I told her I’d take the job. Told her thanks.
On my way out the door she called out my name and fluttered the copy of Howl across the room. “An advance against your salary,” she said.
I put the book in my pocket and said thanks again.
“And one more thing, Bill?” she said.
“Yeah?”
“Beatnik girls don’t go to hockey games.”
Days at the bookstore, nights prowling around Yorkville, and my hair grew longer and winter into spring. I’d stare outside at the leaves bursting their buds while upstairs Samantha or Roxanne or Gretchen, the very same girls who wouldn’t have given me a second look across the room in Introduction to Philosophy 101, writhed away under Kelorn’s experienced hands before shuffling downstairs from her top-floor apartment wearing freshly fucked-flushed faces and carrying Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and Norman O. Brown’s Life Against Death, the building blocks of Kelorn’s very own Great Books course.
But I managed to keep up on the rent on my room and shared bath on Huron Street near the university and not fall too far behind on my bank loan, and even when I couldn’t afford to or didn’t feel like getting high, the music around the clubs was usually good and the girls, if unattainable, even more beautiful than the summer before. And the guitars chimed away while we all waited around for what was going to happen next.
When I’d go back home to Etobicoke to visit, my mother would plead with me to cut my hair and my father would read aloud from the pulpit of his easy chair any one of an increasing number of editorials starting to show up in the Toronto Daily Star or Toronto Telegram about “the moral decay of our young” and “the pied pipers of popular music leading our younger generation headfirst into the hazards of political anarchy and sexual promiscuity” and I’d play right along, as if I’d just come back from a six-hour orgy and was way too tired to go into it, couldn’t even be bothered to defend me and all my raging pagan friends.
Truth was, though, never having to go to the barber any more and hearing some good tunes and getting high once in a while aside, when, I wondered, was some of that moral decay going to come my way?
I wasn’t then and am not now what you’d call a big reader. The hundreds of spines I must have cracked over the counter of Making Waves and the book-crammed cases lining the walls of this Tilbury farmhouse were and are liars both, making everybody and even myself sometimes think I just might be someone who knows something about something. But, then as now, I simply like the feel of being close to so much dedicated conviction and craft, surrounded at every turn by walls and walls of clean black type. Maybe because mine was the first generation to get plunked down in front of the TV whenever mum wanted a quick and easy kiddy-break, eyelids begin to hang heavy and attention span flickers before too many pages manage to get turned.
Or maybe I just wasn’t intended to be one of those who know or think or feel too much, my place the place of steady but plain beat-keeping. But sitting here tonight, a lazy yellow lab by the name of Monty sleeping on the kitchen floor at my feet, maybe a mere metronome is not the worst thing a person can be. Because flip the coin of too much and the other side always comes up too little. Always.
But the next best thing to actually knowing what you’re talking about is memorizing a few good lines and trotting them out at just the right moment. Like when Christine came into the store for the first time wanting to buy one of Kelorn’s recently acquired treasures, a Viking first edition of Kerouac’s On the Road.
“You’re telling me you’ve got to ask the owner for permission to sell me this book?” she said.
“I’m saying I can ask her when she gets back if she wants to sell it, but I don’t think she will.”
“Come outside with me for a second,” she said, opening the shop door, tinkling its bell. Seeing me hesitate behind the desk, “C’mon,” she said.
It was only the first week of April and we both had our hands buried in the pockets of our jeans. But the afternoon sun was warm on my face and the air was beginning to smell more and more like a full-out blooming was only waiting for the right moment to spring.
“What does that say up there?” she said, pointing at the sign over the door to the shop.
“Okay, I get your point, but I’ve still got to—”
“No. What does that sign say?”
“Making Waves Bookstore.”
“Exactly,” she said, pulling the pen out of my shirt pocket and scribbling something on a piece of paper she’d taken out of her beaded shoulder bag. “Stores sell things. This is a store. Therefore, the owner will sell me the book. Here’s my number. Get her to call me with a price.”
She stuck the pen back in my pocket, flashed me a peace sign, and departed down Harbord. Wonderfully long, at least my five-foot-ten, and handsome more than merely pretty with a Yorkville-unfashionable stubbly bald head and strong, sharp features and intense brown eyes, I was glad Kelorn wasn’t there.
“Why do you want the Kerouac?” I called out after her.
She turned around.
Hesitating only a moment, “Because,” she said, “the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of—”
“—of everything at the same time,” I took over, finishing Kerouac’s sentence for her, “the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn.”
The girl smiled. Impressed or maybe only amused, I wasn’t sure. But she smiled.
“You give me a call, too,” she said. “I’m playing a gig at the Bohemian Embassy tomorrow night and you can come by my place before if you feel like it and, you know, whatever.”
I said maybe I would, okay, maybe, yeah, and put her number in my pocket and the Kerouac under the counter and made myself a fresh pot of mint tea. I liked the sound of whatever. Whatever, I thought, just might be what I’d been looking for.
