His voice trailed off and he wrapped his hand tight around his cup, squeezed it hard like he wanted to make sure it was really there. “What we really need is more give. Because love, that’s hard. That’s real hard.”
Sometimes it was like this. Sometimes this was all there was, all he could see, hear, think, breathe; every nerve end in his body encoded right down to the bone with it, every cell inside stuffed straight through until it felt like it was all he’d ever been, would be. Drink smoke snort shoot swallow and still, there it is. Play guitar and sing every song you know until your fingers bleed at the tips and it hurts your throat to swallow and at the end of it, staring right back at you, there it is.
The screen door slams shut with a hard, wood-to-wood summer whack and Becky screams across the lawn and through the small forest of trees everyone has always called Dream of Pines, “Thomas, come here now, Thomas, please, come here now!”
Thomas knows the only thing his sister hates more than being around him and all his dumb twelve-year-old friends is asking her little brother for anything, so he drops the football and tells his friends to go home and tears off toward the house. The Grahams have the biggest lawn in Jackson—it takes two coloured men all day to cut every green inch—but Thomas is up on the front porch before his sister has to call out a second time.
Panting, dry-mouthed, “What?” he says.
Graham family flesh clamped tight to Graham family flesh, her little brother’s hand in hers seems to calm Becky, to give her resolve. “Let’s go and see Momma,” she says.
Their father, as usual, is away on business in Memphis. Selma, the elderly Negro woman who’d served as nanny for both Becky and Thomas, is at her sister’s house in town. It’s only a little after three on a cloudless July afternoon, but Selma has drawn all the curtains just like Mrs. Graham asks her to do whenever Mr. Graham isn’t at home to shout, “Open up those goddamn windows, Selma, and let some fresh air and light into this godforsaken tomb!” and the entire antebellum house is foggy with dark except for here and there the yellow glow of a floor lamp and an occasional slice of dusty sunlight somehow managing to sneak in past the heavy drapes.
Thomas and his sister slowly climb the twisting stairs to the third floor. At the end of the dark hallway, at the closed door of his mother’s room, Thomas pulls back, hesitates. But his sister, saying nothing, but with tears in her eyes, turns the crystal door handle and tugs him hard inside.
Blink (eyes adjusting to the unlit room), and inside no different than it ever is. A gallery of framed ghost photographs of long-gone Gibsons, Thomas’s mother’s people. The well-stocked liquor cabinet on wheels parked in the corner. His mother’s leather-bound Bible on top of the bureau beside two brass buttons, a single piece of green silk, and her ever-present silver comb. Her bedside pharmacy, pills and capsules every colour of the rainbow. And, of course, Thomas’s mother herself, lovely pale lovely Mrs. Caroline Graham. Almost fifteen years to the day of her coming-out party and still any debutante’s dream with her small slim feet, light summer dress of crimson, and all that combed-a-hundred-times-a-night brown hair splashed all over the pillow under her gently resting head.
Blink again (eyes seeing everything now), and not the smell of gin or freshly cut lilacs (all so ordinary, all so familiar) but something else, something different, something ...
See: An empty pill bottle on the bedspread and the discarded white cap and piece of cotton beside it.
See: A creeping black stain soaking through the blanket and red dress below the folded white hands.
See: A blood-smudged razor blade lying by itself on the wooden floor.
See blink stare blink scream and break free of sister Becky’s hand and through the doorway and down the stairs and out the front door and back outside again toward Dream of Pines and into the bright light of saving daylight and run run run, Thomas, run until the green green grass of home is gone daddy gone. You run, Thomas. You keep on running, boy.
6.
KELORN AND I USUALLY took turns picking what got played on the record player at Making Waves. The fake-walnut and permanently smudged turntable and speakers she’d lugged into the store one day from a yard sale a few doors down weren’t that much of an improvement on the Sears and Roebuck system I’d received for my thirteenth birthday, but even if through no fault of his own Dylan sounded even more pinched-nosed nasal than he normally did you were usually able to make out most of the words and could always hum along. And no matter what, music swallowed up an afternoon’s unwanted hours better than any double-talking philosopher blathering on and on about the non-existence of time ever could.
Even if I wasn’t a player like Christine or Thomas, I’d Jailhouse Rocked as a hormone-hopping teenybopper, found out from the Weavers which side of the class struggle I was on as a properly alienated high-schooler, and even heard it all brought back home by the Byrds doing sagacious Dylan when they’d sent everyone onto the dance floor to the toe-tapping sounds of the chimes of freedom flashing. Music meant something.
But, Kelorn was beginning to wonder, what exactly was the meaning of this Hank Williams character I’d started playing nonstop at the shop?
Democracy really is such a nice idea, especially the brand of breezy affairs that Kelorn insisted govern Making Waves. Although she owned the store and I was clearly her employee and she my boss, deepest hippie equality technically ruled the day. So we split up the number of hours to be put in at the shop, divided down the middle the work that had to get done, and even divvied up the amount of time each was allowed on the hi-fi.
