Moody Food
Page 1
PRAISE FOR MOODY FOOD
“Clever, word-drunk, and falling-down funny ... Robertson is a moral writer and a bitingly intelligent one, a man who writes with penetrating insight of what needs to be written about: beauty, truth and goodness.”
—The Globe and Mail
“Introducing Ray Robertson to American readers is long overdue. One of Canada’s finest younger novelists, there is no better Robertson novel to start with than Moody Food, a textured, evocative tale of life, love, music, and inebriation in the late 1960s. Infused by the legend of Gram Parsons (here fictionalized as a draft-dodging American musician named Thomas Graham), Moody Food charts the grand schemes and off-kilter dreams of the Woodstock Nation’s northern enclave in Toronto’s hippie ghetto of Yorkville. If we thought America owned the counter-culture, Moody Food tells us otherwise, and does so with a wise eye on the beautiful and absurd in all of us. This is a funny, generous, touching novel by a writer of genuine gifts.”
—Richard Currey (author of Fatal Light, Lost Highway)
“ ... his characters are as engaging as they are vivid. The spell of his barroom yarn never lets up ... Burning question: Will Ray Robertson and his book make the cover of Rolling Stone?”
—Montreal Gazette
“Riotous and tender, funny and sad, Moody Food is as good an elegy for the counterculture as we’ve seen. The question, ‘What if someone were to write a 60’s rock novel worthy of its subject’ need no longer be asked.
—Books in Canada
“A giant jukebox of a book, Moody Food is the moveable feast of that Found Generation which evolved into the mythic Hippie Nations. Canadian wunderkind Ray Robertson has written a syncopated celebration packed with pure peddle-steel sex and fiddle-assaults on the soul, with moans, weeps, and rainy day Delta blues that make a broken heart seem like an attractive option. Mr. Robertson is the Jerry Lee Lewis of North American Letters and he makes writing a book seem like ringing a bell.”
--Chuck Kinder (author of Honeymooners and The Last Mountain Dancer)
“Moody Food has the vibrancy of The Sun Also Rises, but instead of Pamplona, we have Toronto’s Yorkville in the 1960’s. It’s a tale of idealism gone awry, of dreams going off the rails, of life catching up with those who live it at too rapid a pace. Robertson’s ability to catch the mood of the times is uncanny. Moody Food simply bursts with the life of the street.”
—London Free Press
“Ray Robertson is one of Canada’s finest novelists.”
—Ottawa Express
“Among the most talented of a younger flight of Canadian novelists.”
—Owen Sound Sun Times
“There is much to admire in Moody Food. The novel is filled with a keen wit and emotional robustness, coloured with a gradually building sense of dread (and inevitability, for those familiar with Gram Parsons’ story). While Robertson is obviously working within the parameters of the Parsons mythos, he is not bound by it, and he fills in the broad outlines with a richness of detail and originality that is staggeringly impressive. What elevates Moody Food from the merely good, however, is Robertson’s skill at writing about the music. Robertson doesn’t merely describe the music from outside. Instead, he enters fully into the flow of the songs, recreating them for the reader with an often heartbreaking clarity and a seeming effortlessness that belies his incredible skill. There are moments in Moody Food that are, quite literally, breathtaking. It’s an amazing reading experience, and one which you owe it to yourself to explore.”
—Green Man Review
“Robertson writes sentences that require response, syntactic celebrations that rattle in your brain, long after reading them ... a style and sense of humour reminiscent of word-drunk authors like Barry Hannah, Thomas McGuane and Leon Rooke.”
—Quarter After Eight (Ohio University)
“Robertson is among the most ambitious Canadian novelists—and one of the few not working from a middle-class agenda.”
—Vancouver Sun
A Best Book Selection of the Globe and Mail and the Vancouver Sun.
Copyright © Ray Robertson 2002
Santa Fe Writers Project Edition 2006
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system without the prior written consent of the publisher—or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a license from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.
Santa Fe Writers Project, SFWP and colophon are trademarks.
National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Robertson, Ray
Moody food / Ray Robertson.
I. Title
PS8585.O3219MM66 2003 C813’.54 C2002-904259-3
PS9199.3.R5319M66 2003
Cover design: Bill Douglas at The Bang
Printed and bound in Canada
Published in the United States by
Santa Fe Writers Project
SFWP ISBN: 097767990X
Visit SFWP’s website: www.sfwp.com and literary journal: www.sfwp.org
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Table of Contents
PRAISE FOR MOODY FOOD
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Dedication
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Acknowledgements
About the Author
Mara Mara Mara
HOT BURRITO #1
Give me some music; music, moody food
Of us that trade in love.