And time cannot mist out this. How, from the next day’s first but not last furious fucking, to how Christine, moments after completion of the inaugural act, took a drink of water from a glass on the floor beside her mattress and leaned over as if to post-coital kiss but, instead, patiently passed cool water from her mouth to mine, everything she did in bed—to me, to herself, to us—seemed wholly holy natural, yet, at the same time, shatteringly erotic, every hungry gesticulation body-stirring earthy. And later, after her solo acoustic act between poetry readings at the Bohemian Embassy, all night long all that I didn’t know yet about all the things a man and woman stoked by a little hash and a lot of just-met lust can do to and for one another.
But you’ve flipped through the magazines and seen a late-night cable movie or two, and even if it feels like it at the time, no two people ever invent sex, so no need here to blather on and on about what went where and who wailed what. But to this day, never again like that. Never. Aching muscles, for instance, where I didn’t even know I had any. And coming to work straight from spending the night at her place and within an hour having to go and jerk off in the bathroom because Christine getting herself off with her nimble fingers while straddling me backward all I could see, hear, taste, smell. Et cetera, et cetera, all known positions and speeds.
And it was fun having a girlfriend again. Christine was smart and hip and always knew about all the musicians and authors you were supposed to listen to and read that it usually took Canadian hippies a year after the fact to discover. Because as much as it might not have felt like it, Yorkville was still Toronto, and Toronto was still Canada, the kind of place where it had been a crime ten years before to drink a beer in your own backyard.
Thanks to Christine, though, I was probably the first one in the audience able to sing along with her Fred Neil covers, and I even had my own copy of Last Exit to Brooklyn before Kelorn did. And the fact that Christine played Yorkville so much meant that I had something to do with my evenings, a legitimate reason to sit around all night drinking espressos with a step out the back door at the break for a quick jay
. And that, for a while, for most of that summer, enough.
Then, late one night early in September, after one of Christine’s shows—just before I met Thomas, in fact—after organic banana bread from Yorkville’s combination head shop and munchie mart, the Grab Bag, and after fifteen minutes of fairly predictable lovemaking, Christine shook her head no to our usual post-doing-it doobie, left the bed, and leaned out my small room’s small window that looked directly onto the bricked wall of the house next door.
The stifling heat all the more so for the kiln-sized dimensions of my room, I decided to attribute the lackluster shows Christine, even by her own admission, had been mailing in of late as well as our own recent less-than-banshee-like coupling—even my own heavier than usual toking—to the same sweaty source. Just as soon as this damn heat and humidity lifts... . I sparked up, the joint’s tiny orange end the room’s only light.
“What do you want, Bill?” Christine said, head still hanging out the window. I could just make out the soft white outline of her bare ass and legs softly glowing in the dark, her long back and all the rest of her curving gently upward into the hot black night filling up the room.
“For you to bring that gorgeous body of yours back to bed and smoke some of this fine dope with me.”
“I mean,” she said, as if she hadn’t heard me, “what do you want out of life? What do you really want?”
I inhaled, held, swallowed, breathed out. “In terms of what?” I said.
“In terms of ... I don’t know. Like, where do you think you’ll be twenty years from now?”
“Geez, Chris, I have a hard enough time trying to imagine what I’m going to wear to work tomorrow.”
“Does that bother you?” she said.
“No.”
“Really?”
“I don’t know.”
She came back from the window and sat down on the edge of the bed, took the joint and toked. Her beautiful pear-shaped breasts hung down dipping away from each other left and right, slightly defeated and depressed looking drooping there like two ends of a fleshy frown.
“They say Dylan’s gone electric for good,” she said.
“Yeah.”
“Maybe I should go electric,” she said, passing me back the joint. “What do you think?”
“Well, that depends, I guess.”
“On what.”
“On whether you want to. I mean, do you want to start playing electric guitar with a band?”
She took back the spliff before I’d had a chance to put it to my lips, inhaled deeply and didn’t pass it back. After a while, “I guess that’s the problem, then, isn’t it?” she said.
“What is?”
“I guess I don’t know what I want.”
Naked arm around naked shoulder, I pulled her gently to me, eased us both down on the bed and under the thin white sheet, all the covers the sweltering room would allow.
“Wait until the fall,” I said. “Nobody knows what to do or think in this damn heat.” I crushed out the roach and kissed her on top of her bristly head goodnight.
But it was too hot to sleep lying there so close together so we separated and clung to opposite sides of the bed. And even then neither of us could seem to drop off, even with my little rotating General Electric fan going full blast. So we sparked up another joint and sat cross-legged on the bed with our backs to the cool white plaster wall listening to Dylan’s latest, Highway 61 Revisited.
And Dylan, it seemed, sure had gone electric. That thin, wild mercury sound right through until morning, the September sun blazing back up and creeping down the alley between my house and the next, the light and the heat and the fierce music charging out of the speakers for just a moment almost one.
He woke up with money all around him, nickels, dimes, quarters, and even a few crumpled dollar bills, all of it surrounding him on the warm morning mattress, a few of the smaller coins sticking to his arms, the imprint of their designs only now beginning to fade as he sat up at last, allowing them all to slowly fall away.