But there comes a time in every progressive theory of human affairs when the one who signs the cheques can only hear “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” spun so many times before the plug gets pulled and it’s back to the boss’s Fugs and Joan Baez records with a little Mozart thrown in when she happens to be laying somebody new and feeling a little lovey. That day came for us when I’d returned to work from meeting Christine at Café El Patio for a macrobiotic lunch and Kelorn had apparently forgotten about my scheduled all-day Friday allotment of playing time. Ian and Sylvia pleading in their “Song for Canada” for all us True North types to try to get along meant that Hank wasn’t asking “Why Don’t You Love Me Like You Used to Do?”
“Dearest Christine,” Kelorn said, tinkling doorbell lifting her head from Spengler’s mammoth Decline of the West. “And what did my favourite employee treat you to today?”
Hug hug, kiss kiss, all in the appropriate lip-to-cheek European fashion I’d never learned to feel all that comfortable with. Christine and Kelorn had hit it off as soon as I’d introduced them. I knew everything was going to be fine when Kelorn sold Christine the copy of Kerouac’s On the Road she’d wanted.
“Hey, what’s the deal?” I said, heading right for the hi-fi.
“Your only employee gave me another lecture I didn’t ask to hear,” Christine said. “This time on the difference between—let me get this straight—the Bakersfield Sound and the Nashville Sound.”
“My goodness,” Kelorn said, shutting her book and resting her hands on top. “And I didn’t even know there was any.”
Hank’s “Six More Miles to the Graveyard” restored to its rightful place on the record player, “You two can kid around all you want,” I said, “but if it wasn’t for people like Buck Owens keeping the Fender Telecaster and that freight train sound alive you can bet that Nashville and all those bastards like Owen Bradley would have poisoned every honest country record getting made right now with his goddamn strings and choirs.”
A goateed guy in black horn-rimmed glasses with a slightly constipated look on his face was sitting with legs crossed and perfect posture on the couch by the gas stove near the back of the shop and making no secret of the difficulties he was having concentrating on Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy while Hank merely swam through an ocean of razor blades of suffering to tell the world all about it while a grieving pedal-steel guitar mournfully complemented his every utterance of s
uffocating melancholia. Oh, that was all. Every thirty seconds or so the little geek would look up at the record player and frown. Finally he slammed the book shut and stormed out the door, making sure to shake his head a couple of disappointed times as he threw his long red scarf over his shoulder.
I dinged the door open again and yelled after him, “‘The existence of the world is justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon! ’ Look it up, buddy! Believe me, it’s in there!” I’d never been so happy to have read the first five pages of a book before. I closed the door to the afternoon chill and turned around triumphant.
Not to a hero’s greeting, though.
“What?” I said, beating them both to the punch.
“Bill,” Kelorn said, “I think I’ve been about as understanding as you could expect me to be about this whole ... cowboy period you’re going through, but when it starts to interfere with—”
“Cowboys!” I said. “You know, that’s exactly the sort of stereotype Thomas says you can expect from the supposedly progressive Left. I mean, I thought our whole generation was about breaking down the doors of the old ways of thinking, not reinforcing them. I thought we were supposed to be about getting rid of all life-inhibiting labels.”
Life-inhibiting labels. This from a man who only a month before would have had a difficult time getting worked up over anything other than having enough pot left over in the bottom of his stash for one more good fatty at 3 a.m. and not a pack of matches in the house.
“Now that we’re on the subject,” Kelorn said, “it would be nice if every other sentence that came out of your mouth these days wasn’t directly attributed to Thomas.”
“That’s bullshit, Kelorn,” I said. “You just don’t like Thomas.”
Too much her even-tempered self to take the bait, “I hardly know Thomas, Bill, you know that. Thomas isn’t the problem.”
“Well, then, what is the problem?”
“The problem is that when you start making the bookstore an unpleasant environment for our patrons, you force me to act like some taskmaster and tell you to cool it. And I don’t like doing that, Bill. I won’t do that.”
“That guy wasn’t even trying to hear the music,” I said. “He thought he knew exactly what country music was all about, that it was just a bunch of two-chord songs for bigoted hayseeds who don’t know any better, end of story. If he’d only put down his book for ten seconds and paid a little attention to the way the Drifting Cowboys accented Hank’s every—”
Christine pulled on the hood of her parka and left. No goodbye, no thanks-for-lunch peck, nothing.
I looked at Kelorn like I really didn’t get it.
“For goodness sake, Bill, go and talk to her.”
“Did I just miss something?” I said. I really didn’t get it.
Kelorn wouldn’t even look at me; just carefully took my record off the turntable and put it back in its jacket.
“Maybe I should go see what’s wrong,” I said.
Christine wasn’t trying to get away from me, but she wasn’t slowing down any either. I got lucky with a red light at Spadina and finally caught up.
“Hey,” I said, grabbing onto her arm.
Twisting away, “Hey, what?”
“Hey, what’s the big deal?”
“She’s right, you know,” she said.
“Kelorn? About what? That guy in the shop? He was a jerk.”
“How come you never help me put up posters any more? You never even come see me play any more.”
“I do. I do still come and see you play.”
“Once in the last two weeks. At the Riverboat, last Tuesday. And you and Thomas were both so drunk you yakked through my entire set.”