—antony and cleopatra
one
Chicken-legged Thomas Graham, all white flesh and thirteen years old, in the huddle, on one knee, giving out the signals, in charge.
Mid-signal call, Thomas puts his mouth to the earhole of the helmet next to him, helmet belonging to Gary “Fat Man” Jones, Thomas’s best friend and sure-handed fullback. Whispers:
“Hear that? Hear the cheerleaders?”
“Jesus, Thomas, everybody’s looking, finish calling the play.”
“Listen. That’s three-part harmony. They’re doing three-part harmony.”
“Thomas—”
“Forget the words, don’t even listen to the words. Just listen to the harmony. Just listen to the music.”
“Hey, Graham, what’s the fucking play?”
“Thomas ...”
“Uh, right ... 48 flanker split left, halfback off tackle right.”
“On what, asshole?”
“Two. On two.”
“Break.”
And on two the halfback plunges left just like he’s supposed to behind a tackle blowing spit and exploding left and a pulling guard chomping down hard on his mouthpiece pulling hard left just like he’s supposed to do too. Doesn’t much matter, though. The quarterback forgot to give the halfback the ball.
And Thomas Graham, football tucked underneath his arm, runs the other way, runs alone right, runs for his life, runs right into a wall of half of Jackson Central High’s opposition that afternoon, the All-Mississippi high-school runners-up of the year before, the Oxford Panthers.
Hit high, hit low, hit hard, loudly hit, the ball pops loose at first point of pounding contact and sputters uselessly out of bounds, Thomas’s collarbone snapping in two in the process as easy as someone keeping time to a catchy tune snapping happy his fingers.
On his back, arms and legs splayed, the bars of his helmet stuffed full of home-field turf and with a mouth full of blood and broken teeth like Chicklets floating in warm red syrup: “Oh, that’s pretty,” Thomas says, the cheerleaders on the sideline hitting all the high notes now, really cheering their boys on.
“That is just so pretty,” he says.
1.
I MET THOMAS GRAHAM in a bank. He was withdrawing, I was depositing.
Fall hadn’t managed to elbow out of its way yet all the humidity and baking haze of September lingering summer, but I’d decided to brave heatstroke anyway and broken out my buckskin jacket and slid into the friendly snug of my favourite pair of Levis. Impossible, I’ve always maintained, to be the best you can be when you’re not wearing pants. Maybe this is northern prejudice, or maybe I’m just unnaturally sensitive about my legs. Anyway, there I was in my jacket and jeans.
And there was Thomas. In white cowboy boots and a red silk shirt with a little silver cross peeking out underneath, all topped off with a white jacket covered with a green sequined pot plant, a couple of sparkling acid cubes, and a pair of woman’s breasts. The jacket glowed, I swear, and I’d had nothing stronger that morning than a cup of coffee. He was also the only other guy in the bank in blue jeans and with hair hanging down past his collar.
They’d given him some kind of form to get started on while he waited in line, and he was squinting and grinning at the thing like it was written in a language he couldn’t quite understand but for some reason was getting quite a kick out of anyway. Probably high, I thought. He looked up at me from the piece of paper and blew a few brown strands of hair out of his eyes.
“Now that, sir, is one fine article of clothing,” he said, lifting a long thin finger, pointing at my fringed jacket.
It took me a second to recover from the jolt of his southern accent. “There’s a place over near Kensington Market,” I said. “Good stuff. Cheap, too.”
“Much obliged,” he said. Using the pen he’d been given by the bank, he scribbled down what I’d just told him on the back of his hand. Information recorded, “Thomas Graham,” he said, offering his hand.
“Bill Hansen.”
“Pleased to meet you, Bill.”
A blue-haired teller signalled that it was Thomas’s turn at the counter. Thomas gave me a wink and loped right up. “Afternoon, ma’am,” he said.
Later, after counting out my $23.50 monthy loan payment and signing my receipt, I noticed Thomas with the teller and some obviously important higher-up at the bank—he had to be important: he was balding and wearing an expensive suit—joking and laughing like old friends. At one point the man in the suit actually clasped Thomas by the shoulder to give him a paternal squeeze. My own teller sourly tore off her part of the carbon receipt and didn’t thank me for being part of the Royal Bank family.