Open-stage Saturday nights at The Steer mean Sunday morning hangovers so intense that blinking equals wincing and not all that much you can do about it but gently close your eyes and try not to breathe too hard and lie there silent and still until extreme thirst, hunger, or the need to urinate absolutely necessitates getting up.
But worth it, though.
Easing himself back down on the mattress, rolling over out of the line of direct sunlight pouring through the window, Thomas manages a sliver of a smile.
Oh yes, worth it.
The toughest, shit-kickingist country and western bar in the state of California circa 1965 is the Steer, located in the city of Industry, California. The sign on the highway states that Industry is twenty-four miles east of Hollywood, but it’s actually approximately 100 million miles away. This is Redneck Country. Work, death, and then, the Good Lord willing, heaven.
Sitting by himself at the back of the club drinking his own pitcher of Budweiser with only his guitar on the chair next to him for company, Thomas Graham waits for his turn at the microphone. Thomas Graham in blue satin bell-bottoms, white rattlesnake-skin cowboy boots, and a genuine Nudie jacket from Nudie’s Rodeo Tailors decorated with hand-sewn sequins in the shape of acid cubes, a woman’s ripe bosom, a green marijuana leaf climbing up each arm, and a flaming red cross emblazoned across the back.
Finally, after the guy in the wheelchair singing “I Walk the Line” and the trio of grandmothers doing an a cappella version of “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town,” the bored MC in the white Stetson chewing away at his Redman with a clipboard in one hand and the mike in the other announces, “Okay, next up, Thomas Graham. Are you out there, Thomas?”
The long walk from the back of the bar to centre stage gets the hooting and wolf-whistling and calls to “Get a haircut!” started. By the time he’s settled himself on the wooden stool and tuned his instrument and adjusted the microphone, it’s hard to hear the guitar introduction to his first song over the noise from the crowd.
Not waiting for the audience to quiet down, Thomas sings the opening verse, then another, then goes into the chorus, but with about as much luck at being heard as before. A couple of people think they might actually recognize the song this faggy long-haired hippie is playing, though, and slow down their ruckus long enough to place what it is.
It’s all the opening Thomas needs.
One or two, or maybe even a few, actually begin to really hear him now, but most quit their cackling and hollering just to identify “More and More,” the Webb Pierce song barely audible just below the clamour of the crowd. Webb is pure Nashville, one of the big boys, a fat white guy in a crewcut with eight Cadillacs and a guitar-shaped swimming pool. At least this Graham guy knows enough to know a good song.
But before the next number is even halfway over, no more hooting or hollering and all eyes and ears aimed at Thomas singing a Hank Williams song and letting everyone in the universe know he’s so lonesome he could cry. And he could, too, any fool could hear that. Just listen to that boy sing.
Like a back rub on the brain.
Like drinking velvet out of a glass.
Like hearing God hum.
Thomas finishes up with a recent Bob Dylan tune, “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” a mile-a-minute bluesy thing with slightly surreal sputtered lyrics that no one in this dark, smelly bar would have ever thought they’d be nodding their heads along to even if you had sworn to them on their momma’s tattered black Bible they would be twenty-five minutes before. And then a gentlemanly, “Thank you, everyone, for listening, and good-night,” and Thomas slinks across the beer-puddled floor back to his table by the washrooms.
Before he can refill his glass from what’s left of his warm pitcher of beer, darkness at the edge of his table in the form of three very large men in overalls and scuffed, steel-toed workboots. The Trimar he’d gobbled down an hour before he’d arrived at the club is really starting to kick in now, and Thomas wonders wh
ether he’s seeing triple. Animal tranquilizers, after all, have been known to do so such things.
The one Thomas thinks is in the middle leans his baseball mitt–sized hands (car grease under every nail) on the edge of the table and slowly zooms his hairy face in close.
“Me and my buddies here, we were gonna take you out back and kick your ass,” he says. “But you sing real nice so we wanna buy you a beer instead.”
A white reptile-skinned cowboy boot scrapes a chair away from the table.
“Only if you boys will do me the honour,” Thomas says, making room so his three new friends can sit right down.
3.
“I MEAN, I’M UP there trying to be cool about it, but it’s my show, right? You’ve seen my set a hundred times, Bill, you know I always take requests and try to encourage everybody to get involved. But this guy just wouldn’t stop. I mean, at the end of every song he’s, like, ‘Merle Haggard! Wanda Jackson! Jimmie Rodgers!’”
I’d had to miss Christine’s Tuesday night gig at the Riverboat because of inventory at Making Waves—believe me, taking inventory at a bookstore that rarely ever sells a book is no eight-hour day—and we’d made plans to rendezvous at my place after the show. Christine was striding up and down the length of my tiny room.
“And then, just when I thought I’d caught a break after he got up and split after the first set and I’m just starting back up again, just getting into ‘I Ain’t Marching Any More,’ the front door bursts open and here he comes again. But this time he’s not alone, this time he’s got three of those go-go dancing bimbos from the Mynah Bird with him. And of course he somehow manages to get them all settled in at the same table he had before, right in front.”
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