“That’s not true,” I said. Wasn’t it? I was so loaded that night I honestly couldn’t remember.
“And it’s like we never talk about anything any more but Thomas and country music, country music and Thomas.”
“But you said you were starting to like some of it.”
“I am. I mean, I do like some of it—I can see what you see in it—but that’s not the point.”
“Well, what is the point then?”
The light was green now, but we stayed where we were.
“All you ever do any more is hang out with Thomas and get loaded,” she said.
“Since when did you get so hung up about getting wasted once in a while? Thomas knows a lot about something I’m interested in right now and I like talking to him about it, so what’s the problem? He’s informative.”
“You’re starting to wear each other’s clothes, Bill.”
That, at that very moment, underneath my jean jacket, I had on a powder blue, crushed velvet cowboy shirt Thomas had lent me didn’t stop my machismo meter from going off the chart. Way off. I frowned and locked my fingers behind my head and looked up at the sky like I’d seen my dad do a thousand times when my mum would say he was spending too much time on the golf course and not enough with his family.
“So this is what this is all about,” I said. “You’re mad because I want to spend some time with my friends and not every minute with you.”
“Asshole,” she said. And off she went again.
Relationship late bloomer that I was, I was thankful to Christine for a lot of first-time things. But feeling like a complete shit for saying nasty stuff you don’t really mean definitely wasn’t one of them. I stood on the edge of the curb trying to figure out the best way to apologize long enough that by the time I broke into a trot after her the light was red and I had to play matador with a herd of snarling, horn-farting cars. I managed to make it across the street in one piece, apologizing the entire hop-scotching way, and overtook her after a short sprint.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
Silence.
Try again. “I really am. Really.”
Silence.
If at first you don’t succeed ... “And I promise I’ll go see your set this week. And that I’ll keep quiet.”
She stopped.
“This isn’t about me, Bill. This isn’t about you doing something to make me happy.”
“I thought you wanted me to—”
“What I want is for you not to forget about what makes you happy.”
“I am happy.”
“You’re obsessed. There’s a difference.”
“Hey, y’all.” Oblivious to both the hurricane he was walking into and the fact that he was at the very eye of it, waving and waltzing our way down Hoskins Avenue, here came Thomas. I felt like running.
But by the time Christine had coolly received his kiss on the cheek she couldn’t stop laughing and I started to laugh along with her. Thomas didn’t have a clue what was going on but didn’t want to miss out on whatever was so funny, so then he started laughing too, first in little breathy sniggers but then full-out howling just like us, even if he still didn’t know why.
“Come on now, y’all, what?” he managed.
“Thomas,” Christine said, “who put that ...” That was it, no more.
“Come on, really, what?” he said. By now, we all had tears in our eyes.
It was up to me to finish the job. “Who put that ... black electrical tape on your head!” All of us roared.
Thomas adjusted the two brown paper bags he had under each arm and placed a finger to his head and smiled like it was the most natural thing in the world to have a huge sheath of white gauze stuck to your forehead with half a roll of electrician’s tape to keep it in place. Then he gave us the story.
“So I finally get my pants on and grab my boots and shirt and am almost out the window and on the roof when the damn window comes down on my head just as I’m climbing out.”
“So it wasn’t her boyfriend who did this to you?” Christine said.
“No! His window!”
More hysterics.
“But who ... ?” I said, pointing to his forehead.
Thomas touched his head again. “Well, I just bought some supplies from the Grab Bag on the way ho
me and did it myself. And not too bad a job if I do say so. I’ve seen worse.”
We all laughed again, though somewhat like sane people this time. By now Christine and I had our arms wrapped around each other’s waists.
“What’s in the bags?” I said.
Slowly pulling an album out of one of the sacks, “This, my friends,” he said, “is a little something I just picked up.” Tenderly holding the record out for our inspection, he could have been a proud father presenting his precious first born.
I thought I felt Christine edge back a little into her earlier sulk when she realized it was an album, but after she saw what Thomas had bought, Woody Guthrie’s Dust Bowl Ballads, her face softened.
“Woody,” she said.
“Woody Guthrie, indeed, Miss Christine,” Thomas said. “And all because of you.”
“Me?”
“Yes, ma’am, you. After your fine performance last Tuesday I simply could not get those songs of his out of my mind.” Turning to me, “Remember how impressed I was by them that night, Buckskin?”
“Oh, yeah,” I said. Yeah, right.
“But ... Woody Guthrie’s not country,” Christine said.
Thomas sighed, he literally sighed.
“You know,” he said, talking to us but looking across the street at a white-leotarded girl in a purple, fringed miniskirt getting on the back of a motorcycle and wrapping her arms around the driver’s waist, “it makes me sad to hear you say that.” He looked back at Christine, his eyes locked on hers.
“Sometimes I wish there wasn’t any such thing as country music any more, wish there wasn’t anything called folk music or rock music or the blues or anything. What I’ve always dreamed of is what I like to call Interstellar North American Music, a heaven-sent musical hybrid fusing together all honest forms of sound into one great big soulful stew. Just music, understand, just one kind of music—good music.”
Moody Food Page 4