“Where is everybody?” she said.

“It'll probably be easier if I just take you there.”

“Let's just wait a minute, okay?” She sat down with her elbows on the table, rested her head in her hands.

“If it's about Montreal, don't sweat it,” I said. “It looks real good for Vancouver. Kelorn's just waiting for a call and then Thomas and Heather are all set.”

She looked up. “Good. That's good. I'm glad. At least something's going right.”

“What is it?” I said.

Ever since I'd stalked her all the way home after the fracas at my place, Christine and I had barely spoken. I didn't even know if we were still officially a We any more.

“It's about Yorkville,” she said. “You wouldn't be interested.”

“Try me.”

She thought about that for a moment.

“Okay,” she said. “So finally Lamport agrees to debase himself and see us and hear what we have to say. About the traffic. About the pollution. About kids living out on the street and getting sick. About the constant police harassment.”

“Great,” I said.

“Yeah, great. And do you know what his response was?”

I shrugged my shoulders.

“That these sounded like pretty good reasons to him for us to leave.”

“Geez.”

“Yeah, geez.”

Just then Scotty gave a little hoot and tossed aside his pen and took to his feet and brought out his violin and proceeded to lay down a poem-ending celebratory tune, a slow waltz.

“Give the fiddler a dram or a dance, you two,” he said.

Christine and I smiled.

“What's it going to be?” I said.

“I don't even know what a dram is.”

“I guess we better dance then.”

And we did.

“Thomas wants us to perform
Moody Food
live before he leaves,” I said.

“People are mad, Bill. When no one hears what you have to say, when no one even tries to hear what you have to say ...”

“I told him he was crazy.”

“People are angry, real angry. It's not good.”

“I'm going to try to talk him of out of it, but you know how he gets.”

“It's not good at all.”

ALL AFTERNOON WE planned Thomas's exodus and waited on the call Kelorn was expecting on the pay phone down the hall that Heather was dispatched to wait beside. And when the phone call finally came and the west coast was officially clear, spent the rest of the afternoon arguing with Thomas once he revealed to not just me but everyone how he was more than happy to skip town, but only after
Moody Food
got its moment in the setting sun.

“Thomas,” Kelorn said, “listen to me, listen to me very carefully one last time. You cannot do this. You simply cannot do this.” She'd started off shocked, moved on to patient frustration, and had now arrived at angry insistence.

All along, Thomas had remained the same. He smiled and reached over and squeezed her hand. “Everything's going to be fine,” he said. “No one's efforts will have been in vain.”

The room was minuscule enough to make Slippery's quarters seem like a suite at the Park Plaza. To top it off, the ceiling was so low we all had to sit on the dirty floor around an upside-down wooden crate that supported the room's only light, a single candle sticking out of one of Slippery's old bourbon bottles. Slippery himself, the phantom doorman of before, squatted on guard, filling the room with eyeball-watering smoke from his Marlboros and sipping from a fresh pint of Old Crow. His own pistol was stuck underneath his belt front and centre, behind the buckle, the same place Thomas wore his.

Kelorn looked at me across the flickering candlelight, but I'd already done my best and she knew it, had given Thomas my word that if he took the ride out of town she'd arranged for him and Heather the next morning, as soon as he got settled in B.C. we'd get the group back together out there and not only perform a live run-through of
Moody Food
but also finish up what needed to be done with the record. That was about an hour and a half before, around the time Christine bailed out to meet some friends at the Riverboat concerning the continuing fallout from the hippies' failed meeting at city hall.

Kelorn stood up, as much as she could, anyway.

“You know how I feel,” she said. “I can't understand why you don't seem to care enough about your own future to do the only sensible thing, but I wish you'd think about the others around you who do.” She cut her eyes Heather's way, but Thomas took Heather's hand and she gave him a big kiss and neither said a word.

Kelorn looked at me again. I lowered my eyes.

“Good luck, Thomas,” she said.

“Thanks for everything, Kelorn,” Heather said, Thomas's hand still in hers.

“Good luck to all of you.”

THOMAS LIT A FRESH candle and we listened to him talk about how the
Moody Food
showcase was going to be structured in terms of song selection and how we could compensate for the bare-bones instrumentation and lack of studio wizardry and what would constitute optimum club conditions and even what colour the backdrop behind us on stage should be. I felt like I was ten years old and sick in bed with the flu in the middle of winter and half-daydreaming, half-hallucinating endless summer days of schoolyard baseball and touch football games and glorious suppers of three hot dogs and two whole bottles of Orange Crush. I fell asleep to the sound of snorting noses and Heather's voice softly yesing Thomas's every sentence, thinking that none of us would ever get out of this room alive.