I had to walk right past him to escape the bank’s partitioned maze, and Thomas turned away from the two behind the counter and put a hand on my arm. “Hey, Buckskin Bill,” he said, “Uncle Owsley says thanks for the tip.” He stuck out his hand. “See you around?”
“Sure,” I said.
I smiled, shook his hand, and didn’t open my fist until I was well down Avenue Road.
When I did: two tabs of Owsley acid. Everyone who prided himself on being in the know knew about Owsley Stanley, the mad chemist of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury. But here I was actually holding a couple of his legendary powder kegs.
Won’t Christine be blown away? I thought. And wait until I tell her about the guy who gave them to me.
2.
OKAY, JUST A LITTLE background music: Toronto, 1965 in particular.
For anyone starting to let his hair grow long and wanting to hear some good music and maybe even check out some of that free-love action you’d read about going down in places like California, that would basically mean Yorkville, just north of Bloor Street. No more than three blocks in all, Yorkville was our very own city within a city, every street, alley, and low-rent hippie-converted building bursting with the sounds of loud music and the sweet smell of incense and overflowing with like-minded friendly, freaky faces. There was the Inn on the Parking Lot, the Riverboat, the Mynah Bird, the Penny Farthing—coffee shops and folk clubs, basically—where you could listen to Joni Mitchell and Ian and Sylvia and a million others no one has ever heard of since. Everyone drank lots of coffee and smoked plenty of cigarettes and you could play chess outside if the weather was nice and there was pot if you wanted it and all the girls, it seemed, were eighteen years old and tall and thin with the kindest eyes and long dark hair and none of them wore bras even if there really wasn’t all that much love going on, free or otherwise.
But maybe that was just me. As a University of Toronto second-year dropout of no fixed major working part-time at a second-hand bookstore with no guitar-strumming ability of my own, I wasn’t on anybody’s love-to-love-you-baby list. At least not until Christine showed up one day at Making Waves.
The Making Waves Bookstore wasn’t much more than the entire first floor of a paint-peeling Victorian house near the corner of Brunswick and Harbord crammed to the walls with the owner, Kelorn Simpson’s, own book collection, most of it accumulated over twenty years of academic gypsydom. Kelorn was a fiftysomething psychedelicized Ph.D. in English literature with a framed degree from Oxford and dual portraits of Virginia Woolf and Timothy Leary hanging over the front counter to prove it. She was also near-messianic in her need to educate, physically and otherwise, the young female undergraduates who would drift into the bookstore from the university just a few blocks away, as well as reluctant as hell to sell any of her books. Which is how I started working for her in
the first place.
After she saw how disappointed I was when she barely even looked at the cardboard box I brought by full of an entire semester’s worth of practically new books, and then how pissed off I became when she wouldn’t sell me her City Lights Pocket Book copy of Howl (a cute girl in black leotards with jet-black hair and no makeup in my Modern American Poetry class told me to read it when I’d asked her out to a Varsity Blues hockey game; she also declined my invitation to the hockey game), Kelorn made me take off my coat and gloves, poured me a cup of mint tea, asked why I needed money so badly that I wanted to sell all my books, and why I wanted to read Allen Ginsberg.
After I told her about the cute girl with the jet-black hair and how I’d dropped out of U of T a few months before and how the bank was calling in my loan and how I’d have to move back in with my parents in Etobicoke soon if I didn’t get a job, Kelorn asked me if I wanted to work at the bookstore.
“Doing what?” I asked.
“Nothing.”
“You want to pay me to do nothing.”
“Practically nothing,” she said. “Open and close up when I’m busy. Brew a pot of tea now and then. Help out the customers.”
“But you don’t sell anything. How am I supposed to help out the customers?”
Kelorn set down her cup of tea on the counter. “You’re not buying anything and I’m offering to help you, aren’t I?”
“So when people come in you want me to offer them jobs working here?”
Leaning a heavy arm on the countertop, the massive collection of beads, religious medallions, and junk jewellery hanging around her neck set swinging and crashing against each other as she shifted her weight, “I thought you said you needed a job,” she said. At an even six feet and with a figure that now—thirty years on and my own 28-inch waist as much a memory as my 8-track collection—can be charitably called Rubenesque, Kelorn, I came to find out, had a way of stopping the talking when there just wasn’t anything worth left to say.