THE POUNDING of someone's boots racing down the stairs ripped open my eyelids. Heather screaming and Thomas and Slippery whipping out their guns sent me scrambling on my stomach for the closest corner. I didn't have far to go, but before I got there I recognized Christine's voice.

“Everybody's in the street! You've got to see this! The hippies have taken over Yorkville.”

Gun still at his side, “Miss Christine, I do believe I gave you precise instructions on how to gain access to the upstairs entrance.”

“Everybody's in the street,” she said, trying to catch her breath.

“What do you mean everybody's in the street?”

“Come see for yourself. They've shut down the village. You've all got to see this.”

Thomas stuck his pistol back in his belt.

“Let's move, people.”

“PARK IT AROUND BACK. We can load up through the rear door.” I flicked on the turn signal and did what Thomas said.

When a big party a bunch of hippies were holding at a warehouse downtown got raided, everybody headed over to Yorkville and decided that enough was enough and sat down in the street, effectively doing what the politicians wouldn't, stopping any cars from coming into the village. By the time we gathered on the balcony to check things out the avenue was swarming sidewalk to sidewalk with hippies chanting “CLOSE OUR STREET, CLOSE OUR STREET.” There were so many people down there you couldn't see concrete any more.

“It's like a little country,” Heather said.

“That's it,” Thomas said, eyes roving over the crowd. “That's exactly what it is.”

Of course I said no. No. No way. Forget it. Out of the question. Uh uh. I said it, but Christine was the one who walked away and into the street. I drove the hearse over to RCA to get our equipment while Thomas stayed out of sight by lying down in the back and rattling off instructions. Slippery rode up front with me, keeping his one good eye out for the bad guys.

There was some sense to it. Thomas said that if we did as he said, set up our instruments on the roof of our building and dished out
Moody Food
loud and clear to the starving masses, he and Heather would make their getaway in the morning and wasn't that just a fine plan.

“No,” Christine said.

But there was some sense to it. There had to be. Otherwise, why else had I been sprinting between studio and hearse with all of our equipment, piece by piece, Slippery watching my back from the front seat, Thomas shouting out, “Hurry, Buckskin, hurry!”?

At a red light on the return trip to Yorkville I leaned my head back on the seat, could feel my wet hair sticking to the vinyl headrest. An arm loaded down with a fat line of cocaine snaked into my peripheral vision. I shook my head.

“I'm all right,” I said.

“Like hell you are,” the arm answered. “Pick yourself up.” I saw Slippery see it talking to me, too. He looked away.

“No, I'm okay,” I said. “I'll grab a Coke at the studio.”

“Coca-Cola isn't going to make the thirst you've got go away. Here.” The arm slithered closer to my nose.

“No, it's okay.” I could feel the hairs in my nose tentacling toward the white powder.

The arm disappeared and I took a deep breath. And then Thomas's face was beside mine, outstretched arm back again and sticking straight out and still coke-laden, Thomas's pistol hanging from the other hand.

“I don't know what you're thinking or plan on doing, but this is our moment and it will never come again and we're going to embrace it. And a sleepy drummer who loses track of the beat is not something we can allow to happen.”

I put my nose to his flesh and inhaled. The light turned green and I hit the gas.

HEATHER WAS WAITING for us where Thomas had told her to be, and she helped Slippery start to haul everything by foot
through a dark alley to the back door of our studio. We didn't have to worry about the crowd thinning out; by the roar of it, it was even bigger than before. My job was to go into the belly of the beast and pluck out Christine so she could take her bass-playing place alongside the rest of us.

“Let me help carry some of this stuff,” I said. “Even if I could find her, she won't do it.”

“You'll find her. And she'll do it.”

“She won't. I know her.”

The intersection where I'd parked Christopher was deserted; the entire village was on Yorkville Avenue.

“She will,” he said. “She has to.”

I put my hands in my pockets and turned an ear toward the crowd. I'd walk around for a while and then tell him I couldn't find her and that we'd have to make do without her. So our sound would be a little thin on the bottom end. Nothing was going to stop him now.

“All right, we'll meet you on the roof,” I said.

“Have you got your revolver?”

“My what?”

“The pistol I gave you, the pistol.”

“Yeah, I've got it.”

“Let me see it.”

“I better go now.”

“But you've got it?”

“I better go now,” I said.

THROUGH A FOREST of blue jeans the first face I saw when I hit Yorkville Avenue was Christine's. I cursed my good luck and
squeezed my way through the crowd and squatted down beside her.

“Bill, c'mon, sit down,” she shouted above the noise.

She looked happy. I was glad she looked happy.

“There's no room,” I shouted back, taking in the sea of bodies that had swallowed me.

“Sure there is,” she said, wiggling over a few inches on the street to let me in.

“I can't stay, I have to go.”

She stopped moving. “Thomas is still threatening to play?”

“He is going to play. He says if we all help him he'll leave in the morning.”

“If they don't arrest him before then.”

Someone started up a “CARS, NO! PEOPLE, YES!” chant and there wasn't any use talking any more. I stood up, gave her an underhand wave, and pushed my way off the street. I went around back and climbed the stairs and stopped off at our studio, empty but for Scotty at the table working on a poem. He didn't look up. I climbed to the fourth floor and the door that led to the roof.

“Where is she?” Thomas yelled, looking up from adjusting his amplifier. Everything was set up near the edge of the roof, just like a regular show—Thomas's and Christine's mikes near the front, Slippery's steel guitar off to the side, my drums at the back, even Heather in a chair at stage right. My sticks were waiting for me on the snare.

“I couldn't find her,” I shouted, heading for my stool.

“That's a lie,” he said, standing up. “I saw you talking to her.” He walked toward me, the black curly cord from his guitar trailing behind.

“No, I wasn't.”

“Yes, you were. I saw you. What were you two talking about?”

“Christ, don't be so fucking paranoid. All right, so I talked to her. I told you she wouldn't play. This is
her
thing, man, this is her
Moody Food
.” I'd never thought of it that way before, but now that I had it made me feel good to say it. “Let's just play.”

“Without a bass player? Without half our vocals?”

I pounded my snare, then my tom-tom. Slippery took my cue and ran a run on his steel guitar. You could barely hear either of us over the crowd. “Let's go, man,” I yelled.

“Did you use every means possible?” Thomas said.

“What?”

“Did you use every means possible?”

“What are you talking about?” The wind was blowing my hair in my eyes and I brushed it away; was his, too, and he didn't.

“And now because you didn't, I have to.”

“You have to what?” I said.

“Do what I have to do.”

I stood up. “Let it go, man.”

“I'll do what I have to do.”

“I said let it go, man.”

The door to the roof opened and Christine had one boot off and was working on her other as she hopped toward her bass. Heather jumped up and took it off its stand and put it around her neck.

“If we're going to play, let's play,” Christine barked. Turning to Thomas, “And if I see your face in the village tomorrow I'm going to pay the Vagabonds to ship you off to Vancouver COD.”

Thomas strummed his guitar.

“All right,” he screamed, “‘Some Good Destruction,' on four.”

“Ain't we going to warm up first?” Slippery called out.

But Thomas was already counting off.

We played as hard as we could as loud as we could, but no one heard us. Everyone turned up their amps and Thomas and Christine sang at each other eyeball to eyeball so fiercely I saw blue veins in their necks bulge and threaten to burst. But what the wind didn't carry away high above the protesters' heads, the noise
below suffocated like a heavy blanket of December snow. After every song Thomas kept moving us closer and closer to the lip of the roof. But if anybody did manage to hear anything, they probably thought it was just a radio left on playing in one of the cafés or maybe a record player in an apartment someone forgot to turn off in the excitement of getting down to the street.

“Till My Wet Fur Froze” ended the same way it began, with the chanting of the crowd the only thing any of us could really hear.

“Forget it,” I screamed from behind my drums.

“‘Isn't It Pretty to Think So,'” Thomas yelled out. Now we could hear police sirens wailing in the distance.

“It's no use,” I shouted. The wind had picked up. Christine and Slippery and Heather were shielding their eyes and straining to understand what we were saying.

“On four,” he yelled.

Maybe he thought that if he played even closer to the edge, right on the edge, more people might see him and listen harder and hear what he was singing. Or maybe he believed that the nearer he was to the people the louder his voice would be. I crashed my cymbal at the end of the chorus just like he'd taught me to, and when I looked up he was gone. We all dropped our instruments and ran to the edge. I watched Heather scream, but all I could hear were sirens.

 

 

As many dreams as there are reasons none of them ever come true. Everybody's got one and Thomas is no different. It's always the same and it happens a lot.

Thomas's is simple. He has to make a phone call—why, he never finds out, only knows he's got to make the connection—and every time he dials, over and over again all night, something goes wrong. Sometimes it's not the right number. Sometimes his fingers get jammed in the dial. Sometimes he forgets the number entirely. This last is the worst. Who forgets their own phone number? It's like forgetting your name. Who forgets their own name?

When he wakes up, Thomas sits up on his elbows and opens and shuts his eyes a couple of quick times just to make sure he's not still dreaming and swears that next time he'll remember. That next time he'll finally get through.